Our Bodyguard – Luke 4:1-13
Let me state the obvious. Satan is plotting to undermine our faith. Now a lot of us don’t feel all that comfortable talking about the devil but closing our eyes to what he’s doing doesn’t mean he’s going to stop doing it.
One of his most useful tactics is the ‘proof’ plan: requiring proof as a prerequisite to believing in God. When we start to demand ‘proof’ in order to believe God’s word, we lose the very essence of what faith is. The essence of saving faith is based on believing in what one man did over 2,000 years ago to fulfill God’s plan. That means it’s based on something we’ve never seen, and something we could never do, but Satan wants us to demand proof from God!
How many of us have fallen into this trap? Maybe we don’t buy into it outright. But in subtle ways we begin to test God’s love for us. Satan isn’t dumb. He knows our weaknesses. He knows how to get under our skin by appealing to our pride.
He tried the same tactic to get under Jesus’ skin. “If you’re the Son of God,” he kept saying in the description of the temptation of Jesus in Luke 4:1-13. But the devil was making a mistake. He was appealing to a sinful pride that Jesus didn’t have. He was asking Jesus to prove that He was the Christ by jumping to the devil’s tune. But instead, Jesus proved Himself as the Son of God through God’s Word.
Out of all the millions of people ever born, Jesus resisted and overcame the devil’s temptation not just through what He did, but through the power of the Word of God and the help of the Holy Spirit. Only the Son of God could put the devil in his place, and Jesus did it.
For forty days Satan tried every trick in the book, and after all that, he gave it three more tries by trying to twist God’s Word. But despite all that, the devil still got soundly defeated!
That’s good news! Remember, it wasn’t only Jesus who was defeating the devil, it was you and me. When Jesus defeated the devil, we defeated him, too. Jesus was fighting Satan as our substitute. Because of what He did we can stand before God and say, “I am victorious because Jesus did it all in my place!”
What an amazing message for the beginning of Lent. As we grieve over the price Jesus had to pay for our sins, we also rejoice in our forgiveness!
The devil is still trying to destroy us, but don’t worry. We know what his plan is, and we recognize the weapons he’s using. We have an even more powerful weapon in the Word of God. And more importantly, we have Jesus Himself as our bodyguard.