Not a case of Bible-bashing

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.”‘

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”‘

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying 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 protect you,” and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”‘ Jesus answered him, ‘“’It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”‘ When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time. (Luke 4:1-13)

I began this series with Jesus’s inaugural sermon at Nazareth because I was thinking primarily about Jesus’ use of scripture in his teaching and ministry. But of course there are many other ways to use scripture, and I had forgotten that the testing in the wilderness, where Jesus uses his clearly deep knowledge of scripture to answer the temptations that Satan, the accuser, places before him, and to strengthen his own resolve, actually comes before the Nazareth sermon. Without this ‘training in righteousness’, in fact, he could not have begun his ministry.

Luke, in my view, puts the temptations in a more logical order than Matthew, culminating with the devil himself using Scripture in an attempt to lead Jesus into false theology. So let’s look at them in order, looking for how Jesus employs his scriptural knowledge here to prevent his life’s work falling at the first hurdle. First of all, perhaps we should consider the context. Jesus clearly knows that there is nothing strange about being ‘led by the Spirit into the wilderness’, but that this is a necessary part of a prophet’s calling, especially that of the ‘greatest prophet’ Elijah, who was seen as a forerunner of the Messiah. Knowing this, he does not attempt to leave the desert or seek food within it, but endures its privations. Nevertheless as a normal human being, he is of course ‘famished’ – and therefore subject to temptation to use the miraculous powers he probably suspects he has, to feed himself. Yet in response to the devil’s invitation to prove his messiahship by doing this, he immediately finds a scripture that makes him focus, not on his individual needs, but on the wider spiritual nature of humankind, and his own calling to lead them into truth. He uses scripture, in other words, to reflect on what it is to be human, which is more than simply to be a creature of one’s appetites.

Next, the devil tries the tactic of offering him power – one of those three perennial temptations, money, sex and power, which we see leaders, not least Christian leaders, succumbing to again and again. But we know the devil is a liar. In Genesis 3:5 the serpent offers Eve the chance to be ‘like God’, a quality she in fact already has by virtue of being in God’s image. To Jesus he offers a power that Jesus already has over the world, but Jesus knows that he has been given this power in order to lay it down:

‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from mebut I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.‘ (John 10:17-18)

I suspect the devil is also lying about his own power to give authority over the world to whomever he pleases. He is indeed called elsewhere ‘the prince [or god] of this world’ (2 Corinthians 4:4) but any power he has over it exists only by God’s permission and only God can take it away or transfer it. If anyone chooses, as Jesus does here, to worship only the true God, then the devil’s power over them is already removed. Here I think Jesus is using Scripture not only to define his own calling but also to show that to be truly human is to be in relationship with God. The Bible is a mirror in which we not only seen our own faults and weakness, but our own dignity and status as God stands behind our shoulder looking on us with love.

Thirdly, the devil gets wise to the idea that he too, can use scripture to pull the wool over Jesus’ eyes. It is probably not the first, and certainly not the last, time that the Bible has been used to further Satan’s purposes. Every time we use scripture to condemn others, to exclude them, to ascribe to God actions any earthly court would find unjust, or indeed to make false promises in God’s name (for example the ‘prosperity gospel’) we are following the devil’s lead here. Jesus is not deceived. What Satan has offered him is a very literal interpretation of some verses from Psalm 91. Jesus instantly rejects this literalism and counters with a text giving a direct command not to test God. In other words, he prioritises the demands of discipleship and obedience over treating God as, to use an anachronistic metaphor, a sweetie dispensing machine. Jesus is using scripture here to set clear boundaries in our relationship with God: we are not to play with God, relating to the divine is a serious matter.

What can we learn here about our own use of the Bible in preaching and teaching, as well as in our own devotional lives? First that we can explore the Bible to find out what it truly means to be human: to be a creature in the image of God, and therefore a spiritual creature. Second, and flowing from this, that the Bible does not only show us what miserable sinners we are, but that we are also ‘a little lower than the angels’ (Psam 8), made for relationship with our divine parent, who will restore us into the full image of the divine. And thirdly, that we can use the Bible to learn how that restoration process works, how to grow back into that image, by worshipping and obeying the God we find in its pages. All this makes the Bible a great deal more than an ‘instruction manual’ or ‘rule book’. It is the Book of Life, or rather the Library of Life.

But one note of caution. Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert, and I believe it is the same Spirit who enables him to come up with his scriptural answers to the devil. Knowledge of the Bible is not enough, if we do not know the Spirit of Jesus who helps us interpret it for our times. Christians are not, like Jews and Muslims, a people of the book. We are a people of the Spirit, and if we try to interpret and apply the book without the Spirit, we will get it very wrong indeed.