Fr. Stephen De Young: We’re starting with Luke, chapter four, where we left off last time, and as always, I’ll point out that the big, long introduction to Luke is on the first one of these Bible studies, the recording for Luke. And so, you could check that out at the website. In terms of what we’ve had so far, we’re still pretty close to the beginning, so I’ll give you sort of a quick catch up. We just left off with St Luke’s version of Jesus’s genealogy, which as we talked about last time, came right after his baptism and was sort of giving Jesus credentials, His credentials to be the Messiah, His credentials in terms of the Incarnation.

We talked about how St Luke’s version of the genealogy in particular goes all the way back to Adam, not just to Abraham. The way St. Matthew’s does. That was reflective of the fact that St Luke has sort of a broader audience that includes a lot of Gentiles, whereas St Matthew’s Gospel is aimed more at a Jewish audience. And so, if you’re a Gentile, no matter what country you’re from, whether you’re a Scythian or a Parthian or a Roman or a Greek or an Egyptian, you’re descended from Adam. Somewhere in this genealogy, you can find your connection to Jesus. This is making a point, as I said, about the Incarnation, we saw in Christ’s baptism sort of the revelation of the Holy Trinity, that God the Father spoke concerning Jesus and announced him as his Son. The Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus, so we saw the three persons of the Trinity. We sort of got his divine credentials there. Now these are the human credentials. And so it’s reflecting the fact that Christ is taking upon Himself all of our humanity.

That is now where we’re going to pick up, because as you can see, looking at the headings, if you’re looking at the Orthodox Study Bible, what comes next is Jesus’s temptation. You may remember from St. Mark’s Gospel and St. Matthew’s as well, we saw Christ’s baptism and then immediately He was taken out into the wilderness and tempted by Satan. St Matthew’s Gospel went into more detail about that. St. Mark just told us He was tempted by Satan. That was it. St. Matthew gave us a little more detail. St. Luke is going to give us even more detail, but we have that same order of events. This is happening right after His baptism, just as He begins now His ministry.

We talked about the significance of the fact last time, that St. Luke points out that he was baptized at age 30, which wasn’t necessarily specified in the other two Gospels we’ve read, that 30 was the age at which a priest began his priestly ministry in the Old Testament. And we also talked about the fact that the prophet Ezekiel, who had come from a priestly line, it was at age 30 when he had his first vision and embarked on his prophetic mission. And so, St. Luke is making the point that Jesus, in the same way, when He reaches age 30, He now begins His preaching ministry. He begins it with His baptism, where St. John sort of hands Him the torch. We saw before that St. John prophesying Him as the one greater than he who was coming. And then now he’s going to spend this period of time in the wilderness. So before we get started, does anybody have any questions left over?

Okay, we’ll go ahead and get started then with Luke, chapter four, verse one.

Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being tempted for forty days by the devil. And in those days He ate nothing, and afterward, when they had ended, He was hungry.

So we read first that Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit. This is sort of a callback to what we saw in His baptism, because we had, of course, the genealogy in between, as we’re reading. But remember, at His baptism, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him, and the Holy Spirit is continuing to remain upon him. The Spirit leads Him out into the wilderness where He’s tempted for 40 days by the devil.

We talked a little bit when we were going through St. Matthew’s Gospel about the fact that the wilderness sort of had this connotation not just for Jewish people, but in the Gentile world as well, that the wilderness away from civilization, that was the place where demons were, that was the place where wild animals were. This was the place where sort of bad things happened.  The Romans had what they called the ecumene, which we now translate often as the civilized world, sort of the habitable world. And then outside of that was the wilderness. And the wilderness, at best, you have barbarians living there, but more often you have no humans living there, just wild animals, and in their belief, evil spirits. And so, the idea that Jesus going out in the wilderness would have been confronted by the devil would not be strange. This is the sort of thing you would expect to happen if you went out and lived in the wilderness.

We saw in the Old Testament in the law, remember, on the Day of Atonement, the priest would take two goats. One goat, the sins of the people would be laid on that goat. And remember, that goat would be driven out into the wilderness to die. It was driven out to symbolize taking away the sins of the people. And then the other goat was offered to God as a sacrifice. So, the wilderness there was sort of the symbol of we’re sort of giving it over to the evil to be destroyed by sending it out in the wilderness. And this is paralleled in the Greek mindset. Aristotle, for example, said anyone who’s able to live outside a city, the Greek, sort of the polis, the city, was everything that was civilization. If you lived out away from a city out in the wilderness, Aristotle said you had to be either a beast or a god, one of the two. That’s the only kind of person who could live outside of organized society was somebody who is basically an animal or someone who is somehow divine.

