TEXT: Matthew 4:8-11

SUBJECT: Matthew Henry on the Temptation of Christ #4

Tonight, with God’s favor, we’ll move on in the study we began a few weeks ago; it’s called Matthew Henry on the Temptation of Christ. The story is well-known; it’s told in detail here and in Luke 4, more briefly in Mark 1, and alluded to all over the Bible.

The setting is the Wilderness where our Lord had spent the last forty days alone in prayer and fasting. The combatants are Jesus Christ and Satan, who had long opposed each other, but here, for the first time—it seems—are duking it out man-to-man. The issues at stake could not be higher: If the devil should win the contest, both our Lord and His people would be ruined forever. If our Lord wins, the kingdom of Satan starts to crumble.

This means: we’re more than spectators at the event! We are personally and eternally involved in what happened on that fateful day so long ago.

The temptations are three: the first is to doubt the goodness of God by turning stones into bread; the second is to presume upon that goodness by jumping from the pinnacle of the Temple and hoping the angels will catch Him (as God said they would). Both temptations are resisted firmly and the devil is thrown back with the Word of God. The Lord will have no part with reasoning with the devil, thinking things over, exploring new territory—none of that! For Him, "It is written" was enough.

Now we come to the third temptation which has to be the most brazen and clever thing Satan ever said.

On a high mountain top he shows the Lord all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, and offers it all to Him—right now—on one condition,

That’s the temptation our Lord is faced with.

Matthew Henry calls it,

The Puritan does not elaborate here, but I think we ought to stop and think about the blackness and the horror of what was just said. Our Lord Jesus Christ is eternal God. The Bible says He has always rested in the Father’s bosom, loving Him and admiring Him from before the world was. When He joined the human race, He was born without original sin and still in communion with His Father, Whom He feared and loved and served from the bottom of His heart.

And now, the devil is asking Him to take the worship that belongs to God only and to transfer it to himself, a hideous and morally deformed creature, the source of evil and death and deceit, a being fit only for hell! He wants the worship!

Can you imagine how insulting this must have been to our Lord—how offensive, how dirty He must have felt just in hearing the words?

What if someone called your wife a tramp and names far worse than that? What if he slandered your mother or called your father a pervert? They might be the holiest people in the world, and yet the accusations would break your heart.

Yet that is precisely what the devil is saying here: he’s saying that he is more worthy of worship that God. That’s the sort of blasphemy our Lord put up with—for your salvation.

You’re going to hear the Holy Name of God praised forever because Jesus Christ heard it blasphemed.

Henry next deals with the timing of the temptation.

Some of this he’s touched on before, but one thing stands out: the last temptation was also the worst one. Why would Satan do this? It is for the same reason that, in today’s warfare, an invasion follows a period of bombing. The bombing softens up and wears out the enemy, and then the troops come ashore.

It’s hard to endure temptation. Resisting the devil tires you out. Yet he never gets tires. When he sees you worn out with watching and praying, it’s then that he fires his deadliest missiles.

Don’t you ever think that resisting temptation allows you to relax for a while; it doesn’t. All I can say is, with the Lord,

A man who once did not do that lived to regret it and told us to not make the same mistake,

There is a time to relax, to stop watching, to quit praying, and to forget all about the devil and his wiles. But that time hasn’t come yet. That’s reserved for heaven.

Henry goes on to note the appeal or the way Satan put this temptation to our Lord,

The devil is a master of words and, so far, he has used words to tempt the Lord. But when words didn’t work on him, Satan turned to images, to pictures.

The Bible has a term for this,

I don’t need to draw you a picture on this one, do I? Looking at things we shouldn’t has a way of stimulating ungodly desire. Lust, of course, is the most obvious, but other things must be mentioned too, especially envy and covetousness. For most of us, it’s hard to look at beautiful things and then be content with what we have.

Men are notorious for this, gawking at 23 year old models and then looking down on their 50 year old wife. But women are every bit as guilty: They look at another woman’s clothes and feel their own are frumpy—or maybe worse. Or, they look at another woman’s home and SUV and so on, and wonder why their own husbands haven’t done as well for them?

