Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. (Matthew 4:1)
Among the various terrains in which wars can be fought, the desert is one of the most severe and unforgiving. Intense heat; choking dust; parching dryness; sand in which both humans and machines get bogged down; rocks and boulders strewn everywhere; it is a harsh, unforgiving landscape that gives none of the comforts of more hospitable environments. As the Germans discovered in their North African campaign in World War II, the desert is merciless to those who are unprepared for its rigors—and even those who are prepared must fight the onslaughts of the desert itself while fighting their human enemies.
This harsh, arid desert environment is precisely where Jesus fought the first of his temptations recorded in the Gospel story. It was right after he was baptized in the cooling waters of the Jordan that the spirit led him into the desert. We read that he fasted forty days and forty nights—and the number forty, especially when it is mentioned together with fasting, corresponds to temptation. The Children of Israel wandered forty years in the desert before they could enter the Holy Land. And Moses twice fasted forty days and forty nights on Mt. Sinai when receiving the Ten Commandments and all the accompanying laws.
Jesus’ temptations in the desert
After Jesus had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was tempted by the devil, as told in Matthew 4:1–11. And in the three temptations recounted, we have a summary of all the Lord’s temptations, on all three levels: in his outward actions, in his thoughts, and in his heart:
- Turning stones into bread would be taking mere correctness in outward behavior and believing that this made him truly good, kind, loving, and spiritual. His verbal battles with the Pharisees throughout his ministry were often over this very issue.
- Throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the temple would be thinking that because he knew the teachings of the church thoroughly (symbolized by the temple and its pinnacle), he did not actually need to live by those teachings, but whatever he did, he would be rescued by God and heaven.
- Bowing down and worshiping the devil in return for the kingdoms of the world and their splendor would be allowing his heart to be ruled by a desire for power and glory among humans rather than by a love of doing the saving work that he had come to do.
Notice that each time the devil tempted him, even when the devil himself quoted Scripture, Jesus answered with a Scripture from the Law of Moses. In this way he showed us by example that it is by the power of “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4) that we can resist temptation and gain spiritual life.
The battle of the nine kings
Now let’s turn to the next chapter of the Old Testament after the one we covered in the previous article in this series. We find from Swedenborg’s interpretation of Genesis 14:1–20, which recounts the very first battle of the Bible—the battle of the nine kings, four against five, in the Valley of Siddim—that the Lord’s early temptations were fought more on his outward levels than deep within. These first temptations of the Lord took place, not when he was an adult, but when he was a young boy. In this, too, he was different from every mortal human being. Although we do have struggles as we grow up, we face genuine spiritual temptation only when we have reached adulthood and are able to make the ultimate choices for ourselves.
Yet with that adjustment, the overall process of temptation that we go through parallels what the Lord went through. We first struggle to clean up our outward thoughts and behavior. Then, as we prevail in those temptations, we move deeper and deeper within, eventually facing the darkest corners of our inner heart and mind, and struggling in agony against our own weakness, doubt, and despair. These agonies of inner temptation are shown in Christ’s life right toward the end, in his agonies in the garden of Gethsemane before he was crucified.
But here in Genesis the temptations are the earlier ones, before we face the full depth of the evil and falsity within us. These come when we are first “cleaning up our act,” so to speak. They come when we are carrying out our first commitment to live in the Lord’s way instead of our own way.
Fighting from pride and ego
When we do this, we tend to do so from a feeling that we are pretty good and pretty strong for being able to overcome the faults in our behavior and character. We have not yet learned through hard experience that if we fight from our own strength, we will go down in defeat. We have not yet learned that the moment we start facing our more deep-seated evils, we are entirely at their mercy unless we recognize that we can overcome them only from the Lord’s power, and not from our own. And so, in our story from Genesis, we find four kings from Babylonia—a foreign power—engaging in a spectacularly successful campaign of subduing various cities and nations in Canaan that the Children of Israel would later face as enemies in its own conquest of the Holy Land.
