Text: Matthew 4:1–11
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Expect Dragons
I know that I’ve told you guys that Matthew’s aim is to show us how Jesus came to relive and redeem the whole history of Israel—but our text this morning takes it to a new level. And as it does that, along the way we will be confronted with some of the big, gnarly, complex questions that a careful reader of Scripture might be brought to ask—questions like:
Why did God let a dragon-serpent into his creation to tempt his image bearers and plunge the world into sin and death? You know, small questions like that.
This passage is about testing. It’s about proving. It’s about the testing and failing of humanity. It’s about the God-Man, who passes humanity’s failed test. It’s about a new humanity, remade in that same image and made to stand where their forefathers fell.
In fact, through our text this morning, we find that God never intended to settle for a merely innocent man, but rather that he intended to bring forth a battle-tested, proved out, glorified man through the work of the God-Man, Jesus Christ—that God intended, from the beginning, to make of the old, test-failing humanity a giant-killing, dragon-slaying, glorious new humanity—and so we shouldn’t be surprised by, but rather expect, dragons to show up from time to time.
Let’s go ahead and get the text in front of us, and then we’ll get to work. Look with me at Matthew 4:1–11. This is the Word of the Living God:
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,
“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,
“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and
“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.”
-Matthew 4:1–11
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word. May he write it on our hearts by faith.
Here’s how we will take up this text together this morning. We’ll start by walking through the passage to get a sense of it’s shape—and in doing so, we’ll find that it is a doorway that leads us back through the pages of the Scriptures, to teach us about the mission of God in Christ, and who he is making us.
Into the Wild
Let’s begin by walking through the passage and getting a sense of the narrative, a few verses at a time.
First, remember what has just taken place in the last chapter. Jesus went down into the waters of baptism in the Jordan River, and as he came up, we heard the voice from heaven proclaim: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” This voice is still ringing in the air in verse 1 of chapter four, where we read,
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
-Matthew 4:1
This statement should immediately make us ask some questions, especially if we understand the force of the grammar. The clear meaning of this statement is that the Spirit of God led Jesus into the wilderness for the purpose of being tempted—or as we could also translate this word, “tested”—by the devil.
There is no room in the grammar of this sentence for it to mean that the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, and there just so happened to follow an encounter with the devil where Jesus was tempted. No, the very purpose for which Jesus was led into the wilds was to be tempted, and that is what God intended to happen.
So the question is clear: What gives? Because we know from James 2:13 that nobody is to say what he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself does not tempt anyone.”
So two questions we need to answer right here up front:
One, if God doesn’t tempt anyone, why did the Spirit lead Jesus into this temptation? And two, if Jesus is God, how is it that he could be tempted?
Let’s clear those out of the way. First, the Spirit did in fact lead Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted, but the Spirit is not the one tempting Jesus to sin—God never tempts anyone to sin—and the purpose for which he is leading Jesus into this situation is not that Jesus would become unrighteous, but rather—as we will see—that he fulfill all righteousness. The world, the flesh, and the devil tempt us in hopes that we will fall. The Lord allows for us to be tempted, even ordains that temptations would arise, in order that he might prove out our tested faithfulness.
So with the second question, if Jesus is God, how is it that he could be tempted? This bring up an important doctrinal truth that, if we lose, we lose much—namely, that Jesus is the God-Man.
When, as John puts it in his gospel, the Word become flesh and dwelt among us, when God the Son came down from heaven to save us—he did so by adding a real, truly human nature to his real, truly divine nature.
Jesus, as the council of Chalcedon put it in 451, is truly man, and he is truly God. What this means is that Jesus isn’t merely pretending to be a human—he really is a human being.
He got hungry.
He slept.
He grew in wisdom.
He learned.
He felt pain.
He got tired.
He experienced thirst.
He went through all the normal stages of human development.
