Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action, usually with respect to an offering, such as an item for sale or a service. The word advertise literally means "to turn toward," from Latin words ad "to, toward" + vertere "to turn".
There is no shortage of people who want to turn your attention to something that THEY desire to promote. In this study we look at advertising that sought to make the messiah, God’s anointed savior, choose to turn his attention away from God and thereby discontinue his salvation mission.
Now, pleasure is not inherently wrong. God has created us with certain desires, but God wants to provide for those desires, and God’s provision is always better than what we try to get for ourselves.
Both Deuteronomy 8:2-10 and Matthew 4:1-4 are associated with the account of Jesus being led by the Spirit, following His baptism, into the wilderness over the course of forty days where he is tempted by the devil. The opposer’s three temptations all had the following theme: They were provocations for Jesus to do something outside the scope of God’s will. In each account, Jesus responded to the devil with quotations from God’s Word, specifically from the book of Deuteronomy. Let’s look at how Jesus handled temptation.
Matthew 4:1-4
1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
2 After he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.
3 Then the tempter approached him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
4 He answered, “It is written: Man must not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
What connects us more closely to our ordinary material lives than hunger and the satisfaction of hunger? What religion does not use feasting and fasting to infuse adherents’ lives with something special and spiritual? Fasting in Judaism is defined as total cessation from all food and drink. A full-day fast begins with sunset in the evening and continues through darkness of the next day. A minor fast day begins with the dawn and concludes at darkness.
The act of fasting is believed to result in the spiritual transformation of the individual. The most famous fast day of Judaism is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On that day, God instructs the people of Israel, “You shall afflict your souls.” The rabbinic commentators interpreted the Biblical phrase “affliction of the soul” to embrace a generic understanding of denying oneself physical pleasure on Yom Kippur.
Isaiah 58 interprets the genuine fast as the denial that awakens the ethical sensitivity of the Jew. For the prophetic voice, ethical perfection is the ultimate demand of the religious life marked by the inner transformation of the character of the penitent. The prophetic voice condemns ritual expression that is not marked by spiritual transformation. Isaiah 58 asserts that the genuine fast is self-evaluation.
So Jesus, immediately following the strengthening spiritual experience of His baptism, during which He saw the Spirit descending like a dove and heard the voice of God from heaven declaring, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased” was now led by that same Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days of fasting, self evaluation, and drawing closer to God.
The Spirit had announced that he was the Son of Spirit and that God was well-pleased with him. Now the Spirit leads the human Jesus into the wilderness to spiritually sustain him, and to allow for a time of self evaluation and ethical distillation for his upcoming ministry. During the process he faces temptations. Jesus is our example for facing temptation and demonstrates a pattern that we can follow to resist the “advertisers” that would call our attention AWAY from Godly Spirituality and towards worldly, or self reliance.
Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit for self-evaluation and he faced temptation, but Matthew subtly gave two warnings: first, we are never to assign blame to God for the temptation in our lives; and second, we must never believe the devil can somehow act independently of God. As we studied last week the choice is ALWAYS OURS to make.
So here Jesus would face temptations, and three specific ones are mentioned, basically the temptation to satisfy physical needs (sustain yourself and turn stones into bread), the temptation to satisfy emotional desires through self-gratification (tempt God to see IF you are really what God says you are), and the temptation of self-glorification (side with Satan in opposing God thereby glorifying yourself).
I find it interesting that if there were only three temptations during the 40 days in the wilderness that would average out to one significant temptation every two weeks for nearly 6 weeks. To me this feels like Satan’s attack pattern rather than all three one after another in a frontal assault, but Matthew wrote that Jesus was hungry after he had fasted forty days and forty nights, indicating that the temptation started after the forty days had expired. Either way, temptation is never an easy struggle.
What better place to undertake an almost six week self-evaluation, spiritual strengthening fast than in the desert wilderness. With no people and no provisions, the participant would HAVE to rely solely upon God to provide for their physical and spiritual needs for 40 days, just as the Hebrew community had to do during their 40 YEAR sojourn in the wilderness.