Spiritually, in our early battles the Lord allows us to think that we can conquer our wrong ways of thinking, feeling, and acting by our own strength. The Lord allows us to fight from Babylonian strength—the strength of taking credit for our own actions—because in those early stages of spiritual growth, if we didn’t have some sense of pride and self-worth in our battles and our successes, we would probably not engage in them at all. Gaining a sense of self-worth provides a powerful motivational engine that enables us to engage in a successful campaign as young adults to move beyond our youthful waywardness, get our lives on track, and begin living in a constructive and responsible way. The popular “self-esteem” movement may not be the ultimate path toward spiritual life, but it does give many people their first sense that their lives are worth something, and that they should fight the good fight and make something of themselves. Like the Babylonians, it gets the job done.
Though we have been talking about our human struggles, the same dynamic was going on in the Lord’s young life, too. Even as a young boy he did have a sense of his higher calling, but he had still not experienced the full depths of his divinity. And so, when he first began to engage in inner battle against his spiritual enemies, he believed that it was his lower, human side that was doing the fighting, not realizing that the power came from his divine soul. In Jesus, too, the Babylonians got the first victory.
Rescued from our pride
And yet, when we do get the job done from a sense of “self-esteem,” or in theological terminology, from a sense of our own “merit,” we can find our lives quickly taken captive by the Babylonians. We read that since Lot was living in Sodom, one of the conquered cities, he and his family and possessions were carried off by the four victorious kings. Lot, as we learned in the previous article, represents our outward life. And when we have cleaned up our act and started living in a more virtuous way than before, we can easily get carried away by the pride in our own accomplishments that is represented by Shinar—which was another name for Babylon.
This is when Abram comes to Lot’s rescue. Abram, in contrast to Lot, represents our inner spiritual life. When we find ourselves getting carried away by our own pride and sense of superiority over others because we are so much better and more spiritual than they are, we do need to be rescued—from ourselves! That is when Abram, our deeper and more thoughtful side, can step in and remind us that on our own, we will get carried away just when we feel we have gotten the victory. Our deeper spiritual self reminds us that it is by the Lord’s strength, not our own, that we gain the victory.
It is remarkable that Abram, with only 318 trained warriors, gained a great victory over four powerful kings who had just swept through the land conquering everyone in their path. The Lord does not conquer by strength of numbers or by pride. The Lord conquers through our trust in his power. And once we realize that on our own we are actually very weak when facing our enemies, then the Lord can come through our weakness and give us a true inner victory. This leaves us, not with a sense of pride in ourselves, but with a sense of humble thankfulness to the Lord, who has fought and won the battle for us.
The Lord’s glorification
Turning again to the Lord’s temptation battles, his first sense that he had gained the victory from his outer human side gave way to a realization that it was the Divine Being within who was doing the fighting, and who gave the victory. This, too, was part of his process of “glorification”—of uniting his human side with his divine side, and becoming fully divine and completely one on all levels.
Each time Jesus fought and overcame the evil tendencies that he had inherited from his mother, and that pressed in on him from the human society around him, he realized more fully the presence of his divine soul dwelling within him. As he overcame and destroyed all the evil and falsity that blocked the inner pathways, his soul was opened up to God, the Father, from whom he came. This opening up went deeper and deeper, until by the end of his life on earth, at the time of his resurrection, there was no longer any barrier, nor even the thinnest veil, between his human side and his divine side. He had become completely one with the Father. This is why we know him today as the Lord God Jesus Christ.
Struggles of the heart
All these teachings feed our minds with an understanding of the Lord’s temptations and our own. Now let’s turn to the heart side of things—because our battles in the desert are not merely battles of the head; they are struggles over who will own our heart.
I would venture to say that each one of us has felt the inner anguish of struggle and temptation within our souls. Some of us may be struggling with issues of destructive outward behaviors. Some of us may be struggling with faulty beliefs and attitudes that cause us to veer off course into saying and doing things that bring pain and brokenness rather than joy and deeper relationship with others. And some of us may be struggling with fundamental issues about whether we really care, whether we are really worth anything, whether we should just give up, give in, and not even bother struggling onward anymore.