Jesus is truly man. And in his humanity, he was capable of being tempted by external temptations. He was tempted as we are in every point, yet without sin, as Hebrews tells us. What that means is that, for all the external temptation Jesus faced, there was never a millisecond where he experienced an inward, corresponding sinful desire to that temptation. He never sinned, in other words, because he never wanted to sin.
So it is here. The Spirit leads him into the wilderness, and he does so in order that Jesus might face down the temptation of one who we will see is the Arch-Tempter himself: that serpent, the devil. Verse 2,
And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
-Matthew 4:2–3
It’s so important that we remember the words ringing in the air at the end of chapter three: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!”
The serpent has just tempted Jesus, then, not merely with food to satisfy his hunger, but with what? With the question: Did God really say?
“Did God really say that you are the Son of God? Prove it! If you are, then make the stones bread.”
This calls us back, we will see, into the pages of the Old Testament Scriptures. I know you probably hear it. But wait for a minute and let’s get the rest of the story in front of us. Verse 4,
But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
What does Jesus do with temptation? From memory, in a state of gnawing hunger and weakness, he pulls forth from his memory the Word of God from Deuteronomy 8:3, and he quotes it back to the Tempter. He pulls the Deuteronomic sword from its sheath, and he cuts down the Tempters words. Verse 5,
Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,
“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
and
“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”
Now the Tempter, having been parried with the Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, decides to pull out that same sword himself, and quotes Psalm 91 at Jesus to tempt him. Hopefully you know that: People can use the Bible sinfully. Satan does so here.
And what does Jesus do again? He pulls out Deuteronomy 6:16, again from memory. Verse 6,
Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
Finally, the Tempter pulls out the big guns, and offers Jesus the world, if only he will worship Satan. This is key to understand for a few reasons:
First, because it was a legitimate offer. Satan had, we might say, the title deed to the nations, because Adam, the authorized representative of God, had ceded that to him at the Fall.
Second, because in some ways, Satan understands the mission of Christ: He is not here to carve out an electorate. He’s not here to establish a few pockets of the world where he might rule. No: Jesus came for the world. Christianity is a faith bent on world domination, because Jesus is a King bent on world domination.
He will settle for nothing less than everything. He came to be exalted above every name, above all rule and authority, to purchase the world and her peoples, and to have everything. Satan gets that; he gets what lots of Evangelicals seem to have forgotten about the missio Dei, the mission of God. Jesus answers him, verse 10, this time quoting from Deuteronomy 6 again,
Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.”
That is the text: Jesus, the Word of God in flesh, uses the Word of God stored up in his heart, to rebuke and refuse the tempting of the Devil, standing firm in the faith.
He is therefore the perfect example of what many of us read this week in our Bible reading plan, Psalm 119—the man who keeps his way pure by storing up God’s precepts, his law, his Word, and meditating on it and obeying it.
A Doorway Back
This account of Jesus’ wilderness temptation—and Refuge, I really hope you already feel the tug, already see the light through the crack in the door—is a doorway back into the pages of the Old Testament Scriptures.
Remember, one of the things Matthew is keen to do in his gospel account is to show us that the coming and life and ministry of Jesus is a reliving of the story of Israel, a reliving of the stories of the Old Testament—yet a reliving of that story wherein Jesus stands and keeps covenant where again and again we failed, sinned, and broke covenant.
This wilderness testing of Jesus calls us to see two such parts of that Old Testament story relived and redeemed in Christ.
A New Kind of Israel
First, in the wilderness testing of Jesus, Matthew shows us that Christ is a new kind of Israel.
Think about the shape of the story of Israel in Exodus again: By his mighty hand and outstretched arm, Yahweh judged their enslaving enemies, brought them up out of slavery in Egypt, brought them through a baptism in the Red Sea, then out into the wilderness, following the Spirit of God in pillar of cloud and fire.
However, over and over again in the wilderness, what happened? They were tested, and they failed the test—and I mean utterly. They whined at Moses, longed back for their slavery in Egypt. They made a golden cow to worship when Moses went up on Sinai to receive the Law. They quarreled about water. They quarreled about food.
