In this short series I am looking at the wilderness temptations of Jesus, who is the Christ. In part 1, I considered the very act of Christ going into the wilderness after his baptism as itself part of His trial. Christ’s having to wait to start His public ministry after being empowered by the Spirit to commence his mission, is akin to a president winning an election (legitimately, of course), but having to wait until the following calendar year to assume his office and begin his work for the nation. In the interim period, there is a preparation for his service that is invaluable to his ultimate success (I realize this is a horrible analogy given our current politics, but in principle the analogy makes some sense–just imagine your favorite president, should you have one).
It is in the time of waiting and preparing, therefore, that God does significant work in the person called to serve. Moreover, the greater the commission, the more intense the preparatory period will be. Regular infantrymen go through an intense 22-weeks of OSUT (One Station Unit Training) to conduct normal infantry operations. But those determined to conduct special operations, will go through far more preparation than that. For the savior of the world, the 40-days in the wilderness will test Him commensurate to that ultimate mission.
Furthermore, for Christ, this preparatory work in the wilderness entails the redemption of particular aspects of the nation of Israel’s own failures. Jesus’ mission includes the redemption of Israel’s failure to resist temptation in the past. Jesus will redeem Israel’s own wilderness wanderings (see Deuteronomy 6-8), by doing that which she did not do and by not doing that which she did. For us, God uses such waiting periods, “wilderness experiences,” to hone our character and steel our faith.
After this initial “proto-trial” of being made to wait before He could gather his team, preach the good news, perform miracles and go up to Jerusalem, Jesus is then tempted directly by Satan. The first temptation Christ encounters in the wilderness is related to his human flesh–a direct attack on his physical body.
The Strengths and Liabilities of Our Bodies
That the human body is both incredibly powerful and, at the same time, desperately fragile is a simple fact. At one moment our jaw hits the floor as we gaze at the elegant power of a champion figure skater, an NBA superstar, a world class wide-receiver or a legendary boxer. We are stunned at how beautiful and capable the body can work, especially when trained to its maximum capacity.
At another moment, however, we find ourselves aghast at the same body’s frailty. We see the same skater, basketball star, football player or fighter succumbs to something like COVID or cancer, or contract Alzheimers, only then to die what seems an untimely death. How can this paradox be? Certainly we can give a reductionistic account of the bio-chemical processes at play. But that does nothing to answer our deeper question of why there is decay at all?
For us, as only human, the body is a paradox. It is strong and weak, capable and incapable, fascinating and burdensome all at once. It can resist all kinds of pressures yet yields to all kinds of pressures. It can be tired or well rested, energized or totally spent. When our bodies our good, we seem to be not only more capable of doing physical things, but also of engaging in intellectual activity and moral action. When they are weak, our minds are numbed and our will to moral action subdued.
The Body of The Christ
For the eternal Logos, however, to become human flesh, to take on a human body, could only be an experience of the latter type– a subduing of energy and power. While we can and do experience strength and ability and fascination with our bodies, this would not have been the case for Christ. There would not have been a sense of newfound or newly acquired power for Jesus. There would have been only a sense of limitation, of being restricted by the body. Paul tells us this explicitly of the Christ in his letter to the Philippian church:
5 Let your attitude be identical to that of Christ Jesus.
6 Though he was in the form of God,
he did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped.
7 Rather, he emptied himself,[c]
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
Being found in appearance as a man,
8 he humbled himself,
and became obedient to death,
even death on a cross.Philip 2:5-8 (NCB)
The emptying of the eternal Logos entails God’s putting on an actual body. The kenosis, or self-emptying of God, goes beyond just the physics of the human body. It is the greatest metaphysical event of all time. But God, who is spirit (John 4:24), becoming flesh is a necessary part of God’s self-emptying. Paul reveals to us that for God this taking on of flesh is like a master becoming a slave. It is a full reversal of God’s nature, the unconditioned becoming conditioned, and an about-face of His role as God, the master becoming the servant. It is the paradigm of all humility.
In addition, Jesus did not simply incarnate and then live a happy, comfortable and luxurious human life. From a worldly perspective, He did not make the best of the body he assumed. He did not go hang out with Herod in Herod’s summer palace, eating fine foods and drinking fine wines all the days of his life. He did not travel to Rome to commiserate with Tiberius Caesar and join him in his pleasure gardens. Nor did he pursue a simple life as a peasant farmer or fisherman, dedicating his body to honest labor and more mundane pleasures.
Rather, Jesus’ body was set apart for a life of hardship and suffering. This is not to say Jesus didn’t experience any simple joys in life. He likely enjoyed various embodied acts, like dining with friends and family, sensing the pungent taste of wine, embracing a beloved friend, perhaps playing local games or having the kind of pleasure one has after a long day of physical exertion– the kind of “good” pain one has in the legs after a solid 5-mile run.
