From the first moment of creation, Jesus loved the humans He created. In the garden of Eden, God dwelled with them in perfect harmony. And even when Adam and Eve chose to rebel and disobey, He didn’t stop loving them but promised to redeem humanity and all of creation so that we may live together again in perfect fellowship for all eternity. But between that promise in the garden and the fulfillment of that promise stretched thousands of years—of wandering, waiting, and wondering when God would come and make His home with humans again.
And then Jesus enters the scene. After His public baptism, at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry on earth, the Spirit of God led Him into the wilderness for forty days of fasting, prayer, and obedience training. Throughout Scripture, God’s servants often faced this kind of extensive testing and preparation before public ministry. Consider Moses’s fasting forty days and nights before receiving the law or Elijah’s forty-day journey to the mountain of God before encountering Him in the whisper. But mostly, this wilderness experience would have called to the original hearer’s mind the Israelites’ forty-year wandering: they were in the wilderness because of their disobedience, and they failed test after test.
The tempter challenged Jesus to turn bread into stones, to jump off the temple, and to skip the pain and rejection He would endure by just bowing to him in worship. Jesus was famished, weak from hunger, heat, and thirst, and lonely from isolation. Yet at His most vulnerable point, Jesus declared His continuous trust in His heavenly Father, ending with an exclamation of love for Him: “Be gone, Satan! For it is written: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” (Matthew 4:10) The hell of hunger and loneliness would not affect Jesus’ love, loyalty, and trust in His Father’s provision. Jesus perfectly fulfilled the Father’s purpose for His wilderness testing, because where God’s people failed to obey God time after time, Jesus demonstrated perfect trust and obedience every time. And He did it all for love. With that private victory in the wilderness, Jesus launched His public ministry. He had won the first in a series of battles against the enemy of our souls, and He was establishing God’s kingdom so that everyone—young and old, poor and rich, sick and healthy, Jewish and pagan—would be welcomed in.
Source: YouVersion
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