II. The Temptation on the Temple
The Lord is next brought into Jerusalem from the desert. Satan takes him into the holy city, into the very center of it, the temple area, where God’s presence is, and he tempts the Lord from this very place. I think it is interesting to note that the location indicates that there is no place from which we are immune to temptation. Some would think that if you went away to a secluded place in order to seek the Lord, then surely you will be free from temptation. Others think that if you go into some place designated for the worship of God and the meeting of God’s people, you will find it more difficult to sin. And yet, even in a secluded place, there may be demonic temptation or the temptation that comes from our own sin nature. Then at the holy place in the holy city there are still unholy people. If you think that by coming into an assembly of believers you will escape temptation then you are setting yourself up to fall into temptation. With this mindset you will think that no one will say anything that may offend you. You will think that no one will seek to take advantage of you. You will forget that the devil is just as active in the holy place as in the desert. Now you can thrown into the mix, not only your sin nature, but those of a few hundred others, and you have a recipe for temptation. After all, if the devil can’t keep you out of church, he can certainly keep your focus on that gaudy dress Miss Smith is wearing or the awful haircut that Mr. Jones has recently procured. You cannot escape temptation by running away into seclusion, nor can you avoid temptation by entering into the assembly of the saints. With that said and the understanding that the temptation to sin is ubiquitous (nearly universal), we move on to the second lie by which Satan would seek to trap us.
A. The lie: To trust God you must see
So here in verses 5-7, the devil takes Jesus up onto the temple. This part of the temple probably looked out eastward onto the Kidron Valley below, a short 450-foot drop. Satan brings out his second lie before Jesus: “To trust God you must see.” If you are going to believe His Word, the Bible, then certainly God must guarantee it for you. He is going to have to show you, give you a sign, answer a certain prayer, prove it by allowing Noah’s Ark to be discovered. After all, unless you really see God’s Word work, you cannot truly know if it is the genuine, authoritative Word of God.
Jesus claimed (from the first temptation) to live only by the Word of God. And so the devil obliges Jesus and calls Him to follow Scripture. Certainly Psalm 91 speaks of the Messiah and His trust in His Father. Certainly Psalm 91 speaks of Jesus who, according to verse 3, is delivered from the snare of the trapper (that snare-giver Satan). Certainly, this is He who (according to 91:4) seeks refuge under the wings of the Lord who now finds Himself on the wing of the temple. The wing of the temple in Matthew 4:5 is the same word in Psalm 91. Most assuredly verse 11 (the verse that Satan quotes to Jesus) is a promise to the Messiah that God’s angels will surely protect Him from any physical harm.
The devil intimates that since Jesus is the Son of God and lives by this so-called book (named the Word of God), He must prove its validity by testing these very words of God to make sure that His Father is not lying. And it is this test (oh, that crafty devil) that would seek to destroy faith and not advance it. His lie, to trust God you must see, is the very opposite of faith.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. You cannot have sight and faith at the same time. There is a cost to one if we want the other. If we are content to trust then we will not see. But if we want to see, if we need to see, then it will cost us on the side of faith and we will not trust. The Scripture says that we are called to walk by faith, not by sight. It also asks the question, “Who hopes for what he already sees?”
Think about this: when we walk by sight (demanding that God prove His Word to us under the pretense that it will enable us to trust Him) it actually diminishes our trust. It is a lose-lose proposition for your faith if you do this. There are two scenarios I want you to think through with me. If you demand proof from God before you trust Him and He doesn’t answer according to your demand, your faith will be diminished further because you weren’t trusting Him in the first place with regard to this issue, and now what faith you did have is crushed even more.
But then think of the other scenario. If God answers us according to our demand for proof then our faith is not bolstered by this. It is curtailed. Why? Because we are not trusting Him, but demanding first to see His Word work before we trust. Then we have sinned against God because whatever is not from faith is sin. So our prayer to Him, “Show me so I can trust you” is nothing more than sin. Instead of this proof (that we’ve asked for) causing us to embrace faith and draw near to God, it becomes sin and puts us in need of repentance before faith. So before you can put faith in God’s promise, you have to confess your sin. “God, I was wrong to seek after a sign before I would trust you. I will trust your Word instead of looking for another sign.” A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign. Those seeking signs instead of trusting continue to look for additional signs. Just one more.
