The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in
the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild
animals, and the angels were ministering to him. Mark 1.12-13
Here we find
Jesus dealing with something that we face everyday: temptation. But though an
everyday occurrence, it is something that is well understood by so few.
So, what does it mean to be tempted? It’s to be presented with a choice. Which will it be, love and obedience to your God or attempting to chart a course for your own satisfaction and happiness? In some way or other, every temptation boils down to this choice.
So, what does it mean to be tempted? It’s to be presented with a choice. Which will it be, love and obedience to your God or attempting to chart a course for your own satisfaction and happiness? In some way or other, every temptation boils down to this choice.
So, Jesus is
presented with the choice. Satan, the adversary of God’s people, wants to
thwart the mission of God that Jesus is to pursue. If he can get Jesus to fall,
to choose poorly, he will have succeeded in defeating the mission. You can see this quite
clearly in Matthew and Luke’s accounts of this temptation. Jesus is recorded
there as making the choice between God and self clear by His replies to Satan.
In all the accounts, Jesus is presented with the choice, but He
chooses wisely. (As Luke makes clear, while this is a setback for Satan he
doesn’t give up.)
This is also
another place where the number forty pops up. Here, Mark is making a connection
with the forty years that Israel spent in another wilderness during
the days of Moses where they also were on a mission, to be a kingdom of priests
interceding for the sake of the world. There they were similarly presented with
choices. But time and again, they chose poorly. Mark’s point is that Jesus
is able to do what Israel failed to do. He will succeed in the
mission given to Him by the Father.
One more
thing. The Spirit of God has a role here. He is the one who drove Jesus into
the wilderness so that He could be presented with this temptation. The Spirit’s
work is often viewed in terms of being a comfort to the saints as well as their
encourager. And He is that! But here we see another aspect of His work. Just as
He did with Jesus, the Spirit brings us into situations where we are presented
with that choice. He does this for our good because there are many good things
that can come from facing such a choice. There are times, for example, when we
can be encouraged when we see that we have chosen wisely, evidence that there
has been progress in our developing a love for our God. But there are also
times when our pride needs to be exposed to ourselves as we see that we are not
nearly the perfect people we think we are. In His grace the Spirit brings us
into these situations.
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