TESTING TIME Luke 4:1-13 Jesus had been in the wilderness around the Jordan River when John baptized him. Then, the Holy Spirit led Him farther away to an isolated place in the wilderness where He was alone. He was full of the Holy Spirit and led by the Spirit, indicating that equal Persons in the Godhead are subject to one another for different reasons and at different times. The Lord Jesus later sent the Holy Spirit to indwell His redeemed people after He ascended back into heaven, having completed the work of redemption.
God always has a purpose behind His directives. We may not know why certain things, both bad and good, happen to us. One thing we do know is that we can trust God in everything. The Holy Spirit leads us and fills us for His work. The Lord Jesus Christ is with us, and so is the Father. We know that God allows the outcome of any matter, and He has sovereign plans that are usually unknown to us until after the matter is finished.
The devil continually tempted the Lord Jesus Christ for forty days. Three of those temptations were testing times to demonstrate the superiority and authority of our Lord over every foe, including Satan. Perhaps He told His disciples of those three tests so they would be assured that there would be no temptation to come on them any greater than those with whom He was tried and tested. The “Beloved Son” was completely obedient to the Father in everything He did. Wilderness experiences are often considered places where we meet with God privately and have a new beginning of some kind as a result. The patriarchs, Moses, David, and many prophets experienced “wilderness experiences” in Old Testament times. Paul, John, and perhaps other disciples had similar times as New Testament practices, and the Holy Spirit unfolded teaching. Temptation is a common human experience, and in that way, the Lord Jesus Christ was both tempted and tested in the wilderness, so it is true that He “was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.”
In some of our most sublime spiritual experiences with God, we will also find the enemy, the devil, seeking to negate all the glory and blessing of intimate fellowship with our Lord. Our only recourse is to “resist the devil” with the word of God, “and he will flee from you. Draw night to God, and He will draw nigh to you.” There is power in the very sound of the words of scripture being correctly quoted and applied in the right way that will stop the work of our foe.
Even hunger did not jeopardize the loyalty of our Lord to His Father. As a man, He would never attempt to do God’s work in a way that would contradict God’s authority or oppose God’s will. He would never seek to force God’s hand by putting on a spectacular show of jumping off the pinnacle of the temple. Temptations are really related to security and power. By being found in fashion as a man, our Lord Jesus gave up both to a degree to be obedient to the Father. He fully trusted the Father for His life and well-being, as we do. In that way, He identified Himself with us in our temptations and testing times. Indeed, His experience was not exactly like ours because He is sinless in His very being, but His power is infinite, and His security is unlimited. Yet, by an act of obedience to the divine will of God, He did limit Himself for a time so that whatever happens to us has already happened to Him. He has been there and done that.
Consequently, Jesus went through human experiences so He could understand our temptations. He also endured that particular testing time to undo the damage Adam caused when he yielded to the temptation of the devil. The Lord resisted the devil and won the victory. His victory makes salvation possible for every tempted human being who trusts His substitutionary work on our behalf. The devil’s challenge seeking to get Jesus to sin and disobey God was overcome by three quotations from the book of Deuteronomy, chapters 6-8. The knowledge of the scriptures and the power of the Spirit are available to us and are necessary to overcome temptation.
Satan said, in essence, to the Lord Jesus, “Let’s assume for argument’s sake that You are the Son of God,” when he challenged Jesus’ identity and authority. Those same things he used God had used in the wilderness to test the sincerity of the Israelites. To have eaten bread at Satan’s instruction would have shown a lack of dependence on God. Power used for the wrong reason and by the wrong means is defeat. Satan misused the words of Psalm 91 to challenge Jesus to do a foolish display of power. In this context, Psalm 91 shows that God protects His people, not display His power.
God is to be trusted, not tested. Israel tried to test God at Meribah. They refused to trust God’s promise that He would provide what they needed in the wilderness, but they forced God’s hand by demanding water. The relationship of trust between them and God was damaged beyond repair by that demand on their part, even though God gave them what they wanted. True faith in God does not make demands, nor does it demand tangible proof that what God says is trustworthy. It is wrong to put one’s self in danger to try to force God to reveal Himself to unbelievers. God’s word is what is needed, and that is all that is needed to provide proof of His divine intentions.
The devil is a real person who is the leader of the opposition to God’s intention for the world. He is real, evil, and powerful. We can resist him only by a correct application of the authority of the word of God to any temptation. The testing of the Lord Jesus Christ was to show the reality of His deity, the perfection of His humanity, and the quality of His personhood. Testing times can be used for good purposes as well as for evil ones. Our faith may be strengthened in a special way, and we may be brought closer to the Lord because of the tests we face.
The basic principles of trust and loyalty to God are made evident in the testing times. We can apply comparisons to the contrasts of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life in which Adam failed. The “second Adam,” our Lord Jesus Christ, was victorious in all these three areas of human life. However, the point of the passage Luke wrote is to demonstrate that Jesus is the Son of God and is qualified to be the Messiah, beyond any doubt.