There are many different kinds of tests. We test in school. We test to get a license or a job. Tests are used to evaluate different skills or
knowledge. Some tests to a good job with
it. Some just demonstrate that you do or
don’t know how to take a test. Tests
these days are ones where we want the answers to benign, negative,
insignificant, or normal. But we also
get tested by God to see if we will be obedient. The first test was in the Garden of
Eden. Adam and Eve failed that
test. In today’s gospel, Jesus is tested
as well. Like Adam and Eve, His love for
God the Father is tested. We read that
the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested. Marks’s gospel says the Spirit drove Him into
the wilderness to be tested. Like Adam and Eve, the devil is the agent of
testing. The Bible study group is studying
Jesus’s temptation. I am thankful to our
study author, Ray Vanderlaan, for pointing out that the temptation order in
Matthew’s gospel shows Jesus’s demonstration of fulfilling the Shema, our
Deuteronomy passage. Jesus’s love of the Father was tested—to love God with all
of his heart, soul, and strength (might).
Jesus passed this test with flying colors.
When asked, “What is the greatest
commandment,” Jesus went right to the shema—to love the Lord your God with all
of your heart, soul, strength (and Jesus also adds mind), and to love your
neighbor as yourself as the second greatest commandment. In the Old Testament, the heart was the seat
of the will, not the seat of the emotions.
The seat of emotions was the bowels.
Notice this commandment does not mention loving God with all of our
bowels. We often think of love as a
feeling, but the love God desires of us is more than feelings. In fact, feeling love isn’t even
necessary. Love is demonstrated by
actions and ones life. Love takes will—commitment. Loving God means doing what God wants, not
necessarily what you want.
Next
is to love the Lord your God with all of your soul. Soul is often translated as life. For sure this includes our physical
life. But it is far more than that. Physical life is described as “spirit”--wind
or breath. Without spirit, one is not
alive. When you stop breathing, you are dead, unless you start breathing again
in a very short period of time. So soul
is more than physical life. It includes
identity, and all that makes you, you. To
love the Lord our God with all of our soul is to love God with our whole
being. It means that the way God sees us
and defines us not only supersedes any way we would choose to identify
ourselves, but replaces those ways. We
have an identity crisis in our society today.
Everyone wants the ability to self-identify, and in a free society, they
should be able to. However, it is also
demanded that others accept that identity, no questions asked, even if that
person chooses to change his or her identity from day to day week to week. “Who am I” is one of the most important
questions we ask as human beings. Most
humans start exploring that question on a deep level as teens or
pre-teens. We ask it when we face major
life changes. God wants to answer that
question for us. After all, God made
us. God wants us to find our identity in
Christ as children of God. It is the
kind of identity that is permanent. It
doesn’t change with our life circumstances.
To love God with all of our strength or might is to love God with our
actions. We are called to do everything,
even down to eating and drinking for the glory of God. What we do with our bodies shows our love or
lack of love for God. Jesus adds
“mind.” In Greek and Roman times, the
mind took on more significance.
Intellect was emphasized. Jesus
separates out mind to adjust to the culture of His day and to emphasize that we
are also to love God with our thinking. We
are to love God with our thought by aligning our thinking with His thinking, to
meditate on God, God’s ways, and God’s commands, to remember God and God’s
word. To love the Lord our God with all
our heart, soul, strength, and mind is to love God with all that we are and
with all that we’ve got.
How did Jesus’s tests show His
complete love of God? We see it in
Jesus’s answers to the devil. When
tempted to turn stones into bread, Jesus replies by quoting Deuteronomy
8:3. In the verse prior, Moses tells the
people that all that testing of 40 years in the wilderness was from God, “that
He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you
would keep His commandments or not.” The
first part of verse 3 that Jesus didn’t quote specifically mentions the test of
hunger and God giving manna to the people.
In the second test, to throw Himself off
the pinnacle of the temple, Jesus shows He loves God with all of His soul by
not putting God to the test. Jesus isn’t
going to test God with preserving His physical life. There is a difference between asking God to
do things contrary to God’s nature versus asking God to confirm His word. Though the devil also uses Scripture to tempt
Jesus, he leaves out the part where God promises to preserve the lives of those
who love God and call upon His name, not those who foolishly take their lives
into their own hands just to make a point.
