Authority over temptation and Satan We re continuing our series on authority tonight by looking at authority over temptation and Satan, which is a topic I feel very qualified to talk about given my spectacular failure to exercise this throughout much of my life. But I have learned many lessons, some of which I ll share as we look at the story of Jesus temptation in the wilderness together, and I want to suggest two things on which I believe our ability to step into this authority hinge: Trusting God Knowing who we are in God Setting the scene: Mark 1:9-12 We re going to look first at Mark 1:9-12, which sets the scene for the story of the temptation of Jesus. About that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and John baptised him in the River Jordan. As soon as Jesus came out of the water, he saw the sky open and the Holy Spirit coming down to him like a dove. A voice from heaven said, You are my own dear Son, and I am pleased with you. Straight away God's Spirit made Jesus go into the desert. He stayed there for forty days while Satan tested him. The story begins with Jesus being obedient to God and getting baptised. He has this intimate experience with the Father, then immediately afterwards he is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness for a period of temptation. The Bible tells us that Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. A Jewish person reading this text would have immediately thought about the parallels with Israel wandering in the wilderness for 40 years when God freed them from slavery in Egypt. God had freed Israel in order to lead them to the promised land where they would settle and show the world who God is and establish his kingdom on Earth. Israel had failed and become enslaved again. They were waiting for the messiah to lead them to freedom once again. We need to look at this story partly from this perspective, in order to understand the nature of the authority by which Jesus resists temptation and Satan, and how we can take up this authority in Jesus. 1 st Temptation: Matthew 4:2-4 After Jesus had gone without eating for forty days and nights, he was very hungry. Then the devil came to him and said, If you are God's Son, tell these stones to turn into bread. Jesus answered, The Scriptures say: No one can live only on food. People need every word that God has spoken.
I imagine after going 40 days without eating, Jesus would have been extremely weak, perhaps even close to death. I also think that in order for him to be tempted, he may have experienced God s silence or maybe a sense of his absence. It s certainly hard to imagine that Jesus would have been tempted much if he had spent 40 days in close communion with the Father. Instead, like us, I believe he had to hold on to what God had said to him and choose to trust and obey God, even in the absence of any evidence at the time that God is there or that he cares. The first thing that Satan says to Jesus is to challenge what God last said to him. If you are God s son... It s almost like Satan is saying to Jesus, Look at the state of you! Is this how God treats his son? And implicit in that is the challenge, Is God really good? Are you really his son, who he loves? So Satan tries to first undermine the foundational beliefs on which Jesus stands, and then tempts him to take matters into his own hands. Come on! Feed yourself! Jesus answer to Satan is interesting, because he quotes Moses in one of his final speeches to Israel before they entered the promised land. Moses says in Deuteronomy 8:2-3, Don t forget how the Lord your God led you through the desert for the past forty years. He wanted to see if you were truly willing to obey him and depend on him, so he made you go hungry. Then he gave you manna, a kind of food you and your ancestors had never even heard about. The Lord was teaching you that people need more than food to live they need every word that the Lord has spoken. Israel had failed that test and showed time and again that they weren t willing to obey, but here is Jesus who makes it very clear that he will. [Living by faith for money story. Hard because of pride and work ethic, but learned to trust God as miraculous sums of money arrived just at the right time as bank balance hit 0. Learned to trust God which was vital for the next step, moving to Spain, where I didn t speak the language and had to trust God s provision.] So if we are to take up our authority to resist temptation and Satan, trust in God has to be the foundation. Our authority to resist temptation and Satan comes from God, so without that trust we can t do it. Questions: Are we able to trust God in the situations we face at the moment? What are the things which make it difficult to trust? What are the temptations we face in choosing not to trust?
