When the Devil Quotes Scripture At You (March 9, 2025)
Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from [his baptism at] the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. And when the devil had finished every test, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.
The wilderness is not a peaceful campground in a familiar park; it is a scary place to be for any length of time. As the people of Israel learned in their 40 years in the wilderness, it is not a place where you can make a humane life for yourself or your family. There are poisonous snakes and all kinds of dangerous animals. All the familiar landmarks and stable constants you use to orient yourself are gone. Food and water are meager and unreliable at best – so much so that many times the people of Israel complained that they had it better under slavery in Egypt and wished they could go back. Under the constant pressure of life in the wilderness, the people lost their collective minds from time to time, building golden calfs and turning violently on one another.
But those forty years in the wilderness were clarifying for the people of Israel. They came to see all the bad habits, all the harmful ideas, that they had been infected with during the centuries of their captivity in Egypt; they came to learn, slowly and painfully, about the God who heard their cries and had come to deliver them and bring them to a land where they could live in freedom and plenty as God’s own people even when they themselves were not ready to live in that way. The forty days of Lent often serve a similar function for Christians each year – a time when we seek clarity, when we acknowledge that we are not ready to live fully into the kingdom of God and hope to learn how to do better, when we recognize how many of the familiar landmarks and guideposts of our lives are just not there any more and confront together the collective madness that years of pandemics and political strife have brought upon us and our families and communities.
But our gospel passage today insists that Jesus was led into the wilderness after his baptism for forty days by the Spirit – that it was God’s will for him to be there, and to experience temptation there. The text describes some of the temptations that Jesus experienced there, and these temptations are ones that Christians have often succumbed to over the centuries. The devil says: Since you’re the Son of God, why not command these stones to turn into bread? Since you’re special and chosen by God, why not use that position to ensure your own well-being and safety and security? Since you’re God’s chosen one, why not use the power of the sword to take on all the bad guys once and for all and rule victoriously and righteously? Since you’re God’s chosen one, why not offer irrefutable proof of your specialness so that everyone will have no choice but to accept and bow down to you? Why not?
All of these temptations assume as true that we have a relationship with God – that we are loved and forgiven and chosen and called by God – but then they invite us to make that relationship transactional. Since God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, won’t God therefore ensure that you have all the material things in life you need or want? Since your heart is in the right place (unlike some others we might name whose hearts are in very bad places), why shouldn’t you take upon yourself the power to tell other people what to do? But these transactional relationships are too small for who God really wants to be for us – the desire for a transactional relationship with God comes not from God but from the insecurities and fearfulness of fallen human nature, from the forces opposed to God.
And the more we know about God, the more we know our Scriptures, the more we understand our theology, the greater these temptations become – because the devil knows Scripture too, and how to make us read Scripture wrongly to lead us away from God. Take the Psalm the devil quotes to Jesus today, which we used as our psalm response this morning. “You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, you who say to the Lord ‘My refuge and my stronghold, my God in whom I trust’ – because you have made the Lord your refuge and the Most High your habitation, no evil will befall you, no affliction will come near your home.” The devil says: Look, God has made you an offer. You put your trust in God, you make your dwelling in God’s shadow, you demonstrate your loyalty to God, and in return God will make sure nothing bad ever happens to you. You give God the attention and devotion that God wants, and the deal is that when there’s something you really need, God will come through for you.
Except it doesn’t work that way. Putting our faith in that kind of transactional approach sets us up for disappointment. So there has to be another way that we are meant to read this Psalm and its promises. And I believe it’s Jesus who shows us what it means to dwell in the shelter of the Most High, to make God our dwelling place – because where does Jesus dwell except amid the blind and the lame and the leper and the imprisoned and the suffering and the rejected? Those who come to dwell there with God will experience suffering as Jesus did, they will experience death as Jesus did, but not even death will be able to harm them, because Jesus has defeated the power of death. When we realize that to “abide in the shadow of the Almighty” is to live in the shadow of the cross, then we will begin to hear the promise of the psalm correctly. But that’s just what the devil doesn’t want us to hear. The devil wants us to hear something easier, something superficially more comforting, but something that is in the end empty, that leads nowhere.
The devil’s temptations are real for us as they were for Jesus. In fact, I think they were even more intense for Jesus than they are for us – the more we know the Scriptures, the more that we think we know about God, the more the insecurities of human existence in this world will rise up within us and find new and ever more enticing ways of making our relationship with God transactional. And so I don’t think the message of this gospel passage is – hey, Jesus was tempted just like you, but he overcame those temptations and you can too if you just try hard enough this Lent. First resist the temptation to eat chocolate and then we’ll work our way up from there together. I think the trauma of our wilderness is too great, the temptations to seek easy transactional solutions to our problems are too powerful, for us to overcome them with willpower.
No, the good news of this gospel passage to me is that Jesus experienced the full force of all our temptations and that Jesus overcame them. So that the human life of Jesus truly is the place where we see most clearly what God is like in human form – free from the temptations to take shortcuts that keep taking the rest of us off course. And that the human life that he lived before God is indestructible and is offered to us as a free gift to put on again and again whenever we succumb to our human temptations, to put us back on track whenever our journey through the wilderness becomes too much for us to handle. He has handled it ahead of us; all we are doing is letting him help us catch up to him.
And what that looks like, I believe, is captured well by our first reading today from Deuteronomy. Moses speaks to the people who are still in the wilderness and have been as long as they can remember. Moses invites them to imagine the day when their wandering in the wilderness has come to an end, when God’s promises will be fulfilled and they are finally settled and at peace in the land flowing with milk and honey. When that good land yields its fruits to you, Moses says, don’t say – Finally! After all those years without, now I finally can enjoy the reward for all those years of that yucky manna and I’m just gonna pig out on all this good stuff and enjoy my life. No. You take the first fruits – not what’s left over after you’ve taken all you want, but the first fruits – and you bring them to God’s dwelling place. And you say: I was a homeless wanderer in the wilderness, descended from a family of homeless wanderers, and now I have come to dwell in this bountiful land not through any effort of my own, but by the mercy and grace of God. And then you shall bow down in humility, you shall bow down like a servant washing feet. And only then shall you – and the people with you who do not have their own share in the land, the Levite and the foreigners who reside among you – only then shall you celebrate together with them all that God has bestowed upon you and yours.
The people of Israel never fully lived up to that call from Moses. Despite the blessings they received, despite all the warnings from the prophets, the temptations to have a less gracious and more transactional relationship with the divine were too great for them. But Jesus did. And he invites those of us who have trusted and believed in him to put on his new humanity, to tell the story once again of how we who were fugitives and wanderers have finally been called home, to bow down together in humble service to one another, and to celebrate with food and drink together with those from whom we have been estranged the goodness of the God who defeats all our temptations and brings us to life.