The Sermon On The Mount - pre-sermon encounter with Satan
Posted by Melody on November 24th, 2008
Before Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount (herinafter referred to as SOM) he had a few other things to say which are recorded in the Bible. I know that Jesus said many things that are not recorded but if something is I think there is just cause to take those statements seriously and seek to understand why they were included.
In Matthew 4:4 Jesus responds to ‘the tempter’s’ rather sarcastic enticement of Him to show that He (Jesus) was God by inviting Him to turn stones into bread. We are told that Jesus was hungry - 40 days and nights without food, yeah! - but I think that the greater temptation for Jesus might have been to do it just to make Satan shut-up. Jesus gives in to neither temptation but instead says this, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every ‘Word’ that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” So I got to thinking about this verse more deeply than I have before and the word ‘Word’ grabbed my attention. Up to this point Jesus has not revealed to any person that He IS God, so what ‘Word’ is He actually talking about? Besides, why would Satan care anyway? I keep thinking of the verse, I John 1:1, “In the beginning was the ‘Word’ and the ‘Word’ was with God and the ‘Word’ was God.” So if Jesus was God and the ‘Word’ was God, then Jesus was the ‘Word’.
But back to the “…Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” This is a quote from Deuteronomy 8:3. At this point the children of Israel (Jews) have just finished a 40 year stint wandering in the desert eating manna from heaven with a quail bird once a week for Sabbath and are on the edge of, and about to enter the ‘promised land’. Fleshing out this statement Moses says, “And He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know…that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.” Since the book of Deuteronomy is considered to be the “second law” (because they very successfully forgot the first one) it seems to me that Jesus is very much about the law from the standpoint that among His first recorded words on this earth are words from this book. Since Jesus quotes repeatedly from the Old Testament I think that it is imperative to look at the context of His quotes in order to aid in the understanding of what He is about. I think at this point that we could accept that the book of Deuteronomy, and indeed, the rest of the law fround in the OT are the ‘Word’ of God. In fact Jesus says right in the beginning of the SOM, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.” (Matt. 5:17). Though we live in the ‘age of grace’ having Jesus as our advocate with the Father, and no longer needing to bring a blood sacrifice for the cleansing of our sin, the law does not cease to exist or have application for us today.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Sure… I don’t think that there are many people who would deny this. But the question is not whether or not the OT has any application for us today, but instead the question is what IS the application that it has for us today.
I am pretty sure (I think) that you would not say that we are under all OT law, right?
November 24th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
It is a bit of a mystery. Having said that, we need to look at the overall practice of NT Christians, and other things Jesus says. It’s clear that the ten commandments, the “11th commandment”, and so on, are the minimum standard to which we should adhere. Then there are those comments Jesus makes about the law in other places…. I think this is a very interesting area to explore.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Dave, while we are not under OT law because of grace, two of the primary purposes of the law were to demonstrate man’s sinfulness and also the complete impossibility of man’s ability to keep the law. There has not been one person born who could ever keep the whole law and we are told that if we stumble in even one aspect of the law we are guilty of breaking the whole law (see James 2:10). But on the other hand, the law was given for our good. One aspect of the law I think of is the command for handwashing by priests prior to eating. At the time the command was given, there was no knowledge of bacteria and the spread of food borne illness, but God knew. Why didn’t God tell them the why? Imagine how if they had only known, maybe they wouldn’t have made a spiritual ritual out of it through which they thought of themselves as super-righteous. But God just wanted obedient hearts. Or how about the sexual restraints he put on them? They didn’t know about venerial diseases, yet God required sexual purity of them, thus sparing them both the spread of disease as well as heartbreak. Would you advocate no longer washing hands before a meal? I’ll just bet you will enjoy teaching your little one how to wash hands properly before eating and will go ballistic the first time you catch her eating dirt (experienced mother speaking here). You will also likely teach her about the importance of sexual purity before marriage because you know how special that precious act was between you and your wife as first timers and you desire that same exclusivity and joy for her. Again, God knew, but what He was really after was obedient hearts.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Really? So you think that the underlying premise of the purity laws were to make sure that the Priests were sanitary and the Israelites didn’t STDs?
That is a HUGE stretch, and there is really nothing, either Biblically or historically, that would support this assertion.
November 26th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Dave, read it again. “…two of the primary purposes of the law were to demonstrate man’s sinfulness and also the complete impossibility of man’s ability to keep the law”. This is the assertion. Stopping disease was certainly a by-product only later discovered. You seem to have missed the point. If obedience to God is not the point, then what is?
November 26th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I agree with you that obedience is key.
Which is why I really don’t get why you then went on to talk about stopping diseases in connection to OT law. The first part of your comment was correct, but the rest of the comment was way off, in that it has no Biblical or historical support.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Dave, Melody is saying that those good things are a result of obedience to God’s law, not precisely the only reason for it, and so she conjectures about it. She is not saying that the scripture says, “you shall obey my laws so you will have good public health”, although in fact there are some scriptures that connect obedience to the law with long life and health.
But it is no more of a “stretch” to conjecture as she has than to conjecture that “Thou shalt not murder” was intended to keep people from dying unjustly, that is, it was as much about the result of the evil act as it was about the evil act itself. Yet, there really isn’t a scripture that says that, precisely. It is simply a reasonable inference, as is Melody’s.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
And there are some laws, especially ritual purity laws that seem to have no particular connection to any external outcome, of course. But that doesn’t make it foolish to point out that people who follow God’s laws will tend to have less trouble in certain aspects of their lives than people who don’t, on sheerly pragmatic grounds. And there are specific warnings in many places about specific outcomes of not following God’s laws, indicating a certain cause/effect intent for some of them, again supporting Melody’s conjecture.