Resist
4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written,
“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
In 2021 we have machines which command raw materials to become loaves of bread. We will have any product on amazon.com at our doorstep in less than two days. This technology provides everything we need at a single command.
But are these material things all that we need? Is bread all we need? Jesus could have commanded the stone to become bread and he could have eaten it. After the feeding of the 5000, Jesus could have fed the multitudes and built for himself a political platform and an earthly kingdom…indeed, “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!’ Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself (John 6:14-15).”
Jesus resisted the temptation to power. He resisted the temptation to command the stone to become bread. He resisted because he knew that we don’t just live on material things. We live on words. We need words to live. In the absence of words, we will search for them. We will seek words of life wherever we think we may find them…whether in conversations with friends, youtube, news, talk radio. Do these sources provide the words we need? You know from experience that these are the wells that run dry. God’s word is true drink and Jesus body of sacrifice is true food. Oh let us taste and see that the Lord is good! He is the well that never runs dry.