These are different forms of the same thing. We look at what’s out there and we wonder why we don’t have it? If others have the flat screen TV, why can’t I? If uglier men than you are married to models, why aren’t you?

What do we do about this? Henry says two things:

First we pray about it,

You cannot overestimate the value of prayer for the life of holiness. But you don’t stop there. You go on—as much as possible—to stop looking,

The reference is to Job 31:1 where the godly man says,

Job was an immensely rich and powerful man who lived in a time and place where harems were kept by men like himself. But he’d have no part of that! He wouldn’t even look at a beautiful young woman (and you know what I mean by "look").

The song I learned in the nursery is still worth singing,

The Puritan goes on to observe the cheat of it all.

We’re all guilty of doubting the promises of God and believing the promises of Satan. Yet why should we do that? Has the devil proven his trustworthiness to you in the past? Have you ever given in to a temptation and been happy you did it? Or, has the promise of God ever proven false? What does your own experience tell you?

But setting that aside for the moment, what does the Bible tell you? About the Lord it says, "God cannot lie". As for the devil, it says he is "A liar and the father of lies". It doesn’t just say this in an abstract way, but it shows it throughout history.

It starts in the Garden. Eat the fruit and you’ll die, God says. But Satan says, "You shall not surely die". Who told the truth? Noah preached righteousness while the world laughed at him; who told the truth? Lot warned of the destruction of Sodom while his children thought he was joking: who told the truth? Jeremiah foresaw doom for Jerusalem while the false prophets promised deliverance and prosperity: who told the truth? In the wilderness, God told His Son He would sustain Him, while Satan said He wouldn’t: who told the truth?

Usually, it’s not that hard to discern the truth for the lie; no, where the difficulty comes in is choosing the truth over the lie: in short, believing God or living by faith.

Henry moves on to say what Satan wants more than anything else.

He’s right about this. Paul says the devil’s sin was pride which can only end in the desire for worship. He got this worship—a lot of it—in the pagan religions of that day—and today, too. Paul says that those worship idols, are in fact, offering sacrifices to demons.

The great religions of the world are headed by God (in the case of Christianity) and demons (in the case of all the others).

I wish I could say that only pagans—and other unbelievers—were the only ones guilty of worshiping Satan, but that’s not true: we do it too, for what’s the difference—the real difference—between worshiping him and serving him? God forbid that we—redeemed by the blood of Christ—should ever bow before the Altar of Satan!

The devil’s temptation was real and powerful, yet it was met by something even more real and powerful—two things, in fact.

Jesus Christ was not open-minded about sin or moderate in His opposition to it. He loved sinners, to be sure, but He abhorred sin, from head to toe, He hated it with a perfect hatred.

Do you feel this way about it? Most of us don’t. It’s not that we approve of sin, so much, as we accept it as no big deal. There’s no wonder: the conversations we listen to, the movies we watch, the friends we make, the habits we get into, all have a way of cooling off the anger we ought to feel about sin.

Here, let me point out one glaring example: the abuse of God’s Holy Name. Why are we so sensitive to four-letter words (if we are) but hardly notice someone taking the Lord’s Name in vain? It’s interesting to note that of all the bad words in the world, the only one explicitly forbidden in the Bible is God’s Name.

Maybe we can’t make others stop using it so profanely, but we can stop not noticing what they say. David said,

If we cannot get as mad as our Lord did, can we at least get sad about it? Can we at least notice?

The second thing our Lord does under the temptation is to quote the Bible against it. The verse is Deuteronomy 6:13,

Henry says,

"Full" and "brief"—these are the watchwords! The Scripture quoted speaks directly to the issue and answers it without any qualification. You’ve heard the saying, "What part of `no’ don’t you understand?"

There’s a lot to be said for that: if God forbids a thing, it is forbidden. We are not told to reason out all the commandments of God, but to obey them—because they’re His commandments and He is Lord.

That’s Matthew Henry on the Third Temptation of Christ. May God close our eyes to the lusts thereof and give us to the grace to live by His Word alone and to worship and serve Him alone. For Christ’s sake. Amen.