448: Paradise Regained | Dave Sloop

Introduction

Good morning, everyone. I don't know about you, but my highlight of the service so far is when Quig said, mister and missus grumpy pants. Anyone else? That was... I don't know if I can outdo that, but I'm gonna try.

If you've been with us the last couple of months, you know that we have been walking through the book of James together, and it has been so fun to look at that. Really, it's been— I mean, it's like the only time it's fun to get punched in the stomach. That's kind of what the book of James has been like.

But for the next couple of months, we're gonna pause our series on James. We're gonna come back to it later this spring, early summer. And for this season of Lent that we are in, as Brian said earlier, Lent is a time between Ash Wednesday and Easter where we pause and reflect on the reality that we are a fallen humanity, that we're broken, that we've come from the dust. And we reflect on the very reason that Christ had to come and die and rise. It's because of my sin.

So we're gonna take some time over the next couple of months to just look at some selected readings that would guide us into that kind of Lenten spirit. And today, we're looking at Luke chapter four, verses one through 13. You just heard it read. This is Jesus being tempted in the wilderness.

The Context of the Passage

And Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all three of the synoptic gospels, have this account of Jesus' life recorded in it. And there is a—in each of those gospels, there's an event that happens prior to his tempting in the wilderness. Do you know what it is? It is his baptism.

In all three—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—you see Jesus being baptized, and then you see him going into the wilderness. In these events, they're contiguous. There's no time in between them. In fact, in Mark's gospel, it says, immediately—Quig, would you or someone hit start on that? I need that. Quig, that means my time hasn't started.

There these events, there's nothing in between them. It goes one from the other. Mark says, immediately, he came up out of the water, and the spirit led him into the wilderness. Matthew's gospel reads very similar. And from a chronological perspective, Luke's gospel is the same, but he inserts something in between his baptism and his testing in the wilderness. Does anyone know what it is? It is his genealogy.

And it almost reads awkwardly. I mean, he tells you that he's baptized, and then he just starts telling you where he came from. But it's almost like Luke wants to get our attention. There's two genealogies in the gospels. Matthew, who writes his gospel to the Jewish people, his genealogy traces back to—who? Abraham. His gospel starts, "This is the account concerning Jesus, the son of David, the son of Abraham." And he wants you to know that Jesus is Israel's Messiah. He is the promised Messiah of God. He is the promised seed of Abraham who would be a blessing to the nations.

Luke is writing his gospel to the Gentiles. And so, who do you think he traces his genealogy back to? Adam. It goes all the way back to the beginning. And it's like he's telling everybody, no matter what tribe or nation or tongue you come from, you find your origin in the same place that Jesus is from.

Luke does not want us to miss his humanity. He is the son of God, but he is the son of man. But I think there's another reason that he focuses here on Adam. Some commentators believe that the baptism of Jesus is meant to mirror creation.

Have you ever noticed that? When you look back at the creation, you see the spirit of God hovering over the waters, then you hear a voice from heaven, "Let there be light." God speaks creation into existence, and then He declares pleasure when he creates man. Remember? Everything was good, but when he created humanity, he said, "It is very good."

What do you see at the baptism? You see the spirit descend over the waters. You hear a voice from heaven. You see the light of the world come up from the water, baptized in the person of Jesus Christ, and then you hear a voice declaring pleasure in his son. It is meant to mirror creation.

After God creates Adam, he puts him in a garden called Eden, which means paradise, where he would be tempted by the devil. The very first words of Luke chapter four are, "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by the devil."

In Genesis chapters one through three, you have the creation and the fall. And in Luke three and four, you have Jesus—the new Adam—and he's going into the wilderness to be tempted in all the same ways that Adam was. In fact, it's the exact same way.

In 1 John 2:16, we'll put that up there. It says, "For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father, but from the world."

Let's take a look at how Adam and Eve were tempted in the garden. First, it says, "He saw that it was good for food," that is the lust of the flesh.

That it was pleasing to the eye, that is the lust of the eye.

And he's good for gaining wisdom. Remember? Satan said, "You will be like God if you eat of this fruit." That's the pride of life.

