Not By Bread Alone, Part 3 | How to Fight Temptation

Luke 4:1-4

Starting in Luke 4:1, and we’ll read all the way through verse 13. “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led up by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “Man shall not live by bread alone.”’And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time,and said to him, ‘To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.”’

“And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here,for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,” and, “On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”’ And Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”’ And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.”

Verse 4, “Jesus answered him, ‘It’s written, “Man shall not live by bread alone.”’” I’m going to make three simple statements as points to help us understand the way that Jesus resisted and stood firm against this fiery dart of temptation shot from the devil at him. First, Jesus answered the devil. Jesus answered the devil. That is, he didn’t ignore the enticement. He didn’t pretend that it didn’t happen. He didn’t stick his head in the sand. He didn’t run from the conflict. He looked carefully and intently at the reality of the temptation. He assessed the words, the nature of the temptation, and he responded to the temptation appropriately and righteously. Jesus answered the devil.

Secondly, Jesus responded with God’s Word. He responded with God’s Word. As I said, so many Christians want to wrestle, and banter back and forth with error, with lies and do debates and all that. They didn’t learn that approach from Jesus. His words were, “It is written,” and the rest of what he said were words of Scripture. Jesus didn’t debate here. He didn’t enter into a dialogue. He didn’t try to understand where the devil was coming from, to figure out if he had a good point or not, I mean, maybe he came from a bad neighborhood, didn’t have really good parenting. I mean, there’s kind of some trouble with his background and his culture. No.

He wasn’t willing to listen to the devil and take in his lies and chew up the meat, as they say, and spit out the bones. No, he rejected it all. For Jesus, here, this idea that the devil suggested was an attack against God. And Jesus is not going to stand for it. He’s insinuating and assuming something is not right in the divine character, in the divine nature. So, Jesus, being God-centered in his thinking, he was God-centered in his response. There’s a sense in which he stepped out of the way and he let God speak for God.

Listen, that is a good approach, folks. Let God speak for God. Charles Spurgeon famously said it this way, “Pardon me if I offer a quiet suggestion. Open the door and let the lion out. He will take care of himself. He no sooner goes forth in his strength than his assailants flee. The way to meet infidelity is to spread the Bible. The answer to every objection against the Bible is the Bible.” Thank you, Mr. Spurgeon, well said. Let the lion out. Spurgeon learned that from our Lord’s example here.

Jesus answered the devil, he responded with Scripture, which demonstrates the heart of the matter is this, thirdly, that Jesus stood firm by faith. Jesus stood firm by faith. Luke’s record of Jesus’ response, here, quoting from Deuteronomy 8:3, that’s only a partial quotation, here, from Deuteronomy 8:3, right? Matthew includes the whole of Jesus’ response, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out from the mouth of God.”

Luke captured the essence of that in a shorter version and you might say, why the difference? Why did Luke want to actually shortchange that statement, not give the whole statement? I believe that Luke’s reason for the partial rendering, it causes the reader to stop and reflect more thoughtfully on that statement, to get to the nature of this temptation and the nature of the response. He wanted his predominantly Gentile readership to stop and ask the question, Huh. Man shall not live by bread alone and then it stops. Well then, how does man live?

Good question and that question actually gets to the heart of the matter. It reveals the true nature of the devil’s enticement. This isn’t primarily about Jesus making an unauthorized use of supernatural power, even though that’s involved. This is fundamentally and primarily an issue of trusting God. How is it exactly that man is sustained? By his own hand, or by the will of God? That’s the issue. The fact, here, that Jesus is alive after all this time without food or water, it proved that God had been sustaining him, upholding him. He knew that to be true, but he knew it to be true first, by the written record. He believed the Word. Now he’s experiencing it personally and practically.

He’d obviously, here, by his responses, all of them, by the way coming from Deuteronomy, he’d been meditating on God’s provision of Israel during the nation’s wilderness wanderings recorded in Deuteronomy. So, Jesus understood, here, and he’s affirming the body’s need for food. He knows the body needs food. He’s not some mystic saying, oh, all I need is Scripture to chew on and, and I’ll somehow be physically sustained. That’s not what he’s saying. He just refused to worry about food. He’s not going to let it trouble his mind or his heart. He fundamentally trusted that God would provide for him. Man does live by bread, but not by bread alone. That’s the issue.

There’s a parallel structure, actually, in Deuteronomy 8:3, which doesn’t deny the need for food. It actually affirms the need for food; it’s just not food only. That’s the issue. It emphasizes the greater need for God’s intention to provide, and it’s God’s intention expressed in all his promises to be our faithful provider, that’s the true source of our sustenance. The food, that’s merely the means of our provision, but it’s not the source.

It’s that simple confidence in God that will sustain us whenever we see no visible means to feed our hungry bodies. In fact, that’s the point of the larger context of Deuteronomy 8:3. You might turn back to Deuteronomy 8, Deuteronomy 8:1, and follow along as I read. Moses here exhorts Israel to obey God and to fear him because God’s faithful to provide, and he reminds Israel, here, the Deuteronomy meaning second law, and he gives the reminder of the law that they received, and then he points back to what they just experienced.

