At the very centre of the desert experience is the contrast between prevailing ideologies concerning the Messiah, and the task God the Father entrusted to Jesus – to redeem by sacrifice. The established ideas of the Messiah and his mission were about to be turned upside down and inside out. An ideological revolution was taking place in the desert, one with immense consequences for Jesus.
So, how was Jesus going to use His power? In a state of deep starvation, the little pieces of desert limestone rock called out to Him. And since this was not His appointed hour, what could be more logical than turning them into bread, ensuring His survival by His own powerful hand? But this seemingly logical and expedient course of action required a number of decisions, all of them disastrous: to break His fast; to prioritise His status; to meet His needs; in other words, to be inauthentic, to act in direct contradiction to His baptismal commission.
It is not surprising that, in exploring how He was going to proceed, Jesus turned to Scripture. Yet, from all the myriad of passages He could have quoted, Jesus chose Deuteronomy 8:3. Why?
Part of the ‘Do not forget the Lord’ sermon Moses had delivered hundreds of years previously, Jesus’ answer gives a powerful glimpse into His thought processes. He was recalling Israel’s experience in the desert, particularly the exact time six weeks (42 days!) into their deliverance from Egypt when God promised to rain down bread from heaven in a such a way that it would test them to see whether they would follow His instructions (Exodus 16:4). Moses amplifies this in his sermon, saying that the Lord had provided in such manner to humble them, to test them in order to know what was in their hearts and to teach them that man does not live by bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Exodus 8:2-3).
So there we have it. Satan took Jesus’ most pressing need and served it back to Him with a twist. There was truth and there was challenge – Jesus WAS the Son of God and HAD the power to turn stones into bread. The twist was to combine these in such a way that it would jeopardise the entire mission, His Exodus. His response, those few words, exploded Satan’ logic and revealed Jesus’ own.
He had been brought into this place to be humbled and tested in order to know what was in His heart. There He found the guiding principle of His whole mission – it is the Father, living in me, who is doing His work (John 14:10). Dependency on the Father would be the hallmark of this Messiah. His journey in the desert had begun by the Spirit and would end by the Spirit. Here, Jesus lived on every word that came from the mouth of His Father. And He never deviated from this fundamental principle, not even on the cross, when He was similarly tempted.
Hineni 