Invocabit – March 9, 2025Psalm 91; Genesis 3:1-21; 2 Corinthians 6:1-10St. Matthew 4:1-11
In the Name of the Father, and of the +
Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Immediately after His baptism in the Jordan River, Christ
was cast into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted for 40 days and
nights. At the end of this sojourn, the devil appeared to directly tempt our
Lord. He tempted Him three times: with food, with command over the Holy Angels,
and with power. In these temptations, we can see what is sometimes called the
“Unholy Trinity”: our flesh, the world, and the devil. These three are the
means by which Satan tempts the holy ones of God to sin, seeking to drive you
away from your Heavenly Father.
The devil tempts Christ to use His divine power of creation
to turn stones into bread. Our Lord is hungry. He is truly man, meaning He
feels the ache in His belly the same way you and I would if we fasted for 40
days. He is hungry. Satan is tempting Christ to give in to the ache of His
body, to indulge His flesh through the use of His divinity.
Although you are not divine, Satan uses the temptations of
the flesh in the same way against you. He would have you believe that if it
feels good it must be good for you. If it brings momentary pleasure, it must be
good.
Yet, how does Christ respond to this temptation? “Man shall
not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”[1]
The only reason food nourishes and sustains your body is because God has
ordained that it would. With this response, Christ is also stating that if God
has commanded Him to fast, He will not listen to the command of Satan to create
bread and eat. He refuses to eat the meat supplied by a wicked butcher. God is
the One who makes food profitable to your body. As such, a man would starve
even if he had all the food in the world but did not have the Word of God.
So too, as the beloved children of the Lord, recognize that
every bit of nourishment you receive comes from God. When St. Paul speaks of
meat sacrificed to idols, he says that on one hand, the idols are nothing but
wood and stone, meaning the meat comes not from Baal or Shiva, but from God,
and is therefore permissible for Christians to eat and be nourished. On the
other hand, such meat has been set aside for the worship of false gods and if
by eating, your conscience is tempted toward these demons or the conscience of
those around you might be fooled into worshiping such false gods, then such
eating is forbidden.[2]
When this temptation fails to deceive Christ, Satan tells Him to leap off the pinnacle of the temple because God will send His angels to save Him. This is a temptation to manipulate the creation, those things visible and invisible, to serve a frivolous end. He is tempting Christ to manipulate God and His creation. This can be seen as a temptation of the world.
The sinful world will almost always tempt you through the
manipulation of creation. While the temptations of the flesh come from within
you, temptations of the world come from the outside. ‘The world is yours for
the taking.’ ‘Eat, drink, and be merry.’ Just as Satan manipulates the Word of
God to tempt Christ, so too the world will manipulate the Word of God to tempt
you. The world says, “You shall not kill means you should protect life.
Therefore, don’t go to church for two weeks, three months, a year or more
because you might get sick, or worse, get someone else sick.” Similarly, the
world has convinced us that health is so important that if you are sick or
injured, you shouldn’t go to church, but you can’t miss any of your doctor’s
appointments. You can’t sit in the pew for an hour or so, but you can sit in a
waiting room for just as long. And those are the manipulations of the world
against only one of the commandments.
Satan’s temptation of
Christ is to take something God has promised, the ministrations and protection
of the holy angels, and put it to the test. “Did God really say…? You should
test it and find out.” God cannot lie. There is no reason to put His Word to
the test. The preaching of the apostles and the preaching of your pastor should
be put to the test, but they should only be tested by the standard of God’s
Word, that which is certain and true.
Having failed to tempt Christ twice, Satan cuts to the heart
of the matter. He offers Christ all the kingdoms of the world and their glory
if only He will fall down and worship Satan. He is claiming authority that is
not his, for although he is the ruler of this world, it does not belong to him.
God alone governs the heavens and the earth. God alone has all authority on
heaven and in earth. Yet Satan will offer anything, lie about anything, if it
means he can have his way.
