Temptations of Jesus (Part 2)
(Part 2)
Lk 4:5-8
The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendour; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.”
Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only."
The Devil, or Lucifer (which means Morningstar), was once an angel in heaven who was created by God. Scripture tells us that Lucifer was the most beautiful angel that God created, and because of this, he became so full of self-pride, arrogance, and vanity that he got a bit of a notion about himself. This resulted in self-pride and self-adoration to the extent that he thought he was equal to God. Because of his sin of pride. As aa result God cast him out of heaven, along with a third of all the angels who had sided with him, down to earth. Luke tells us in chapter 10:8 that Jesus said “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven".
On earth, in the garden of Eden, Lucifer then tempted Adam and Eve, and they too fell, sin entered the world and humanity became sinful and corrupt. Through our sin, the devil gained power over all the nations and peoples of the earth. And the scary thing about this, humanity is not even aware of the influence and control of sin over us and our world, or even the fact that we are being influenced by evil forces. The Devil’s power is over all the nations of the earth. Even Jesus calls him the ruler of this world in John 14:30 when he says. “I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me”
The Devil affects us by twisting our thought processes, so much that we strive for the satisfaction of self. He stirs up self-pride within us to the point where we put ourselves first in everything. And when this happens, we break the greatest commandment which is to love and serve God before all else, and when we’ve broken the first commandment we don't stand a chance of keeping the second.
In this second temptation, the Devil shows Jesus all the nations of the world in an instant, and says, “I will give you all their authority and splendour”. The temptation here is for Jesus to become a worldly king, all he has to do is worship Lucifer, a lesser created being! If Jesus had fallen to this temptation, he would have become sinful just like us, those who he had come to save.
Yet again we see that Jesus overcomes temptation by looking to the Father and by quoting scripture from Deuteronomy 6:13, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only”
Throughout Jesus’s ministry, he preached the “Kingdom of God has come close”, and he was executed as King of the Jews, yet when being questioned by Pontius Pilate, about his kingdom Jesus answered in Jn 18:36 “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
Remember also, Jesus taught us to pray, “thy kingdom come”. God’s Kingdom will come one day, but until his return, that kingdom isn’t a Kingdom in the traditional meaning of the word. For now, God’s Kingdom is in heaven and also in the hearts and minds of those who have placed their trust in Him as their Lord and Saviour, those of us who strive to follow his will for our lives and keep his Laws while we are here on earth.
All of us can take comfort in Jesus's words from John 17:16“They (meaning us) are not of the world, even as I am not of it”.
In the next blog, we’ll look at Jesus’s third temptation in the wilderness, until then,
Have a great day and God bless,
Trev.