Matthew 4:1-11
February 22, 2026
“The Devil went down to Georgia; he
was looking for a soul to steal. He was in a bind, cause he was way behind and
he was willing to make a deal. When he came across this young man sawing on a
fiddle and playing it hot, and the Devil jumped up on a hickory stump and said,
‘Boy let me tell you what.’ I guess you didn’t know it, but I’m a fiddle player
too. And if you’d care to take a dare, I’ll make a bet with you. Now you play
pretty good fiddle boy but give the devil his due. I’ll bet a fiddle of gold
against your soul, cause I think I’m better than you.’”
Charlie Daniels’ hit, “The Devil
Went Down to Georgia” was released in May, 1979, and as far as my memory
serves, it hit big. I don’t remember listening to a lot of country music at
that stage in my life, but that song was everywhere on just about every radio
station I had access to. I knew that song, and so did all my friends. I
remember sitting on the steps of Blair School of Music in Nashville with a
young guy about my age. We were both waiting for our parents to pick us up
after our piano lessons, and we spoke/sang “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
The next year, my freshmen year of
high school, the entry into the one act play contest was “The Devil and Daniel
Webster,” and I attended every performance of that show that I could. I had
grown up hearing the phrase, “The devil made me do it.” I had seen images of a
person trying to decide right from wrong with a devil on one shoulder and an
angel on the other, both trying to lead the person down their particular path
of either good or evil. I grew up seeing the Underwood Deviled Ham cans that
bore – and still bear – the logo of the devil with horns, a pitchfork, and a
tail so long that it wraps around the image in a circle. Lyrics about the devil
and a young fiddle playing boy named Johnny made for great music. I had grown
up hearing about the disaster that Adam and Eve brought on themselves and the
world when they listened to the snake in the garden, and I definitely knew
about the fire and brimstone of hell from my fire and brimstone preaching
grandfather.
The point of all this is that images
of the devil were common in my life and in the culture, more common than I
realized. I knew the devil was someone to be avoided. Hell was not where you
wanted to end up, and when it came to temptation you just had to listen to the
angel on your shoulder. I didn’t really think a lot about the devil or the
temptation he brought, and I always believed that when it came to choosing
between what was wrong versus what was right, that the choice would be obvious.
I thought that the real temptations of life would show up in the big choices,
and those I was pretty sure I could spot. My real fear of the devil was the
punishment that he would wreak on anyone who did end up in hell after they
died. I didn’t spend much time thinking about the temptations he offered in
life.
But it is temptation that we wrestle
with each year on this first Sunday of Lent. We wrestle with it throughout this
season. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all offer their own versions of Jesus facing
temptation in the wilderness, and today we also revisit Adam and Eve and the
talking snake in the Garden of Eden.
Tradition and our translation
of scripture dictate that Eve is the one who is originally tempted, then she in
turn tempts her husband. That tradition has not served Eve or women in general
well. But the Hebrew offers a contradiction to traditional interpretation. The
conversation we read in Genesis may have been between Eve and the serpent, but
the grammar asserts that Adam was there as well, a silent, complicit partner in
all that happened.
Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden
fruit; they give into temptation and everything changes. They are forced to
leave the garden; their idyllic existence is disrupted and their relationship
with each other and with God is changed forever.
That is one powerful story about
temptation. Yet, we also have the gospel story. Here is another story of
temptation, only this time it is Jesus who is tempted.
Jesus has just been baptized by John
in the river Jordan. And now he has been led by the Spirit into the wilderness
to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights and
afterwards he is famished.
And it is then, when he was at his
most vulnerable, that the tempter appears. After that long without food, it is
an understatement on Matthew’s part to say that Jesus was famished. He must
have been weak with hunger. He was weak with the kind of hunger that would make
most of us vulnerable and desperate for any sustenance someone offered. The
tempter appearing at this exact moment can’t be coincidence. Temptation is at
its strongest when we are at our weakest.
The tempter comes to Jesus at his
weakest. His first temptation is to offer Jesus bread. The word translated as
“if” here would be better translated as “since.” The tempter is not trying to
throw Jesus’ relationship with God into question. He is trying to find cracks
in that relationship.
“Since you are the Son of God,
command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
Jesus answers him with scripture,
“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth
of God.”
Then the devil transports him from
the wilderness to the holy city and places him on the summit of the temple.
