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The Holy Day That Jesus Kept, Presentation 1: Into the Wilderness
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Cheong-Ju Seventh-day Adventist Church, Republic of Korea
Delivery: 2010-12-11
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2011-02-20 00:40Z
Type: Seminar Presentation
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kirl-thdtjk1.php
At the very beginning of His ministry, Jesus was driven by the Holy Spirit into the desert. The Koine Greek of the New Testament literally states that He was “thrown” into the wilderness.
Jesus understood that He must not eat until God gave permission. After Jesus had fasted forty days, Satan came. The ensuing confrontation holds lessons for us about the holy day that Jesus kept: the seventh day Sabbath.
Jesus’ First Temptation and Ours: Materialism
Jesus is very hungry. Satan comes. In the first temptation (according to the order presented in Matthew’s Gospel) Satan says, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matthew 4:3). The temptation is for Jesus to abandon His identification with fallen man and engage in proving He is God.
Before taking the form of a servant, Jesus had laid aside certain of His powers of Deity (Philippians 2:6, 7; John 10:18; 17:5). He came not only to be sacrifice in substitution for man, but also to demonstrate a pattern of overcoming through the Holy Spirit—experienced in the same damaged humanity we bear. Satan wanted Him—at all costs—to abandon this demonstration. He wanted Jesus to focus on His own extreme hunger. He wanted Him to obsess over His material needs. Satan wanted Jesus to forget to trust in a power outside of Himself, to take back to Himself powers of Deity He had laid aside, and then employ those powers to turn stones into bread.
Jesus’ answer was,
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).
It gives insight to see where Jesus quotes from&mdadsh;Deuteronomy 8:2, 3:
You shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Jesus, experiencing extreme hunger after 40 days without food, refuses to reduce His vision to a materialist one. Looking beyond hunger He instead identifies Himself with Israel in the wilderness. He does not abandon the higher vision, but sees Himself as tested with Israel, engaged in keeping the commandments. God humbled Israel, let them hunger and then fed them with food from above to teach them that His command must be first. Not my mouth but God’s mouth is what matters. Not my hunger but God’s lesson, is primary.
Recall the story in Exodus 16. Israel complains of lack of food. Then, God gives manna every morning. But on the sixth day of the week, Friday to us, He instructs them to gather enough for two days. He does not send manna on Sabbath morning. In this way, He taught a lesson of obedience. God placed a test before this band of freed slaves leaving Egypt—the test of Sabbath reform.
The temptation they faced, is ours too. But where Jesus succeeded, we often fail. Our vision is limited. Had we power to turn stones to bread, how tempted we would be to choose the material over the spiritual, eating over fasting. Would we choose to violate God’s holy day rather than to prepare for it and obey it?
Actually, we do have power—free choice. God never takes it away. He does not prevent us from profaning His holy Sabbath. When we engage in wrong behavior on the Sabbath, we prove ourselves unlike Jesus. We are gluttonous, materialistic eaters living by bread alone.
Jesus Second Temptation and Ours: Presumption
That was only the first temptation. Satan takes hold of Jesus and whisks Him to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem. His next ploy is to approach Jesus with this stratagem:
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down” (Matthew 4:6)
Jesus had quoted Scripture, but particularly the story of Israel in the wilderness. Now, Satan quotes Scripture back to Him: Psalm 91:11: “He will command his angels concerning you,” and “On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”
Psalm 91 is a beautiful praise for God’s deliverance, but we must be careful how we apply it. Jesus knows that presumption treats God’s promises and encouragements as license; and that faith treats them with respect and trusts Him without abusing His mercies. Jesus rejects Satan’s application of the passage to His present situation, and instead replies,
“It is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Deuteronomy 6:16).
In Jesus’ time there was no versification such as we have today. Quoting a passage acted as reference not to only those few words but to the larger context of the full passage. (This phenomenon is a principle of midrashic interpretation called DABER HALAMED MEINYANO, or “something proved by context”—the seventh rule of Hillel.) Deuteronomy six refers not only to the general principle that we should not put God to the test, but to the testing at Meribah in Exodus 17:1-7. Right after the manna and the Sabbath experience (Exodus 16), comes complaining about water in 17. God instructs Moses to strike the rock and water flows out of it (verse 7).
