In this series we are going to look at the Lord’s temptations in the wilderness by the Devil, just after He was baptised by John in the Jordan. This can be found in the fourth chapter of Matthews’s Gospel. You will have noticed that the temptations are conveyed as a set of three. The first temptation the Devil incites is for Jesus to make stones into bread, the second is a temptation to cast Himself down from the height of the temple to see if God would undertake to preserve Him and the third is an offer of power and glory if He would worship the Devil.
These three temptations actually describe the nature of every form of temptation that a person can experience, so they are like a general overview of the kinds of things that come against us when we seek to live a life using spiritual principles to guide and direct us. With this in mind, we will look at these temptations as descriptions of our own process so that we can better understand how the Lord, as Truth from the Word in our minds, is tried and tested as our sense of self becomes more grounded in heavenly or genuine spiritual things through the removal of our attachments to the loves of self and the world.
The Lord hungers for our good and His hunger will only ever be satisfied with our free response to His call on our life. A call to resist our evils, our tendencies toward self centredness and embody angelic qualities so that we might know heaven. The struggle to do this opens up the way for doubts to enter in and these doubts are represented by the voice of the love of self or in the literal sense of the story the Devil, which is constantly asking us to settle for something less than the Lord has purposed for us.