All these temptations bring us into our own spiritual desert. No matter where we are on our path of spiritual rebirth, the struggles we face are struggles for our mind, our heart, our soul. And the farther along we go, the more desperate the battles become. We may feel that instead of getting better, we are getting worse. As new and more hidden parts of ourselves open up, we see new layers of ugliness, muck, and mire within our thoughts and feelings that we had never realized were there. We see more clearly than ever before our own self-centeredness, our disregard of others’ needs, our desire for our own pleasure and control, and realize that these have been driving us all along. As these painful self-revelations come to us, we find ourselves sinking into the tar pits of self-pity, hopelessness, weariness, and despair.
And we feel that we are all alone. We feel that we are abandoned; that no one understands; that even God is not there for us. We may cry out within our souls, as Jesus did on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1).
Rescued by the Lord
It is precisely when we have reached the point of despair that we are finally ready for the Lord to come into our lives in a new way. It is precisely when we realize that on our own we are lost, that the Lord is able to show us that there is a higher power, a divine power, that is more than equal to every struggle we face. It is then that we realize, like the Apostle, that “because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18).
Jesus has fought every evil; Jesus has struggled against every wrong; Jesus has experienced the deepest and bitterest desert warfare of the soul, and has come out of it victorious. On our own, we would succumb to the blasting heat, the choking dust, the terrible drought, the harsh sand and rocks of inner conflict. But the Lord has fought the desert battle, and has won it. And Jesus will rescue each one of us if we will turn to Jesus and trust in Jesus.
(Note: This post is an edited version of a talk originally delivered on February 1, 2004. For the next article in this series, please see: “A Promise and a Mission.” To start at the beginning of the series, please go to the article, “What Child Is This?”)
For further reading:
- Water and Spirit
- What Does it Mean that Jesus was “Glorified”?
- War, Military Service, Violence, and Self-Defense: What’s a Christian to Do?
- What about Violent Religions? Is God Really Bloodthirsty and Vengeful?
- Spiritual Growth 101 with Mike Tyson: “The Virtue of Selfishness”
- The Logic of Love: Why God became Jesus
Share this:
Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
This analysis rings so true. It is such a strong temptation to think “Hey, I’m doing pretty good now!” I must remind myself that everything good and true flows from the Lord. Thank you Lee for such a great reminder!
Hi Joe,
Good to hear from you again, and thanks for your kind words. Glad this article is helpful for you.
Thank you for these articles. It has changed my life. I struggle with my past but this helps. Thanks again.
Hi ..,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your good words. I’m glad these articles are helpful to you in your spiritual walk. May God bless you and give you strength for the journey.
This is good.
Meant to write
This is GOLD.
Hi Tamalji,
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it!
When I read the line about how Jesus fought to overcome “the evil tendencies inherited from his mother” I was a bit disturbed.
Having grown up around the Catholic Church and having found my first spiritual sentiments as a child stirred by the gentle person of Mother Mary (when God still seemed rather intimidating and Jesus a horrific image of agony) , it was grating to me to read your statement associating her with evil tendencies.
But i have come to understand the Catholic doctrine of Mary being herself conceived without sin in order to be a pure womb for Christ to incarnate in is not Biblical. I have really appreciated that story about her, but it admittedly isn’t in the original tradition, no matter how lovely it sounds to persons who have an impulse for goddess worship.
There are other spiritual traditions that offer the option of worshipping a Feminine Godhead, paired with the Masculine Godhead like sunlight to the sun, two-and-one, but the Bible does not.
Just objectively speaking, without any competition or comparison between sacred paths: Goddess worship is a human impulse that Catholicism has benefitted mightily from, but only by adding afterthoughts of their own to the original Text.
So reflecting on this a bit, and also considering your recent post about the Imperialist propaganda inherent in the post-Biblical doctrine of the Trinity, i had this idea:
Is the figure of Mary (blessed as thou art among not just women but all people) absorbed by that imperial domination motive and made a front for the Church itself?
That is, by making Mary the sinless mother of its members, does the Mother Church thus indoctrinate people to believe it’s own institution is born without sin and holier than humanity, not subject to humanity’s dangerous vices?
