First Sunday in Lent

First Sunday in Lent (C)

March 10, 2019

Text: Luke 4:1-13

            Immediately after His Baptism in the Jordan River, the Spirit having descended upon the incarnate Son, the Father declaring from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22; ESV), the Spirit now leads our Lord out into the wilderness.  Understand what is happening here.  Our Lord Jesus, the righteous and holy Son of God, was baptized into our sin, and now, as the Sin-Bearer, He is the Scapegoat sent out into the wilderness, to Azazel, the demon of the wilderness.  The wilderness is the haunt of Satan.  It is the place of nothingness and death.  It is there that our Lord fasts for forty days.  He eats nothing.  In a monumental understatement, St. Luke records for us that when the days were ended, “he was hungry” (4:2).  Think how weakened our Lord’s very human body must have been at the end of that time.  Yet it is precisely at that time, in that state, that Satan unleashes the barrage of his greatest temptations on our Lord.  This is instructive for us.  The devil never rests in his work of tempting us away from the Lord.  But he does his best work when we are at our weakest.  And, incidentally, he knows the signs of our weakness better than we know ourselves.  He can read the circumstances, our body language, our temperament, and he knows just the right way to get at us so that we’re most likely to fall, and we do fall every time apart from the Lord’s help. 

            So there is Jesus in the wilderness, physically diminished, greatly weakened, and famished.  In other words, in our condition at its weakest, to do battle with the devil in our place.  And what is the nature of the temptation?  Yes, it is certainly an appeal to fleshly desire.  Food.  Power.  Glory.  Those are the kinds of temptations you and I face.  But that is just the external packaging.  What is behind the specific thing to which the devil is tempting?  You know, he really shows his hand here in his first few words: “If you are the Son of God…” (v. 3; emphasis added).  He does it again in the third temptation, same words, “If you are the Son of God.”  That’s really the temptation.  To doubt what the Father had just said of Him at His Baptism, that He is the Father’s beloved Son.  To doubt the Father’s Word.  To believe that the Father has it out for Him.  To believe there is another way than the will of the Father.  If You are the Son of God, then why is God holding out on You?  If He loves You, why does He want You to go hungry?  Command this stone to become bread.  You made the stone, after all.  It has to obey You.  And, by the way, You want to be King?  Just so happens that I, the devil, once an archangel of God, now rule this world.  Look at all the kingdoms of the earth.  Behold all of world political history in this moment of time.  I own it all.  You can have it, You know.  Just one little thing I ask.  Just once, bend the knee and worship me, and it’s all Yours.  You think You have to suffer and die to make it Your own?  No, no, no, no.  I can make it happen with the snap of a finger.  No cross.  No bleeding.  No dying.  It’s as simple as one act of obeisance.  Or, You know what You could do?  Throw Yourself off the pinnacle of the Temple, here, in the sight of everyone.  The fall would be certain death for a normal man.  But for the Son of God?  If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down and the angels will pick You up before You even hit the ground.  It’s in the Bible and everything.  Psalm 91.  The angels will catch You, bear You up.  The people will see the great miracle and they’ll be putty in Your hands.  No need to die.  There’s a shortcut.  God must not really love You if He insists on all this suffering and death stuff. 

            You see how temptation works?  There is the external temptation, and then there is the temptation behind the temptation, which is always a temptation to reject faith in God and sell yourself into unbelief and slavery to the devil.  Is that not what happened to Adam and Eve?  The temptation was not just about a bite of fruit.  Yes, the fruit was pleasing to the eye, and good for food, and able to make one wise (albeit not with the true Wisdom from God… just a poor human, and demonic, substitute).  Just like commanding the stone to become bread, the temptation at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is about so much more than food!  It’s a temptation to doubt God loves you, to doubt that you are who God says you are, to doubt His Word and gracious will for you.  “Did God really say?”  Eve fails that battle.  She heeds the voice of the serpent over the voice of God.  Adam fails that battle.  He does not preach the Word given him by God, “Eat from every tree of the Garden, but not this tree!  In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.”  He heeds the voice of his wife over the voice of God.  And all humanity falls with our first parents. 

            When you are tempted, it is the same thing.  Every sin is about so much more than just the specific thing you do against God’s will, or don’t do according to God’s will.  Every sin is a rejection of God.  It is unbelief in His Word, in His love for you, in His gracious will for you.  It is faith in the serpent’s word in which he preaches that God is against you, holding out on you, out to get you.  It is a denial of who God says you are in Baptism: “You are my beloved son… my beloved daughter… with you I am well pleased because of My Son, Christ.”  As much as the devil delights in the specific sins you commit, because he loves chaos and destruction, he’s out for more than just your indiscretions and transgressions.  He’s out to make an unbeliever out of you. 