Satan had sought to provoke Jesus to leap from the pinnacle of the temple—instant death unless God intervened. But Jesus still saw His role to continue to relive Israel in the wilderness. God had not yet ended Jesus’ mission. Jesus resisted Satan’s misapplied appeal to God’s Psalm 91 deliverance promise. Jesus persisted in identifying Himself with Israel—an Israel that never delivered itself but was always delivered by God. He refused to throw Himself down.
Satan was prompting Jesus to engage in an act of presumption, to test God. He refused. What does this say to us about the Sabbath?
We presume upon God’s mercy when we tell Him how we will worship Him. He has defined for us what is His holy day. He has preserved to us needed insight in the events recorded in Scripture. We are not to choose to worship Him in our own way. Rather, we see what He says—then do it.
But often our course is the opposite. We try to keep the Sabbath holy using human methods. We choose our own terms of obedience. When it comes to the Sabbath, it is as when Satan prodded Jesus to jump, only, in our case, we do. We presume upon His goodness and interpret His instructions to suit ourselves.
Jesus’ Third Temptation and Ours: Compromise
The third temptation is different. Satan understands he has been detected; now he comes brazenly.
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, ’All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’
Satan takes Jesus to a vantage point and shows Him all the kingdoms of the world. He offers to give them to Jesus if Jesus will simply bow down to him. Satan presents Jesus with a short-cut around the cross!
The temptation here is to try to worship God in a way that does not cost Jesus’ life. It is a subtle attack on the badness of sin. The illusion is, that Jesus can have His righteous world, and yet avoid going to the cross. But in making the deal He will be affirming that there is room for compromise with evil, that sin is not so bad after all, that sin and salvation are negotiable, that compromise with it is possible. This temptation, the most subtle, receives Jesus’ firmest reply: Deuteronomy 6:13.
“Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ’You shall worship the Lord you God and him only shall you serve.’”
The portion of Scripture Jesus quotes is a warning—about compromise. Moses writes that when you’ve come into the land and have “great and good cities,” and “houses full of all good things,” and vineyards, olive trees, and large quantities of food—all for which you expend no labor, which has cost you nothing, then beware that you do not forget God. You are not to serve your own convenience, but serve the Lord God who brought you out of Egypt (Deuteronomy 6:10-15).
The first temptation was an appeal to materialism. The second was to presume upon God’s mercies and try to worship Him on our own terms instead of according to His specifications. The third is the temptation to worship God at reduced cost. In terms of Sabbath, the first temptation is for us to make the material world more important than the Sabbath. The second is to set our own terms of Sabbath-keeping. The third is to compromise, to honor God on His holy day less than He has asked.
Many in Christianity have failed on all three points. They ignore the Sabbath outright, or they set their own terms for Sabbath-keeping, or, they make a compromise even more directly. They choose what they call “keeping” it, but on the day of their own choosing. All this is pleasing to Satan. Most pleasing of all for him, is when Seventh-day Adventists become confused about the Sabbath. God had goals for Jesus in the wilderness, and those were achieved. God has goals for His end-time people. We have not done so well. Not yet. But neither is He through with us.
Conclusion
Jesus’ wilderness experience repeated the testing of Israel. Where Israel failed, Jesus succeeded. He successfully resisted the temptations to materialism, to presumptive obedience on His own terms, and to compromise. Jesus is a pattern, not just for those who have already passed off the pages of history, but for we who now are walking across those pages. He is our pattern. The temptations He faced we are facing again. We find ourselves in a spiritual wilderness, and Satan has come down to us with sly deceptions to persuade. He would have us trade God’s law for the material; to obey God selectively on our own terms; or, slickest of all, to compromise our Christianity in exchange for the imagined good we think we could do if only obedience did not stand in our way.
Brothers and sisters, are we Christians? Are we Israel? Are we Seventh-day Adventists? Surely Jesus is calling us to Sabbath reform. Our next talk launches into this process.
Originally presented at Seventh-day Adventist Language Institute, Cheongju, Republic of Korea, December 12, 2010. GCO
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