BibleProject - Jesus Passes the Wilderness Test

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

The Wilderness E9 — After Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit leads him into the wilderness to be tested for 40 days. The exodus generation spent 40 years in the wilderness, so we’d be right to expect parallels with their experience. But why does Jesus need to go through this wilderness test? And what does it mean for his followers? In this episode, Jon and Tim look at Jesus’ three wilderness tests, discovering the long-awaited faithful human who is ready to enter the garden land.CHAPTERSRecap of Theme and Setup for Jesus in the Wilderness (0:00-16:59)Final Thoughts on Baptism and Intro to Wilderness Tests (16:59-39:29)Jesus’ Wilderness Tests (39:29-1:01:46)OFFICIAL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTView this episode’s official transcript.REFERENCED RESOURCESJesus on the Mountain: A Study in Matthean Theology by Terence DonaldsonThe Gospel according to Matthew: A Commentary by Matthias KonradtYou can view annotations for this episode—plus our entire library of videos, podcasts, articles, and classes—in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.Check out Tim’s extensive collection of recommended books here.SHOW MUSIC“Heaven Is Home” by Lofi Sunday, Zairis TéJion“Fellowship” by Lofi Sunday, Cassidy GodwinBibleProject theme song by TENTSSHOW CREDITSProduction of today’s episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer, and Cooper Peltz, managing producer. Tyler Bailey is our supervising engineer, who also edited today’s episode and provided the sound design and mix. JB Witty does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Our host and creative director is Jon Collins, and our lead scholar is Tim Mackie. Powered and distributed by Simplecast. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The wilderness is a place of struggle and turmoil. It's a season that's dangerous and lifeless. The wilderness is the reality that we're not home yet. In the story of the Bible, God meets his people in the wilderness. And in his creative generosity, he uses the tragedy of the wilderness as an opportunity to prepare us for future garden life. The whole goal is to transform youth. through the hardships of the wilderness

into the kinds of people who can truly inhabit the garden and not replay the failures of our ancestors. This brings us to the story of Jesus. In our last episode, we saw how Jesus in the wilderness was baptized as an act of repentance. When Jesus has nothing to repent of, but he joins us in our repentance,

because on our own, we can't repent and turn to God, but Jesus can. And from heaven, God declared that Jesus is his, His divine son and whom he's well-pleased. He was marked out in his baptism as the one who's ready. Jesus is called to live out in his own experience, the sonship that should have characterized Israel. After this, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tested.

Jesus doesn't eat or drink for 40 days, and then the Satan shows up with three tests. Each test linking back to the ways Israel was tested in the wilderness. And where Israel failed, Jesus succeeds. Jesus trusts that God will provide for his daily needs. He also chooses not to force his father's hand. He also trusts that God will fulfill his destiny as the divine son to become the ruler of the world. Now, Jesus is inviting us to join him so we too can pass the test in the wilderness.

Jesus wants his followers to see that through baptism you become a part of the the father, son, spirit, community. And that now changes my position in these wilderness moments of my life. I might succeed, I might fail, but Jesus becomes the image into which God is making me. Today, Tim Mackey and I look at Jesus as our guide and salvation as we travel through the wilderness. Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Hey, Tim. Hello, John Collins. Hello. We're talking wilderness.

Yes, we are. We're in it. We're in the wilderness. Yeah. Actually, we're not. We're in the opposite right now. You and me? Yes.

You mean like we're in a climate, like, controlled little room that we just cooled down. Yeah. Because it's a warm summer day here in Portland. And you've got a water bottle next to you. I've got a bottle full of water. Yeah. I had a good breakfast. There's some snacks outside.

Yeah. We're good. And that's not like the wilderness. That's true. anywhere, and especially in the Bible. But we are in the wilderness of life. Oh, okay, but in another sense, we are outside of Eden. We are outside of Eden.

And we're dying out here. Yeah. Yeah, and there's a lot of scarcity. I cut my finger open last night. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Trying to manage the growth in your yard. Yeah.

