Satanic
Attack on the Seed; Matthew 4:1-5
In Genesis 3:1 said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not
eat from any tree of the garden’?” In this attack Satan not only questions the
message of God in Genesis chapter two, it questions His motive and the
prohibition to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
By stating this question the way he has Satan doesn’t have a frontal assault on
the character or integrity of God but he is implying that, he is suggesting
that there is something insufficient about God’s provision. Not only that but
what God said was not really true, so he questions the integrity of God by
saying to the woman that she won’t die. In 3:5 he questions God’s motive and
suggests that He is restricting something good so that man can’t have it. We
know what happened then. The result of the temptation was what we call the fall
of the human race into sin.
The result of the fall was that man loses his position as the king of
the earth. Satan then has usurped that position and he is given titles in
Scripture such as the prince of the power of the air in Ephesians 2:2, the god
of this age in 2 Corinthians 4:4, and the ruler of this world in John 12:31;
16:11. So what happens in this insidious temptation of the woman is a direct
assault on the position of man over the kingdom, and assault on the provision
of God in terms of His grace, and his questioning of God’s integrity,
especially in terms of His plan. So after the fall there is a warning by God,
the announcement of judgment upon the man and the woman, but first of all on
the serpent. And that is the most significant statement made in Genesis 3:15.
As God addresses the serpent He says: “I will put enmity Between you and the
woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And
you shall bruise him on the heel.” The last three clauses there indicate the
flow of human history, that enmity between Satan’s seed and the seed of the
woman, the emphasis on the seed of the woman as the ultimate solution to the
problem and that there would be this conflict between the two.
There are no more direct assaults on the human race by Satan in the Old Testament,
although there are numerous indirect assaults. The next time we see a direct
attack of Satan in human history comes at the inception of the ministry of
Jesus Christ when he is inaugurated into His public ministry.
What we see in the temptations of Christ is a reflection, a mirror image
of the temptation strategy in the garden. It is important to have in the back
of our minds two things. First there is the context of what happens in the flow
of the life of Christ—the baptism by John the Baptist, the leading of the Holy
Spirit into the wilderness, followed by the temptation. The other context has
tom do with understanding the plan of God in terms of the incarnation, what
Jesus Christ is doing in terms of demonstrating His qualifications to go to the
cross and also providing a precedent for the spiritual life of the believer in
the church age. We have to look at the context otherwise the implications of
what is happening here will not be as evident to us. What is interesting is
that as we go through these passages we will see various things that are
emphasised that tie these things together and help us to understand what is
happening here.
Matthew13 NASB Then Jesus arrived from
Now it is time for the Messiah to appear. The forerunner has appeared
and in view of Old Testament prophecy he has announced that the Messiah is
about to come, that the
Philippians 2:5, Paul gives a mandate based on the Greek word phroneo [fronew] meaning to think
a certain way, have a certain mental attitude, a certain mindset. NASB
“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,
The attack in the garden was on the sufficiency of God’s grace, the
sufficiency of His Word, and the integrity of His plan. Satan and then the
woman and the man question and challenge by their actions the integrity of
God’s plan. Jesus in contrast humbles Himself—grace orientation and authority
orientation—and becomes obedient to the plan of God, even the death on the
cross. What is the result? He is obedient and in His humility to recognition of
the proper sphere of authority over Him, even though it cost Him so much, in
that act of obedience it leads to His eternal exaltation and glorification. [9]
“For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name
which is above every name,
There has been a lot of debate over what the word “kenosis” means.
Liberals came along and said that what it means is He gave up His deity. That
is not true, he doesn’t give up His deity. Others more orthodox have defined
kenosis as the fact that the Son “limits the independent use of His
attributes.” We read that in the books of any number of theologians, yet there
is a problem with that definition. The problem is the word “independent” and
the reason is because as the second person of the Trinity He never used His
attributes independently of the Father. That is not the issue. Jesus in His
humanity is going to be obedient to the plan of God and not rely on His divine
attributes, His divine power, His own omnipotence and omniscience, to solve
problems in His humanity. His purpose in the incarnation is to live out His
human life in dependence upon God, demonstrating that a human being—in contrast
to Adam—living Hs life in orientation to God’s plan and in orientation to God’s
provision can live sufficiently and have happiness and meaning and significance
in life, that H doesn’t need to rely upon His deity to solve His problems; He
can do it on the grace of God and on the Word of God. What He demonstrated in
His life in the incarnation is that the Word of God and the grace provision of
God—and specifically that involves the indwelling and filling of the Holy
Spirit in the incarnation—was sufficient to handle any problem. He did not need
to rely on His deity to do it.
The point of the temptation is almost as if he had this wall that He
generates between His divine attributes and His human attributes so that he is
willing limiting access to His divine power, omniscience, so that he is going
to handle these problems from His humanity in total dependence upon God. This
is what we see in Hebrews 2:8ff., a quote from Psalm 8: “WHAT IS MAN, THAT
YOU REMEMBER HIM? OR THE SON OF MAN, THAT YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT HIM?
God the Father mad the “author of their salvation,” i.e. the Lord Jesus
Christ, complete through sufferings. He took Him through a process of adversity
in order to exhibit what was going on in His soul, i.e. the Lord Jesus Christ
was not relying upon His deity to solve His problems, He is relying on the
provision of God. We have that same provision: the same sufficient Word of God,
the same sufficient grace of God, the same righteous plan of God that is
perfect in every single way. And if we learn what God has provided for us in
terms of His grace provision, and if we learn His Word and His plan and rely
upon that, and we fit within that in terms of humility, then the ultimate
result of that is our glorification and praise for us at the judgment seat of
Christ. But when we try to solve our problems on our own in terms of our
limited resources, our limited knowledge, when we reject the sufficiency of His
grace and the sufficient of His Word, then the result may be temporal
glorification, temporal stabilities, a measure of temporal happiness or
pleasure, but there is no eternal glory to God.
So Jesus sets that pattern and He establishes His credentials for this
initially at the temptation. This is to establish His credentials at the
beginning of His ministry and He passes that test. Jesus in His humanity has
real success only because he completely subordinates His will to the will of
the Father.