The rest of the verse that Jesus quotes back to the devil refers to the
people tempting God at Massah, when they were complaining about a lack of
water. After God provides water from the
rock, Moses names the place Massah and Meribah, because the people “tested the
Lord saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not.”
God is not obligated to prove Himself, though God reveals Himself to us
all the time. I think about Jesus
Himself after the resurrection. He
didn’t go around showing Himself to those who had criticized Him, proving to
them that He was who He said He was and that they were wrong. He went to those who were already following
Him, confirming their faith and strengthening them in their discipleship. This
was an identity challenge for Jesus. Is
He going to test who God says He is, the beloved Son, or not. Jesus did not need God to prove His identity. He knows He is the Son of God.
The last test of getting all the
kingdoms of the world tested Jesus as to whether He loved God with all of His
strength. The devil offered Jesus the
easy way to get what was rightfully His, a way that required little effort from
Jesus and none of the pain of His passion and crucifixion. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy again, “You shall
worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.” This verse comes from Moses warning the
people that when they get into the Promised Land and start building homes and
living the good life from the all that the land easily produces, not to forget
the Yahweh their God. Moses knew the
temptation would be both to claim their success as self-made and to worship the
gods of the nations that surrounded them, traps into which they did eventually
fall. Loving the Lord our God with all of our strength means it takes some
effort. Worship is service, that is
doing things. Jesus knew that loving the
Lord with all of His might took effort.
It would take all he could humanly handle and reliance on God to uphold
Him. Philippians 2 says that because
Jesus humbled Himself and was obedient even to death on the cross that He has
been given the name above all names at which every knee will bow and every
tongue will confess that He is Lord, and this will also bring glory to God the
Father. As Jesus is worshipped the
Father too is worshipped.
Notice the tools that Jesus used to
overcome temptation. He was prayed up
and studied up. These temptations come
at the END of Jesus 40 days of praying and fasting in the wilderness. So He was hungry, but He was spiritually
mighty. He has spent 40 days in
communion with the Father. He was
studied up. The fact these passages
could roll so quickly and easily off Jesus’s tongue showed that He had spent
time studying and memorizing God’s Word.
It was customary especially for Jewish young men to memorize the
Torah. I’m sure Jesus had the writings
and prophets memorized as well. Jesus’s
own practice of spiritual disciplines serves as a model for us.
Jesus loved God fully and
perfectly. This was just the first
testing we hear about prior to His public ministry, but all through His life,
He lived in perfect love. Next week we
will look at Jesus’s biggest time of testing—His time in the Garden of
Gethsemane. This was the moment when
Jesus most struggled with His will versus the Father’s will. He knew what was coming, and He knew that
this is why He had been born, and yet, He didn’t want to do it, but He remained
fully committed to loving God with all of His heart, soul, strength, and mind,
and what He went through, certainly took everything out of Him. Yet He did it! Ray Vanderlaan writes in regard to the Shema
that through Israel had not been able to keep the Shema fully, “they believed
that when Messiah came, He would show everyone, Israel and the nations, how to
live by that creed. And they were
right!” He couldn’t command it of us if
He hadn’t done it Himself. In loving God
perfectly, Jesus also loved us perfectly.
In our epistle reading, we hear that Jesus is the superior High
Priest. He is because He can identity
with us. His temptations were part of
Him learning what it is to be fully human.
He knows what it is to be weak. Yet
Jesus passed all His tests with flying colors.
Because of this, not only is He the perfect High Priest, He is the
perfect sacrifice. He doesn’t have to
offer sacrifices for Himself before offering them for the people, because He
was sinless. He doesn’t have to offer repeated sacrifices, because He is the
perfect once for all sacrifice. He intercedes
for us still. We can come boldly to Him
expecting grace and mercy in our times of trial. He is, as Hebrews 5:9 says, “the source of
eternal salvation” for those who obey Him.
Jesus not only perfectly loved the Father, He perfectly loved us and
loves us too.
No comments:
Post a Comment