Looking down across the multitudes, the devil says, “Since you are the Son of
God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels
concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not
dash your foot against a stone.”
Jesus returns scripture for
scripture, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Then in the final temptation, the
tempter takes Jesus to a high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the
world and their splendor.
“All
these I will give you,” he says, “if you will fall down and worship me.”
Jesus commands, “Away with you,
Satan! Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”
At this the tempter leaves and
angels appear to wait upon Jesus.
If you think about it, all these
temptations sound … good. Turning stones into loaves of bread. Think of the
poor that Jesus could feed. Throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the
temple and having angels bear him up. Surely that would be a miracle that could
convince even the most skeptical of skeptics. Having power over all the
kingdoms in the world? We must believe that Jesus would govern them with
justice and mercy.
Real temptation often tempts us to
do what we think is good and right for others as well as for ourselves. My
internship supervisor once told me that true temptation does not come to us as
darkness, it comes to us as light. Temptation slips in under the guise of good.
But the tricky thing about
temptation is that what seems good now may not be so good in the long run.
Jesus understands this and turns the tempter on his head.
Yet later in his ministry Jesus does
some things very close to what the tempter offered. He takes loaves and fishes
enough for just a few and feeds thousands. He walks across the water as a sign
of his divinity. And certainly, we believe him to be the true ruler of all that
is in heaven and on earth. So why was this time in the wilderness seen as
temptation? Maybe because as I said before, the tempter wanted sever the
relationship between Jesus and God. He was trying to weaken it, to distract
Jesus from his obedience to God.
If we think about it, the temptation
the tempter offers when he comes to the garden and to the wilderness is power.
Think about what he offered Adam and Eve. Power. Power to be like God. If they
were like God, knowing good from evil, then they wouldn’t need God anymore.
They wouldn’t need to rely on God. They could rely on themselves and they would
be just fine. It wasn’t about eating some forbidden fruit, it was about power.
And what about Jesus and power? Our
theological claim is that God is all powerful, omnipotent, completely in
control, and if God is this then surely his Son must be as well. I’m not saying
that all of the above isn’t true, but it seems to me that Jesus turned our
notions of power upside down again and again. Jesus did feed a multitude of
people, but if he used his power to do that it was not to feed himself but to
feed others. Jesus did not exhibit his power for the sake of spectacle but for
the purpose of call and trust. And finally, when Jesus could have used his
power to walk away from a criminal’s death, he chose death. There is no greater
example of relinquishing power that I can think of then Jesus going to the
cross.
When the tempter comes to Jesus in
the wilderness, he offers him the kind of power that we understand. But Jesus
turns the tables on him by claiming the power of God that we can barely wrap
our imaginations around. Jesus makes it clear to the tempter that he
underestimates the true power of God.
The tempter’s temptation to Adam, to
Eve, and to Jesus is power. If you trust me, you will have power. You will be
like God. Adam and Eve can’t resist that. And they give into temptation. Jesus
is God, but Jesus is also human, and I believe that his temptation was real,
bitterly, vividly real. How much did it cost him in that moment of
vulnerability to say, “no”? I suspect it cost him more than we can realize. But
Jesus knew that the tempter’s offer of power was a way to distract him from his
ministry and from his purpose. Jesus knew that the real power lay in becoming
powerless.
Temptation in the guise of good.
Temptation in the guise of power. Temptation to think that we can be like God
and that we don’t need God. That is the true temptation. When I look back over
my life, I know that the times when I have really messed up, when I have given
into temptation and experienced the consequences have been when I have thought
that I knew better than God. I’m grateful that I have survived those
consequences and hopefully learned from them. This season of Lent offers us a
vivid reminder that the opposite is true. We are not God. We are tempted and we
fail. We choose what we think is good only to discover that it was otherwise.
That is part of the messiness of being human. And Jesus experienced that
messiness too. Jesus was fully human. He understood our frailty because he
lived it.
But Jesus kept walking toward God,
walking with God. He knew that power was not something to be grabbed but
something to give up. And the good news is that we can learn that lesson. The
good news is that we have the same ability to see through the tempter just as
Jesus did. The good news is that we are not God and we don’t have to be. So in
this season of Lent, let’s just keep walking trusting that God is walking with
us. Thanks be to God.
Let all of God’s children say,
“Amen.”
Amen.
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