Right? That's what you told me. Totally. Yeah. So in that sense, we are in the wilderness, a cosmic kind of wilderness. It's very much a wilderness outside past the atmosphere the little blanket

surrounding our planet that's kind of wilderness out there This is an observation that I think I made recently I want to make it again just hear your thoughts on it one more time the wilderness you could think of it in terms of different levels of scale

so there's the cosmic wilderness there's the fact that we are on a journey to new creation and so all of this is not as it should be and will be recreated and made new. So we will enter the land of promise, all of creation will. Big epic cosmic wilderness.

Yes. That's multi-generational, centuries long, millennial long. It's the arc of the universe. The arc of the cosmos. Yeah. Yeah. It's on the way to the promised land currently in the wilderness. Then you could take a step down from that and think, well, what about just my life?

My entire life, from being born to when I die, is one long journey through the wilderness because my moment in this story is during that time where things are still in the wilderness. So I can think of my life as a wilderness journey. But then I think you could take a step down from that and you can just consider just moments of testing. A season of life. A season of life. Or that week in life or that month or that, yeah, it could be a year. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But it's that moment where just the volumes turned up on the fact that, man, I am not in control, things are happening to me. I don't have what I need. Yeah. I feel at the end of myself, this is a moment of wilderness. Because there's sometimes in life where things feel good. And wilderness is not far, but it's not in the thick of it. Yeah, sure. Thanks for that scale. Cosmic, whole human life.

and then individual season or period of time in human life. And maybe those two about humans, you could also scale to a community. A community's whole life cycle or a moment in a community's life. So we have this variety of images in the Bible. The wilderness, along with the chaos waters, is a primary image of the pre-creation nothingness, the blank canvas of nothingness and out of that God plants a garden and then when the humans

show themselves that they're not ready to be in the garden that was a whole conversation that we had in this series that their choices and the consequences they're enforced by God usher them back into the wilderness but it's a slow motion decomposition back into nothingness

that is a return to the dust. And so these images of the hostility of the ground towards you produces thorns and thistles, the danger of the hostile creatures out in the wilderness, the jackals and the ostriches, lions, and so on. Coyotes? Yeah. But this big question then of the wilderness is it permanent?

And it's clear that God's purpose is not that it remained permanent. Right. He wants to restore people to. the life and goodness of the garden. But if they're not ready for it, then what the wilderness then represents is this long or short, however long, transition period of preparation, of testing. But the whole goal is to transform you through the hardships of the wilderness into the kinds of people who can truly inhabit the garden and not replay the failures of our ancestors.

Is that the main idea? Well, you had a line earlier on. I mean, this is now a while ago, this is we started, but it's about we're not ready to be in the garden. There's a direct route to the garden, but we're not ready. We're not ready for it. And you can show that you're not ready to be in the garden while you're in the garden. Yeah.

Or you can show you're not ready to enter into the garden while you're undergoing the hardship of the wilderness. and both of those paradigms get explored in the biblical story. Yeah, and so I think through these three levels really quick, we want to get into Jesus. Yeah, cosmic? Yeah. Let's start down from the bottom, though, because I can understand that there's seasons in life

where maybe I'm not ready to receive the good gift, that whatever that is. God has something in store for me and my family or my community, and we're just not ready yet. And there's going to be a season, but then there's going to be a season of like, we're ready, we're doing it. and you can kind of feel that in the life cycle of a community.

Yeah, I can think of moments just from my own life where there's an experience that I ended up having, I don't know, whatever, in my 30s. And then I try to think like, how would my 22-year-old self have experienced this? And I found myself, when retelling things like that in life, I'll be to say, man, I wouldn't have been ready for that. Yeah.

I wouldn't have even known what to do with that opportunity. Right. It probably would have ruined me if I hadn't had these other experiences that came in between. And that's an insight that landed for me, which was when you're in abundance, when you're in the land of promise in that good season, and you're not prepared to know that every good gift comes from God and this isn't because of you, like, you're setting yourself up for failure. Yeah, totally. You've got to be ready. But then when you get to a cosmic level, this is where it starts to spin my brain a little bit. Like, in what sense?