Nevertheless, as to pain, the body of Jesus was like our bodies– tested and tried in various ways. Jesus’ physical pain was no different than ours. His C-fibers fired in the same way yours and mine fire when we smash our thumb, throw out our back or have a migraine. He would have known the displeasure of pain intensified and known it perhaps better than we do. He probably would have been more aware of His body than we are of our bodies, not only as the Christ, but also as a first-century Palestinian existing in a world without modern technologies that mediate the interactions between our bodies and our environment. And, as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, Jesus, like all ancient men and women, lived in a world without chloroform (pain killers).
“Turn This Rock Into Bread”: The First Temptation
The devil’s first temptation of the Christ, therefore, is a physical one. He attempts to lure Jesus into saving His own body from physical demise:
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after He had fasted for forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”
Matt 4:1-3 (NASB)
In God, Freedom and Human Dignity, theologian Ron Highfield points out something about Jesus’ first temptation that can go unnoticed:
Matthew informs us that Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights. This may be the writer’s way of emphasizing that this was not a sunrise to sunset fast. At the end of it he was hungry, life-and-death hungry. In this dire situation, the devil suggests that God cannot be trusted to provide for Jesus. God sent you out into this godforsaken place, the devil says in effect, and it seems like he has forsaken you.
Highfield, 153
Highfield is right to not overlook Matthew’s intent of pointing out the full scope of Jesus’ fasting. Matthew is telling us that Jesus did not eat for 40 days! Of course this period of “40” has symbolic overtures as well. It clearly refers to Israel’s 40-year wilderness wandering after the exodus from Egypt and before entering the promised land. However, if Jesus spent a literal forty days in the desert without any food (which is technically possible), then two things become clear about the nature of this temptation.
Two Aspects of Jesus’ Physical Temptation
The first aspect of this temptation is simple to discern: Jesus was at the brink of physical death. This means that not only was Jesus tempted by having to wait to begin His public mission, but that within the first two months of that waiting period He is confronted with what seems to be a very real, and very premature, end to that mission. If Jesus does not eat, and eat soon, His body will obviously die. It is a human body after all, one susceptible to all the natural liabilities that human bodies have.
Furthermore, this is the very body that is required for Jesus’ divine mission to be fulfilled. It is this body that will be nailed to a cross. It is this body that will die for the sins of men, and it is this body that will be raised from the grave and ascend to the right hand of the Father. How could it be then, that already this very same body, this body of the Christ, is at the point of ceasing to exist? Would this extreme confrontation with bodily weakness not be quite confusing to a fully human Jesus?
How tempted might Jesus have been to say something like the following to Satan: “You know Devil, I do have the power to turn these stones into bread, and to show you that my mission is that important and that I cannot fail to accomplish it, I am going to do just that!” And then, “poof!” bread! But this is not Christ’s response to extreme physical limitation. Christ does not reference Himself to save Himself. Here there is no “I.”
The second thing to note, then, is that Jesus will not fail in the way that Israel failed in the Sinai. Instead of grumbling and losing faith, Jesus responds with the well known recapitulation of Deuteronomy 8:3:
But He answered and said, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of God.’
Matt 4:4 (NASB)
Jesus does not attempt to take things into his own hands, like Israel, and Abraham, tried to do during their trials by famine (see Exodus 16:1-4 and Genesis 12:10-20). Instead the Son obeys the Father, avoiding the temptation to break trust with God. And he does this at the breaking point.
For Satan’s attack is not only aimed at Jesus’ body, it is a direct assault against the internal, trinitarian relation between Father and Son. Further, any attack against the Trinity is an attack against human nature, humanity being the crown jewel of God’s creation. In not breaking trust with the Father, therefore, Jesus redeems sinful Israel and sinful Adam. In relying not on Himself, on his own self, Jesus reverses our primal disobedience to God when confronted by the Serpent and every disobedience to God that we have enacted since and still enact today. In doing this, He ensures that God’s plan of salvation cannot be derailed.
In their highly regarded commentary on Matthew, W.D. Davies and Dale Allison sum up the entirety of Satan’s temptations of the Christ:
The devil’s aim is to break Jesus’ perfect trust in the Father’s good care and thereby alter the course of salvation-history.
Davies and Allison, International Critical Commentary on Matthew 362
Satan’s attack against Christ’s body, like his attacks against our own bodies, are but a precursor to an attack on our souls and on God’s plan of salvation for them. Physical attacks are never just about the physical body, they are about much more than that. But they are attacks against the body, which, again, demonstrate the body’s importance.
