The Temptation of Christ
In Luke 4:1-13, we read:
And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’”
And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,
“‘He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,’
and
“‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”
And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
(All Bible quotation will be from the ESV.)
At a first reading, this story appears straightforward: the devil suggests that Jesus do some bad things, Jesus refuses, and the devil is defeated. However, the specific things that the devil suggests don’t immediately fit into an obvious pattern. They don’t build on each other, for example, or escalate or de-escalate in an obvious way. Satan isn’t bargaining or wheedling with Jesus. He’s trying three different avenues of attack, and, when one fails, he moves on to another.
David J. MacLeod summarizes some frameworks for understanding the devil’s choices. Each temptation mirrors one of the temptations to which Adam and Eve fell: food (although bread, not fruit), “a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6), and the desire to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5), immortal and invincible. Each temptation also attacks a different part of Jesus’s human nature: first the body, then the soul, then the spirit. These make sense, but they leave a significant fact unexplored: Jesus is not just a human to be tempted. He is something entirely new in the universe: a being with two essences, not just one, fully human and fully divine. We should expect the devil to adapt – and, by studying how he adapts, we can hope to be able to understand the mystery of the nature of Christ a little better.
To the extent that humans can understand it, which is extremely limited at best, the Son has had a divine nature from eternity past, but acquired a human one through the work of the Holy Spirit sometime around 0 AD. Furthermore, he did this, as he says, “not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). He is in a deep, trusting relationship with the Father, to the point where in his darkest hour he can pray “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).
All three of these are crucial to Jesus’s mission. Without a divine nature, he would not be able to bear the full wrath of God. Without a human nature, he would not be able to take our place on the cross. Without a perfect relationship with the Father, he would not be able to actively intercede for us day by day. I would argue that what we see in Luke 4 is the devil systematically taking aim at each of these three things in turn.
First, he tries to exploit Jesus’s human nature. As a human, Jesus was hungry. As God, Jesus could make any food he wanted, anywhere he wanted. The devil suggests that Jesus suborn his divine nature to his human nature, ignoring the fast on which the Spirit is leading him and using his power merely to satisfy his most base desires. Jesus’s response is not a flippant rejection of bread in particular, but a reminder that the human body is more than a vessel for various kinds of hunger. He will not debase his own by reducing it to one.
The devil then tries a surprisingly similar approach with Jesus’s divine nature. We understand the divine nature of Jesus much less well than we understand the human, for obvious reasons, but we can say one thing: anything divine deserves glory, honor, and praise. Jesus later says that, should the people be kept from singing to him, the stones would cry out. Furthermore, the drive to acquire such honor is one of God’s primary motivations: speaking to disobedient Israel through Ezekiel, he says that “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name” (Ezekiel 36:22). So, just as Satan offered a hollow satisfaction of the human nature in exchange for a perversion of the divine, he now offers a hollow satisfaction of the divine nature – all the glory that accrues to the ruler of the world – in exchange for a perversion of the human. Humans are built to worship. They love to worship. Just worship me, he says, and I’ll give you everything. Jesus reminds the devil that this isn’t how worship works, and that power accrues not to the one who happens to be in charge of kingdoms for now but to God almighty.
Finally, the devil invites Jesus to throw himself down from the temple roof. It’s a little less obvious what he’s offering here, but Jesus’s response provides a clue. His responses to the previous two temptations have been quotations specifically prohibiting the action he’s being tempted to take, so it stands to reason that the third one, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test,” would be as well. If so, it becomes very significant that Satan is inviting Jesus to throw himself down, fall, and be lifted up. That’s exactly what Jesus is on earth to do.
The third temptation is the devil suggesting that Jesus take a trial run before committing to the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. This would be wrong on a number of levels. It would put Jesus above the Father, by setting up a situation in which Jesus calls the shots. Worse, it would insult the Father by implying that he could not be trusted until he had been tested. Having failed to split Jesus’s human and divine natures, Satan is now trying to drive a wedge between Jesus and the other persons of the Trinity. Jesus simply refuses to allow this to happen.
What unites the three temptations is a thesis that the terms of the incarnation – this never-before-seen new thing – are in some way up for negotiation. Jesus has never done this before, after all. Maybe now that he’s actually living it, he’d like to change some things. This would be a fatal blow to the grand salvific project, which hinges on Jesus being able to bring us back into communion with the Father. The Father, who has not been incarnated, is not going to change one way or the other. If Jesus does, he will no longer be precisely what is needed to mediate between the Father and us.
Thanks be to God, then, that Jesus’s response to temptation recognizes and rebuts this thesis. When Jesus quotes scripture, he isn’t affirming his commitment to a set of arbitrary rules. As the Word of God, he wrote that scripture, and he is telling the devil that it is just as true now as it used to be. Satan cannot successfully tempt Jesus, because Jesus, in all his natures, at all times, is just as committed to the Father’s plan as he has always been.
This is good news for us. Since Jesus has proved that he does not abandon his old promises after a change such as the incarnation, how much more does this demonstrate that he does not abandon his promises after his resurrection and ascension! Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, he is the same Lord. Satan tried to demonstrate that he wasn’t, and succeeded only in giving him an opportunity to prove that he was, and, in so doing, to reassure us that, no matter what the future holds, he will gladly save all who call on his name.