Sermon: Invocabit (Lent 1) - 2020

1 March 2020

Text: Matt 4:1-11

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Jesus is tempted, and Jesus overcomes temptation.  And so we are tempted to say, “So what?  He’s God.  He wasn’t really tempted.”  But this is to deny our Lord’s humanity.

It is a mystery, dear friends.  Jesus is completely God, and completely man.  And yet, He is not two Christs, but one Christ.  Theologians have all kinds of technical explanations and terminology for this, but the bottom line is that Jesus is God who broke into space and time – and even into our flesh – to rescue us.  His divinity makes Him the perfect sacrificial Lamb, whose death isn’t a payment for what He deserves, but rather His death pays for what we deserve.  And at the same time, His humanity means that He can, in fact, die.  If He couldn’t die, He couldn’t pay for our sins.

When He was on the cross, He was mocked by those who said: “He saved others, but He cannot save Himself.”  Of course, He could have saved Himself.  It was within His power to come down from the cross.  He could have turned the tables on the world that crucified Him.  But He could not have saved the world by doing so.  So there is some truth in what was said.  His love for us meant that He could not come down from the cross – and at the same time atone for the sins of the world.

Such is our God, about whom we can use the word “can’t” – not for want of power, but because, by His nature, He is incapable of not loving us.  

And so our God in the flesh deals with all of the things we ordinary human beings deal with: anxiety, pain and suffering, and even death.  Jesus suffers all of these things even as we do, only He suffers more – knowing that He deserves none of these things.

Temptation is one such thing.  Unlike the rest of God’s creation, we have a rational mind.  We can be taught and instructed.  We have a moral compass.  We know right and wrong.  And this is what temptation is: our desire wrestles with our morals.  And to complicate matters, we have an enemy, the devil, the serpent, whose hatred of God and of mankind makes it impossible for him to love, impossible for him not to interfere in the affairs of man.  He is truly the anti-Christ, but he can only appear to us in various forms.  Unlike our Lord, Satan is not human, and certainly does not come to us out of love and a desire to rescue us.

Jesus is described as the Second Adam, the reboot of humanity.  The first Adam yielded to temptation from his wife, who yielded to temptation from the devil, the serpent.  Not content with his place in the cosmic pecking order, Satan enlisted humanity in his cause of overturning the order of creation.  He tempted the woman to take charge and wear the pants in the family.  And she in turn tempted her husband to join her in the Satanic rebellion against God’s authority, defying God’s Law, and desiring to be godlike himself.  Temptation became action, sinful action, and the cost of this violation of God’s Law was a mortal tear in the fabric of the universe.  Since that day, hell has been unleashed on our planet.  Satan has taken charge of the world and of the hearts of man, largely through the weapon of temptation.

Hence God’s rescue mission.  Hence Adam 2.0.  Hence the incarnate God, the Christ, doing battle with the serpent, the devil, yet again.  Only this time, the New Adam does not fall like the Old Adam.  The bride of the New Adam, the Church, will be saved by her bridegroom, unlike the bride of the Old Adam, Eve, whose bridegroom assured her death by succumbing to temptation himself.

And this is what this temptation in the wilderness is all about, dear friends.  The fate of the universe hangs on our Lord being victorious in this battle.

And what’s more, our Lord reveals the kind of thing that repels and repulses the crafts and assaults of the devil.  Three times, Jesus cites Scripture, the Word of God, and hurls it at Satan, the accuser and the tempter, the serpent, the father of lies.  For a lie is a powerful thing.  It can confuse.  It can mislead.  It can lead directly to death.  But it cannot abide truth.  Truth is like a small light that dispels darkness.  And a liar, once exposed, loses his power.

The Word of God is incapable of lying, dear friends.  And so when you hear “Thus says the Lord,” you are hearing something that causes the devil to shrink away defeated, even as his power and malice were destroyed by the cross, as Jesus completed His mission to crush the head of the serpent and to gather His sheep into the green pasture of Paradise in which God placed us at Eden, before the serpent corrupted Paradise and mangled creation by his lies and temptation.

And so when we are tempted, we have a blueprint for pushing back.  Jesus came to rescue us, not merely to give us instructions to save ourselves.  But there is an element of teaching going on here.  For even though Jesus saves us, we are still rational creatures with a will.  God will not physically restrain you from sin.  He loves you too much to turn you into a robot or a zombie.  You are not a brute beast; you are a human being with a mind.  God will not impose salvation on you.  You can indeed choose to follow the serpent, though we know where this leads.  Jesus saves you by calling to you, by urging you to follow Him, by offering you opportunity to hear His Word, to be absolved of your sins, to be baptized, and to partake of the body and blood of the Lord for the strengthening of your faith.  But Jesus will not force you to do anything.  You are free.

And so if you want to serve truth instead of the lie, if you want to resist the temptations of the devil that you know will lead you astray and cause you harm, if you want to turn in repentance and follow Jesus instead of the serpent – you can see how to do it, and what your greatest weapon is: the Word of God.

The pure Word of God in Scripture is what Jesus – who is the incarnate Word of God – uses to repel the devil.  Three times, He says, “It is written.”  Satan tries to distort the meaning of the Word of God, but Jesus is having none of that.  Jesus shows us how important it is to know the Scriptures, and to be guided by their light.  It isn’t enough to know right from wrong, dear friends.  For we all know that.  We need the Word of God to repel the devil and deliver us from temptation.

When the serpent first tempted mankind in Eden, notice that he did not directly attack God nor did he threaten or coerce Eve.  Rather, he just injected a little doubt, a small wedge of disbelief and distrust of God’s Word: “Did God actually say…?”

We are surrounded by this temptation, dear friends.  Nearly every image we see on TV, in the movies, in magazines, books, websites, and in our schools and universities, we are bombarded with “Did God actually say...?” and we are tempted by Satan to pursue our own desires instead of the will of God.

The kind of Satanism that used to be quiet and behind the scenes in Hollywood, in politics, in sports and entertainment, in public schools (and even some Christian schools), in universities, in public libraries, and in popular music, has now become open Luciferianism.  Secret societies dedicated to Lucifer (that is, the devil, the false angel of light) are finding their way into the popular culture.  You’ll see the tee shirts with pentagrams and the goat-headed Baphomet idol when you simply go to the store to pick up groceries.  Disney cartoons now feature demons and deviant sexuality – not to mention disrespect of parents and hatred for normal social institutions.  

“Did God actually say…?”

And still, Christian parents allow their children – and even themselves – to be seduced by the serpent.  What we should be doing, dear friends, is learning the Word of God.  In the words of the ancient prayer, we must “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Bible.  There is no excuse today.  We have so many resources for reading and understanding the Scriptures.  You don’t need to read Hebrew and Greek and understand the technical theological terms for how Jesus is both God and man. You can if you want to, of course.  But what you actually need to do is to read and understand the Scriptures so that you can recognize the truth, discern the lie, and rebuke the devil.  And you cannot do that if your worldview is shaped by Hollywood and Big Media while your Bible is a dusty, decorative coffee-table prop, or a pristine relic of your baptism or confirmation.

Once again, dear friends, Jesus will not force you to do anything.  But if you call upon Him, He will protect you, and the Holy Spirit will guide you to the truth and lead you where you need to be for the sake of yourselves, your families, your friends, and if you have children – for them as well.  There is still time to board the Ark.

Now it is Lent.  “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”  Now is the time to say, “Be gone, Satan!  For it is written….”  Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.