Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 10: Desert Temptation

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

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My Wilderness Journey 

When I was growing up, I had a very well defined (you might even say rigid) identity.  It was solid, there were rules, easy answers, a group I was a part of, and I had a solid image of the Truth (™). 

But then I reached a turning point.  I realized that the rules and easy answers didn’t always work, the group wasn’t always that great, and I had questions that I couldn’t come up with answers to - at least not within the paradigm of the rigid identity I had grown up with.

Now I didn’t realize it, but this turning point I spoke of was actually a desert, or wilderness journey.  And what I didn’t get at first was that I had to go through the desert - to the other side of it.  But that’s not how I responded at first.  My first response was to leave - to check out, avoid the problems, and retreat in the hopes of finding something better.  

But I needed this time to heal.

After this period of healing, I ended up coming back to my old group.  But at this point, I was really in the group but not of it - I had this detachment, and I talked as if I knew my identity was right, but I was really non-committal about it.  I was there, and I was enjoying the company, but I talked about things as if I was talking about something that was not me.  And during this time, there was an emptiness that I didn’t understand.

And that’s when I hit the real turning point.  And it started by noticing things outside - I looked around and realized that there was this societal disease.  And then, with a certain sense of horror, I realized that I had grown up right in the (metaphorical) center of this epidemic.  I had either had the disease, or I still had it.

You see, I had thought that I made it through the wilderness before, but I had really just avoided it. 

At first, I didn’t understand the disease I had grown up with.  But after some analysis and deconstruction, I realized it was centered on tribal-thinking.  When someone has the disease of tribal-thinking, they pick a team and agree with everything they say, while staying away from all the other teams.  All truth is filtered through this tribal lens.

Before this realization, I could avoid my questions.  But after I realized I was infected with this sickness – though I didn’t fully understand what it was at first – I was thrown into a state of doubt.  Before this point, there were questions that I did not dare ask - or if I asked them I had concrete, easy answers for them.  But now, these questions hung over my head, blotting out the light of the sun.  They demanded that I pay attention to them, like never before.  So I threw myself into these questions for the first time in my life.  And at first, this felt like being caught in the middle of the sea during a violent storm with no anchor.  I questioned what I believed.  I questioned why I believed.  I questioned what it meant to believe.  But, while I did not realize it at the time, I was really questioning: who am I?

The Desert Temptation

Darkness!

The temptation of Jesus in the desert is a story that actually bears quite a few similarities to my situation - though you might not realize it if you’re looking at it through a supernatural lens.  I think that often people miss the point of this story - it’s actually quite scandalous.  They miss the point because of the image of Satan as a supernatural being of pure evil.

Our culture has all these images of Satan where his appearance gives him away - think Satan with red skin, goat legs, enormous horns, and a pitchfork.  Or maybe the Satan of the History channel’s “Bible Series” - what kind of doofus wears a black hooded robe in the middle of the desert?  Oh yeah - Satan.  He’s so evil he’s crazy.

Speaking of the "Satan" character in the Bible Series, I remember the controversy over the fact that some people thought that the actor was deliberately chosen as a way to equate Obama with Satan.  Do you remember how I pointed out in the beginning of this series that we use the President as a scapegoat?

One similarity I noticed, however, was that the Satan of the Bible Series actually resembles Emperor Palpatine.  And that's kind of what we want our Satan to be - we want him to say obviously evil things like "Give in to your anger!  ...Strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!"

But when you take what we’ve learned so far about Satan - the image of a son/servant of God who fulfills the role of God’s sifter, and often gets a bit overzealous and carried away in that role, leading him to become legalistic and accusing - and if you realize that "Satan" in this story is actually one of us, the story of Jesus' temptation in the desert actually makes a lot more sense. 

Think about it - if Satan is pure evil, then why would Jesus be delivered to him?  Why place Jesus in ultimate jeopardy?  Why not have Jesus be tested by the Spirit, rather than an agent of pure evil?

