Temptation of Christ: Resisting Sin

The gospels were presenting another credential, another proof that Jesus is Messiah.

When you test something, it has to be a real test, otherwise it doesn’t prove anything. When a bridge is built, certain guarantees go with the bridge:
* It is guaranteed not to fall apart.
* It is guaranteed to hold up a certain amount of tonnage over a certain period of time.
* It is guaranteed to withstand all kinds of weather and other stressors.

All those guarantees are backed up by test after test. Every test is documented, proving the guarantees are genuine. No test, no guarantee.

The temptations God allowed Satan to test Jesus with were real, they tested Jesus to the limit of His emotions and intellect, to the limit of His physical, emotional and intellectual strength. The test was going to reveal whether Jesus, being a man, was also a sinner.

"Sin" is a Greek word, referring to an archer missing the mark with his arrow. Anything less than a bull's eye is sin. The "mark," in Biblical terms, is God's glory, and God's law. God's glory is the Spirit of His law, the beauty of His holiness. God's law expresses His righteousness and is the ultimate standard for inner and outer lives. Every human misses achieving this standard, this "mark;" every person sins. But Jesus never did. How?

Jesus was delivered from sinning by the same means you and I have access to today. He was filled with the Holy Spirit, just as believers are today, and He had studied God's word in the same way you and I are studying God’s word here today.

He memorized scripture exactly the way any other ordinary person sets about memorizing something -- He did the plain hard work of getting God's word into His mind for the Spirit to recall when He needed it.

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Temptation of Christ: Jesus is Tested

When Jesus was baptized by John, He was also anointed and filled by the Holy Spirit and He received His Father’s public affirmation as God’s beloved Son, pleasing to God.

In combining the three gospel accounts of what happens next, we find out that immediately after His baptism, full of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit literally impelled Jesus to go into the wilderness alone to fast and pray, and to be tested.

In scripture, fasting often preceded a great spiritual struggle. Elijah and Moses are both described in the Old Testament as fasting for 40 days and nights. As Jesus’ life paralleled the life of His people, all Israel was led by God into the wilderness to be tested for forty years before they entered the promised land.

The principle of fasting is simple. When you temporarily stop eating, many of the systems in your body are given a break from the hard work of digestion. The extra energy gives your body the chance to heal and restore itself, and burning stored calories gets rid of toxic substances stored in your body, which is symbolic of what happens to us spiritually. Biblical fasting always centers on spiritual purposes. We cover up what is inside our hearts with the pleasure of eating and other good experiences, but in fasting these things come to the surface.

There are side effects to fasting:
* fatigue,
* aches and pains,
* emotional duress,
* headaches,
* nausea,
* the symptoms of colds and flu,
which are all caused by the temporarily increased levels of toxins in your body which have also been inadvertently stored along with energy.

Jesus was likely experiencing all these side affects as He fasted and prayed. Jesus was slowly starving. At the end of the forty days, He was right on the brink of death by starvation.

During the entire time of His fasting and praying, Jesus endured relentless temptations from the devil.

How did He keep from sinning? The easy answer is to say, “Well, He’s God. The Bible says God can’t be tempted, so it was a slam dunk.”

But that’s not the answer.

The Greek word “peirazein,” which is translated “tempt” in English, has very different element in it’s meaning than to try to entice or persuade someone to do wrong. It means “test” far more than it means what you and I understand as “tempt.”

[Tomorrow: How Jesus withstood the test, when He was the absolute weakest, physically and emotionally, that a human being could be]

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