SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/2/2020
10:09 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The Preparation”
My Worship Time Reference: Matthew
4:1-2
Message of the verses: “1 Then Jesus was
led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil. 2 For
forty days and forty nights he fasted and became very hungry.”
Jesus
went from the first great testimony, which was His baptism to the first great
test of His ministry as the Holy Spirit “impelled” Jesus to go out into the
wilderness according to Mark 1:12. The
Word “impelled” in the English/Dictionary means “to drive out (cast out).” MacArthur writes that “Jesus now was in full
consciousness of His divine mission, and His sacred humanity was filled through
and through with the abiding presence and power of God. As never before, He was deeply satisfied as
He contemplated the redemptive word He was sent to accomplish. After thirty years of waiting in obscurity He
now was fully commissioned to begin His task.
Then the devil tried to turn Him away.”
Jesus
would encounter the devil “diabolos” in the Greek which is one of Satan’s names
and this means accuser or slanderer.
There are many names of Satan in the Word of God. “The ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30;
16:11); “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2); “the god of this world”
(2 Cor. 4:4); “the serpent of old and the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev.
9:11), then we have “Abaddon and
Apollyon” both of which mean “destroyer” as seen in Revelation 9:11, and then
we also have “the tempter” as seen in Matthew 4:3, and similarly in 1 Thess.
3:5), so in conclusion we have many different names of Satan which different
meanings to show us what he is capable of doing. As I think more about this Paul called him “the
angel of light,” in 2 Corinthians 11:14 “No wonder, for even Satan disguises
himself as an angel of light.”
With
all of the names and all of the history of Satan found in the Word of God it is
a shame that many do not believe that there even is a devil. I mentioned in an earlier SD how I was witnessing
to a man I use to work with, and this was a very long time ago when I did this,
and he told me if you add an “o” to God you get “good,” and if you take the “d”
away from the “devil” you get “evil.” I
think this is kind of typical in our world today. There is another story about the devil that is
from Martin Luther where he was so upset with the devil that he threw an ink
bottle at him and the stain can still be seen today in his office in
Germany. Yes the devil is real and yes
he hates Israel, and he hates Christians, and yes he hates Jesus Christ. It was Satan’s purpose to disrupt the plan of
God which He was working out through Jesus Christ and he tried many different
times while Jesus was on the earth in His incarnation, but he never succeeded
and will never succeed as we know that his place will be in the lake of fire as
the later chapters of Revelation talk about his eternal fate.
Jesus
is known as the second Adam and of course that means that Adam the man that God
created was the first Adam. Satan meet
the first Adam in the garden where all was perfect, and he caused him to
fall. Satan not now meets the second
Adam, Jesus Christ, in the wilderness where things certainly were not perfect
and he will fail in causing Him to fall.
That could never happen, but that does not mean that our Lord went
through some horrible temptations, temptations that He could never fall to
because He is God. Lord willing we will
begin our next SD talking a bit more about Christ’s temptations.
2/2/2020 10:39 PM
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