And this plays into when you read a lot of the accounts, especially the early accounts of monasticism, of some of the desert fathers who went out into the desert and went out into the wilderness. And you read about sort of the Greek culture, the way they sort of marveled at them and why you would see these pagans, for example, going to these Christian monks for advice, and you kind of say, “Well, this guy is sort of this dirty, unkempt guy living out in the desert. Why would the governor or the emperor go to him for advice about what to do?” Well, they saw that if someone could live that way out by themselves, then there must be something divine, something wondrous about them. They must have some connection to God, or the gods in the case of pagans, beyond what a normal human possesses.

So there’s sort of both resonances here because, again, remember, St. Luke is writing to a mixed audience. He’s got Jewish Christians, He’s got Greek Christians, Gentile Christians. And so, between the two, the fact that Jesus is able to sort of go out in the wilderness and live for 40 days sort of shows that He has this unique connection empowered by the Holy Spirit. This sort of unique connection to God. That He’s able to do something like that. But also He’s going out into the place where the devil is. Where the evil spirits are. Where the wild animals are.

But now, also, the second part is also important because it may seem obvious, and you may wonder why St. Luke would bother to tell us this. In those days, he ate nothing, and afterward, when they had ended, he was hungry. Go figure. He didn’t eat anything for 40 days. And wow, He’s hungry. But the point there is St. Luke is again, St. Luke sort of vacillates between these two poles, right? He wants to show us that that Christ Himself is divine. At the same time, he wants to make sure we don’t forget that Christ is also human, right? So the fact that He goes out and spends these 40 days in the wilderness doesn’t mean He’s superhuman or some kind of angel or some kind of spirit because when He goes out there, doesn’t need anything for 40 days, He’s hungry, just like you or I would be hungry, just like any human being would be hungry after spending that time fasting.

So now we’re going to see the devil sort of seizes upon this. Now, notice here he is referred to as the devil, which is a transliteration, basically, of the Greek word diabÛlos, or di·bolos as it’s sometimes pronounced, and transliterated into the Latin as diabolus. And what that literally means in Greek is “the one who was cast down” or “the one who had been thrown down.” It’s not really “fallen” because there’s more of an active voice to it. So this title is sort of referring to how Satan got that way, how he got where he is. He’s also going to be called Satan later on, but the primary title that St. Luke uses for him is di·bolos.

Part of this is related to the way in which, and we’ve talked about this several times before, but we’ll do it again here. The word daimon that we get transliterated as demon meant something very different in the Greco-Roman world than the way we normally use it. When we use the word demon, we’re talking about evil spirits, we’re talking about fallen angels. That’s not the way the Greeks of the Romans used it. The Greeks and the Romans, for them, it was just a neutral term that just meant spirit. Not necessarily good or bad, just spirit. So, for example, in Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates talks about how he has a demon, a daimon, that whispers wisdom to his soul. That’s sounds really super creepy to us because we have this other understanding of what the word demon means. But for them it just meant a spirit. For them it was a good thing. And so we’ll see more of that when we get into the Book of Acts and some of the exorcisms there, sort of the conflict that St. Paul comes into in terms of his view of what demons are and the cultural view of what demons are in these Greek cities.

But this is part of it, that these evil spirits in the wilderness, and Satan in particular, are not sort of divine spirits, they’re not gods with a small g, but these are fallen beings. These are beings that have been cast down. And that, of course, refers us back to at least Genesis 3, remember, when Satan is cursed to crawl upon the earth.

Interlocutor: What do we refer to them today, as modern theologians?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we usually use the term “demons”. If you’re real fond of the King James version, they use “devils” every single time, whether says diabolos or not, they use devils instead of demons, but it means essentially the same thing. But, yeah, we just transliterate it and the same thing with diabolos and the devil. That’s just us taking that word. I mean, it would be pronounced in Modern Greek “diavÛlos”. So we just sort of shorten it into devil in English. So we really just sort of taken over those words rather than translating them. But for us as Christians, there’s the whole connotation of them being fallen angels, evil spirits that are seeking mankind’s destruction.