The Experience and Mystery of Pain
The body is precious to God. Unlike the heretical Gnostics, who saw the body as the prison of an immaculate soul, the Bible affirms the goodness of all God’s creation. The biblical view of the body and soul is holistic, not unlike the often misunderstood Platonic view. After all, the most profound act of God, after the creation itself, is His incarnation, or “enflesh-ment.” Clearly God has had the human body in mind from the beginning of time and has more plans for it for the eternal future. Thus, while the soul is, in one sense, primary (Matt 10:28) the body is by no means negligible to the overall plan of God.
The experience of negative physical pain, therefore, is obvious evidence that something terrible has gone wrong. Physical suffering is the foremost empirical proof that sin is real and we are not yet as we are supposed to be. The redemption of our bodies is yet to come, even if our souls are already redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice (and our acceptance of it). Thus, physical pain is the most common means for the devil to attack us. Further, physical pain has a quality all its own that makes it difficult for the sufferer himself to grasp, and almost impossible to express to others.
Virginia Woolf once wrote of pain, saying:
English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache….The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.
quoted in Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4
The author of Hebrews tells us that Christ was tempted in every way as we are tempted (Heb 2:18). One could consider the various ways Jesus was tried physically during his lifetime: being hungry in the wilderness, being homeless (Matt 8:20), in resisting natural sexual impulses, in knowing thirst, in muscle pain, and, of course, in experiencing torture.
As such, the mystery of physical suffering was not unknown to God. Truly the transcendent, all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, infinite and everlasting God is also the God who suffers with us. When we experience physical agony, therefore, we can look to Jesus for the answer to the trials of our flesh.
In virtue of God’s incarnation, there is nothing about God’s creation that He does not know from within. God is, therefore, intimately familiar with the mystery of physical pain, including your and my physical pain. For us, it may be hard to grasp our own pain or express it to others or to truly understand the pain of someone else, even someone we love deeply.
For God, however, being God, He understands human pain perfectly. He has expressed it through Christ most profoundly, and He knows the pain of the world better than you or I ever could. Jürgen Moltmann, in his classic treatment on the suffering of God, puts it simply:
It [the passion of Christ] can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds….[and] The pain of God heals our pains.
Moltmann, The Crucified God, 61-62
When Trials Come, Trust in The Word of God
Trust in God is the bedrock of all goodness for the human creature. Apart from trust in the God of the universe we will either lose trust in everything, which can only end in self-destruction, or we will trust in something or someone that either cannot provide for our needs or who plays off of our needs for his, her or its own benefit. In short, either we will fall into self-despair or arrogance, or we will fall into the hands of an abuser hell-bent on destroying us.
Jesus’ faithfulness in the wilderness, which redeems Israel’s unfaithfulness, provides the model for our own trials of faith. In spite of His suffering in the body, He continues to trust in the Lord. His response to Satan is one of the most quoted portions of Scripture throughout human history:
Man must not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God
Matt 4:4
Jesus does not get into a debate or discussion with the evil one, the father of lies. He already discerns who Satan is and what his game is. Christ’s defense should also be our defense against the enemy of our soul. That defense is the Word of God. In speaking God’s words to Satan, Jesus reaffirms God’s sovereignty and, in doing so, shows us how to respond to the devil and his attacks on our flesh.
Highfield explains why it is God’s words that we must rely on to be victorious over evil:
Jesus asserts complete trust in God, who sent him into the desert. I place my life in God’s hands, Jesus says, and I will not assert a right against God even to save myself from death. God’s word is the source of life because God’s word is the source of everything, including bread. Jesus’ answer implicitly corrects the devil’s skewed view of Jesus’ special relationship to God. For Jesus, being God’s Son is a matter of absolute trust and obedience to the Father.
Highfield, God, Freedom & Human Dignity, 154
Some of course will mock this thought, believing the words of the Bible to be little more than products of an ancient culture–an ignorant, unscientific and, yes, even patriarchal people. And while medical science can certainly alleviate physical pain or bodily decay in ways unimaginable to our ancestors, it can only do so invasively and through the manipulation of natural processes. Medical intervention, as great as it is, causes its own experience of pain commensurate to the pain it seeks to alleviate (as any chemo-survivor knows). As such, pain itself is, in this life, unavoidable. How we face physical pain, therefore, is far more important than whether we avoid or mitigate it.
In conclusion, when the moment of testing comes, when the Devil come for you, and trust me he will come, do not rely on your own strength or your own logic in that time. No syllogism or sociology or science can save us when Satan attacks the soul through our body. Only every word that proceeds from the mouth of God can defend against such evil.
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