We try to make a character out of Satan whom is a representation of all evil in order to make it an easy target, so that we can avoid the difficult questions.  But the image of Satan presented in the Bible has not up to this point presented him as a being of pure, irredeemable evil - Satan is God’s sifter, who tests the resolve of God’s people and refines them!

And that’s where the real scandal of the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert is revealed - because the temptations Jesus faced were actually the conventional wisdom of Jesus’ day, and if you’re paying close attention, they provide a model for what Jesus is up against throughout his entire ministry.

One of the reasons this is so often missed is that many Christians are taught to believe in the idea of faith as absolute certainty.  This absolute certainty gives these Christians a feeling of invulnerability - they don’t think it’s possible that they, or their tribe, could be wrong.  But one of the more interesting things to come out of modern psychological studies is the knowledge that those who feel they are invulnerable are actually the most vulnerable.  Case studies show that those with the illusion of invulnerability are the most susceptible to deceptive advertising - this ought to make Bible-believing Christians mindful of the doctrine of humility (see Proverbs 11:2, Proverbs 18:12, Proverbs 29:23, Matthew 23:12, I Cor. 4:7, and Philippians 2:6-9 for a few examples).  The conclusion in one of the aforementioned psychological studies states:

Far from being an effective shield, the illusion of invulnerability undermines the very response that would have supplied genuine protection.

So let’s go back to the story of Jesus’ temptation with fresh eyes.

Now, if you read the version of the story in Matthew 4 or Luke 4 with a literalistic lens, there are going to be some problems for you.  First off, one must wonder how it is that someone who was fully human could go without food or water in the middle of a desert for 40 days!  “Oh, but Jesus is God!”  Well, he’s not sounding much like he could be considered human in any, way, shape, or form any more.

However, there is an interesting fact that it seems most Christians don’t know about: most Christians are probably not aware that the temptations of Jesus appear in the Gospel of John, because in this gospel, John the Baptist does not even baptize Jesus, and there is no desert journey afterward (see John 1:19-29).  Keep that in mind, because it might be a clue....

But the same three temptations do appear in the Gospel of John.  Except that in John’s version of the temptation, it’s the people who present Jesus with the tests, rather than “Satan”.  (Actually, I might note that in this story, it’s not even “Satan” at all who tempts Jesus, but “the Devil”.  This word is translated from the Greek word “diabolos” - which means a slanderer, or a false accuser.  So you can see it is a very similar word to “ha satan”.)

Another fact that Christians seem to miss quite often is that the 40 days of fasting in the desert presents a clear parallel to the story of Moses - who fasted for 40 days in the desert and neither ate bread nor drank water before he received the law (see Ex. 34:28).  Understanding the parallel to Moses' fast is key, I believe, to understanding this story about Jesus - the idea that we must empty ourselves before understanding the things of God (see Phil. 2:6-11) is a very important theme to this story.  It is also important to note that Christians saw Jesus as bringing the new law - the law of love (see John 13:34 for just one example).

Also, the three trials of Jesus parallel three trials that Moses faced.  In the first trial, a shortage of food resulted in praying for manna from heaven - this parallels with Jesus' first trial of being tempted to create bread from stones.  Next, both Israel and Moses "put God to the test" with Israel claiming "there is no God among us" in Ex. 17:7 and Moses in Num. 20:10-13 - when Jesus says "do not put the Lord your God to the test" (Mt. 4:7 and Lk. 4:12), it is a direct quote from Deut. 6:16, making the connection explicit.  And finally, the people of Israel turned from God to worship something else in Ex. 32:1-6, which parallels Satan's direction for Jesus to bow to him in Mt. 4:9 and Lk. 4:7.  
 
Another issue we run into if we take the desert temptation literally - how did the gospel writers know of this story?  There are only two ways this story could have come about, as in the story Jesus is alone: either Jesus told the story to his followers (and he was known for telling parables, after all), or they made it up to illustrate truths about Jesus' life.