When St. Paul’s going to say “All the gods of the nations are demons,” right? The Gentiles who didn’t believe in Christianity would have just said “Yeah, so?” But to Christians, St. Paul was saying something very different. To Christians, St. Paul was saying the gods who are worshiped by these pagans are actually spirits that don’t want good and health and prosperity for human beings, they’re out to destroy human beings. And so, we should not worship them, we should worship the true and living God.

So verse three here:

And the devil said to Him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” But Jesus answered him, saying, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’”

Now, a lot of times we read this at a real surface level because Satan comes and he says, “Hey, look, you’re hungry?” Notice he says, “If you are the Son of God,” Satan knows full well who Jesus is. So this “if” is not a hypothetical. What he’s saying to Jesus is, “Prove who you are, by turning these rocks into bread.”

Now we know Jesus could have turned the rocks into bread. We just saw a couple of chapters ago, remember St. John the Forerunner said if God wanted to, He could raise up children of Abraham out of these stones, right? So if He could turn rocks into people, He could certainly turn rocks into bread if you wanted to. When Jesus answers him and says ” It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God,’ He’s not just saying, “No, I’m not going to turn rocks into bread,” right?

The point that He’s making is twofold. Number one to Satan, He’s telling Satan that He doesn’t have to prove anything to him. He doesn’t have to prove anything to Him. He doesn’t have to do miracles to try and prove to Satan who He is. But secondly, He’s saying that He is not going to take this into His own hands, meaning he trusts in His Father to provide for Him, which is what the original quote was talking about in context. In the original context that Jesus quotes here from Deuteronomy, it’s talking about the fact that we as human beings especially, imagine you’re a farmer in ancient Israel. You go out, you work the field, you plant the seed. The rain comes, the crop goes, you go out and harvest it. Your wife pounds the wheat, makes flour, makes bread. It’s very easy to sit back and say, “Well, look at this great bread. It’s the result of my hard work. Don’t I provide for my family? Don’t I take care of everything myself?” The point that was being made in Deuteronomy is yes, you went out there and did all that work, but it was God who gave you the rain. It was God who caused the crops to grow. It was God who gave you the health to be able to eat bread. God is the reason you even exist. It’s God and His word, particularly His creative word, to which you owe your sustenance. And so, we need to rely upon God, not upon our own efforts.

And that’s what Jesus is referring to here. He’s not saying He couldn’t have turned the rocks into bread. He’s saying, first of all, He doesn’t have to prove anything to Satan. And second of all, that He is relying upon His Father, not the other way around.

Now, I don’t know if it’s raised this question for anyone here, but this does raise questions for some other folks, some of our friends, some of our Muslim friends, some other friends who tried to use this to say, well, see, this shows Jesus isn’t God. If Jesus is dependent upon His Father, how can God be dependent upon God? The answer to this question is, of course, if we accept what St. Luke is telling us, that God became man, God became human. So, Jesus is a person who is divine and human in nature. Would we expect Him to be an atheist? Would you expect Him not to pray to his Father? Would you expect Him not to worship his Father? Of course not, right? Of course He would worship His Father. Of course he would pray to His Father, of course, in his humanity, to satisfy His human needs and the incarnation, he would depend on His Father.

So this is not a contradiction. There’s a tendency sometimes for people to try to set up Christ’s divinity and His humanity as if they’re in contradiction to each other. “He can’t be both” or “He can’t be 100% both,” “He could be 50% or 60/40”, or “What’s the split?” or whatever. But what St. Luke is telling us is that He’s both. He’s able to go and live in the desert by Himself, confronting the wild beasts and confronting Satan for 40 days, but He also gets hungry when He doesn’t eat anything for 40 days. Both are true. He’s able to give graduate level lectures to the rabbis at age twelve in the temple, as we saw earlier in Luke. But at the same time, He goes home with, and obeys His parents as he’s growing up.

And these things don’t contradict each other, because if we accept what St. Luke is telling us, that God became man, then the man who God became would be a perfect man. Not some kind of distorted man, or partial man, or some kind of weird demigod hybrid, right? He would be a perfect man. And so that’s what we see that St. Luke is telling us about Jesus and the fact that He is a perfect man. The fact that He accomplishes humanity perfectly is part of the proof that He is, in fact God incarnate and not just another human being. I’ll speak for myself. I am not a perfect man. Far from it. If you don’t believe me, you can call my wife. She’s at home. I’ll give you her number. She’ll tell you just how imperfect I am. But Jesus is not just another particular man who sort of does better than most of the rest of us. He is a perfect man. And so that shows us that he’s actually God incarnate.

