The hardships begin for the Second Adam

Sermon for Invocavit – Lent 1

2 Corinthians 6:1-10  +  Matthew 4:1-11

In today’s Epistle, St. Paul gave the Corinthians a list of some 30 things that established him or that proved him and the other apostles to be true ministers of God, many of them hardships of one sort or another. Why would the things in that list, especially the hardships, establish someone as a minister, as a servant of Christ? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Because those are all the things that characterized Christ during His brief three-year ministry on earth. And all the hardships began with His 40-day fast in the wilderness and with the temptations He endured there.

Matthew tells us that, immediately after Jesus began His ministry by being baptized, He was led by the Spirit out into the wilderness to be tempted. To be tempted. To be tested. To be tried. That was God the Father’s very first task for His newly ordained Son. He had to be tempted, because He had to follow a certain pattern, certain type. Paul writes in Romans 5 that Adam, the first man, was a type or pattern of the One to come, of the Christ who is sometimes referred to as the Second Adam.

Well, you remember how it went in Genesis. Adam was tempted. So the Second Adam also had to be tempted. But the circumstances were hardly the same. Adam had no hardships to face before he fell into sin. He was surrounded by an abundance of food. There was no sickness in the world, no suffering, no death, no loneliness, no disease, nothing at all to make him doubt God’s goodness or love. The Second Adam, Jesus, lived in a world plagued by all those things, “cursed” with all those things, because the first Adam fell into sin and earned the curse for our race. Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death has spread to all men, because all have sinned.

So Jesus is sent out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit so that He could begin to experience the hardships of mankind. A forty-day fast, all alone in the desert.

Part of the hardship of that fast was the special attention of “the Tempter,” Satan, who tempted the first man and overcame him by a tree. The Second Adam would one day overcome Satan by a tree, as you hear me chant every Sunday during the Lenten season during the Proper Preface before Communion. But before that, He would have to face Satan’s temptation, in order to provide mankind with a “second chance,” as it were, to succeed where the first man (and all the rest of us, too) had failed.

The first temptation we can understand pretty easily. Jesus was hungry after not eating for over a month. Remember, He didn’t choose this fast for Himself. His Father chose it for Him by leading Him out there by His Spirit. So the devil plays on that, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread!” It’s a temptation to doubt His Father’s goodness, to question His Father’s love. It’s a temptation to look around, see how bleak things look, how hard life is, and to say, “You know what? Forget about God. I’m gonna do what I have to do for me.”

It’s hard enough for us sinners to face that temptation, when the reality is that, as sinners, we deserve a hard life, a life full of hardship and pain, and finally, death. We deserve it, and yet we still want to accuse God of unfairness or meanness or simply turn our backs on Him or forget about His Word whenever real hardships come along. Jesus didn’t deserve it, didn’t have to endure hardships at all. He suffered, even though He was sinless. And still, He didn’t fall for the devil’s temptation to doubt His Father’s goodness. He replied, It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Such devotion! Such a love for His Father! Such a readiness to cling to what God says, no matter what His eyes saw, no matter who disagreed.

We could all use some of that devotion. We could all learn a lesson from Jesus’ refusal to budge from God’s Word, even in the face of hardship.

The second temptation is the kind that strikes when there are no hardships, when things are going fine. Jesus certainly had no compelling need to leap from the top of the temple. But the devil tried to manufacture a need, to create a longing for something. Here, jump down from the temple! Here, do something dangerous, something thrilling, and watch as God sends His angels to fly to your rescue!

That’s the toughest part of this temptation, the twisting, the misuse of God’s Word. The devil quotes from Psalm 91, ‘He will put His angels in charge of you,’ and, ‘In their hands they will lift you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone. But he leaves out the rest of the first verse, to keep you in all your ways. Your ways are the paths God has laid out for you, the living out of your many vocations, the opportunities and the good choices God has placed in your path. God has promised divine protection as you live the life He gave you. But if you choose to walk on a way that God has forbidden, a way that God hasn’t laid out for you, like risking your life unnecessarily just to prove that God will keep His Word, now you’ve put the Lord to the test and you’ve stepped outside of the refuge He offers.

But Jesus didn’t step outside of that Refuge. He quoted Scripture again, It is written again, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.

Putting all of Scripture together and knowing God rightly is essential to being a Christian. You know how the world has twisted the Word of God to shape God into the image the world wants to believe in, into a god who lets young men and women sleep together outside of marriage, who lets people not attend church and still consider themselves very “spiritual” or even “Christian,” who lets people be prideful and condescending to one another and nasty toward those in authority, on the Right or on the Left. Go ahead! Say what you want! Do what you want! God is love! He would never punish you for it!

Learn from today’s Gospel to recognize the lie when you hear it. Learn from Jesus to know God’s Word well enough so that no one can deceive you by taking it out of context.

The third temptation in Matthew’s account is the easy-way-out temptation. It’s the “You can be happy! You can be safe! You can keep your job! You can stay out of trouble! You can get along with the world! You can have it all…if you just compromise on God’s Word just this once” temptation. “All these things I will give You,” says the devil, “if You will fall down and worship me.”

Jesus faced that temptation as He faced the others, standing firmly on God’s Word: Get away from Me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.

Satan did get away from Jesus, but He has kept coming back for Christians throughout the ages. For almost three hundred years, the devil kept coming back through one Roman emperor or another, accusing the Christians of atheism, of all things, because they wouldn’t bow down to the Roman gods or sacrifice to them. So they would invent all kinds of tortures and threats and hardships to put the Christians through, and then they would give the Christians a chance to get their life back, to end the torture, to escape death. All you have to do is offer incense to our Roman gods just this once. Deny Christ and make the sacrifice. Here’s the incense! Go ahead!

Some gave in to those temptations. But many walked the path of Jesus and refused to worship any god but the true God. And just as Jesus eventually had to face the cross in service to God, so they lost their earthly lives, too, because, after all, Jesus had done it first. Jesus had done it for them. For us. And He promised them that no matter what hardships they faced on earth, no matter how much they lost on earth, they would gain far more in the next life with Him. And they believed Him instead of what their own eyes told them. They believed Him instead of the devil.

This whole business of eternal salvation, living as a Christian, facing all sorts of temptations is a much more serious business than we tend to make it. It’s why we keep coming back to church week after week and in between, because we couldn’t hold onto this faith if the Holy Spirit weren’t constantly feeding it. He feeds it again today in the Gospel by holding Jesus, the Second Adam, before our eyes as both Substitute and Example.

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous. The First Adam failed and his failure has spread to us in the sinful nature that has spread to us. But the Second Adam overcame, beginning with His 40-day fast and His successful stance against the devil, and His victory spreads to us through faith. But His example also stands before our eyes, to stand firmly on God’s Word in the face of every temptation. After He endured hardship and temptation for a while, divine help was sent to Him. Divine help will be there for you, too, as you endure whatever hardships you must to remain faithful to God. Trust in Him! Trust in the Second Adam, and His victory will be yours, over sin, over death, and over the power of the devil. Amen.