And in a kind of final test, they got to the other side of the wilderness, to the edge of the Land that God had promised them, and the spies went in, and what happened? The people believed their own whispering, idolatrous fears rather than the Word of God.
“Did God really say? Did God really say he would give you this Land? But their are giants there! There are fortified cities! How could God possibly give it to us?”
They failed the test, and so wandered in the wilderness for 40 year, a whole generation. As we sing in Psalm 95, “Your fathers put me to the proof, though they had seen my hand. For forty years, I hated them, a generation through.”
In one of the very passages which Jesus quotes here in Matthew 4, a passage from Deuteronomy chapter eight, Moses explains what it is that God was up to in all of this wilderness testing—this is a passage that is on Jesus’ mind as he faces his wilderness test:
“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”
-Deuteronomy 8:1–3
The test was this: Would they keep the commandments? Would they believe what God had said? It was a test of faith. Was their faith a living, obedient thing, or a dead, disobedient thing?
And they failed.
Now think about what we just read in Matthew: Israel has become like an Egypt. John the Baptist warns her leaders as they leave Jerusalem that there is wrath coming on that city. He calls them to repent, just as Pharaoh was called to repent.
And so Jesus comes up out of this little Egypt, crossed through the waters of the Jordan River in his baptism just as Israel had the Red Sea in their baptism, and as they did—immediately went up into the wilderness to be tested. As they Spirit led Israel on the other side of their baptism into the wilderness, so the Spirit of God comes upon Christ at his baptism, leading him into the wilderness.
Then, for forty days and nights, he faces hunger and temptation, just as Israel was tempted for forty years. Yet Jesus is not a test-failing Israel—he is a new kind of Israel. He is a new kind of Israel, one who passes the test, refuses to obey the Serpent, and rather rebukes and banishes him.
Jesus relives their wilderness testing, except where they sinned and fell—receiving the curses promised in Deuteronomy for covenant breakers rather than he blessings of covenant keepers—Christ stands and wins the blessings of the covenant, kept.
He’s here, like he said, to fulfill all righteousness. And to do that, he has to go back further than Israel, and pass a test that humanity failed long before Israel failed her test.
A New Kind of Man
Second, in the wilderness testing of Jesus, Matthew shows us that Christ is a new kind of Adam—which is to say: He is a new kind of humanity.
Paul invites us to see this parallel in Romans 5, that just as death infected the world through the one man, Adam, so righteousness would cleanse the world through the one man, Christ. Because they are both alike and unalike, Paul argues.
The free gift of grace in Christ, Paul tells us, is not like the trespass in Adam. They are both covenantal representatives of humanity, but they do opposite things with that headship. Adam sins and brings death, but the Lord Jesus stands and brings life—verse 21 calls it “…righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Two Adams face a test, face the tempting of the Tempter, the Serpent: One does so in a garden, with his bridal companion near, stomach full. The other in a wilderness, hungry, and alone. Both face this test as covenantal heads of humanity—with everything at stake.
Both faced a test of their faith in what God had spoken: “Adam, did God really say you would die if you ate of this fruit? Not so! Eat and you’ll be like God!”
“Jesus, did the Father really say you are his beloved Son? If you are, make these stones into bread and eat!”
Adam’s bride sinned as he looked on, as he let her go first. He should have crushed the serpent’s head and cried out to God, “Take me instead!” Instead Adam self-justifyingly whined, “The woman you gave me!”
Jesus’ bride was far away, dead in her sin. But he stepped forward and did what Adam should have done: He banished the Tempter, and he would go on to crush his head and rescue his bride at the cost of his own blood. Instead of “The woman you gave me!” Jesus said, “My life for yours!”
What God has Always Been Up To
See, God has been up to this sort of thing from the beginning—this testing of man to show his mettle.