            And we can’t win that battle by our own spiritual strength, or intellectual prowess, or cleverness.  Luther said the devil is stronger than the whole world.  He’s definitely smarter and stronger than you.  We need another Champion to fight for us.  That is what we have in Christ, our Savior, who is led out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to do battle for us.  And He wins!  He conquers the devil.  He stomps on the serpent’s head. 

            Now, here we have to be careful, because we often say, “See, Jesus conquered the devil by quoting the Bible, so we can conquer the devil by quoting the Bible.”  It’s true, Jesus quoted the Bible, and it’s helpful for us to know the Bible and quote the Bible.  Vital, even.  But don’t forget, the devil quotes the Bible in this episode, too.  He quotes selectively.  He quotes out of context.  But he does quote it.  And the dirty secret is, he knows the Bible better than you do.  So while the Bible is the sword of the Spirit, the weapon we are given to fend off the attacks of Satan, we shouldn’t think of this in such a way that we can easily win a skirmish if we just quote the right passages.  We should quote the Bible, of course.  But we still need Jesus to fight the battle for us, or we lose.  That’s it.  It’s that simple.  We can’t do it by our own strength, even with the Bible.  We can’t outsmart the devil.  We can’t win in a debate with him.  But when Jesus fights for us, He wins.  And here is why…

            In the face of the devil’s scheme to introduce doubt into the mind of our Lord about who He is, Jesus doesn’t enter into debate.  He simply lives the reality that He is the Father’s beloved Son, in whom the Father is well pleased, by faithfully speaking God’s Word and acting according to the Father’s will.  Man does not live by bread alone, but by every Word that comes from the mouth of God.  You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.  You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.  He speaks it, and He lives it.  And here is why this matters for us.  First, because in maintaining His righteousness, Jesus is the Sinless One who bears the sins of everyone else.  Adam’s sin.  Your sin.  He will bear it all the way to the cross to put it to death in His flesh.  Second, as the One who is baptized into us in the Jordan River, Jesus’ victory over the devil is Adam’s victory, and our victory.  He succeeds where Adam and you and I fail.  He undoes the damage Adam did.  Adam sinned and was cast out of Paradise into the wilderness.  Jesus goes out into the wilderness and does not sin so that Adam and you and I can come into Paradise.  That is the good news of our Lord’s victory over Satan. 

            And now we are assured of heaven and the resurrection of our bodies on the Last Day.  Jesus won this victory over Satan, and the devil left Him until an opportune time.  That time, of course, was in the Garden of Gethsemane where our Lord sweat drops of blood as He prayed that, if possible, He would not have to drink the cup, yet submitted nonetheless to His Father’s will.  It was the devil’s entering the heart of Judas to betray his beloved Master into the hands of sinful men with a kiss.  It was before the Sanhedrin, in the high priest’s house, standing before Pontius Pilate, where the devil stirred the crowds to cry out for His crucifixion and perverted the cause of justice.  It was in the abuse of the soldiers, the solemn procession toward Golgotha carrying His own cross, the piercing thorns, the nails, the mockery, the spit, the gall, the lifting up of the Son of Man.  And the great surprise of it all: In being thus defeated, the Son of God gains the ultimate victory over Satan, and sin, and death, for Himself and for all people… for you.  For death could not hold Him.  Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. 

            And now we have confidence in our own temptations.  To be tempted is not a sin.  Falling to temptation, giving in to it, is sin.  Luther famously said that you can’t prevent the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.  You will be tempted.  And God can even use the temptation for your good, as an exercise of faith. 

            What should you do when you are tempted?  Well, of course it helps to know Scripture, and you should use the Holy Scriptures in your battle against temptation and sin.  Again, you can’t outwit the devil this way.  But what the Scriptures do is fortify you against your own sinful flesh, so that you know God’s will, and the precious Gospel of Jesus Christ, all that He has done for your salvation, which gives you to want to do God’s will and the ability to begin to do it.  Haltingly, imperfectly, yes.  Old Adam has to be drowned daily in repentance.  But this is done precisely through the Means of Grace: The Holy Scriptures, the preaching, the witness of your brothers and sisters in Christ, your Holy Baptism, Confession and Absolution, the Lord’s Supper.  These are the means God gives you to strengthen you against temptation and give you Jesus’ forgiveness when you fall. 

            Of course, you should pray.  “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”  Pray the Psalms.  Have others pray for you.  These are invaluable gifts.  Talk to your pastor.  Confess and be absolved.  That’s spitting in the devil’s eye.  And most of all, remember who you are in Christ.  You are baptized into His death and resurrection, His righteousness.  You are the Father’s beloved Child.  He is well-pleased with you, because you are covered with Christ. 

            We sang of the devil in the sermon hymn, that “One little word can fell him” (LSB 656:3).  Luther later told us what that little word is.  It is the word that identifies the devil for what he is.  “Liar.”  So when the devil assaults you with temptation, call him out.  “Your day is done, you slippery serpent.  My Lord Christ has crushed your head.  And I know who you are, my dear devil.  You are nothing but a big, fat, liar!”  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.