2nd Temptation: Matthew 4:5-7 Next, the devil took Jesus to the holy city and made him stand on the highest part of the temple. The devil said, If you are God's Son, jump off. The Scriptures say: God will give his angels orders about you. They will catch you in their arms, and you won't hurt your feet on the stones. Jesus answered, The Scriptures also say, don t try to test the Lord your God! So once again Satan challenges what God has said, If you are God s son, and Jesus once again has to choose to remember his baptism, and remember what God said over him and hold on to it. This time Satan tempts Jesus to prove that God is really with him. Jump off the highest part of the most important building in the capital of Israel and let everyone see angels rushing to your rescue. Then everyone will know who you are! It must have been tempting! Not having to put up with the constant challenges to prove who he was, the endless speculation that followed him around, arguments about whether he was or wasn t the messiah and why. And Satan s saying. Go on then! Prove that God is with you and that you are the Messiah that the people are waiting for, and prove to them that God is with them and is leading them to freedom. Again Jesus quotes Moses in his speech to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:16 where he says, The Lord your God is with you, so don t try to make him prove that he can help you, as you did at Massah, referring to the time when Israel demanded that God give them water. Jesus knew who he was and where he had come from. He was the king, who was born in the poorest of places and slept his first nights in a food trough. He wasn t a king who would awe people and command their allegiance. He was God s servant, sent to lay down his life and lead in God s way, which loved people and respected their right to choose. Israel had tested God and demanded things their way, Jesus would trust Him and trust His way. 3 rd Temptation: Matthew 4:8-11 Finally, the devil took Jesus up on a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms on earth and their power. The devil said to him, I will give all this to you, if you will bow down and worship me. Jesus answered, Go away Satan! The Scriptures say: Worship the Lord your God and serve only him. Then the devil left Jesus, and angels came to help him. I think often as Christians when we read this temptation, it s easy for us to dismiss it. We proclaim Jesus as Lord, and king of heaven and Earth, so it s easy to think of this encounter as a bit of a joke. What does Satan think he s on!? But if this offer that Satan makes to Jesus isn t real, then it s not a temptation. So if we are to believe the Gospels are trying to tell us the truth about Jesus, then we need to accept that this offer is real, that Satan has authority to make it, and try to understand what the temptation is for Jesus in it. Because the reality is that having failed to get Jesus on the first
two attempts, Satan goes for the jugular and takes aim at the heart of Jesus vocation, his mission, the whole reason that he came to us. To understand this, we need to start in Genesis. In the beginning God created everything and proclaimed that all he had made was good. He made humans in his image and placed them at the heart of creation to bring his wise order to it. God made humans with a purpose, a vocation, and gave us AUTHORITY to rule the Earth in relationship with Him. But then we were tempted by Satan and we chose to disobey God and sin. When we did that, we gave up the freedom and the authority we had in God when we lived in obedience to Him, and we handed it to Satan and became slaves to him and to sin. So when Satan comes to Jesus and offers him all the kingdoms on the Earth, he was doing so with full authority as the ruler of the Earth. The authority that we gave him. What Jesus knew, is that God was not content to let the devil get away with ruining his creation. He had launched a rescue plan, starting with a small people group enslaved in Egypt, who he led through the wilderness to the promised land. They were destined by God to be a royal priesthood, sent to restore God s rule to Earth through obedient human beings. On their own they learned that they could never do this, but Jesus had come to fulfil their destiny and lead them, as their king, to freedom. What Satan was offering him in this exchange was an easier path to his destiny. Sure you could do it God s way, but that s going to be really, really hard AND it s gonna hurt a lot. Or you could worship me and I ll let you have it all now. I m sure that it would have been very tempting for Jesus to take Satan up on the offer. I kind of imagine Jesus in this exchange like Galadriel in LOTR when Frodo offers to give her the ring of power. He, after all, would use this power to do good, he would set people free, get rid of the brutal empires enslaving people and rule with justice. But Jesus saw the temptation for what it was, a parody. A story that really illustrates this comes from a film I watched on Netflix called Cartelland. [Cartelland story: Poor farmers in Mexico are brutally punished by a drugs cartel for nonpayment of protection money. They decide to fight back and rid themselves of the oppression. But the means they used were the same power and brutality used by the cartels. Although at first you watch and think, Yes! Come on! Free yourselves! The lines become more blurred as the film progresses and ends with the liberation movement having become the very thing it was trying to eliminate.] So Jesus understood that although God s way was harder and would cost him everything, it was the only way that would bring freedom. Jesus trusted God and He knew that obedience to God was the only way that he could be all that he was meant to be. And this gets to the heart of the Gospel and the authority we have to resist temptation and Satan. You see the Gospel is that Israel and Jesus were not God s plan B. God never gave up on plan A. Jesus gospel announced that the kingdom of God, was once again coming to Earth.
Jesus obedience to God would open the way for humans to once again take up the authority and the vocation that they had been created to have. When we enter God s kingdom as sons and daughters of the King, we are called to take back up in Jesus the authority that was given up in Genesis 2. This happens in 2 ways. First and foremost the taking up of this authority requires transformation. When slaves are set free, they don t tend to wake up the next day and think, I know, I ll just go back out and work in the fields with all the other slaves, wear the same clothes, sleep in the same bed and suffer the same abuse. They start a completely new life and begin a journey of learning how to live as free women and men. In the same way Paul says in Galatians 5:1 Christ has set us free! This means we are really free. Now hold on to your freedom and don t ever become slaves again. So we need to take sin seriously. Sin matters because as Bev said in the first talk of this series, we are never neutral. 2 Peter 2:9 puts it like this, people are slaves to whatever controls them. When we sin, it dehumanises both the person who sins and those affected by it. Sin bolsters the kingdom of Satan and helps to perpetuate his rule on Earth. When we don t deal with sin in our life we allow it to control us, and we have no authority to resist. [DNA story. Talk: The unconfessed areas of our lives are the parts where Jesus is not Lord. Convicted by the Holy Spirit to confess a sin from early teens which I had decided no one could ever know about me. The fear in confessing is punishment and judgment. What I experienced was mutual confession, grace and forgiveness. I had walked into the session bound by past sin, I walked out free.] When we repent of our sin and give our whole lives to Jesus we continue a journey of transformation which gradually restores our true humanity. In the same way we as a community, practising discipleship, which we looked at in our last series, need to be taking authority over the sin in our lives and the temptations we face. We do this not by judging each other or condemning, but by joining each other on our knees, confessing that we ve all fallen short, practising forgiveness and praying for God s grace. We need to own the discussion of the dehumanising parodies held out by Satan as freedom, that would actually seek to keep us enslaved, which means we need to get comfortable talking openly together, in appropriate groups, about sexuality, pornography, money, debt, pride, envy, alcohol, anxiety, addiction. These are topics which belong in church, not so that we can tell people where they re going wrong, but so that we can remind each other of all that we are supposed to be in Christ and of the grace which opens the way for each of us to reclaim our true humanity.