The story of humanity from Adam on down is one long succession of failed examinations. He’s been showing us over and over again that we are not up to the task of facing this Tempter. He’s been showing us that, left on our own, we cannot stand. God is in the business of kicking out the props of self-righteousness and self-sufficiency from under us—and doing so as a grace to us.
God has always been letting his sons test their mettle on the flinty scales of dragons. He has been doing so to show us the nature of our work, the nature of our strength. He’d have us see that we cannot pass the Arthurian test, that we cannot pull the sword from the stone, that we cannot stand in our strength.
Yet, if we stop there, if we don’t move through the rest of the story, to the ending God is also writing—we make a mockery of it.
Expect Dragons
Because God is not just interested in showing us the edges of our strength—which really turns out to be the enormity of our weakness.
He isn’t testing us to failure in order that he might leave us in failure. No, he tests us to the point of failure in order that we might be brought to repentance and faith and new birth and new life—in order that he might remake us in the image of this New Israel, this New Man, after the image and likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Why did God let a dragon in the gates of his garden? Why did God let the Tempter into Eden to tempt his image bearers? Did God just forget to set the alarm on Eden for a night? Did he not know what would happen? Of course not! God knew.
So why did he let the man face down a lying, tempting dragon-serpent in the garden? The answer is this: Because God is not content with a merely innocent humanity, but would settle for nothing less than a battle-tested, glorious new humanity.
The arc of the Biblical narrative runs from a failure of a first man to a failure of a people who fell before temptation—to the God-Man who was tempted and yet stood, and then onward and upward to his re-creation of a new humanity in that same, serpent-crushing image.
Did you know that?
The point of the failed tests of humanity isn’t to sit down and pout and say, “Well, I guess I’ll never obey God or believe God. I guess I’ll never have living faith. I guess I’ll just keep listening to the Serpent every time he comes. Good thing there’s grace, right?”
That is an utterly inadequate telling of the story!
The point of the failed tests of humanity is rather to bring us to say, “I hate that Serpent. I hate that Adam and Israel and my fathers and my own heart have all listened to him. Jesus, save me! Jesus you stood! Jesus forgive me! Break the curse and bring me to living faith! Make me stand!”
And listen, saints: He does. That is, in fact, the very thing he is doing here in Matthew 4! Jesus passes the test—and not just here in the wilderness, but the test of an entirely righteous, law-fulfilling life—and he goes to the cross to bear the curse of those who failed the test. And on the cross he breaks the curse and the Serpent’s skull.
And he rises from the dead and goes to the throne, from where he is right now resurrecting sons and remaking them in his own image—if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation. And so the New Testament could abound with statements like this:
“For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.”
-2 Corinthians 10:3–6
“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”
-Romans 16:20
“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
-James 4:7
God is, in Christ, passing humanity’s failed test, to redeem them from the curse of their failure, and to bring them to living faith and new life, whereby they can stand as free men, not fall as slaves to the Serpent.
We should therefore not be surprised when we get dragons, serpents, jackals, and giants in our own world and lives. We shouldn’t be surprised when the world, the flesh, and the devil show up with temptation, with opposition, with reviling, with testing.
Why not? Because God is proving out his people. God is proving out our faith, our fruit, and he is conforming us to the image of his Son, who strode into the wilderness after the Spirit’s leading to do battle with serpents and win.
We did not receive a spirit of fear to shrink back and be destroyed, but of faith. He would also bring us to stand.
He would bring us to face dragons and laugh as we draw the Deuteronomic sword from its scabbard and watch the serpent flee, and watch the serpent crushed underfoot.
That’s your one, big application today, church: Look to the Lord by faith, the one who stood the test, crushed the serpent, and bore our sin and shame on the cross. And look to him in every trial, testing, and temptation of your own—because God is proving out your faith, purifying you, and he will bring you to stand on the last day in glory, a battle-tested and trial-proved people.