But the devil doesn’t sort of say, “Curses foiled again!”, and run off into the wilderness. He continues.

Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the Devil said to Him, “All this authority I will give You, and their glory; for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be Yours.” And Jesus answered and said to him, “Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only you shall serve.’”

Notice a couple of things here. Notice when the devil takes Him up on the mountain and He shows Him the kingdoms of the world, notice it says that he showed Him all the kingdoms of the world “at a time”. That’s how they translated it here. “All the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.” Meaning, He’s not just up on a high mountain looking around, “Well, look there’s the Roman Empire. And look over to the east, there’s Persia. And look here’s this. And look here’s that.” Right? When it makes the point of “in a moment of time”, it means all the kingdoms of the world, period, right? All the kingdoms of the world in history. And notice that Satan says to Him, “This has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish.” Notice Jesus doesn’t argue with him or contradict him on that point. Jesus doesn’t say, “That’s not true.” He doesn’t counter that point at all. So when was it delivered to him? Who delivered it to him?

Interlocutor: Adam and Eve?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’re going back to Genesis 3 again. As we’ve seen already, there’s a lot of Genesis 3 in the background of this. The same way Satan tempted Eve and then Adam, he’s now trying to tempt Jesus. Jesus does better, as we’re seeing already. But it’s that same kind of temptation. Remember, Adam and Eve were created, placed in the garden. God said to them, “Fill the earth and subdue it.” He gave them dominion over the animals, over the plants, over nature. So it was God’s, because He created the world. He gave it to Adam and Eve for them to rule over. And so what we see happening when they decide they’re going to follow the serpent, they’re going to follow Satan, rather than God is they hand over that authority that they had to him. The idea being Adam and Eve are now not the king and queen of creation, they’re now slaves. They’re slaves to what? They’re slaves to death because now they’re going to die. Slaves of mortality. They’re not going to have to work the ground that’s opposed to them. The wild animals are opposed to them. And ultimately Satan, because he wields the power of death, now has control. So Satan has this authority. He says he gives it to whoever he wants.  Who is Saint Luke saying is behind the Roman emperor? 

Interlocutor: Satan.

Fr. Stephen: Satan. And all the other emperors, not just at the time, but in history, remember? He showed them all the kingdoms at a moment in time. Right? This is why we’re going to see in St. John’s Gospel about three times, Jesus refers to Satan as “the prince of this world”. This is what He means. And we’re going to see, we have to keep this in mind because what we’re going to see after Christ’s death and resurrection is that this changes.

Interlocutor: Satan was king of this world, or prince?

Fr. Stephen: The prince.

Interlocutor: Does that signify that God is king and Satan is prince?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yes, because he only exists because of God. He’s dependent on God too. But also, the word that’s translated “prince” could also be translated like “official” or even “warlord”. It’s sort of a less regal title, right, strong man. So, it’s sort of saying he’s a petty dictator.

Interlocutor: He has a lot of power but no legitimate authority?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so we’re going to see, for example, at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus says “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”, we’re going to see as this plays out in Luke. Part of what’s happening, part of what Christ’s mission is, is to take back that authority. But again, notice, remember, St. Luke’s audience includes a lot of Gentiles, includes people from every country in the world. So again, we’re going back to Adam and Eve. We’re not just talking about Israel’s situation, that Israel is still in exile. We saw in St Matthew. A lot of it was about deeply connected to the Old Testament, about Jesus’s relationship with the law, about Jesus’s relationship with the Davidic King we’re already seeing in St. Luke. He goes back further to Adam because your average Roman or Scythian or Parthian may or may not know much about the Old Testament, right, may or may not see themselves as part of the Kingdom of Israel. In fact, they probably don’t, right? But they all, because of Adam, are under the power of death, as we’re going to see. St. Paul’s going to make that point in Romans 5 when we get there in a couple of years, probably. Maybe a year and a half with Romans, but we’ll see.