The temptations of Satan are always a lie. To believe the
lies of Satan are to offer him worship and praise. In the stillness of night,
he will try to convince you that God has abandoned you, that you are worthless
to God and man. Or, he might try to convince you that you are greater than man
and more powerful than God. He will use whatever lie seems most convincing. To
believe him is to fall down and worship before him. For Eve, that meant sowing
the seed of doubt in God’s Word and God’s goodness, then convincing her the
opposite of God’s command was good. She was deceived and obeyed the command of
Satan. In so doing, she offered him worship, violating the first commandment.
Now, we all know that Satan is the Accuser, the Deceiver. He was created an angel of God who led a rebellion against the Lord and was cast out of heaven. Hell, the place of eternal torment and damnation was created to be the eternal dwelling of Satan and his rebellious angels, now called demons. What motivated him to tempt Christ? His primary motivation is to drive a wedge between God and man. He desires to separate man from God so that he would not be alone in his suffering. He rebelled against God in hatred for God and His creation, most especially for the creation of man, whom God placed as the crown jewel of all creation.
Satan also knows exactly who the Christ is. He knows that He
is true God and true Man. If Satan could tempt Christ to sin, he would forever
divide God from man. God is, by definition, good. He is the source of all good
things. If Satan could drive a wedge between the two natures of Christ, if he
could divide Christ’s humanity from His divinity, then there would be no hope
of salvation for all human beings. Christ would no longer be God because He
would no longer be pure, without sin. Christ would also no longer be truly man
because the purity of humanity lies in relationship to God. To be the most
fully human is to be in perfect communion with God, our creator and the source
of life. If Satan could corrupt, divide, destroy the One in whom humanity and
divinity are perfectly united, he would succeed in destroying God and all
humanity in one fell swoop. His plan to tempt the Christ was his most devious
plan to date.
In St. Luke’s account of the temptation, it is recorded that
when the temptations failed, the devil “departed from Christ until an opportune
time.”[3]
The temptation was Satan’s best opportunity to “defeat” the Christ. Our Lord
was weakened by hunger and exposer in the wilderness for 40 days. Both Satan
and Christ knew the prophets had written about our Lord’s crucifixion. Satan
seized the opportunity to attack the hungry and exhausted Christ with
temptations that all boil down to avoiding the crucifixion. At this time, Satan
uses the crucifixion as something to be avoided, tempting Christ with a
pain-free way out.
But when that fails, he departs for a while, waiting for the
next opportune moment – our Lord’s passion and crucifixion. He waits for the
next opportunity when the flesh of man and the world will align with the
desires of Satan to attack Christ again. In that instance, Satan is certain
that he has won the victory. The body of the Christ will hang dead on a tree.
The devil believes he has finally won the victory he so desperately sought in
the wilderness of temptation.
And yet the one who drew man into sin by means of a tree was
by a tree overcome. What Satan thought was his great victory, was, in reality,
his defeat. Christ overcame the Accuser in the very death Satan claimed to be
his greatest weapon.
This is the greatest lesson to be learned from the
temptation of Christ. Where we have failed, Christ has won the victory. While
Eve succumbed to temptation, Christ triumphed over it. While Job eventually
blamed God for his suffering, Christ was sustained by the Word of God alone.
While Peter denied Christ before the world, Christ overcame death to restore
Peter to salvation.
Satan still stalks about as a roaring lion, seeking to devour whom he wills. He still has the means of your flesh, the world, and his own evil will. He still has the motive to separate man from God. He still has the opportunity whenever you are at your weakest, even if that means you are feeling your strongest. These he still uses to tempt you. Yet though he rage, he is little more than a rabid dog on a chain, waiting to be put down. Christ has won the victory and will not let Satan tear you away from Him. Christ won the victory in the wilderness and brought it to completion on the cross.
Now is the day of salvation. The Accuser stands accused. The
judgment has been rendered, and the sentence will soon be carried out against
him. All who dwell in the shadow of the
Most High will find refuge under His wings. When you call, He will answer. You
will be satisfied with long life as He shows you His salvation.
In + Jesus’
name. Amen.
