First Sunday in Lent

First Sunday in Lent (A)

March 5, 2017

Text: Matt. 4:1-11

            Everything was riding on Adam.  He had the Commandment.  He was armed with the Word of God.  “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17; ESV).  This is not just some arbitrary rule God made up because He’s a divine stick-in-the-mud and doesn’t want Adam to have any fun.  God is not withholding good food from Adam and Eve.  He has given them every other tree in the Garden for food, and I’m certain all of it is very delicious.  But this tree is special.  This is tree is a place of worship.  This tree is a place for man to exercise faith that God’s Word and will are good and wise.  By not eating this fruit, and preaching the Commandment to his wife and their children, Adam would be loving God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving his neighbor as himself (Mark 12:30-31).  In failing to preach the Commandment, and eating from this tree, Adam would be rejecting God as his God and proclaiming himself god.

            And so the moment of battle came.  The sly serpent approached Eve, questioning God’s Word which Adam had preached, preaching instead an anti-Gospel.  “You will not surely die.  God knows that in the day you eat of it you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  Now, don’t miss the trick in the devil’s words.  He would have Eve believe that with just one bite she could determine good and evil for herself, be like God, essentially be her own god.  And he would have Eve believe that God was holding out on her for this very reason, that He did not want to cede His power to the man and the woman.  But the plain truth is, up to this moment, Adam and Eve had known only good.  Now the supple flesh of forbidden fruit between their teeth, the juice still dripping down their chins, Adam and Eve for the first time knew evil.  And it was them.  It was their rejection of God.  They had lost.  They had fallen.  They had died spiritually, and they were dying physically, and they would die for all eternity as slaves of the serpent.  By the way, where was Adam in the heat of battle?  Hiding behind his wife.  We find out he was standing there the whole time, not saying anything, failing to preach the Word God had given him.  He let Eve be the preacher.  He let Eve fight the battle.  It would be like Jesus making His Bride, the Church, fight the devil on her own!  Eve preached a sermon, though it was not given her to preach, and she got it wrong.  She skewed God’s Word and finally rejected it, and then she turned to her husband and gave an anti-Sacrament.  “Take and eat,” she said, and the whole creation was subjected to the curse, plunged into darkness, broken, dying, and dead. 

            Our first parents sinned.  It’s not just that they did what they weren’t supposed to.  They were mortally wounded by the serpent, infected with a deadly disease.  We call this original sin, not just because it was the first, but because it is the condition to which Adam and Eve succumbed and in which their children have been born ever since.  Sin is not simply a matter of the bad things we do and the good things we fail to do.  We call those actual sins, sins of commission and sins of omission, our transgressions of God’s holy Commandments.  But the problem is so much deeper than that.  No matter how successful you may be at avoiding sin and doing all the things you should do, you’re still a son, a daughter of Adam.  And so you’re still a sinner.  From the moment of conception.  That is what King David confesses in Psalm 51: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (v. 5).  Original sin is a corruption deep within your nature.  Its guilt is with you from the moment you exist, passed down from father to child.  Yes, it’s your dad’s fault you’re a sinner.  It’s ultimately Father Adam’s fault.  Everything was riding on him, and in a moment, with one bite, it was gone.

            And so the Promise, a new Word from God spoken directly to the evil foe: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).  A Son would be born of the woman, born without the guilt of Adam, without an earthly father, and He would go toe to toe with the devil.  He would be our last and greatest hope, One who by the mortal bite of the serpent would crush the serpent’s head forever.  “Ask ye, Who is this?  Jesus Christ it is, Of Sabaoth Lord, And there’s none other God; He holds the field forever” (LSB 656:2). 

            Jesus is our Champion.  Jesus fights for us against the prince of darkness.  Adam lost everything in Paradise.  Jesus, our new and greater Adam, fights the rematch in the desert.  Note again the place of food in the temptation, food God has not given.  Take and eat, forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Take and eat, stones commanded to become bread.  It is the temptation to forsake God’s Word which nourishes to eternal life, for that which only fills the belly for a time.  Armed with the Word of God, our Champion proclaims: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).  Note also place of glory in the temptation, glory God has not given.  Your eyes will be opened.  You will be like God.  You will not die.  Cast yourself down now from the pinnacle of the temple.  The eyes of the masses will be opened.  They will see you are God, as the angels catch you before you strike your foot against a stone.  You will not die.  And again our Champion preaches, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (v. 7).  Finally, note the place of power in the temptation.  You will be like God.  You can determine what is good and what is evil for yourself.  Make your own rules.  Follow your heart.  See all the kingdoms of the world in a moment, throughout time, across space.  These I will give you, now, apart from suffering, apart from the cross, if you bow down and worship me.  And our Champion proclaims the First Commandment, the Commandment of Commandments: “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (v. 10).  And the devil has been mastered.  It is only the first battle in a war that will culminate at the cross.  But it is a decisive victory.  And it is vital for your salvation.  For just as sin came into the world through one man, Adam, and death through sin, and sin came to all men for all sinned, so by the one man’s obedience, that of Jesus Christ, are the many made righteous (Rom. 5:12, 19). 

            This is what we call our Lord’s active righteousness, His fulfilling God’s Law on our behalf.  Adam fought the serpent and lost.  You fight the serpent and lose.  Jesus fought the serpent and won.  He did not give in to the temptation.  It is Eden 2.0.  Recapitulation we call it in theology.  Jesus undoes all that has gone wrong with Adam and with us.  He is THE faithful man.  He is THE righteous one.  And all His righteousness, all of His resisting temptation, all of His active fulfilling of the Law, He gives to us in Holy Baptism, He gives to us by faith.  We rightly stress Jesus’ passive righteousness, His suffering and death for our sins on the cross as the sacrifice of atonement.  So also we stress our Lord’s resurrection victory over death, and rightly so.  But we so easily forget that our Lord’s life of faithfulness to His Father is also a vital component of our salvation.  He does what we cannot do, and we get all the credit.  Our Lord undertakes a great exchange.  He takes all our sin and death upon Himself and nails it to the cross.  He gives us all His righteousness and life in exchange, received by faith.  Jesus fights the devil and wins.  God declares His victory is ours.

            And, of course, the ultimate victory is His death and resurrection.  In His death on the cross, where the nail literally pierces His heel, the serpent’s head is crushed.  By His death, death is undone.  By His resurrection, we have life eternal.  Everything was riding on Jesus, and He came through for us.  If He had lost, if He had sinned, if He had failed, we would all go to hell.  But He did not lose.  He did not sin.  Jesus is our Champion.  He won for Himself a Kingdom, and He gives it to you.  By means of a tree, the precious tree of the cross, once a tree of death and condemnation, now the tree of life and salvation.  This tree is also a place of worship, but unlike the tree in the Garden, here you worship by taking of its fruit.  Its fruit is the body and blood of Jesus.  Man does not live by bread alone, but by the Word of God.  Hanging on the cross is the Word become flesh, and He is the Bread of Life.  Take and eat.  In receiving this fruit, you receive Jesus as your God.  Your sins are forgiven.  You live.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.