So, yes, Jesus doesn’t contradict that point, that at this moment, at least, Satan has enslaved most of the world’s population. And breaking that slavery and that bondage and freeing the people is a big part of what now St. Luke is going to show us that Jesus is here to do. But what Jesus does contradict: Satan says, “Well, if you’ll worship me instead of your Father, then I’ll give all this to you.” And Jesus’s response again is, “You shall worship the Lord of your God, and Him only shall you serve.” So he’s saying, “I will not serve Satan.”

But we’re going to see that’s not because he doesn’t intend to take this authority back, but he’s going to do it again as the perfect man and as the perfect God.

Then he brought Him to Jerusalem, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down from here. For it is written: ‘He shall give His angels charge over you, to keep you,’ and ‘In their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.’” And Jesus answered and said to him, “It has been said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’”

So a couple of things to notice here. First of all, Satan can quote the Bible too. We’ve talked about this many times before. This is a point that’s made by St. James in his epistle, that just knowing factual theological information or knowing the Bible doesn’t have a lot of value if you don’t also do it. St. James makes the point: Satan knows that Jesus is the Son of God, Satan knows about the Holy Trinity, Satan knows what happened with Christ’s death and resurrection. He knows all of that. But it doesn’t do any good, because though he knows about that, he rebels against it, he hates it, he despises it, he rejects God.

And so merely knowing a lot of things isn’t going to do us a lot of good if we don’t also do. To quote St. Paul in Romans, again, “It’s not the hearers of the law who are justified, but the doers.” Just receiving it doesn’t do you any good. And notice also that he can sort of then take, because he knows them, he could take the scriptures and twist them around and try to use them for ill purposes. So this is not something new. When we talk about people today who might appear on your television, on certain channels, who will preach interesting sermons based on interesting passages and manipulate them in various ways to teach different things, that’s not new. This is something that’s been going on forever. Forever. St. Peter famously says in Second Peter that St. Paul’s epistles contain many things that are difficult to understand, and people twist them to their destruction, which always makes me feel better, because if St. Peter had trouble figuring out what St. Paul meant, what can I be expected to figure out?

But again, by twisting them, we twist them to our own destruction, twist them to our own destruction. And this is why, as I’ve said many times, when we go to the Scriptures, we have to be looking for what is God trying to say to me through the Scriptures, not come to the scriptures with an intent. “I want to do X, does the Bible really say I shouldn’t do that? I don’t know. Let’s look. Does that really meanÖ?” Remember that’s the first thing we see Satan say in the Bible, like in Genesis two and three, the first thing we see Satan say in the Bible is he comes to Eve and says, “Did God really say you weren’t supposed to eat the fruit of the tree? Is that really what He meant?” And we do that all the time with the Scriptures, but we have to allow the Scriptures to speak to us because there are things God needs to say to us that we don’t necessarily want to hear. And if we approach it with, “Can I make this say what I want it to say?”, we’ll succeed in making it say what we wanted to say, but the end will be our own destruction because we won’t hear the warnings that God is trying to give us for the sake of our salvation.

Now, notice Jesus’s response. See, the devil again, isn’t stupid, right? Remember, Jesus first response regarding the bread was what? That He was depending upon the Father to protect and care for Him. So what does the devil tempt Him with? “Well, You depend on God to protect You, right? Well, so that means You could jump off this pillar here, and nothing will happen to you, right? Because God said He would protect you, right? It even says so in the Bible, look, it says He’ll protect You. So if that’s true, if You really trust God so much, go ahead and do it!”

And notice Jesus’s response once again isn’t “If I jumped off here, He wouldn’t protect me.” And it’s translated here as “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” The word that’s translated there as “tempt” would probably be better translated as “test”. The idea being, yes, God has promised this, so now you’re going to test Him and say, “Oh, is this really true? Is this really true?” And so the point there is what does that reveal? That reveals a lack of faith. The faith is believing that God’s promises are true, and God promises you something and you say, “Oh, I don’t know, let’s test this out.” That’s showing that you don’t really believe it. It’s showing that you don’t really believe God, that He’s someone who keeps His promises, because they both agreed this was something God promised in the Scriptures. But if you really believe it, if you truly have faith in it, you don’t have to test it. You don’t have to test it.

If I’m teaching a class and I know my students understand something I taught them, I don’t have to give them a pop quiz, right? If I give them a pop quiz because I think maybe they’re not getting it and I need to find out. And so we are not in a position to start giving God pop quizzes.