The Lord Jesus encountered this very lie infecting those to whom He ministered. The Jewish leaders asked Him to show them a sign from heaven. When Jesus spoke about who He was and their need to receive Him as Savior, the people said, “What sign do you give us?” even though on the previous day He had just fed five thousand with a few loaves and fish. This testing of the Lord instead of trusting in Him results in the search for one more sign, not an increase in faith.
Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 6:16 in this passage: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” The full quotation says, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested Him at Massah.” The mention of the location of Massah brings us to Exodus 17 and it clearly delineates for us the truth that seeking proof from God before trusting Him leads only to a diminished and not a growing faith. In Exodus 17, the people under Moses had seen the ten plagues that devastated Egypt and left the people of Israel intact. They crossed the Red Sea on dry ground. God sheltered them in the desert by a cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night. He gave them water to drink and fed them miraculously, but then they came to Massah. Once again they ran out of water, and their response was one of doubting and not trusting. They tested the Lord and instead of recognizing that He was with them in the pillar of cloud, they cried out, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They craved sign after sign that did not build their faith but caused it to wane. When they hit a hard spot in their journey, they were not willing to trust but only grumble. Instead of trusting Him for provision they doubted His existence. It wasn’t because God hadn’t shown Himself faithful, but because they were thinking that to trust God they had to see first.
It is as ludicrous as the vessel saying to the potter, “Why are you making me like this? Please explain yourself.” Imagine the potter shaping his vessel and as it spins upon the potter’s wheel, the vessel calls out, “Exactly what are you doing? Please tell me that I can trust you and give me five good reasons why I shouldn’t go to the other potter down the street.”
I remember one young man I shared the gospel with. He told me that he wanted to know God but that he had doubts about the trustworthiness of the Scripture. We studied the Scripture for a while. We looked at the gospel in detail but he always claimed that he needed to be more fully assured if he was going to trust the Lord. He ended up becoming one who was always learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth because he wouldn’t believe God’s Word and call upon the Savior. Everything that he saw to confirm the Word of God did not bring Him faith because he refused to believe what he knew of the Word of God.
Are there promises of God that you have yet to claim because you are waiting for God to really show you that His Word is true before you trust Him? “All things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to His purpose.” Are you trusting God in this? Or are you saying, “God, I will trust you when you get me through what I am in right now, but I’m not sure I believe this is really working out for my good”? Don’t test the Lord. Because once He “gets you through that” you still haven’t learned the lesson of trusting Him in the midst of it. And you’ll probably have to go through it all again because your faith hasn’t been built up but has been chipped away at. There is a cost to be paid on your faith when you believe Satan’s lie that “to trust you have to be able to see.”
B. The truth: Faith will increase your sight (or the opposite of the above: To see God you must trust)
Now we come to the truth with which Jesus dispels Satan’s lie. In verse 7, Jesus says, “On the other hand, it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord Your God to the test.’” The truth that Jesus tells Satan is that “Faith will increase your sight.” Or if we want to place it into the reverse of the above lie, “To see God you must trust.” It isn’t “To trust God you must see” but “To see God you must trust.”
When Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy 6, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test,” He was introducing for you and me the truth that there is a trust that does not need to test the Lord. Jesus was content in the fact that He could rely on that Scripture if He needed it, but He would not create a need by jumping. He would be content in trusting His Father to meet every need.
Now before we look at this truth more, I want to point out something that is inherent in this passage when Jesus says, “On the other hand, it is written…” Jesus was countering Satan’s misuse of Scripture. This tells us that we must be careful in how we use the Scripture and how we allow others to use the Scripture. The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15 says that even Satan himself may appear as an angel of light and his servants disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. There are many who pervert the Word of God for their own selfish purposes. Paul said that he did not sell the Word of God. What does that mean? It means that there were people who were selling the Word of God so as to gain from the gospel. They sought to promote a prosperity message in what they proclaimed. They appeared as servants of God but they were men, as Paul said in Philippians 3, whose god was their belly, whose end was destruction, who gloried in shameful things. Let us beware lest we are taken in by those quoting Scripture with breath that smells of sulfur.
Now back to the truth that will break the cycle of the lie that Satan breeds in the hearts of people. The truth is that faith will increase your sight. In other words, to truly see God you must trust.