Jesus in the wilderness, it says, "Turn these stones to bread." It's the lust of the flesh. He shows him the splendor of the kingdoms. It's the lust of the eye. And then he says, "Throw yourself down from here." In other words, make a spectacle. Don't suffer. Be great. Be like God. That's the pride of life.

You see the same exact temptation of Adam, but on a much more difficult playing field. See, Adam had a companion. He had Eve. You have Jesus alone.

Adam was in a garden called paradise. Jesus was in the wilderness, a fallen world. Adam had a full stomach. Jesus had an empty stomach. Adam had nothing to lose by obeying. He already had everything. Jesus would lose everything by obeying.

It is a repeat of the Garden of Eden. But that's not all. I want to show you something else.

If you look at the first couple of verses here in Luke chapter four, see if you notice some words that are a pattern that we've heard before. And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days, and when they were ended, he was hungry.

Can you think of someone else who came from the water into the wilderness for a period of forty-something and had no bread? Who is this? It's Israel.

Jesus is not just the better Adam. He is the better Israel, and Luke is going to great lengths to make sure that you and I see this.

Did you know there are only two people in the Bible that are referred to as the—well, three. Jesus was the Son of God. Luke calls Adam here at the end of his genealogy the Son of God, and there's one other person called the Son of God. In Hosea 11:1, let's put that up. It says, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt, I called my son."

You have Adam, the son of God, who fails in the garden. You have God's next son, Israel, to whom he gives his law, a sacrificial system, the temple of God so they could worship and be in his presence. And they blow it in the wilderness.

And here comes Jesus—the second, the last Adam, the better Israel—and he will succeed where Adam fails. He will succeed where Israel fails. No question.

This is why Luke interrupts these two accounts because he wants you to see, don't miss his humanity. He is the son of God, but he is the son of man.

And as he goes into the wilderness, he does not primarily go as the Son of God. I'm not suggesting he loses that part of his identity, but when he goes into the wilderness, he goes as the Son of Man.

And what I mean by that is he will not use the privilege and the power of his divinity when he battles the enemy in the wilderness. The very first thing that he says, Satan says, "Turn these stones to bread," and he says, "Man shall not live by bread alone."

He is identifying with us. Do you know why? Because we only have access to the weapons that he uses here. He goes into the wilderness with the Holy Spirit and the word of God, and that's what we have.

He is going to fight the battle. He's going to live this life that we couldn't live on our behalf.

How Satan Comes After Jesus

Now, it's a big intro. I want to turn now to the text, and I want to show you: how does Satan come after Jesus as the Son of Man? Because this is how he comes after you and me.

Let's take a look.

The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread."

And Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone.'" It's kind of an odd temptation, isn't it? You think of the devil trying to trip someone up. What's his first approach? Bread.

It's not what we'd expect. He's not trying to get Jesus to do some immoral thing. You know what he's trying to get Jesus to do? Depend on yourself. You don't need the Father. Feed yourself. Take care of yourself.

And this is the way he comes after you and me too. You don't need him. Depend on me. Provide for yourself. In the comfort, in the convenience, in the wealth of this Western world that we live in, do you think that this is a lesson that you and I need to hear?

I heard somebody once call this practical atheism. We profess a belief in God, but we live practically as if he isn't there. Depend on me, Jesus says. Remain in me like a branch remains in the vine.

Satan here says, "You don't need him. Depend on yourself."

Jesus responds, by the way, each time he responds to Satan using God's word. Do you know that each one of the verses that he uses, they’re all from Deuteronomy, between chapters six and eight? And that's significant because it is Moses talking to the people Israel about their failures in the wilderness and how they need to remember to trust and cling to God.

And here he is in the wilderness, quoting from that sermon. By the way, what if someone was to say to us, "You're only allowed to use the book of Deuteronomy to fight off Satan." How would we do? How many of us have verses memorized from Deuteronomy that we could access?

Jesus had no problem. Verse, chapter six to chapter eight. He says—I wanna read to you in context what he's quoting from. This is from Deuteronomy chapter 8. It says, "And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."

He said, "He made you hunger." He's telling them, "You're about to go into a land, into the promised land. You're gonna live in houses you didn't build. You're gonna drink from wells that you didn't dig."