Now when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from Him until an opportune time.

Notice two things there. This is not an exhaustive list, because remember, at the beginning, Jesus spent 40 days in the desert being tempted by the devil. That means more than three, right? These are three that communicate to us certain things. But the devil, again, didn’t just go “Darn it, three strikes, I’m out, see ya!”. This is continuous. But this is an example. This is an example of the way the devil tempted Jesus. And then notice also when he departed, he doesn’t just go away. He says he departed “until an opportune time”, meaning later on in our story here in St. Luke’s Gospel, he’s going to show up again. We’ll see when that is.

This raises the question. This is at least mentioned, as we said in St. Mark’s Gospel, it’s barely mentioned. It’s just Jesus was out in the wilderness; He was there with the wild animals and the devil tempted Him. We had a little more in St Matthew’s Gospel, we have even more than that here. Why is this such a key incident that Christ was tempted by the devil?

Interlocutor: To test His humanity?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s on the right track, and St. Matthew and St. Luke do that a little differently.

Interlocutor: He’s reversing what Adam and Eve did,

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that’s St Luke’s emphasis we saw in St. Matthew, there was a little different emphasis because St. Matthew, when he has Jesus go out into the wilderness, we talked about how the language that’s used there of the wilderness was referring us back to Israel in the wilderness. Israel, when they were wandering in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land, right? Their faith was tested, and they failed pretty miserably. The whole first generation all died in the wilderness because of it, except for Joshua and Caleb. So St. Matthew was making the point. We saw that St. Matthew, one of his major themes was that Jesus was succeeding where Israel failed, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” Jesus coming back out of Egypt after He fled there with His family, and then He goes into the wilderness and He sort of passes the time of testing in the wilderness where Israel had failed. St. Luke, as we said, has a broader audience, and we saw here the references back to Genesis three. Right? And so St. Luke’s point is that Jesus here is succeeding where Adam failed, where Adam and Eve failed. We talked already a little bit about this with Eve, with Mary, but Jesus is here succeeding where Adam failed. And you noticed the first temptation, again, was eating, just like Adam’s temptation was eating. There are all these connections. Why is it important that Jesus succeeded where Adam failed?

Interlocutor: Because He became man, not just [inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: That’s true. But alsoÖ that’s true. Well, part ofÖ what was the consequence of Adam’s failure, of Adam’s sin, of Adam’s rebellion, what was the consequence, not just for him, but for everyone descended from him?

Interlocutors: Death.

Fr. Stephen: Right, death. And every human being descended from Adam, death has had a claim on. Why? Because we’ve all done the same thing Adam did. We’ve all sinned. We’ve all sinned, we’ve all rebelled against God. And so, death has a claim on every single one of us. St. Paul says the wages of sin is death. So someday when I die, I will be dying because I have sinned, and that’s the consequence. So if Jesus succeeds where Adam failed, Jesus doesn’t sin. What does that mean? Death doesn’t have a claim on Him, right? So, theoretically, He never has to die.

So if we see later on in St. Luke’s Gospel that Jesus does die, what does that mean? It means He did it voluntarily. Means He’s the only person in history who has died voluntarily. Because, trust me, I, like most people, if I had a choice, wouldn’t die. If you gave me an option, I’d opt out. But for everyone else we don’t have a choice, right? Wages of sin is death. It’s the consequence. When you work for two weeks, you get your paycheck, right? Because that’s what’s coming to you. When you sin, you die. That’s what’s coming to you. But for Jesus, he doesn’t owe death anything. So when He dies, He dies voluntarily. And so this is why, as we’re going to see, and this will get developed out more when we get towards the end of St Luke’s Gospel. This is why, in what St. Luke is teaching us, this is why Jesus can be said to die in our place and die for us, because the death he dies voluntarily is not his own death, because he doesn’t owe death anything. He can take our death; he can voluntarily die our death and then give us His life. And we’re going to see this play out. But this is already being established right here in chapter four, with this temptation, because right here, we already saw it. We just saw the genealogy, St. Luke establishing this connection between Jesus and Adam. And now we’re seeing a little more of the nature of that connection. That where Adam sins and condemns all of us who sin after him in the likeness of our Father, condemns us to death. Christ is under no such condemnation. That makes him free. That makes him free to lay down his life.