The Temptation of Christ

If you haven’t noticed, due to a mixture of AP exams and end of school laziness we haven’t had a blog post out in a while, hopefully we can get it back on track over the months of summer.

At the beginning of last week, I was really feeling complacent with my relationship with Christ and my studies of the Bible, so I decided to try something new. Instead of just reading a chapter or two a day I decided I would camp out in a chapter of Luke for a week and try to really think and pray about it. Well the prayer part of my plan didn’t go too well but I feel like God still taught me a lot. The passage I chose for last week was on the temptation of Christ in Luke 4:1-13, I tried to pick a passage that I knew one of the preachers I liked had a sermon on so I after thinking about it for a couple of days I could listen to their takes on the passages and bounce around some more ideas. This method of studying helped me to see things on a deeper level than just reading through a book could do.

The temptation of Jesus has been a passage that is pretty familiar to me over the years but always been kind of weird at the same time. The questions that always came to my mind were “what is the purpose of Jesus being tempted”? Over the next few posts I will try to share what I have learned about this question.

I think that part of the answer to that question comes in Hebrews 4:15. I feel that a big reason Luke includes the temptation of Christ in his gospel to help to show us the humanity of Christ. He was tempted after a 40 day fast where he was definitely not at his full physical strength. He therefore knows how it feels to us to be tempted at full force by Satan. He also knows how sly and crafty the devil is. This is very reassuring in our times of need and despair. As the text from Hebrews says, he can “sympathize with our weaknesses.” He knows how it feels to be kicked around by Satan while we are down. Christ came down to earth and experienced the same “weakness” that plagues me and you on a day to day basis. This idea a very reassuring, especially after the many times that I fall in to temptation and do a “first-degree sin” as Steve Brown calls it. I can run to Christ and he can not only forgive me, he can also relate with me in a way that only someone who has shared the same experience can. What a great Savior we have. Any thoughts?