And listen to what he's gonna tell them down here in verse 17. He's gonna say, "Don't forget. Beware, lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.'"

Is this where we live?

There's a guy on Young Life staff named Chuck Reinhold—a hero to many of us—and he used to say to people, "What did you do today that you wouldn't have otherwise done if it weren't for Christ in your life?"

In other words, is there anything you did today because you know him? Any decision you made, anything that was influenced in this direction or that because of his word or his presence in your life? Did you seek him in a certain way? Were you willing to be inconvenienced in a certain way because of a prompting of his Spirit that lives in you?

How did you live differently because of Christ? And I would just ask you, do we live dependent on him, or are we practical atheists, professing a belief in God but living as if he's not there?

If Satan can get us depending on our own ingenuity and our own wealth and our own talent and good looks—fill in the blank—then he's already won. He'll leave you alone because he's already won.

Here's the second thing Jesus is tempted with. It says the devil took him up, and he showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

And he said to him, "Look. To you, I will give all this authority and all the glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I will give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will all be yours."

Satan is being somewhat loose with the truth here. All the authority is not his. He is under God's authority, but it is true that he is the prince of this world. That's what the Bible calls him.

And he is telling Jesus, "If you bow down and worship me, I will give you your kingdom, all the kingdoms of the world." What's the temptation here? The temptation here is to look somewhere else to be satisfied other than God.

Are we tempted in this way to find our satisfaction somewhere other than God? Satan says, "Just worship me, and you can have all this."

The question here is, what do we love the most? What can you not live without?

Whatever we love the most—that is the thing or the person that we worship.

Have we learned to be satisfied in the deepest part of who we are by God Himself?

Jesus said to his disciples in John chapter 4, "I have food that you don't know about. My food is to do the will of the one who sent me."

I mean, have you listened to the way that the biblical writers talk about Jesus? I was just looking at Psalm 63 a couple of days ago, and David says, "Early I seek you in a dry and weary land where there is no water. My soul thirsts for you. I will be satisfied as with rich foods. Your love, your steadfast love, is better than life."

This is just David, just stream of consciousness talking about how he experiences Christ.

Jesus said in John 15, when he's telling his disciples, "Cling to me, remain in me like a branch in a vine." He says, "I've told you these things so that my joy may be in you, so that your joy may be full."

John 10:10, "I've come that you might have life, that you might have it to the full."

Everything else that we reach for in this life is a substitute. It's a cheap substitute.

CS Lewis was famous, I'm sure many of you have heard this quote before. I'm probably going to butcher it. It's my summary. He says, "God finds our desires not too strong but too weak, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is available." Like an ignorant child playing with mud pies because they don't know that a holiday to see is available.

Have you learned to let him touch the deepest part of who you are? He's better. He's better than anything else that we could try.

Not just in some distant fairy tale land, but he's better now, in this life.

Satan would love for you to believe that there's some things out there that can satisfy you more fully than he can. It's a lie.

The Final Temptation and Response

Here's the third temptation. And he took him to Jerusalem, and he set him up on the pinnacle of the temple. And he said to him, "If you are the Son of God"—by the way, notice how he keeps saying to Jesus, "If you're the Son of God," trying to cast doubt perhaps that this really is his true identity.

"Throw yourself down from here, for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you. And on their hands, they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone."

Pause here for a second. This is Psalm 91, verses nine through 16. I just want to make an observation here: Satan knows the Bible better than you do. Have you noticed that?

Satan here observes that Psalm 91 is about Jesus. It's a messianic Psalm. He's the only one in the biblical record that makes that observation, and he's right. It's about Jesus.

But do you know what he does here? He kind of picks and chooses pieces of it. Do you know what part he leaves out? We read it. Did you hear the part where it says that this one that Psalm 91 is writing about will trample on the serpent's head? He conveniently leaves that part out when he's talking to Jesus.

What is the temptation here? Throw yourself down from here. The temptation is that you can be messianic without dying. You can almost hear the lie of Satan coming from the garden. "You surely will not die."

You know what the temptation for you and me is? The temptation is to believe that compromise will not cost us. You can be messiah through a different way. You don't have to suffer. You don't have to die.

