We are living in a fallen world where we are separated from the presence of God. People are trying to please God by their various righteous deeds but still, loneliness is prevailing in them.
We are weak and prone to commit sin due to our sinful nature that forces us to violate the will of God. In spite of such hopeless situations, Jesus established a way for every human being to get rid of them.
He came down on this earth and lived with us and finally gave his life on the cross to give us salvation. He had shown his grace for the entire human race on the cross.
Throughout history, we don’t find such a God who sacrificed himself for man. Only Jesus proved that he is God alone by dedicating his life to us.
We get the privilege to become righteous by putting our trust in him. We need to remember that we are constantly fighting with the Devil who is always busy devastating us.
His eyes are upon the children of God and keeping himself busy to make plans to tempt them so that they might fall in his trap.
Jesus also was tempted by Satan right after his baptism. But he delivered himself using the scripture. The word of God is living and powerful and it can also redeem us from various temptations.
Matthew 4: 1-11
Jesus was baptized and brought to the people. He did not need to change his mind because he was sinless. The purpose of his baptism was,
(1) To identify himself with mankind – not as an animal or a bird for the sins of man, but as a necessary human sacrifice, to prove that he is that innocent man;
(2) He did not support the Jewish people to present themselves as separate from the overall, racial sin.
(3) To set the standard of righteousness (Matthew3:15), so that all of them would realize the will of God. The important thing is that the temptation comes after baptism. The same thing happened with the Lord Jesus.
The faith that we have in our hearts, the outward manifestation of baptism, makes the world understand that I am loyal to Christ. Why do we face temptation? God is omniscient, so what is the need for temptation? In fact, temptation describes how much we believe in Christ.
God tests us where Satan tempts us by his cunningness. When God tests, it is from the inside out, that is, the spirit-soul-body, in this discipline. But when Satan tempts, from the outside to the inside, or body-soul-spirit, in this way.
The best example of this is Eve; she saw the fruit (the desire of the eye- the body is touched); she plucked the fruit (recommended for enlightenment – the desire of flesh) and ate the fruit (pride of livelihood- to become like God). After eating the fruit Eve and Adam died spiritually.
Spiritual death means fellowship with God was broken due to their disobedience.
Christ was tempted in the same way; The body was first attacked – ‘to make the stone bread. Then his soul’ to jump from the top of the temple. In the end, his soul was affected where he was asked to worship Satan.
Adam and Eve failed to respond to Satan to save them from God’s anger because they did not use the word of God, that is, what God said. But the last Adam, using only the Word of God as a weapon, defeated Satan and became victorious.
We will always confront various temptations in our lives but we need to remember that we can overcome them only using Scripture.
The word of God is living and active and it helps us to make the right decisions at the time of every temptation. We must be careful concerning our eternal life. In the beginning, Adam and Eve were created to live with God forever and death did not enter their bodies.
Because of their disobedience sin entered into man’s body and it brought physical death in our bodies. We can say that death entered into the world through the first Adam whereas the afterlife came to us by Jesus who is considered the second Adam.
We must enrich ourselves with the word of God so that we can withstand before Satan who is always seeking a chance to tempt us.
We are not to avoid temptations but we must have to resist them so that we can grow more spiritually. In order to build up our spiritual health, we should read the scripture regularly with prayer.
Apart from this scripture must be memorized in our hearts to guide us in times of unexpected temptations. The Bible teaches us not to follow the world but we are called to be separated ourselves so that we can live a righteous life.
We have to live a Christ-centered life where all our actions would be based on his teachings. It would be possible if we discipline ourselves with the wonderful words of God.