And Moses says this in Deuteronomy 8:1, “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 your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness,” why? “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. Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your foot did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you. So, you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land.” Stop right there.

God took Israel in the wilderness to a place that they had never been before, to a place where all they saw before them was the impossibility of survival. All they could see before them in the land was barrenness and nothingness. Why did he do that? To humble them so they could learn that wherever man sees impossibility, God is never hindered. He’ll always be faithful to what he promised. God is not limited. He can rain manna from heaven to feed our bodies. That’s never the issue with God. The issue is will we look beyond the food, trust him as the source of our provision?

I love how John Calvin captured the essence of Christ’s reply. He writes this, “There are some who torture Deuteronomy 8:3 to a false meaning as referring to spiritual life, as if our Lord had said that our souls are not nourished by visible bread, but by the word of God. The statement is of itself no doubt true,but Moses had a quite different meaning. He reminds them that when no bread could be obtained, God provided them with an extraordinary kind of nourishment in manna which they knew not, neither did their fathers know, and that this was intended for us as an evident proof in all time coming that the life of man is not confined to bread, but depends on the will and good pleasure of God.

“Having created men, he does not cease to care for them, but as he breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, so he constantly preserves the life which he has bestowed. Though we live on bread, we must not ascribe the support of life to the power of bread, but to the secret kindness by which God imparts to bread the quality of nourishing our bodies.” End quote.

That’s what Jesus understood from Deuteronomy 8. And that’s what Jesus did in the spirit of Deuteronomy 8:3. By the way, you can turn back to Luke 4. But in the spirit of Deuteronomy 8:3, he kept God’s commandments here, he walked in his ways, he feared him always, and from the depths of his heart, Jesus believed God. He had already been sustained by faith in God very practically all the way up this very moment. He wasn’t dead. God had proven faithful, and Jesus never had a reason to doubt him at all.

Jesus trusted the God who had said, Psalm 81:10, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” It’s God prerogative how and when, but his promise is, I will fill it. I will take care of you. That’s how Jesus responded to this enticement. From the overflow of his believing heart, he responded to the devil, he expressed a fundamental, unshakable trust in God to provide for all of his needs, he responded by faith in the written Word of God.

He responded by faith in the God of the Word. That faith, by the way, is what won the victory. The victory is this, beloved, simple point: Jesus withstood the temptation. He did not sin. That’s how we as Christians define victory. It’s not sinning, it is pleasing God and we need to understand that it’s not a matter of whether our bodies die or live. That’s not what victory is as a Christian. We need to understand what it means to win.

Listen, in the war with Satan, in the war with sin and temptation, winning means never sinning. Even if our bodies die, to be absent from the body is to be where? Present with Christ, right? Winning means pleasing God at all times. Satan’s sole objective in fighting against God and his people is to get them to sin. Sinning is losing. If we fail to please God, that is losing, that’s a victory for Satan. That’s why Jesus is the greatest soldier who ever lived, he won! He never sinned. He always pleased God even when things were very hard. Listen, even when he died: never sinned.

Jesus Christ fought the greatest fight against Satan. He served in the greatest war for the glory of God and, to win the souls of his people. He won the greatest victory. He prevailed over sin. He destroyed Satan; conquered death by rising from the dead. In the language of Ephesians 6:13, Jesus took up the whole armor of God, he withstood in the evil day, he was girded about with the belt of truth, his vital areas were protected by the breastplate of righteousness.

Jesus lifted that shield of faith, which quenched all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And when the enemy rushed upon him hoping that he would drop that shield and he could get through the line, he drew the sword, which is the Word of God. He did so skillfully. He parried that mortal blow. He stood firm, never sinning, fully pleasing God. That’s victory.

We’ve learned about the enticement, the resistance, the victory. What is the pattern here? That’s what we need to see for ourselves, for our own encouragement and application. What is the pattern of temptation and victory? The pattern is this, as we said, the goal of every temptation is to get us to sin, okay? We stand firm by resisting that temptation, dressed in the full armor of God, Ephesians 6:10 to 20. Sometime I want to teach that to you, wonderful passage. But we win, we resist by not sinning.

We’ll be more wary of the wiles of the devil, more aware of the way he operates if we notice the pattern that is there, resident in every single temptation. And we saw it here in the first temptation. Each temptation involves, firstly, a solicitation to please yourself. Here, it’s avoid suffering, provide for your needs, fulfill your desires. Don’t wait for God, take care of yourself; if you don’t look out for yourself, no one will. So, first, solicitation to please yourself.