And one final thing I'd like my readers to consider before we examine this story is how different the sense of the English word "temptation" is from the original language.  The English word "temptation" has the sense of one person trying to get another to do something that one or both of them knows is wrong.  But the Greek word used in these stories - peirazein - meant a test or a trial.  We could imagine calling the SAT's a peirazein and this would not be an improper use of the word.  The Scottish Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism William Barclay wrote in his commentary on Matthew:

Now here is a great and uplifting truth. What we call temptation is not meant to make us sin; it is meant to enable us to conquer sin. It is not meant to make us bad, it is meant to make us good. It is not meant to weaken us, it is meant to make us emerge stronger and finer and purer from the ordeal. Temptation is not the penalty of being human, temptation is the glory of being human. It is the test which comes to those whom God wishes to use. So, we must think of this whole incident as being not so much the tempting as the testing of Jesus.

With all this in mind, let’s examine the temptations one by one.

In the first temptation, Luke 4:3 and Matthew 4:3 have “the Accuser” delivering the exact same line with only a slight change in wording: Matthew says “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread”, while Luke changes it to a singular stone.  Now, as I said before, if you’re interpreting this story through a very literalistic lens, you might notice a problem here - what is so wrong with turning stones to bread?  Jesus has been out here for 40 days with no food or water - he’s starving to death!  Is God really going to be upset about him feeding himself?  And after all - later on, Jesus will feed five thousand through a similar miracle.  So what’s the big deal?

But here the Gospel of John’s version provides a very valuable clue - John 6:30-31 has a similar temptation coming from some of his followers (note how this follower quotes scripture as part of his temptation - much like "the devil" does in Matthew and Luke):

So they said to Him, “What then do You do for a sign, so that we may see, and believe You?  What work do You perform?  Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”

The problem here is not the miracle or the bread - it’s that this is a condition for proving that Jesus is the Messiah!  It’s a problem of expectations!  The people expect the Messiah to use power, and to solve all their problems.  

In this period in history, the poverty situation was quite similar to what is happening in America today, with huge inequality between a small few in the upper class and the masses in the middle and lower classes.  Rome had raised the taxes in rural areas to levels that had become hard for the people to bear - in order to build their temples, Colosseums, and cities.  And so the middle class farmers ended up having to take out loans with their land as collateral in order to pay their taxes.  In addition, the lenders had used very unfair lending practices - with very steep interest rates.  And so what would happen is that the bankers would then take the land in lieu of the payments, and then these farmers ended up becoming common workers on their own land, under the management of the new owners.

And the poverty situation kept getting worse and worse over time.  It seemed an impossible problem to solve - and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Jews, in desperation, might have expected their Messiah to solve their problems miraculously.  But if you pay attention to Jesus’ ministry, his solution to the problem is for the people to come together in unity, giving to each other generously and watching out for each others’ needs - he’s not giving them an easy solution, but teaching them how to solve their problems themselves!  Jesus instructed his disciples to give without expecting in return (Luke 6:35) - undercutting the debt system built on interest payments that was currently crushing Rome’s citizens.  Jesus wasn’t serving the function of superhero who flies in and solves all his followers’ problems for them - he was teaching them how to solve these economic issues by living a life based on unconditional love, which meant living in a way that was extravagantly generous!

To put it as William Barclay did in his commentary on Matthew, to simply give the people food miraculously "would have been to remove the symptoms without dealing with the disease. People are hungry. But the question is, why are they hungry? Is it because of their own foolishness, and their own shiftlessness, and their own carelessness? Is it because there are some who selfishly possess too much while others possess too little? The real way to cure hunger is to remove the causes – and these causes are in human souls. And above all, there is a hunger of the heart which it is not in material things to satisfy."

This gives a bit of clairvoyance to the replies that Jesus gives to the tempter in Luke 4:4, Matthew 4:4, and John 6:32-33.  In his reply to this trial, Jesus is saying that it is not by the supernatural gift of magically appearing bread that their problems will be solved, but through the teachings that Jesus is giving them - the teachings on how to build community through love.
 

