Christ’s Victory in the Wilderness

Jesus’ wilderness temptation isn’t recorded in Scripture primarily to help us fight temptation—it marks the beginning of Christ’s victory over Satan. Today, Sinclair Ferguson invites us to take courage in our conquering King.

Last time on Things Unseen, we began to think together about the temptations of Jesus, and we were thinking about them generally, since the whole time of Jesus’ life and ministry was a test, or a temptation. But I want to invite you now for the next few days to think about the temptations of Christ and the wilderness, the temptations that are recorded in the Synoptic Gospels. After His baptism, and also after an extended period of fasting, Jesus was confronted by the devil, and the devil faced Him with three specific temptations.

The first thing to remember when you read about Jesus’ temptations—whether in the abbreviated form in Mark 1, or the longer forms in Matthew and Luke 4—the first thing to remember is this: this event isn’t recorded to tell you how to resist temptation. It may help you to do that, but it isn’t, first of all, about our temptations; it’s about Jesus’ temptations.

I sometimes refer to what I call the “Where’s Waldo approach” to reading the Gospels. You may be familiar with those books that were popular at one time—pictures of massive crowds of people in different scenes and situations, and there was this little fellow called Waldo, or he was called Wally in the UK, and he wears a red and white striped sweater and hat. And the whole point is that you try and find him in the crowd. I remember when I first saw those books, I thought: “That’s how some of us read the Gospels, with ourselves as Waldo. We’re looking for ourselves in the story: Am I there as Nicodemus or Zacchaeus or Simon Peter?” And of course, the problem with that approach is twofold, really. The first is, I wasn’t there. And the second is, perhaps even more important, that can divert me from looking at Jesus in the story and discovering more about who Jesus is and what Jesus is like.

And I think you sometimes can see that tendency when we read the temptation narrative. We can make the mistake of thinking, “The most important question here is, How does this passage help me to deal with temptation?” And as I say, it does that, but the point of the passage is not so much to help me deal with temptation, it’s about how Jesus dealt with these very special temptations because He was our Savior. This is about Him, not about me. It’s about what He has done for me, not what I need to do for Him.

You probably noticed there’s something right at the beginning of the temptation narrative that underlines this for us. Each of the first three Gospels says it in one form or another. In Matthew, it’s this: “Jesus was led up by the Spirit . . . to be tempted by the devil” (4:1). In Mark, it’s “the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness” to be tempted (1:12). And in Luke, it’s “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil” (4:1).

You see the point? There’s a military strategy here. Satan is the prince of this world. He has usurped the authority, the dominion that God gave originally to Adam. Remember in Genesis 1:26–28, God made man as His image and gave him dominion. And now, the divine director of military operations, the Holy Spirit, is leading out the great general, Jesus Christ, into the field of combat. The Spirit is the connecting link between the heavenly operations center and the battlefront. And what we have here—to borrow language from World War II—is the beginning of D-Day. If I can give you a spoiler and the rest of the story, something is going to happen for the first time in human history. The man, Christ Jesus, the new Adam, is going to enter enemy-occupied territory—a garden that’s been turned into a wilderness by the enemy—and He’s going to face him down, withstand his fiercest, attacks and conquer him.

And so, the temptation narrative is really all about Genesis 3:15 coming to pass. The seed of the woman is beginning to crush the head of the serpent. That’s what caused Martin Luther to sing:

But for us fights the proper Man whom God himself hath bidden. As ye who is this same? Christ Jesus is his name . . . 

And He will win the battle. And in the desert, the Lord Jesus began to fight that battle in earnest and won it. Of course, there were more battles to come before the war was over, but this was a very significant one. And because of that, we can be more than conquerors through Him who loved us. And tomorrow will think more about what it means that Jesus has conquered the enemy.