In Matthew 4, the third and final temptation that Satan attacked Jesus with was an all out effort to destroy Him. Satan took Jesus to a high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and then said: “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.” There are many things at work in this temptation. I believe we see Satan’s frustration and desperation, Jesus’ resolve to glorify His Father, the offer of things that are already promised, but above all else, we see how Satan attempts to rob Jesus of God’s plan for His life by attempting to divert His worship from His Father to the things that the Father had promised.
Jesus had already been promised possession of all the kingdoms of this world and all of their glory. From Psalm 2, to Isaiah, to Philippians 2 to Revelation 1:5 we see Jesus proclaimed as the King and Lord of all the nations. Satan was not offering Jesus something that was outlandish or outside of His eternal destiny, Satan was offering Jesus a way to grab what had been promised rather than waiting for the promise to be provided by the hands of His Father. One commentator writes that Satan was offering Jesus “a crown without the cross.”
The temptation is relevant for us today because Satan continues to make the same offer. He attacks our minds and our hearts by trying to get us to take our eyes off of our Father and put them on what the Father has promised. In Scripture we see that Jacob longed for power over his older brother more than the God who had already promised that He would be a nation greater than that of His brother. We see that Israel longed for the Promised Land and how they imagined it to be much more than they ever longed for the God that freed them from bondage and led them toward the promise that He had prepared for them. In both cases, as in many of ours, the longing for the promise revealed a place of fractured worship in which God was included as the giver of the longed for promise rather than the object of affection and the true portion of fulfillment (Lamentations 3).
My prayer for us as we close out this series is that we will allow God to reveal the places of fractured worship in our hearts and lives. That we would loosen our grip on how and what we perceive God’s promises to be and that we would hold on tightly to God. I pray that He would truly become our beloved, the focus of our hearts and the longing of our lives, that, like Jesus, we would never trade a moment with the Father for any amount of perceived fulfillment or provision. Jesus followed the Holy Spirit into the wilderness, prepared Himself for temptation through the worship and hunger of fasting and then fought for us by taking on the tempter and defeating him thoroughly.
As long as we are on this earth temptation will not cease, but neither will the victory of Jesus in the wilderness! When Jesus made His final rejection of temptation by using Scripture to glorify God and build up His own faith Satan fled and then angels came and ministered to and fed Him. As I have come to the end of my study and preparation for this series I have become convinced of one thing in particular, there are angels standing by with all of the provision that we will ever need, they are waiting for the moment in which we will resist the devil by glorifying God so that they can come to us, by the urging of our loving Father, to satisfy our hunger and to strengthen our weary hearts and minds. Don’t trade your worship for a morsel of a promise, keep your heart and mind stayed on Jesus and look up, for your redemption draws near!