As scared, vulnerable creatures human beings naturally crave consolation. But it’s easier to get some shape of that sheltered feeling from sumbitting to the higher power of a physically tangible socio-religious institution. Much harder to take actual, integrous, autonomous, painstaking, long-suffering refuge in GOD. That’s a mighty task the masses don’t seem up for.
Thus, religious institution seems ultimately to be a necessary evil. (In Spanish translation the phrase is even more ironic – “un Diablo necesario”, “the needed Devil”.)
Anyway, it was hard to hear that line about Jesus’ blessed mother Mary contributing evil tendencies, but i get your point and it gave some food for thought.
Thanks again brother Lee.
Hi Tamalji,
Giving up beliefs and traditions that we received “with our mother’s milk” is always a wistful and painful task. But if we are to seek and find the truth that sets us free, we must bend our mind and heart to that task where necessary.
In answer to your question about the near deification of Mary, I do think that the Catholic Church has increased its own power and influence by decreasing the power and influence of the Lord, splitting that power and influence among many saints, Mary being the chief of them. When power is diverted away from the Lord, it can be diverted toward the Church. This is accomplished in part by taking away much of the Lord’s power and giving it to “Saints” that are canonized and authorized by the Catholic Church, thus giving the Catholic Church power over its people’s life of worship and religion.
The tendency to worship multiple gods and goddesses has therefore infected the Catholic Church for many centuries, diverting its people away from the direct, personal relationship with the Lord God Jesus Christ that is the core and the beauty of the Christian religion.
Mary, of course, was a good woman, and worthy of being honored as the vessel through whom the Lord was born into this world. But she was, after all, only a human being, just as human as the rest of us. There is no warrant in Scripture to make a goddess out of her. You might be interested in a couple excerpts from a sequence in which Swedenborg talks about the Catholic saints in the spiritual world:
And:
And indeed, even in the Acts we find that Mary was among Jesus’ followers as one of them. She was given no special status as the earthly mother of Jesus.
If you want to read the whole sequence, you can do so starting at this link:
61. The Catholic Saints in the Spiritual World
It is not wrong to think of God as encompassing both male and female. But to divide God out into multiple gods/goddesses or saints to whom people direct prayers and worship is pagan, not Christian. On the feminine aspect of God, please see:
For those who long for a sense of the divine feminine, it is not necessary to turn to goddess worship, or to the sanctification of Mary.
Lee – Thanks very much for taking the time to give such rich replies, to everyone here.
The Swedenborg references you shared here are fascinating. I will read the whole sequence you linked.
About the longed-for Divine Feminine sense that you refer to in those linked articles on Mother:
I appreciate the Bible references showing God’s maternal aspects, but finally they are very few and far between. The God of the Bible is presented overwhelmingly in masculine language. Its as if the feminine aspect of life itself is a faint rumor – prophets, apostles, Messiah, practically everything is masculine in the Bible’s world).
It makes me wonder if the Bible could be a revelation corresponding to a lesser creation of humanity (when equality of male and female has been lost to degradation, as briefly remembered in Genesis) and thus in and of itself not capable to (microcosmically) represent the fullness of God?
I question if a soul were drawn by their own devotional taste especially to the feminine aspect of God, would the Biblical cosmovision and tradition be adequate for their spiritual needs? All cultural factors aside, the 99% masculine language and imagery for divine things might be spiritually insufficient for some souls.
I propose that God, being Infinite, is never wholly knowable to any finite entity and therefore angelic souls in the spiritual world must be drawn toward the particular features and Image of God relevant to their own devotional nature so as to culture a personal intimacy according to their own mood. That would be the actual masterpiece of free-will – to choose which aspect (among endlessly diverse aspects) of the Infinite Divine Godhead you want to dedicate your own limited being to adore and serve.
It seems only reasonable that there must be a ‘mansion’ or dimension of Heaven designed for each soul to exist in proximity to their ‘own’ God – the particular Face of infinite God they love. Just because someone becomes an eternal angel doesn’t make them capable of knowing all of God all at once, ever, so necessarily either He is manifest as some abstract Universal Divine Being-ness to everyone or He presents Himself variously according to their intrinsic, personal devotion.
