The Real Temptations

When Christ went into the desert for forty days, He was tempted by Satan. At first glance, it seems like Satan’s temptations are all about getting Christ to give into His pride or vanity or ego. If you’ve got all of these awesome powers, why don’t you show me some of them, Satan seems to say. But it’s actually more insidious than that. In the first temptation, Satan tells Christ He should stop fasting and turn some stones into bread. We might focus on that second, more miraculous part of turning stones into bread, but the real danger is in that first part. Satan wanted Christ to stop fasting. If you’re the Son of God, what are you bothering with fasting for? Why should you, of all people, have to put obedience to God above your own hunger? Satan could care less if Christ used the powers of creation to transform stones into bread. What he wanted was for Christ to stop fasting, to stop getting closer to God, to stop growing from grace to grace by sacrificing His own personal comfort for the great and marvelous work of the Plan of Salvation. In the second temptation, Satan again talks about doing something miraculous. Christ was at the top of the temple, and Satan tried to get Him to leave the temple in the most dramatic way possible - just throw yourself off and see if God will send His angels to come save you. But more dangerous than falling from a great height was abandoning the temple. Satan was trying to tell Christ that He didn’t need the temple. That He could get through life without the protection that the temple offered. But Christ didn’t want to tempt God. He didn’t want to find out what life would be like without the temple in His life. In the third temptation, Satan offers Christ all of the kingdoms of the whole earth. This seems like a great offer, but what Satan was trying to do was to get Christ to settle for less than was His due. Christ is the Son of God, the Creator of worlds without number. Even if Satan could have delivered on His promise, Christ would have been diminishing Himself by giving up the whole universe for only this one little world. Satan was trying to get Christ to settle for the Telestial Kingdom when Christ was determined to dwell in the Celestial Kingdom in Eternal Glory with as many of us as would accept His saving grace. We might think that it makes little difference if we fast or not, but it does. We may think that we will be safe without the temple in our lives, but we won’t. We may think that Heaven has enough glory and it won’t miss us, but it will. By small and simple things are great things brought to pass. Christ was able to survive the terrifying anguish of the Garden of Gethsemane because He never let Satan stop Him from fasting, or going to the temple, or looking up towards His heavenly home.