January 13 - Testing Jesus’ Divine Rights

“‘If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread’” (Matthew 4:3).

Before Satan tempted Jesus more directly, he threw out a cynical challenge to test Christ’s deity. The devil’s conditional statement, “If You are the Son of God,” assumed that Jesus was indeed God’s beloved Son (3:17). But he hoped to persuade Him into a demonstration of divine power that would violate God’s plan, which called for Jesus to set aside His divine power while on earth and use it only when the Father commanded. If Satan could make Jesus presume upon His divine rights and act independently of His Father, this would amount to disobedience.

Obviously, then, the purpose of the first temptation went far beyond getting Jesus to satisfy His physical hunger by wrongly using miraculous power. The devil wanted Him to doubt the Father’s word, love, and provision—to disobediently declare that being hungry was simply not fit for God’s only Son.

Satan’s argument was, “Hadn’t He endured enough humiliating circumstances already (the stable, the flight to Egypt, obscurity in Nazareth, this time in the wilderness) in an effort to identify with unworthy humanity?” But unlike Eve in the Garden of Eden (cf. Gen. 3:1f.), Jesus stayed true to God’s will and did not cast doubt on the Father’s word or His already secured position as God’s Son.

Yes, there is more at stake in temptation than the mere subject of the enticement. There are significant matters of trust and freedom and identity involved. How seriously are you taking these threats to your Christian calling? Pray that God would help you see the battle for what it is.

“What’s the biblical basis for John’s assertion that Jesus set aside His divine power while on earth?”

In context, he is not saying Christ did not have His divine power but that He set aside His right to use it to do His own will as a human.

Philippians 2:5-7 (NKJV)
Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.

John 6:38 (NKJV)
For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.

In our fallen state we tend to become legalistic and want to measure our success or failure at doing the right thing by our compliance with the rules (in this case, the Law of Moses). We think in terms of how we can do whatever we want to do so long as we don’t break any rules.

Think of how that would work out for a top athletic team. What if a team lost and its members told their coach that the obeyed ALL of the rules of the game, but then they just meandered around as if there was no goal to accomplish?

I personally cannot find a single Law that Christ would have broken if He had commanded stones to become food. But the reason Christ was going without food was not because the Law of Moses obligated Him to deprive Himself for 40 days. It was specifically because God the Father had directed Him to do so, as Christ was filled, led, and empowered (during temptation) by the Holy Spirit. The idea to use His power to feed Himself did not come from God. He was not told by His Father to do so, nor was He led by the Spirit in this regard. So, He waited. And then God fed Him through angels. Afterward He returned and had tremendous power to heal the sick and cast out demons.

Matthew 4:1-2 (NKJV)
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry.

We could probably contrast this with Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise immediately succumbing to temptation to eat. They had no lack of food. They were not in the desert. They could have said, “No!’ Or they could have simply did as Christ did here, and waited for God and talked with Him about what the serpent had proposed.

We could contrast Christ’s response with Peter when he became impatient waiting for Christ after the resurrection and decided to go fishing. I don’t see Peter sinning necessarily by doing so, but he certainly did not emulate what Christ had done after His 40-day fast.

These are all helpful object lesson for us to learn to wait, listen, and test whether our own impulses are something God wants us to act upon.

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