Yeah. Is the cosmos not ready? Is the cosmos not ready? And that's too big of a question probably for us to answer. Yeah. The wilderness is primarily focused on the human drama, the human divine partnership drama. That's really at the core of the biblical story, which has huge implications for the created environment, that humans inhabit. But there's this intimate connection between the status of,

God's partners, human partners, and the well-being in the status or the future of our created environment. So when Paul talks about the liberation of creation from slavery to decay and ruin, its freedom is bound up with the freedom of the human images of God and their resurrection from the dead, which will coincide with the renewal of creation. So if the renewal is connected, then also somehow the... I mean, well, gosh, how many rabbit holes do we want to go to it right now? I don't know. We are in a season both cosmically where the energy and order that creates these islands of life.

Right now we know of one of them. We're on it, the flying space rock. But, you know, what biological life is in the words of Michael Green or entropy waystations, Yeah. We're just slowing down the decomposition of matter in these little deposits of order called our bodies and biological life and self, right? Yeah. But it's all... You're talking about the second law thermodynamics.

Yeah. We're all dying. It's all going to get more and more disorganized. And for a moment, we're experiencing a lot of order, but that's the entropy way station. It's the moment of, let's create a lot of order, but then actually this is all going to... Yeah, instead of all my atoms, just, yeah, never integrating, they integrate into these forms, right? Yeah. And I'm sorry.

It's got really, yeah, geeky. Yeah, but I guess the point is, that's our modern way of talking about God's lament about the humans outside in the wilderness outside of Eden, which is from dust you came, and now, because of your folly, to dust you over, the dust. will reclaim you. The wilderness dust will suck you back in. So the land of promise, ultimately, is creation in which we don't have to disintegrate back into the dust. Yeah, where God will sustain the life and order of what he's made in a way that's connected to his infinite power and love. And we're not ready for that. Yes, it's too much. That's what God says. And now the human has become like one of us, knowing good and bad. And so

that they don't send out their hand and take also from the tree of life and eat it and live forever, dot, dot, dot. They're not ready. And he banished them from the garden. This feels so startling and significant to me that I just want to think about it. We're not ready for heaven.

On earth. Yeah, on earth. That is the new creation. Yeah. But then also, Jesus says it's here, it's happening. Yeah, that's the surprise gift of the arrival of God's kingdom. And so we have And we're not ready for that.

We're not even ready for that. I mean, gosh, Jesus' followers clearly haven't been ready for that. For 2,000 years, we've been, like, making a mess of it. Man, that frame brings so much sense, well, so much intrigue and so much sense, we're not ready. We're not ready for new creation. We're not even ready for the new creation acts that God's doing now in our lives. We're just not ready. Yeah.

What would it take to be ready? What does it take to be ready? What does it take to be ready? Okay. We're going to get into talking about Jesus here. and Jesus is going to go into the wilderness and he's going to pass the test. After he was marked out in his baptism

as the one who's ready. He's the one who's ready. And then he's going to show us what does it look like to be in the wilderness and for the wilderness to not push you further away from God but actually create that union with God because the wilderness is an opportunity to learn to trust God.

listen to his voice, and be prepared to be the kind of people who can enter a land of promise. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. After our little cosmological rabbit hole, you're bringing us back. We've been tracing in this series all the different, if the meaning of the wilderness is what we talked about in a not very succinct way. To get ready? How do people end up in the wilderness? We've been tracing that. There's all these case studies through their own folly. Adam and Eve. Abraham and Sarah's folly push something. someone else into the wilderness, Hegar, Pharaoh's fear and murderous folly creates actually a wilderness-type environment in the Garden of Egypt. And God confronts him and liberates them,

and then God leads the freed people out into the wilderness to get them ready. Yeah. How do we end up in the wilderness? It's our folly or someone else's folly. Yeah. But why would God lead us into the wilderness? Oh, yeah. Why would God allow us to stay in the wilderness. Yeah. Why wouldn't God just say, take us the direct route? The direct route.