How often do we presume on God's goodness? Like in Romans 6, where they say, "I've just gone sinning so that grace may increase." No one's gonna know. God doesn't care. It doesn't matter. We're engaged. We don't have to stay pure. Do people still believe that anyway? No one's gonna know if I cheat on my taxes? There's no possible way they could ever find out. No one's gonna look at my website history.

See, our temptation is to pretend it doesn't matter, and that there's no cost—that compromise is fine. No one's gonna know in the end anyway. But compromise, it always costs. But if he can just get us believing, if he can just make sin smaller than it actually is—this is how he gets—or what he speaks to Cain in Genesis? He says, "Sin is crouching at your door, and its desire is to have you."

Tim Keller observes that when a beast of prey is crouching, it's smaller. It makes itself smaller, and that's when it's most dangerous. When sin makes itself small, it's about to take us out.

Jesus, in all three instances, responds with scripture. In this last one, he says, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test."

And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Application

Here's a question I want us to consider as we begin to close. How can Jesus' victory become our victory? I want to propose two ways.

Number one, we have to see him living for us. When we read about the wilderness temptation, we need to look at that and see that he is the perfect Son of Man.

He goes into the wilderness with the same weapons available to us: to be his disciple is to do as he did. And what was Jesus' primary way of defeating Satan in the wilderness? It was the word of God.

Can I just ask you a question? How important is God's word to you? Jesus said it's more important than eating: "Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."

God's word was more important than food to Jesus. I wonder how important God's word is to us. Do you cling to it? When Jesus was under pressure, it just spilled out of him.

I mean, when you get cut off in traffic, what spills out of you? For God so loved the world—Jesus was being nailed to the cross, and he said, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"—it's the Psalms, just spilling out of him when he's under pressure.

David would put it this way: "I've hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you."

Joshua 1:8 says, "Do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do everything written in it."

Are you in God's way? This is, by the way, the application part of the sermon today, and this is the only application.

Do you value God's word? I mean, really. And I don't just mean do you occasionally read it? Because we can read God's word and not bring ourselves to it. Do you know what that is like?

The question is not just, are you going through God's word, but is God's word going through you? Is it changing you? Are you doing what it says?

We need to see Jesus living for us. He is our example. But if we want his victory to be our victory, we have to do more than just see him living for us.

We have to see him dying for us.

Twice, Satan comes after Jesus and essentially says, "Be the king without dying. Take the crown with no cross." And Jesus refuses.

In Matthew's account of this, do you know what he says? "Get away, Satan."

In Matthew 16, Jesus is telling his disciples the very same thing. He's saying, "I'm gonna have to die, suffer, and die." Do you know what Peter does? By the way, this is a little tip for you: don't do what Peter does here.

He pulls the Lord aside and rebukes him. It's always a bad start. He rebukes the Lord and says, "Not you, Lord. You won't die." And Jesus says, "Get behind me, Satan,"—the exact same Greek words he adds in there—because Peter was supposed to be following Jesus.

See, this temptation for Jesus to be the king without the cross produced this visceral response in him. Do you know why? Because if Jesus is the king without the cross, he might get a crown, but he doesn't get you.

Because if Jesus doesn't die, you and I are still in our sins.

We need to do more than just see him living for us. We need that one who lived the perfect life, the perfect Son of Man, to become the perfect sacrifice on the cross.

If he doesn't die, he doesn't get us. But you know what else? If he doesn't rise, we don't get him.

Jesus said to his disciples, "It's better for you that I leave because when I leave, I give you my Spirit."

Jesus went into the wilderness with the Holy Spirit and the word of God, and you and I have the word of God. And at the moment you receive him, this is the truth about you: you get his Spirit. The same Spirit he went into the wilderness with, the same Spirit that raised him from the dead, moves into your life.

I want to close with this verse.

For it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. — 1 Corinthians 15:45

Have you trusted him? Do you have him in your life? If you will let him, he will produce in you the same desires that he has.

He will give you a love for his Father like he has. He will help you understand the word of God like he does. That's how we have his victory become ours.

Conclusion

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for this time we've had this morning to worship you, to be in your word. And, Lord, I just ask that the truth of this passage would take root deeply. I pray that this week, we would allow your word to go through us.

In Christ's name. Amen.