It would be a softer version of the same worldly religious exclusivity to say that everyone will find out its Jesus and love Him, no matter what they called Him on earth. What is the meaning of free-will if one’s most central choice of how to adore God cannot be fulfilled? The Infinite God cannot accommodate a variety of devotional desires? It cannot be like that.
So if the spiritual world must accommodate a potentially endless variety of divine Images of God, and if a soul’s inborn attraction is particularly to the Feminine Image, then it is feasible that such a nature could begin sprouting in this embodied life and Biblical religion would not be equipped to satisfy them unless supplemented with Marian devotion. I’d bet the Catholic Church would not be half as popular without her person highlighted, because Divine Mother is a massively popular human longing.
So although Marian devotion is not Biblically supported per se, and has been inflated by the Catholic Church apparently for institutional reasons, still the Mother cult phenomenon (among other, entirely non-Biblical Goddess traditions) could reflect the will of God reaching into the world to nurture souls who love ‘His’ Feminine aspect best but can’t get what they need from the hyper-masculine Bible as it is.
Just thinking out loud, Lee. Sorry to wax long. I won’t feel slighted if you haven’t got time to respond to my various comments everywhere.
Stay blessed.
Hi Tamal ji,
You are most welcome, and thank you for your kind words. There is a lot here—more than I can do justice to in a comment. I hope you don’t mind if along the way I link you to various articles that take up one or another of these topics.
First, there’s this one:
If there’s One God, Why All the Different Religions?
God gives different religions for people of different cultures and mindsets. Christianity is not for everyone. That’s why Christianity is the religion of only about one-third of the world’s population, not of all the world’s population.
For one thing, through historical accident, even though Christianity arose in the Middle East, in a Semitic culture, over time it became a religion mostly of Europeans (who are in the lineage of Japheth in the Hebrew Table of Nations), and therefore received the stamp of the European culture and mindset. Even today, when Christianity has spread to several other areas of the world, there is a tension between that European form of Christianity and the local non-European cultures.
Perhaps one day Christianity will be broad enough to be the religion of the entire world. But as of now, it is a religion that has the stamp of one particular continent and culture upon it. Plus, it has deviated quite far from the Christianity that Jesus and his Apostles taught in the Bible. As a result, for the foreseeable future, other religions will be required—religions that are adapted to cultures and mindsets that the current dominant form of Christianity cannot reach.
About Marian devotion, and adoration of saints in general, this was probably inevitable given the increasing materialism of Christianity once it became a state religion under Constantine. Catholicism in particular is a rather thinly veiled form of Roman paganism. Even Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity are polytheistic in nature. See:
Is the Doctrine of the Trinity Polytheistic?
Catholicism simply takes that polytheism to greater lengths than the rest of Christianity. It says with the lips, as all Christians do, that there is one God, while worshiping and adoring many gods in the form of the Trinity of Persons and all the saints.
About the Marian devotion and the goddess cult in general, it is good to understand where polytheism and idol worship came from in the first place. Secular conventional wisdom holds that humans started out polytheistic, and only gradually moved toward monotheism. But if the Bible story is any guide, that is not correct. In the earliest chapters of Genesis there is one God who is the Creator of everything. Only later do multiple gods show up on the scene.
Swedenborg takes his cue from this as well, saying that the earliest humans knew that there was only one God, and they worshiped and followed the one God of the universe.
Early humans also, according to Swedenborg, had open communication with the spiritual world. As a result, they knew that each thing in the material world is a representation of some corresponding thing in the spiritual world. This is what Swedenborg calls “correspondence,” and it is the origin of the meaning of all the early myths, including the first ten or eleven chapters of Genesis. About correspondence, please see:
Can We Really Believe the Bible?
Because these early humans knew the correspondence, or spiritual symbolism, of everything in the material universe, everything they saw in the world around them brought to their mind something specific about the nature of the spiritual world, and of God. As their technical abilities improved, they began making representations of various earthly things, which to them each represented something about the nature of God. These are the early representative images or icons that paleontologists find in their digs.