Yeah. And that was that little paragraph in Exodus 13. I love it. I was ready to like quickly discuss that paragraph and you were like, wait a minute, there's something here for me. And it's this right here. Yes.

Why not the direct route? Why not the direct route? And then you think, cool, it's a meditation about how the wilderness is supposed to prepare me for the land of promise. But what's so frustrating is that it doesn't have that effect. Yeah, that's right. Yep, in the Hebrew Bible, all these wilderness stories usually end poorly for the people involved.

And so there's all these stories, and we went through them. And in those stories, we get lines that Jesus is going to quote here as he passes the test. Yeah, that's right. And so let's get into it. Great. But I think the big meta question for me, and maybe we don't answer this episode, but which is like, then what is the purpose of the wilderness for my life? just to teach me that I'm not ready, or is it really to make me ready?

And in what way can it help me get ready if these stories of God's people is that it doesn't? Or it didn't. Or it didn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. That's a great setup. In this last conversation,

we looked at John the Baptist in the wilderness and then the baptism of Jesus. We're going to look now at Jesus' own wilderness sojourn. I just want to highlight one last thing in the baptism. that's an important background for the wilderness test. We kind of talked about it, but since we had this conversation, I wanted to make sure that we really landed on it.

Because these two stories, Gia's the baptism and the wilderness, are linked together by some really key ideas. I just want to make those explicit. So first the baptism, then to the wilderness. So recall in Matthew's account of the Matthew's account of the baptism that we read in Matthew chapter 3. Matthew's version is the only one where he preserves the memory of John the baptizer, John the Immerser, preventing Jesus, saying, like, no, no, no, no,

like, you don't need to get purified through these waters of repentance. I need to, by you. And Jesus says, no, no, no, this is appropriate in order to fulfill all doing right. So we talked about this. Fulfill all righteousness. Yeah, to fulfill all righteousness. So Israel has failed to do right by God throughout its covenant history. That's the background of this little line.

Okay. And Jesus is going to say later, I'm here to fulfill the Torah and the prophets, which is all about God's covenant partnership with Israel that's itself enfolded within God's partnership with all of humanity. So Jesus is here to fulfill doing right by God in a way that his people have not. That's why John's calling everybody to come, Israelites, to come, repent and turn around at the Jordan, where they first entered the land under Joshua. This is what we talked about. So here, Jesus is identifying himself

by going through these waters of saying, we're sorry to God. He's identifying himself with the failure of his people to do right by God. But then, the moment he identifies himself with Israel's failure, his father cracks open the skies. And you're like, his father?

Yes, that's what Matthew 1 and 2 we're all about, that he is conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, he is the divine son of God, become human. And that true identity of Jesus, that's already true of him, but that we don't know how many people Mary ever shared this with, it now becomes like a public announcement. And so the spirit of God descends in the form of the dove, and you have this amazing proto-trinity image right here of the father conveying his love and message of love to the son through the person of the spirit. And so Jesus is marked out as my son. That's what God says, my beloved one, in him I have delight. So we are already learning that Jesus is the

divine son become human. But yet, he's willing to set aside that divine cosmic authority and identify himself with corruptible, like, fickle, failed humans in their projects. Yeah. There's no reason he had to do the baptism. Yeah, that's right. And then there's no reason he has to go into wilderness to be tested. Yeah, that's right. Like, he's not the kind of person who needs wilderness or should be in the wilderness. Yeah. And this moment with John is then highlighting, like, you don't belong in these waters. Yeah. And so that theme right there, if you are the divine son become human.

He doesn't need to get ready. He doesn't need to get ready. But yet Jesus is like, no, no, no, I need to go through the experience that my family has gone through to get ready. To fill full all doing right. The rightness. So, in other words, what Jesus is about to go through in the wilderness is also a continuing of what he was already beginning as he stepped into those waters.