In the ancient Near East, deserts were believed to be places of demonic activity. Originally from a Greek word, the word demon refers to some deity, divine power, lesser god, guiding spirit, or overseeing deity." It was there, in this remote area, that Jesus was tempted by such a daimōn.
We have come to term this entity a devil as this word is from Greek diaballein meaning "to slander, attack," and literally meaning "to throw across". This devil sought to “throw across” Jesus’ path an advertisement, a “turning toward”, that sought to slander God, attack Jesus, and accuse Jesus of NOT being what God SAID that he was by raising doubt and drawing attention to potentially “alternate pathways” that ultimately do NOT lead to God.
We also personify such a devil as Satan, a word literally meaning “opponent”. What is necessary for us to remember is that Satan (opponent) is a created being, an angel who stands in opposition to God. He is constantly at work, making accusations against humanity. In this crucial event in Jesus’s life, Satan began to put the Lord to the test, attempting to draw the Son of God, in whom God was well pleased, away from God’s path and towards Satan’s evil, or harmful, path.
In God’s wisdom, the temptation of Jesus was for our benefit. The process of tempting can reveal a character defect we were unaware of, spurring us on toward greater maturity. It is during temptation that we are forced to place our trust in God rather than trusting in our own weak will. Jesus was tempted to exalt Himself and become the type of Son (and Savior) He was never meant to be—one who avoids the cross and bows to Satan’s leadership instead of God’s. Jesus was tested to demonstrate that He was truly the Son of God and that He would indeed follow God’s plan.
Jesus succeeded because He consistently responded to the devil with the Word of God. Scripture is our ultimate guide for life and godliness and for overcoming temptation for we may rely upon the TRUTH that God has dictated rather then the OPINION of someone who is LESS THAN GOD MOST HIGH.
Jesus was tempted when His flesh was at its weakest point. He had fasted for forty days. But notice the temptation Jesus experienced never rose to the level of sin. Temptation and sin are NOT the same thing. Jesus was tempted but was without sin. It is only when we succumb to temptation that it becomes sin, and it is then that the devil levels his accusations against us.
As the Son of God, Jesus was called to endure the temptations of the devil to the end, preparing Him to fulfill His mission. Matthew identified Satan by his trademark characteristic, the tempter.
Satan’s objective throughout the forty days of temptation was to get Jesus to distrust the statement made of Him by the Father at His baptism that He was the Son of God. If Jesus could be persuaded to misunderstand His role as Son, then His relationship with the Father and his calling could be compromised. The temptations of Jesus in this encounter were all attempts to get Him to use His divine privileges as the Son of God to neglect His mission as the Suffering Servant, obedient to the Father. In other words, to get Him to circumvent the suffering He was called to take upon Himself. He was being tempted to seize the crown without first enduring the cross.
This tempting suggestion that Satan gave to Jesus is one he gives to us as well. After all, shouldn’t we always look out for ourselves first? Don’t we have that right? We are all tempted to reach for the crown without first enduring the cross. The forms may be different, but the temptation is universal.
If Jesus’s temptation was universal His response was also. It is based entirely on the Word of God, which is our ultimate guide. In this case, Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 8:3, that underscores God’s provision of manna during the wilderness wanderings in contrast with the people’s attempts to provide for themselves.
This passage highlights one of man’s greatest temptations: to put the physical ahead of the spiritual.
Deuteronomy 8:2-5
2 Remember that the Lord your God led you on the entire journey these forty years in the wilderness, so that he might humble you and test you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.