Later on though, as human culture became more materialistic, and fell away from that early spiritual awareness and knowledge of the correspondence of material things, they still had all the icons and statuary, but they no longer knew what they meant. They only knew that these were sacred in some way. So they began to worship them individually as gods, having lost the knowledge that each one of them represented something specific about the one God of the universe.
The interesting thing for this discussion is that those statues that became idols represented both male and female figures. This suggests that those earliest humans were aware that God encompasses both male and female. Otherwise their statuary would have been exclusively male. Since it was not exclusively male, we can conclude that these early humans had a concept of God that was balanced between the divine masculine and divine feminine aspects of God.
As a result of the Fall, however, this early balance between male and female was lost. This is represented in the three-step process of falling from the original equality in the creation of man and woman in Genesis one, to the inequality of the creation of Eve out of Adam in the second half of Genesis 2, to the relationship of dominance and submission that came as a result of the humans’ disobedience in Genesis 3. For more on this, please see these two articles:
Because man came to be seen as primary and woman as secondary, and then even more, man came to be seen as dominant and woman as submissive, God also came to be seen as primarily male. God, of course, was seen as the most powerful being of all. In a culture that had made woman secondary, to make God female would be to make God a secondary power, not a primary power. So the increasingly male image of God in the Judaeo-Christian tradition was a reflection of the fallen state of humanity in which the original equality between man and woman was replaced by a relationship of male dominance and female submission.
In light of all of this, in my view what is needed to restore the gender balance in our concept of God is not to introduce Marian devotion or goddess worship, but to regain the understanding that all the gods, goddesses, and saints of polytheistic paganism and Christianity are really just representations of different aspects of the one God of the universe. We can then direct all our worship to that one God, and leave behind the polytheism and paganism that we have fallen into over the millennia.
I should also add that the idea that the Bible is some paternalistic male-dominated affair is a superficial and mistaken idea. In fact, the Bible is full of strong female characters who often have a greater influence than the male figures in the Bible over the course taken by the Bible narrative. On this, please see:
Is the Bible a Book about Men? What about Women?
There is more that could be said in response to your musings, but I’ll leave it at this for now, and let you explore some of the linked articles. I hope you will find this, and them, helpful and enlightening. Just one more quick response: Yes, different people and cultures live in different parts of heaven, and see God in different ways, each according to their own culture and mindset.
Thanks as always for your generous and attentive responses.
I have actually read most of the articles you linked already, but the couple I haven’t may provide some missing pieces.
Grateful.
Hi Tamal ji,
You’re welcome. There are now almost 400 articles on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life. I was bound to hit on at least one or two that you hadn’t already read! 😉
Wow, that’s great.
Is there a link to the full index of articles, by subject or alphabetical?
Hi Tamal ji,
There is no full index of the articles here. Creating one would be a mammoth task!
The only index-like thing is my list of readers’ submitted “spiritual conundrums,” which you can see by scrolling down a bit on the submission page here. They are listed in chronological order. But of course, this list does not cover any articles that were not written as responses to readers’ submitted questions. Currently there are 63 articles on the list, compared to 392 articles currently on the site.
Meanwhile, I have so far published two volumes of a planned five that collect and organize articles from the blog on five general topics. These volumes do cost money, but they also provide a more organized read than the blog can provide. Here are the two published so far:
The links are to their Amazon pages. (I do receive commissions from the Amazon links on this website.)
The volumes that remain to be published are:
I hope to get back to publishing them next year. (The first two volumes were published in 2019.)
Your five-volume set looks great. AND… I humbly suggest (knowing nothing about websites) that it shouldn’t be difficult to make a page with links to all the articles – even without organizing by subjects or alphabetizing, just like a single folder with every post dropped in there to scroll through. Or maybe there is an inspired reason for having folks meander about and discover things along the way.
Hi Tamalji,
Thank you.
Building such a list would be a major task. Unless it were ordered by topic, it wouldn’t be much use. Then it would have to be maintained every time I post a new article. It’s just not something I’m going to take the time to do. There are so many claimants to my time even now that I’m happy if I can just post something new from time to time.