He didn't need to, but he is doing it to identify with, to do right by the people to whom God has made a covenant. And is the punchline then he's doing it, not just to identify with us, but we can also identify with him. Yes. And then we can then go through it as well.

You got it. You got it. And so his identity as the sun is, there's this tension between then his identity with his covenant human partners. Somehow he's the divine covenant initiator and he's the human covenant receiver in one person. That's what this narrative is trying to explore and the wilderness story is exploring that too. Okay, onto the wilderness.

I'll let you read this is Matthew 4, 1 through 4. It's the first test. then Jesus was led into the wilderness by the spirit to be tested by the slanderer the devil often out's translated okay that's right diabolos diabolos means the slanderer yeah yeah

just like the Satan doesn't mean oh it's not a name it means the adversary yep devil means slander okay and having fasted 40 days and 40 nights he's been out there for a while afterwards he was hungry and approaching the tester

said to him that's a new title for the slanderer and that's kind of a puzzle because you were just told Jesus was led into the wilderness by the spirit to be tested so in a way is the spirit testing him the spirit of the father sent to the son is one initiating this test

or putting Jesus in the environment where he will be tested yeah But then there's the one doing the testing. That's very interesting. Something happening here. Yeah. Okay. God will allow you into the wilderness.

But it doesn't mean every voice you encounter there. And every, like, bad thing is like God doing it. It's, there could be another energy there. Yeah. And notice where the voice of the tester focuses. Okay. So the tester said to him, if you are the son of God. speak so that these stones become loaves of bread

okay if you really are the son of God meaning what does I mean you're the son of God this is the divine like this is the so that's what the literally the previous paragraph you are my son I love you

in you I have delight we just haven't done the Son of God theme video yet yeah oh sure yeah we will It means... Well. Well. Can you summarize what would be ten hours of conversation and just one sentence, please? It means a lot of things.

Okay, it means a lot of things. Because it is the title that is used for individuals. It's used for groups of people. It's used for spiritual beings. And it's used for one unique spiritual being who is walking. with the Divine Father. All those meanings are in the same Bible. And sorting out how they relate to each other is...

Okay. And which meaning is the tester, the slanderer here? Well, that final one, but also echoing the fact that the people of Israel, God's covenant partners, are also called the Son of God in the Old Testament. But if you're the one who is going to bring them into that because of your kind of special status... If you are the beloved son... Yeah. A father would not withhold. Yeah, you haven't eaten for 40 days.

Yeah. Like, why don't you create a meal for yourself? Yeah, in a way, what the tester is saying here is like what John said, just in the previous paragraph. This is not appropriate for you to be here in a place that's usually reserved for people who make stupid decisions and end up in the wilderness because... You don't need the baptism. You don't need to go through the waters of repentance. You don't, and then you don't need to fast. What are you learning from fasting?

Right. You're the son of God. Yeah, have a feast. You're... For goodness sakes, make some bread. If your words spun the cosmos into being, what are you doing out here starving? Yeah.

That makes no sense at all. It's not appropriate. Hmm. That's what John says to him. That's really fascinating. Isn't, yeah. No, this is super important. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's go back. John said, I need to be immersed by you. Thinking of this analogy between the baptism and the wilderness, this would be like John saying, I should be out here starving. I should be fasting. The stupid decisions I've made. You make some bread out of rocks.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. If you are the beloved, delighted in son, divine son of the divine father, what on earth is you doing out here? So this is a test for Jesus because he, is meant to go through with us. So it wouldn't be wrong for Jesus to do a miracle to make some

bread. No, in fact, he's going to do it. He's going to do it. A couple times over later on in the same gospel account. But he's in the wilderness for a purpose. You're connecting it to the baptism to fulfill all the righteousness. The doing right. The right stuff that we are meant to do. There's some way to do right by God that has yet to be fulfilled. by this family. And so he's in the wilderness, filling it full, and the Satan, or sorry, the slanderer comes out