3 He humbled you by letting you go hungry; then he gave you manna to eat, which you and your ancestors had not known, so that you might learn that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
4 Your clothing did not wear out, and your feet did not swell these forty years.
5 Keep in mind that the Lord your God has been disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son.
Moses explained that the difficult time of wandering in the wilderness for forty years was purposeful. In essence, the wilderness wanderings were a time of discipline. God’s discipline of His people is seeking to bring His people back in line with their faith. So, to this end, God led them through the wilderness as a means of testing their commitment to God, or to something other than God. God desired to awaken the people to a new and fresh understanding of His goodness. The desert experience was more of an educational experience in which God was conditioning His people to live in covenant faithfulness to Him.
In the desert, the Israelites were presented with two choices: they could either trust God and His provision or they could murmur against Him and spend their time complaining. They could not produce their own food but had to completely depend on God for food and, by extension, for their very lives.
Moses reminded the people that God allowed them to go hungry in order to then satisfy that hunger with manna. Moses then reminded them that man “does not live on bread alone” but by “every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” The food referred to as manna is not easily identified. The word literally means “What?” or “What is it?” Manna was delivered by God to sustain His people in the wilderness after leaving Egypt, so even their food was decreed by the Word of God. The supplying of manna was an act so supernatural there was no way the provision could have been made except by God. They had manna because it came at God’s command. Ultimately then, it was not the bread that kept them alive but the Word of God. Food acquired any other way, apart from God’s word, would have been insufficient to sustain them.
Jesus quoted this verse and the lesson is this: Spiritual food is much more important than physical food. Having learned to rely upon God for their spiritual nourishment we next see the outcome of having grown spiritually enough to be entrusted with the management of God’s world.
Deuteronomy 8:6-10
6 So keep the commands of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and fearing him.
7 For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams, springs, and deep water sources, flowing in both valleys and hills;
8 a land of wheat, barley, vines, figs, and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey;
9 a land where you will eat food without shortage, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you will mine copper.
10 When you eat and are full, you will bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
Moses urged his people, Israel (meaning struggles with God) to “keep the commands of the Lord your God” and gave them two ways to help facilitate this practice. First, they were to walk in His ways. They were being called to be absolutely obedient, to fear Him. They were to be reverently afraid to disobey One so powerful and holy. I like to phrase it be in such awe of one so excellently perfect that the contemplation of following anyone less, results in fear. When you are following the directions of the one who KNOWS you won’t then be fearful that you might be led astray. This 40 years of discipline were teach the Israelites to rely on God when they had “nothing”, so that when they are led into a land that is rich in resources that they will remember to continue following God.
Egypt was a “one river town” so to speak. It relied on just one river, the Nile. Canaan, on the other hand, had an abundance of rivers as well as various springs flowing from the valleys and hills. The produce in Canaan was also in ample supply and diverse. In Canaan, they could expect to find wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey. The land would provide everything necessary to sustain them. They would not lack anything needed for their survival.
The blessings of Canaan would provide years of comfort to the Israelites, but it could also steer them away from the Lord and into a false sense of complacency and self-sufficiency. Moses, therefore, gave them a word of warning. Just as they had remembered the Lord’s provision of manna in the wilderness and how that had been a supernatural work on His part alone, so were they to remember the provision of Canaan came directly from the hand of God.
The Israelites had learned to be dependent on God for everything. Their food, water, clothing, and stamina all came from God’s supernatural provision. Now, as they prepared to enter into the affluence of Canaan, a land full of sustenance and bountiful blessings, the temptation would be to forget the One who brought them and instead rely on themselves once again: “Whew, now that there is so much food, water, and material supplies, won’t it be good that we don’t have to worry about ‘bothering God’ to supply our needs…we can just do it ourselves.”
But Moses reminded them that the requirement for full obedience to the Lord would not be set aside when their lives got better. There is often something like amnesia that overtakes us when it comes to remembering how God has worked in our lives. We must take time daily to meditate on the goodness of God, and we must recognize that all the blessings we experience have come from His hand. We must consistently resist the urge to satisfy ourselves through our own efforts, to the neglect of acknowledging the Lord’s role in every blessing we enjoy.
Just as Jesus demonstrated, we must avoid the temptation to be “self-reliant” rather than “God-reliant”.
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