Deliverance from Evil

Deliverance from Evil

Luke 4:1-13

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Everything Jesus says to the devil is true, and everything the devil says to Jesus is false. We believe that, most of the time.

Þ When we are full, it’s no trouble to say that we do not live by bread alone, because we’re full; we’re not thinking about food. But Jesus was famished when he l said it.

Þ When we are in church or at prayer, it’s not hard to declare that we serve God alone; but Jesus said it when the devil was trying to distract him with all the kingdoms of the world.

Þ And when we are perfectly safe and everything is okay, why should we put God to the test? But Jesus refused to do it when he was in grave physical danger.

In his three responses to the devil Jesus shows us what he meant when taught us to pray deliver us from evil.

To ask this of God makes a heavy demand on him, and an even heavier demand upon ourselves. So before we ask it, we must realize there are things we can’t believe if we are going to pray this prayer, and things we must believe if we are going to pray it.

We can’t believe that physical survival is the meaning of life. Any argument for believing it is cancelled by the fact of death. So you live to be eighty; big deal, says the Bible.

⁹For all our days pass away under your wrath;
our years come to an end like a sigh.
¹⁰The days of our life are seventy years,
or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;
even then their span is only toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away (Ps 90).

When we think we are going to live forever—that is, when we disagree with the Bible—the idea of physical survival as the meaning of life is an attractive one.

If you live by bread alone, you can’t be delivered from evil because you are too easily suckered. You would turn a rock into a loaf of bread in a second! Why not, if you or your kids were hungry? What’s more important than physical survival?

The key moment in the novel and movie Gone with the Wind, comes after Scarlett O’Hara flees Atlanta with her little boy, her cousin Melanie, and Melanie’s tiny baby. Scarlett herself is barely out of her teens. She comes to her family plantation only to find her mother dead, her father devastated, and the plantation neglected. She stands in the ruined garden, and tries to eat a raw carrot but gags on it. Then she lifts her fist to heaven and speaks for herself and her loved ones. “If I live through this, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” She will keep her vow if she has to lie, cheat, and steal to do it. She lives by bread alone.

But you don’t have to be as desperate as Scarlett to live by bread alone. Do you remember Esau and Jacob in the book of Genesis?

Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!’ . . .. Jacob said, ‘First sell me your birthright.’ Esau said, ‘I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?’ Jacob said, ‘Swear to me first.’ So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

Genesis 25:30-34.

Esau believed more in that lentil stew, that bean soup, than he believed in his own future.

Esau probably hadn’t thought about it much; from what he said, it doesn’t sound like he did. But Jesus had thought about it. The truth was ingrained in him. We do not live by bread alone. Even when your family is homeless and you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you still do not live by bread alone.

If we believe that we live by bread alone, we hamper God’s ability to deliver us from evil—because what we believe How can a person who agree with the lies of the Tempter, and thinks that the devil has it right, be delivered from the evil of selfishness?

But the kids still need to fed! You still need a place to stay! Yes indeed; and when they have been fed and put to bed, they will have to be fed and put to bed until eventually they are doing it for their children. After they die their descendants will carry on. In the meantime, what are they going to do when the neighbor’s kids have food and yours doesn’t? Steal it? Fight over it? Or will they learn that life is more than physical survival?

Jesus was not tempted to steal, but he was tempted to cheat by turning a stone into a loaf of bread. No one would be hurt by it. So why didn’t he do it? Because the word came from the mouth of the devil, not from the mouth of the Lord.

To the unbeliever it makes no difference who suggests it, if it is what you feel you must do. In the godless thinking of our day The question is not what is right or wrong, true or false, but what’s the harm? If I can’t think of anybody I’ve harmed, what difference does it make?

Such a one has no idea what Jesus is talking about when he says that we live by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

In a T.S. Eliot play, a mature young woman cannot understand why she feels a sense of sin. Her counselor asks her what she thinks sin is. She is not a believer, so has to think about it. “I suppose it is doing something immoral. But I have done nothing immoral.” As it happens, she has committed adultery; but the man’s wife hadn’t seem to care. “I didn’t take anything from her. Not anything she wanted.”

She doesn’t see the logical conclusion of her thinking: If adultery is meaningless, so is marriage.

All of the devil’s suggestions are meaningless, because everything he suggests are done for the wrong reasons. Right reasons come only from the mouth of God, not from the Evil one. Even that stone doesn’t belong to the devil. He has no right to it. All he can do is tell lies about it.

Jesus knows that we live by bread, but not by bread alone. The bread is God’s gift, given in God’s way: like all of God’s gifts, by every word that comes from the mouth of God, the Word of God.

By Every Word

Every caught my attention this time. Every word includes a lot of words! God speaks nothing but truth, and we cannot live except by the truth. What is untrue cannot stand; the way of death is the way of untruth.

By every word means that we cannot choose which words to live by. To obey the law of God, we have to go to the heart of the matter, says James 2, which is the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself .’

If you don’t do that, says James, but try to choose which words you will obey, you will find the words you have not chosen condemning you. For the one who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.

The other two responses to temptation, to worship and serve the Lord alone, and to refuse to put God to the test, are simply applications of the truth that we live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Temptation distorts reality. The Word of God clarifies it.

The story begins with the word that Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where he was tempted. Jesus taught us to ask God not to lead us into temptation, but he seemed to have led Jesus! In the prayer, Jesus assumes we’ll be tempted anyway, as he was, for we are to ask for deliverance from evil.

Jesus was delivered from evil, but no miracle was involved except the miracle of the word of God. In the midst temptation, remember that the Word of God, not your appetites, is to guide your behavior; remember that you have but God alone to serve; and remember that you do not to have to test God, because you are on his side! Amen.