How Christ Resisted Temptation

The days were hot and stifling, the nights cold and sleepless. He had eaten nothing for weeks. Soon the interrogator would arrive with his diabolical torments. How much more could one man endure?

We are not told much about Jesus's temptation in the wilderness. Certainly, those days rank among the worst of human experience, as trying as being adrift at sea or tortured as a prisoner of war. Christ, who must have related the event to His disciples, is characteristically brief. He shares just enough to equip His friends for their own spiritual battles, which in turn is enough to equip us for our battles — especially if we dig beyond the surface of Christ's words to find their origins.

In Matthew 4 and Luke 4, we read how the devil tempted Jesus with three proposals: turn rocks into bread, jump from the pinnacle of the temple, and worship the Adversary. Jesus resisted each temptation by quoting the Old Testament. But the Old Testament is over half a million words long; how did Jesus find the words He needed? First, He seems to have narrowed the search to just one book, Deuteronomy. This is Moses's farewell address to the Children of Israel, a book full of admonitions about how God's people should behave, a pocket guide to God's will. Second, Jesus drew from His circumstances. He found the three verses He needed by focusing on His extreme hunger.

Consider the first temptation. Starving while fully able to turn rocks into bread, Jesus replies with the last words of Deuteronomy 8:3: "...man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord" (ESV). The first part of the verse hints that food may already have been on Jesus's mind: "[God] humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know..." After forty days without food, Jesus would have craved even the smallest bite of manna. Recalling Moses's description of God's provision in the wilderness led Jesus from the devil's food-based temptation to the words that gave Him the strength to resist a powerful suggestion.

The devil wouldn't make the same mistake again, but it was too late. Jesus had the key for turning temptation into resistance. To the next two temptations, Jesus answered from verses that closely follow lavish food imagery, Deuteronomy 6 verses 13 and 16, "You must fear the Lord your God and serve him" and "You must not test the Lord your God” (NLT). Those words follow verses 10 through 12, which read:

"And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you — with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant — and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Deuteronomy 6:10–12 ESV). (emphasis added)

Jesus converted His hunger into a spiritual advantage. He craved food, and He used that desire to find the words of Scripture that He needed most. His greatest weakness — the weakness the devil tried to exploit — Jesus transformed into His greatest asset by the power of God's Word. He became like the heroes of Hebrews 11 who "were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war" (verse 34, ESV).

Call to Action: Knowing Scripture

Christ's temptation in the wilderness is familiar to us all. We face similar temptations every day, temptations to eat when we shouldn't, temptations to listen to bad advice, temptations to test God's patience or ignore God and declare our loyalty to something else. But Jesus's responses to temptation show us that where we are weak God is able to make us strong. Jesus held to the promise that man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of God, and we can hold onto that promise too. The more Scripture we know and contemplate, the more the Holy Spirit will surprise us with applications we never considered. Why not start preparing now?