For last week's newspapers, I answered a question about the Holy Spirit's role in Jesus' wilderness temptation:
Q: If it is Satan who is
responsible for the temptations we face, and not God, then why do Matthew and
Luke say that the Holy Spirit led Jesus out into the wilderness to be tempted
after His Baptism?
These details do seem to be in
conflict with each other on the surface, but if we wanted to be very detailed
in looking at the sentence, we could note that the Spirit simply leads Jesus
into the wilderness, where Satan does the actual tempting.
But that answer is not necessarily
adequate, because we still see the Holy Spirit serving to lead Jesus into
temptation when James, the brother of Jesus, writes in his epistle, “God cannot
be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” This seems to place the
temptation far too close to the Holy Spirit’s work of leading Jesus for the
comfort of most.
Since the words tempt and temptation
do not refer only to sin, but also to other various types of tests, trials, and
tragedies, some have used the same kinds of explanations here that are often
used by pastors when people face hard times in life. Among these are explanations like that God
does not tempt people, but allows people to be tempted or tested to achieve a
greater good. While explanations like
this may be comforting and may be true, they still seem less than satisfying in
this instance.
When reading the details that Matthew
and Luke give about Jesus’ temptation, it is interesting that there are
repeated Old Testament connections made by the events of Jesus temptation which
point us in the right direction about what is happening there:
The best example might be that the
temptation lasts 40 days. The number 40
shows up dozens of times in Old Testament history and in the life of
Jesus. The most relevant here would be
that Moses was on Mount Sinai 40 days when He received the Law in God’s Ten
Commandments, and the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness 40 years on
their way from Egypt to the Promised Land, giving in to many temptations along the
way.
Jesus, on the other hand, spends His
40 days in the wilderness perfectly resisting temptation, and while the Law
revealed by Moses brought only the bad news that we have sinned and fall short
of God’s demands, Jesus spent His 40 day temptation, and all of His earthly
life, fulfilling God’s Law in our place.
His perfect record under temptation is a reversal of our failure to
resist sin.
In another case, an Old Testament
Sacrifice on the Day of Atonement involved sacrificing two goats. One was slaughtered as a Sacrifice for sin,
while a family would confess their sins while laying their hands on the goat’s
head, after which they would lead it into the wilderness and abandon it never
to be seen again, pointing forward to this temptation of Jesus in the
wilderness.
These among many others, point
Israel, and us with them, to the work of Jesus as the Savior who lives and dies
in our place. Because of this office as
Messiah and Savior, Jesus is different from us in His relation to God. Just as He suffers the cross in our place to
exchange our well-deserved punishment for His perfect rewards, it is necessary
that He be tempted, and so the Spirit leads Him to it in a way that might not
be true for us.
Jesus temptation was done to fulfill
the righteousness God demands and to achieve God’s will which is that people
would rely on Him for forgiveness and be give eternal life through Him. Likewise for us, even when we do face tests
and trials in life, we trust that they occur for the greater purpose of pointing
us to God’s salvation and an eternal, resurrected life in which there will be
neither temptation nor suffering of any kind.
No comments:
Post a Comment