There is a rest that we receive by faith in the promises and Word of God that the world cannot give. Jesus said, “My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you.” The people of the world try to cover their bases, make sure that they are all set, ready for any circumstance. And Christians do the same thing. Our trust comes in making sure we have manipulated the situation so that we are in a no-fail operation. As long as we can see what is going to happen and know where we are headed then we have a feeling of security, but when the bottom drops out on us we begin scrambling to get our feet back under us. We are frantically trying to figure out what went wrong and reverse it. We are screaming at God and not trusting. Then after all the trouble is over, we almost blasphemously say, “Thank God.” Why are you giving lip service to God? You did it all, you made it all work… you and all your frantic maneuverings.
But there is another way. Isaiah 26:3 says, “The steadfast of mind You will keep in perfect peace, because he trusts in You.” When we are trusting in the Word of the Lord, when we have rested in His promises, then He will give us His peace. Notice that it is not the other way around. It is trust first and then peace, not peace leading to trust. The person who seeks the sign, who tests the Lord, calls for peace first without the thankfulness that comes through trust. “Lord, thank you for allowing me to go through this.” Please understand that this does not mean you must understand WHY you are going through what you are. This is the part of trust. When my son was very sick last year, I asked him if he had any questions about what he was going through. He said no. I asked him if he was okay with what we were doing and he said yes, “Because I know that you know what is going on and will do what is best.” His response is the very heart of faith that God wants us to have in His Word.
When you trust Him first, God will provide the way for you to see that His Word is true and that He is faithful, even if it means not seeing it in actuality until heaven. Peter said in chapter 1 of his first letter, “Though you don’t see Him now, you believe in Him…” And the author of Hebrews, in chapter 11 said, “All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having SEEN them and having welcomed them from a distance…” How did they do this? How did they SEE them, not having RECEIVED them? By their trust in the Lord and His Word. Trusting God’s Word means that we leave the timetable up to Him. This means that we have a confidence that God will do what He says, even if He doesn’t do it in our timetable. I mentioned last week how my children have the stomach bug. I promised my children that I would give them food, but only according to my timetable. They may not have understood why I only tempted them with food, only giving them a piece of a cracker, a sip of water. They may not have understood why I didn’t give them a hotdog right away. They only needed to trust that I would keep my word and give them the right food at the right time. When God promises us certain things in His Word, we need to trust that His timetable is more accurate than ours. Trust means that we patiently wait in God’s timing. Though Abraham’s descendants received the land as an inheritance as God promised him, Abraham didn’t see it except through the eyes of faith. Faith increased His sight to see what was real, though what was visible did not yet express the reality of God’s promise.
When God called him to offer up his son Isaac (through whom all these promises were to go) he trusted that the Lord would somehow be able to raise him from the dead and carry out what he said. By doing so he received the blessing of being able to portray a type of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His obedience by faith (his trust expressing itself) was used as a blessing to show us a picture of the gospel in the life of Abraham.
When you cling to the truth that “to see God you must trust,” God will bless you by allowing you to portray the gospel (like Abraham) for others to see in the very circumstances that the devil tried to lie to you about in order to get you to test God FIRST before you rest in Him. Satan tries to tell us to test before we rest but God says “to rest in the test.” When God’s Word speaks to a matter, you can rely upon it. And it is in this that the devil is defeated.
So what do I do, when I realize that I have fallen for Satan’s lie? What do I do when in my anxiety I have tested the Lord and not rested in His promises? What do I do when I have sought to carry out what I think needs to happen in the way that I think it needs to happen in the timeframe I think it needs to happen?
Let me tell you a story. There was a man to whom God promised by His word that he would have a child (though he was 75 years old). And he believed God… but time went on. Then instead of listening to God he listened to other voices and sought to take things into his own hands (though the promise of God was still there) and he had a child by other means than God’s promise. When God brought it to his attention, he repented and turned back in faith so that 25 years after the promise was first delivered to him, he had this child of promise in God’s way, in God’s time, by God’s power.
When you have messed up and Satan tries to tell you in the midst of the trouble that it is too late to trust God now so just keep going in the way you were, the truth is that God’s recourse for us is to repent (God, I was wrong for not trusting You), to commit your way to Him (Lord, since all things work together for good to those who love You and are the called according to Your purpose, take what was meant for evil (my not trusting You) and use it for good.). Then rest in Him. (I will trust Your promise and see You carry it out). Leave the past in the past with God and allow Him to do far more abundantly than you could ask or even imagine. Don’t believe the lie that to trust God you must see. Believe the truth that to see God you must trust.