and says, like, what are you doing? You don't need to do it. Yeah. Okay, and that's the test. That's right. Yeah, that's the test. So a couple of thoughts. One, I've learned a lot about this story

from lots of people over the years. One was actually someone, a scholar I quoted from in our study on the mountain, Terence Donaldson published an academic work many years ago about the mountain theme in the Gospel of Matthew and so he focuses on the third test that's to come which takes place on a mountain but the first one's in the wilderness he puts it this way

he says the heart of the temptation is found in this attempt to induce Jesus to compel him to be unfaithful to the pattern of sunship that is conceived of in terms of of the relationship between the ideal Israel and the divine father. So Jesus isn't Israelite.

I'm just me now interrupting. Jesus is an Israelite, born into this right family, and he is offering himself in terms of the ideal fulfilled version of what Israel could have been in the one-ness. So he continues, this is a temptation away from sonship. Jesus is called to live out in his own experience, the sonship that should have characterized Israel and the relationship with God that involves, one, dependence on him for provision of need, two, he's outlining the three tests here. So the first one is dependence, this about food.

Second one is about trust in God's presence and protection without the need to demonstrate it. Throw yourself off the temple. And third, the acceptance of sovereignty, but only on the father's terms. That is the bow down and worship me, the tempter says, and I'll give you rule over the nations. So this first one is about dependence on God to give you what you need in God's time and way. And this is the one we've been focusing on is in the wilderness. In the wilderness. God's preparing us to believe I will get what I need.

Even when I run into what is a plague, God will heal. There will be enough. I can learn to just trust and listen to God's instruction and find the good in the wilderness. Yeah, think of the story. It's one Adam and Eve at the tree. There it's we're surrounded by food. But there's one tree that seems to be the key

to something that I'm going to need, which is wisdom. And why would God withhold that? So it's really not about, will God provide me food? will God provide me wisdom to transcend my like

dependence on him for food to graduate? And wisdom will help me know how to deal with food and a whole lot more. And a whole lot more. Yeah. Yeah. With Abraham and Sarah, it's will God provide us

the child that he promised us? For Pharaoh, it's will God provide order and stability and abundance in my community when there's this thriving immigrant community that intimidates me, that's Pharaoh's, right?

David, will God protect my honor in this long period of waiting to become the king of Israel? Especially when there's a guy named Malicious Idiot who is dishonoring me. So it's about what do I think that I need and how am I going to get that? Yeah. It's good to connect it to that.

It's also good for me to remember. that food insecurity is a big cause of a lot of poor decisions that we make and a lot of strife. Not in my life. I just haven't had to deal with that. But throughout human history, that has been a big thing. But this is much more than just food, but it's a way in. So make these tones into bread. And then so Jesus responds, it has been written, not by bread alone does humanity live, but by every word that comes out of God's mouth. Yeah. Out from God's mouth. Yeah. from there's a word that God speaks and that's actually the true that's a nourishment I need life of humanity yeah now he's putting this in a stark

way well actually these aren't even his words he's quoting right from the Torah yeah but the contrast isn't to say that bread doesn't keep our bodies alive of course it does but it's saying by this contrast there is underneath the bread there's a deeper of life that even makes the bread that we live by because you eat bread and then you get hungry again yeah poop it out gives you energy for a time but what is it that sustains the human life throughout the whole of the human life and even beyond what bread is capable of producing what sustains my life what even makes bread possible in the first place yeah and then it's that thing it's the word of god yeah that then not only is sustaining life and making

making life possible, but it is the word that gives instruction of how do I interact with all of this. Yes. So, Jesus is quoting from Moses' words to Israel from Deuteronomy chapter 8. We spent a whole episode reading this very chapter of the Torah and meditating on it. The word of God is what in the Torah weaves the whole cosmos into being with all the trees and the flowering fruit and so on. And so somehow this hunger to too quickly meet his own needs, physical needs, in his own time and in his own way, would be, because remember he was led here by the Spirit, the Father sent. So at the baptism, Father communicated love. Then Jesus becomes aware through the Spirit of the Father that there is, I'm going to leave that a little river oasis.