Secondly, each temptation involves a solicitation to distrust God, to think slanderous thoughts about him, to think lower thoughts than are due him. In this case, with temptation toward independent self-provision, the unbelieving, unworthy thought of God is this, God doesn’t care about my needs. He’s stopped caring. There’s a lapse in his concern. And that little window that you give, that foothold for the devil, leads thirdly, this unbelief leads thirdly to a distortion of reality.

If you enter into that temptation, it distorts your thinking. Why? Because it’s a denial of truth altogether. It’s a denial of truth. And from that platform of distorted thinking, that erroneous thinking based on a lie about God, embraced because your sin nature deceived and enticed you, it’s only going to lead to living in a distorted version of reality. In this case, the distortion is that pain and suffering cannot or should not be tolerated or endured.

Look, that’s ridiculous. Any athlete that’s every achieved anything, any musician that’s ever achieved anything, anybody who’s ever built anything, built a business or anything else you might imagine, has gone through difficulty, trial, suffering, and we acknowledge that and affirm that and look up to that, as well we should. Suffering should be tolerated and endured. We’re distorted when we think we need to avoid it. But God doesn’t intend his people to suffer, to go through trials, what kind of lunacy is that?

The same lie peddled by the prosperity preachers that fill our land, God only wants your health, wealth, and happiness. It’s that distorted view of reality that cuts people off from what God wants to teach through pain and suffering. Jesus endured sadness and sorrow. He endured pain and suffering, all manner of trials, but that is all lost on those who are living in that satanic dream world where they pretend suffering does not exist.

Each and every temptation works according to the same pattern. It starts with the solicitation to please the self. It quickly solicits from us a distrust in God to move away from our faith in God based on slanderous thoughts about him. And when embraced, you enter into temptation, distorted reality. You’ve gone down the rabbit hole, and the world is all off tilt. Once you enter that distorted reality, once you’ve entered into temptation, well then transgression and every kind of misery follow on your heels. “Desire when it has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death,” right?

That said, we can do a choose-your-own-ending kind of a story, here. We don’t have to enter into temptation, okay? So, let’s scrap that third option I just said there, and let’s do a new third option. Here’s the new third step. It’s, that, that step of entering into temptation, it’s avoidable because we’re saved, because we have a new nature, because we respond to God and his Word, because his Holy Spirit is in us, resident within us to give us power to move through it. So, we can say, make that third step, okay, so there’s solicitation to please self, there’s solicitation to distrust God; thirdly, this is the perfect opportunity to put ourself in God’s hands, to trust him and not ourselves, to turn away from what we’re tempted to embrace.

Look, we don’t have to understand all that God has in mind for our circumstances, do we? We don’t need to understand the fullness of the situation we’re facing. We don’t have to know all the reasons in his mind for our suffering. All we need to do is believe in him. We need to accept the fact that God is fundamentally good. We need to affirm the fact he is powerful enough to remove our suffering if he wants to. We need to embrace the fact that if we continue to suffer, well, then he has a good and wise reason to continue that trial. He will bring relief when he believes it’s the proper time, but not before, because he’s wise. We trust him, and we walk forward in obedience.

Look at the last verse there in Luke 4. I just want to wrap up here. It says the devil departed from him “until an opportune time,” in Luke 4:13. There were other opportune moments throughout Jesus’ ministry in which he faced other temptations. But this one, the temptation to avoid suffering, to take care of his own needs, to distrust God’s wisdom in putting him through suffering, this temptation visited and followed him throughout his ministry because everywhere he turned, he faced conflict and suffering, and he needed to lean into it, not run from it.

How many of you are conflict avoiders, you hate conflict, you don’t want to offe-? You know what? We’re not allowed to do that as Christians. Look what Jesus did. Luke 22:39 to 42, I’m not going to have you turn there, but just listen. He faced a severe, probably the severest form of this same temptation. He looked ahead and he saw the cross before him.

It says, “He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, the disciples followed him,” on that night. “And when he came to the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not enter into temptation.’ And then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and he knelt down and prayed, saying, ‘Father, if you’re willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.’” 

He faced the temptation once again to please himself, to avoid the suffering of the cross, to turn away from that bitter cup and not drink it. He faced the temptation to distrust the goodness and the wisdom of his father. Instead of entering into temptation, instead of entering into a distorted reality, Jesus reaffirmed his trust in the father saying this, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” At the end of his earthly ministry, just as at the beginning, Jesus affirmed the good and wise provision of God. God was his provider, that Jehovah Jireh. “I am sustained not by bread alone, but by the good will of my Father.” Same thing for us, isn’t it?

Let’s pray. Father, you are our great provider, and having seen the devil’s wiles, his craftiness, his trickery and deception, we’re a little bit more informed now than we were when we came in here about that tendency to distrust you, to listen to the whisperings of a, a voice that says, take care of yourself, a voice that says, God doesn’t care anymore. Heavenly Father, we reject, emphatically reject that voice. And we want to once again affirm you for who you are, that you are great. You are God. You are very God. You love us. You care for us. You’re concerned for us. You are good and wise.