"The God who leads us into pain"
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil. (Matthew 4:1 NLT)
Does your God lead you into pain? Into battle? Into discomfort?
Matthew 4:1 says that it was not the devil that led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted but rather the Holy Spirit. Consider the implications of this. Jesus is led by the Spirit into a place that could undo the whole mission of God. And yet it is as necessary as his baptism. But why?
Jesus' temptation in the wilderness shows us that if God does not spare his own son from harm, we can expect that trial will be a part of our Christian experience as well. Discomfort & difficulty are not signs that we are far from God but may actually mean that we are in the will of God. Ultimately the will of God led Jesus to a cat of nine tails & execution on a cross. God led Jesus to death. While we may never face death for Jesus, we can be sure that following him most certainly means a cross. More than that, it means a battle. Following him means we have a common enemy. His enemies become ours. Following Jesus is not comfortable but it is what we were made for. We weren't made for comfort, we were made for Jesus.
This story of Jesus' temptation is also necessary because of our unfaithfulness to God. Jesus not only purchased our righteousness before God on the cross but he also lived the obedient life we never could. Mark Dever says it this way, "Just as the Israelites crossed the Red Sea & sinned in the wilderness for 40 years, so too, Jesus was baptized & resisted sin in the wilderness for 40 days." He did for us what we could never do, namely, obey God. So we get not only his righteousness applied to our unrighteousness but also his obedience applied to our disobedience. He became sin, so we could become righteous.
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