and go out into the desert and now it's a time to be without and to trust and so for Jesus to meet his own needs would be the equivalent of the taking of the fruit

yeah which is interesting garden but now he's in the opposite of a garden so he's like a new Adam and Eve in the sense that he's just in the opposite of a garden and this is about withholding food instead of taking food

right Jesus could go the direct route God leads him into the wilderness he is there to identify with us so that we can learn to identify with him. That's his role. And to decide, yeah, I guess I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to bypass this. Yeah.

Would be taking what's good on terms. It's not the father's terms. Yeah, yeah. And so then he quotes from the story in the Torah where Israel is in the wilderness. 40 years. For 40 years. like he's in the worst 40 days

and they are given bread from the sky and the point of that story is just gather what you need today I'm going to prepare you to be the kind of people who can just trust me day by day. And then that's the context for this line.

Yeah, literally the words before Jesus quotes from them is Deuteronomy 8, verse 3 there's Moses saying to Israel our God, he humbled you, allowing you to go hungry, then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers really knew what that even was, in order to teach you that a human doesn't live by bread alone. So that whole thing of being in the

wilderness and having a lack and then having God show up and provide is to teach you that it's God that provides. It's not the bread. Yeah, that's right. Everything in creation in this way of seeing the world that we think is going to provide security and sustain our existence. It's a sign. It's a symbol. It's not actually really the thing that's keeping you alive. You think that we think we're so easily deceived into taking the sign for the reality. Yeah.

And we attach ourselves to these things that we think are the thing that sustained us. Yeah. And the only way, apparently, to retrain a human. is for you to go without the thing that you think you need, which will often lead you to a great desperation, even think you're going to die. Yeah, fasting. That just made me think maybe fasting is such an important spiritual discipline

so that you can practice in kind of like a... Yeah, yeah, it's like training wheels. Training wheels. Because if you get to learn it through just the practice of like looking at a loaf of bread and being like, I think this is what I need today to keep me alive. It's not true. It's not true.

I need something way more, and I'm going to just use this day or a week or whatever to just do that. Then maybe you won't need that season of wilderness in the future. Yeah. I wish it worked that simply. But this is the wisdom of the spiritual formation traditions that go back, deep roots in early Christian history and then Jewish history. I bring the test on myself voluntarily as a way of partnering with God's process of maturing me for the other times of wilderness that I don't bring on myself. You know, what's interesting is the Stoics do a similar thing, but they come to a completely different

conclusion. Oh, they're like, you're sufficient to make it through more than you think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The end meditation isn't, wow. Thankful. for the god of the universe as a good father who wants to take care of me. For the Stokes, it's like, yeah, I can handle that. You know, yeah, I heard this fascinating radio piece about someone here in our city

who does cold plunging in the winter. Yeah. And they were talking about how they went through a terrible season of life. Yeah. A divorce, career, collapsing. It all just life caved in in the course of a year.

And they began cold plunging as a way of teaching themselves how to come into their limits. Yeah. And it's been a really healing. And so I know this because a friend of mine is neighbors with this person and started doing it with them. And it's been transformative for my friend who follows Jesus. And so we have this conversation about how my friends discovered,

the reasons for doing it are totally different, really, in the way that we're talking about right now. But they are both doing it as a part of this group of people who do it regularly. Interesting. That's very fascinating. Yeah. So maybe one other layer here is the Israel called to be God's covenant partners on behalf of all humanity. And now here is the son of God becoming human to be the faithful Israelites on behalf of Israel and on behalf of all humanity.