Questions: What are the parodies or imitations of freedom we are tempted by? Are there any areas of unconfessed sin that need to be confessed and dealt with? (If so, how and where should we do that in and with who?) Are there any topics that we re afraid to talk about in church? How can we get over our fears/cultural discomfort and discuss these topics, to benefit people struggling with them and point the way to God s grace? Secondly, taking up our authority as sons and daughters of the king means taking our responsibility as image bearers seriously. The misdirection of the gospel we ve often heard is that it is about going to heaven when we die. For me this had the effect that I just thought there was nothing much that I needed to do. I ve prayed the prayer, been baptised. I m in. All that s left to do is wait it out and then one day Jesus will get rid of everything, sort it all out and we ll spend the rest of eternity in blissful paradise. But that s not what the bible says. Yes I believe that Jesus and the bible do teach that heaven is a place that God s people go when they die, and there are good reasons to believe this, but the bible indicates that this is only a place to rest and wait. The destination and the hope that we have is a fully redeemed and restored Earth, and the picture of the fulfilment of that hope in Revelation chapter 21 is heaven coming to Earth and joining with the Earth in a similar way to marriage. This has already started to happen. It started with Jesus resurrection, it continues now, and it will find it s fullness when the marriage happens. [Ruth and me story. Ruth helped decorate the house. We spent days talking. When we got engaged we bought furniture together and chose light fitting etc. Ruth moved her stuff in. When we got married and started living together, all of this was still there.] Just as all that Ruth and I invested in our relationship before we got married wasn t lost when we married, so all that we do on Earth now is important. It matters, and it is not lost. The bible makes it clear that the work of seeing heaven come on Earth starts now. Resurrection life doesn t start when we die, it starts from the moment we accept Jesus. We re living it now. So as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 we must each be careful how we build, because Christ is the only foundation. Whatever we build on that foundation will be tested by fire on the day of judgment. Then everyone will find out if we have used gold, silver, and precious stones, or wood, hay, and straw. We will be rewarded if our building is left standing. But if it is destroyed by the fire, we will lose everything. Yet we ourselves will be saved, like someone escaping from flames.
Not everything will be destroyed, just the sin and the rubbish that keeps people enslaved. The gold, silver and precious stones: the love we show, the character we build, the environment we care for will go on. That s why Jesus sent his followers out into the world, commanding us to let our light shine before men and to pray that His kingdom would come on Earth. So what does this authority to resist Satan look like when we let our light shine before men. Well it emphatically doesn t look like Christians condemning those whose lifestyles or moral choices we disagree with or telling people how to behave. As my favourite theologian Tom Wright says The generous creator God is not honoured, is not reflected into the world, by a church that stands aloof, secure in its own holiness, and looking down on the best that the rest of the world can do as so much unspiritual, un-christian, or ungodly rubbish. Jesus was often gentle with people, he loved them, and he always left them free to choose. As Isaiah prophesied about him in Isaiah 42:3, He won t break off a bent reed or put out a dying flame. He commanded us in Matthew 20:25-26 not to lord it over people like the rulers of earthly kingdoms, but to serve others. The church belongs in all the places where the world is in pain, as a place of prayer, where broken people join together, crying out to God, groaning for grace. In Citylife that looks like: The gate This starts with the belief that prostitution is dehumanising so we exercise our authority to love prostitutes, serve them and remind them of their dignity and worth. If you want to get involved see Nicky. Safe families for children in places where families have been supported with mentors to talk to and respite in childcare there has been a 12% reduction in children going into care. If you want to become a family friend or offer respite see Debbo. Street Pastors Alder Trust Cell group rubbish collection Christians should be at the forefront of environmental issues. The greenhouse And perhaps the most important thing: Our jobs. So to summarise. We resist temptation and Satan, firstly, as we choose to trust God and trust that His way of love, sacrifice and service is the best way. Secondly, as we catch his vision for what it means to be truly human, get serious about dealing with all the things which dehumanise us, and step out in the vocation that God created us for in the beginning.
Questions: What are some of the practical ways we as individuals are building for God s kingdom in our daily lives? What are the things which stop us doing this? Is there anything we need to start doing as a connect group? Are there any City Life projects we need to sign up for?