Immediately following one of the highlights of Jesus’ life (His baptism), He experiences one of the lowest points in His life. Matthew writes that “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (4:1). Adding to the severity of the temptation was the fact that Jesus fasted 40 days and nights before His encounter with Satan, which obviously brought Him to an extreme state of hunger (4:2). The tempter, Satan, brought three specific temptations against Jesus (4:3; 4:5-6; 4:8-9) and each one was designed to cause Jesus to ignore the plan of God the Father by using the divine power He had willingly set aside to become like man (Philippians 2:7). At the heart of every temptation is the desire to act independent of God, so in order to resist, Jesus had to be more desirous for God’s way than the ways of the devil. At the beginning of human history, Adam and Eve failed miserably at this and chose to live independently of God and their disobedience ultimately threw the entire human race into sin (Romans 5:12). Jesus also faced this same direct pressure from Satan, but He successfully resisted each time through remembrance of and perfect obedience to God’s words (4:4; 4:7; 4:10). At the core of resisting temptation is seeing God’s ways as good and worthy to be obeyed. If we cannot find worth or relevance in God’s way of living, we will never be able to resist temptation. Paul provides great comfort to the church at Corinth regarding temptation when he writes, “The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure” (1 Corinthians 10:13, NLT). God’s presence accompanies those who are His and He has equipped them to handle any temptation which comes their way.
Dear God, I look to Jesus as my example of resisting temptation and I pray for the strength to also resist when I am confronted with evil.