Also, quite a few articles here from earlier years were fairly time-specific, because they drew on particular events in the news. Most of these get very few hits now. The hits go to the timeless posts that cover the big topics about God, the Bible, the afterlife, love and marriage, and so on.
The vast bulk of visits to the blog come direct from Google searches, which yield articles on topics that people are specifically searching for. It’s unlikely that enough people would make use of a site index to make it worth my time to create one.
A year or so into the blog I did start posting links to related articles at the end of each new post. This helps people who have arrived here looking for ideas or answers on a specific issue to find other articles related to the topic they were searching for. For now, that’s the best I can do.
When tempting Jesus three times in the wilderness, Satan wanted the Savior to sin so that he couldn’t be a propitiation for our sins. That would ruin God’s plan for salvation, which Satan wants. Why else would Satan tempt Jesus?
Does the Bible say that the savior, the propitiation for our sins, would have to be someone with no sin of his own? If Jesus sinned he couldn’t be our sacrifice?
Hi WorldQuestioner,
No, Satan wanted the Savior to sin so that he (Jesus, the Savior) would fail in his mission of saving humanity from Satan’s power. The one who sins is a slave to sin. If Jesus sinned, that would mean that Jesus would be a slave to sin, which is being a slave to Satan. Instead of conquering Satan and saving us from Satan’s power, he would have become subject to Satan. That is why Satan wanted the Savior to sin.
The Bible does say that Jesus never sinned. But it doesn’t say it was necessary for Jesus not to sin so that he could be the propitiation for our sin. What it does say is that the lamb for the sacrifice must be without blemish. This is in the Old Testament. Metaphorically, the Lamb of God must be without blemish. If Jesus sinned, he wouldn’t be our sacrifice. But it wouldn’t be because he was “imperfect.” It would be for the reason given just above.
Does Jesus have to have a common sin lineage with us to save us? Does he have to be descended from sinners in order to be our sacrifice? Does he have to share come genealogy of sinners with us, continuous with no gaps, no independent developments of sin? Hard to explain it better. What’s a better way to say it than, does Jesus have to share sin blood with us, with the only reason for not sinning being because God is his father, not a human male? Are those ideas Biblical?
Jesus died to compensate for our sins, right?
With Jesus’ death, sacrificing lambs are no longer necessary. That Biblical?
Hi WorldQuestioner,
Jesus did not die to compensate for our sins. This is false doctrine, taught nowhere in the Bible.
For Christians, sacrificing lambs, or any other animal, plant, food, or drink is unnecessary. That’s because Christianity is not an external, symbolic, and behavioral religion, but an internal, spiritual, faith-based religion. Christians do not need continual ritual observances to keep them on track. Christians live a good, loving, and useful life based on an inner faithfulness to Christ.
On your first series of questions, please see:
What Does it Mean that Jesus was “Glorified”?
To accomplish the purposes of the Incarnation, which were to defeat the power of the Devil and to glorify his human nature, Christ needed a regular sin-prone human heredity, which he received from his human mother Mary. But he also had an infinite divine inner self, which was God. It was from his inner divine self that he gave his teachings and fought his always-victorious battles against evil and sin.
Doesn’t “propitiation” mean compensation?
Hi WorldQuestioner,
No. Not even in the traditional definitions of that word. But see:
How did Swedenborg interpret 1 John 2:2: “He is the propitiation for our sins”?
Does Isaiah 53 refer to Jesus? Are you aware of Isaiah 53:4?
Hi WorldQuestioner,
Of course it does. Everything in the Bible refers to Jesus, as he himself told us in John 5:39 and Luke 24:25–27, 44–45.
And yes, I’ve read Isaiah 53:4 a few times. 😉
Does that particular verse mean that Jesus experienced the wrath of God? Stricken (English Standard Version and King James Version), smitten (Young’s Literal Translation), punished (Complete Jewish Bible)?
Here are the two verses in the ESV:
The idea being expressed here is that we thought it was God who plagued him, but in fact his affliction was because of our transgressions, not because of God.