Sermon: Wittenberg Academy – Sep 26, 2023

26 Sep 2023

Text: Matt 4:1-11

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Immediately after His baptism, our Lord was “tempted by the devil.”  This should not surprise us, dear friends.  We see the same pattern in our Christian life.  The devil is not too concerned about unbelievers.  They are already his.  But when a person has been claimed by God, having been washed from his sins, marked by the cross, and named as God’s own child by the invocation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, when one has become a disciple according to Jesus’ own invitation and command to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them,” he becomes a target of the devil.

Of course, Jesus did not change at His baptism.  He was always perfect.  He remains both God and man.  Jesus was targeted by the devil from the first day of Satan’s rebellion.  The devil tried in vain to murder our Lord, even as a child.  But His baptism was a formal and public declaration of war upon Satan and his fallen angels.  For Jesus began His public ministry with His baptism.  He demonstrated the power of Holy Baptism by revealing for us the supernatural action of the Trinity, water, and the Word.  And at the end of His earthly ministry, He unleashed the mighty power of baptism upon the entire world, handing over this weapon of mass destruction to His apostles, and to the church that follows in their train.

What else can Satan do but counterattack, dear friends? 

There are many paradoxes in the life of Jesus: the God who is a man, the man who is God, the man who has existed eternally, the God who was born of a virgin, the God who suffers pain and temptation, the man who triumphs over death and the lure of the devil.  When Satan attacks the man, He finds that His target is God.  When Satan attacks God, He finds that His target is a man: a man who gives His own divinity to other men by the supernatural means of Word and Sacrament.  When we are baptized, we are given the divine quality of righteousness as a gift.  And just as Jesus was attacked, dear friends, so are we.

Like a martial arts instructor, Jesus demonstrates the very real techniques for defeating an attack of the devil.  He doesn’t merely explain the theory behind spiritual warfare.  Rather, He goes to the mat and repels the diabolical attack of temptation – a reality faced by all mankind, but especially the baptized.  Jesus demonstrates the technique three times – and each time, the devil offers Jesus what he believes Jesus would want the most in His condition: food in His hunger (trusting things rather than God), command over the heavens (testing God’s promise), and kingly power (grounded in the devil’s rebellion instead of God’s faithfulness).  And in each of these brutal attacks, our Lord fights back with the Word of God.

Think about what is happening here, dear friends.  The Word Made Flesh speaks aloud the written Word of God to rebuke the chief of demons.  Jesus, the perfect man, teaches us poor miserable sinners how to resist the crafts and assaults of the devil.  The secret is the Word of God.  Satan cannot abide it.  The Word has been weaponized: the incarnation of the Son and the inscripturation of God’s Word in a form that we can read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, but also speak it, confess it, repeat it, and hurl it as a weapon against the forces of darkness, against temptation, against the old evil foe who would drag us down to hell with himself and his demons.

Let us heed not only the words of our Lord, but let us use the Word in our own hand-to-hand combat with Satan.  Let the baptized be weaponized.  “For it is written.”

Amen.

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