In Matthew’s version, the wording of Jesus’ reply (“Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”) plays right into the Accuser’s next temptation.  Luke, for whatever reason, has the temptations in a different order - with the next two temptations in reverse order from Matthew.

But in Matthew, the Accuser picks right up on Jesus’ statement - which shows his respect for the Logos of God.  And the Accuser takes a position similar to many Evangelical Christians of our time - God’s word is the scriptures, we can pick and choose phrases we like in the manner of a constitutional lawyer, they are to be interpreted in a literalistic manner, and with a rigidity that leaves no room for questioning or nuance!  

Do you see this?  The Accuser is an expert at religiosity.  The Accuser takes Jesus up to the pinnacle (the highest point) of the temple, and quotes the Bible!  As Thomas Merton writes in “New Seeds of Contemplation”: “The devil is not afraid to preach the will of God provided he can preach it in his own way.”  The Accuser is quoting Psalm 91:11-12 here, which speaks of God sending angels to guard His followers - “on their hands they will bear You up, so that You will not strike Your foot against a stone”, he says.  

Look what the Bible says!  You should obey it, right?  Jump off of the temple and prove you are the Messiah!  

Once again - just like in the first temptation - a sign of power is being demanded! 

Again, if you’re interpreting this story through a literal lens, you have some problems - did Jesus and Satan just teleport from the desert to the top of the temple?  And how come no one noticed them up there and started pointing and gawking?  Below the temple would have been a courtyard teeming with people!  Wouldn’t it have been in all the newspapers after that?  (Well, they didn’t have newspapers - but surely someone other than the two gospel writers of Matthew and Luke would have recorded such a newsworthy event?  Two men suddenly appearing at the top of the temple, and then just as quickly disappearing afterwards?)  And - if this story is to be interpreted literally - why isn’t this particular temptation...tempting? 

But again, in the Gospel of John, we can find a similar temptation where it is the people tempting Jesus - in John 2:18, Jesus is in the temple and the people are asking him for a sign, in order to prove that he is the Messiah and has authority.  And so if we look at the Matthew and Luke version of the story with a more symbolic lens, the issues with the story disappear - the Accuser is a representation of Jesus psychologically wrestling with his mission, and is a voice of his culture goading Jesus to try to get him to prove himself to the people in order to kick start his ministry, taking a very literalistic and legalistic approach to the scriptures to try to influence Jesus in this manner.  The fact that Matthew and Luke’s version takes an absurdly literalistic approach to a verse that is obviously not supposed to be taken literalistically almost screams at us: this story is symbolic!!!

But Jesus’ rebuke of this temptation (see Luke 4:12 and Matthew 4:7) shows something very important - to live by the word of God is not merely prooftexting!  The word of God is found within Scripture, tradition, communal discussion and interpretation, way of life / tradition, creed, doctrine, scientific inquiry, experience, and intuition.  In other words, the word of God is found through engaging in all of these areas rather than choosing one to the detriment of all the others.  The word of God is living and active (Hebrews 4:12) - it is something that continually challenges us and makes us uncomfortable; continually calls us to move with God and grow.  The moment you think you can settle down and relax because you’ve figured it all out, that is when you have fallen to the temptation of the Accuser!  To “live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” as Jesus said before in the story means that we don’t fall into the docile model of Christianity that simply waits for Jesus to take care of everything for us - it means that we enter in to the way of life that Jesus modeled!

The third, and final, temptation of Jesus in the desert is perhaps the most important of the three.  Jesus’ response to this trial defines his entire ministry, and the temptation itself is the framing story in which Jesus’ story is set.  So we are going to take another break, in order to spend more time on the last trial.

In my next post, we will examine the context of the Jewish expectations for a Messiah, before moving on to examine Jesus’ last temptation.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?