Hungry in the Empty Desert

The river water had hardly dried in Jesus' hair when the Spirit of God led him out into the desert.

It was a hard, empty country of rock and hot sand, with jackals yelping at night and wild animals for neighbors. Jesus stayed there forty days and forty nights, and he ate nothing. (Forty days is almost six weeks. Try counting forty breakfasts, forty lunches, and forty suppers, then picture eating none of them.)

At the end of it he was very hungry. That was when the devil came, the enemy of God whose other name is Satan.

He came with a friendly voice and a sensible-sounding idea. He pointed at the stones lying all around, round and brown like loaves fresh from the oven.

"If you are the Son of God," he said, "tell these stones to become bread."

If. Six weeks earlier, at the river, the Father had said, "This is my Son." The devil wanted Jesus to stop resting on that and start proving it.

Jesus was hungry enough to do it, and he had the power to do it. Instead he said, "It is written: People do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God."

So the devil tried again. He took Jesus to Jerusalem and stood him on the highest point of the temple, so high that the people below looked like ants.

"If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down," he said. "It is written that God will send his angels, and they will lift you up in their hands so you won't even hit your foot against a stone." (The devil knows the Bible well enough to quote it. He just bends it to mean what God never meant.)

"It is also written," said Jesus, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."

Then the devil took him up a very high mountain and showed him every kingdom in the world at once: palaces and armies, gold and crowns, ships. "All of this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me."

"Away from me, Satan!" said Jesus. "It is written: Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only."

The devil left him. Then angels came and took care of Jesus.

Every answer Jesus gave came from words Moses spoke to God's people at the end of their forty years in the desert. Those people had been hungry too. God fed them bread from the sky every morning, and still they grumbled, and tested him, and bowed down to a golden calf. Before them, in a garden full of good fruit, Adam and Eve had listened to the same smooth voice and reached for the one thing God said no to.

Now Jesus stood where all of them had fallen, hungry in a desert instead of full in a garden, and he trusted his Father. But Luke says the devil only went away until a better time came. Jesus' road ran on to a cross outside Jerusalem, and people walking past shouted the devil's old word up at him: "If you are the Son of God, come down!" He could have. He stayed, trusting his Father to the end, and he died there.

On the third day he rose from the dead. Then, on another mountain, he met his friends and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." Every kingdom the devil had offered him for one bow, his Father gave him by the long road through the cross.