So in a way, I think that's why we're hearing echoes of both the Garden of Eden, of a food test, but it's inverted, it's in the wilderness, you know, but then also he's replaying the story of Israel. It's like he's filling full both the human story and the Israel story, and I suppose you would blow it out even to the cosmic story. Yeah. No, this is not the only test. There's two more. But this is the one that happens in the wilderness. This is the one specifically located in the wilderness. Although the rest are in the wilderness, they just, like, are also somewhere else. Well, kind of, yeah, his, I guess you'd say his body stays in the wilderness,

but his consciousness soars all over the place. Did you want to go through the rest of them? Well, let's at least touch on them, because, like, good Jewish meditation literature, Matthews composed these three so that they all kind of hyperlink and work together. So the second is the slanderer, we're back to calling the slanderer, took him to the holy city. Jerusalem. Yeah, apparently. That's what it's often called.

And stationed him at the upper tip of the temple. So this could refer to a couple places. It could refer to the temple proper itself at the center. The upper tip, the terugion, could refer to a really high, kind of like arch at the top of it. Point. It could also technically refer this word is used. I have this in the notes, but the word. were technically referred to the temple precinct,

at which case, what do you say, the southeast corner of the pillared colonnade where Jesus runs out the money changers later, the tip of that building, the roof, would have been overlooking not just the building, but the building was up against the corner that was a sheer drop into the valley of Qedron. Okay.

And that would have been a really far drop, too. Oh. So you're talking about the courtyards had a little barrier. The courtyard had a barian wall, and there was a building on one of those corners. I see. And that would have been the farthest drop, and it would have felt like the highest plot. Exactly right. So it could refer to either.

The point is, is that he's positioned at a place where he's overseeing the temple precinct, which is another way of thinking about the heaven on earth spot, the temple. This is all garden imagery there. And the slanderer says to him, once again, if you are the son of God. So it's another disconnect. Yeah. But here it's going to be a little different. If you are the Son of God, you could throw yourself down, which would be intentionally put your life in danger.

And if you were to do that... Which is what the wilderness is doing. Ooh, yeah. Except there he's led by the spirit. So the father puts him into food insecurity. It's not necessarily wrong to be in a place where you're in more danger. That's right, where you're exposed to danger and risk. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. But I guess the question is, what's the difference? Yeah, what's the difference? If you're led by the spirit, if you find yourself in an environment where all of a sudden your dependence on God is being tested and you didn't bring it on yourself. Yeah. I think that's the food and the bread.

Here, it's why don't you intentionally put yourself in a position so that God has to rescue you? Because it has been written, the slanderer quotes, from the Hebrew Bible. He, that is, the Father, God, has commanded his messengers concerning you. So the slanderer reads this Psalm, which is what we call Psalm 91, as being about the Messianic Son of God, being assigned protectors, God's angelic messengers. And they, that is, the angelic messengers, will lift you up in their hands so that you won't even strike your foot against the stone.

Yeah. So if you're the son of God, God's going to protect your life no matter what. Yeah. He's not going to let his darling die. So prove it. So you are actually in a position of power over your father. Oh. Because he's guaranteed your protection, right?

Reads that right there in your Bible. Oh, interesting. So if your father is depriving you of food, that's not befitting for the status of the son of God. Yeah. And then here it's, if you are the Son of God, your father's obligated to rescue you, whether your father initiates it, like what just happened, or whether you put him to the test. Put him to the test. And that's what Jesus sees here. Jesus said to him, again, it has been written, you will not test the Lord your God.

And this is a quote from the water narrative, right? Yes, yeah. Where they're just grumbling. They're just complaining, and they're like, Moses, you wanted to kill us out here. That's why there's no water. And then God says, why are you testing me? Yeah, they're trying to force God's hand to supply them water. Yeah, so he's alluding to the Israelites grumbling against Moses and God,

but then also beginning to get violent and threaten Moses. We'll go back to Egypt then. We'll solve this. We're going to force your hands. Solve this ourselves. Oh, okay. If you're not going to give us what we want in the time that we want it, I see.

Then we're going to take matters into our own hands here. And so here it's about forcing your father's hand to fulfill his promise. Maybe it's sort of like, when somebody says they're going to do something for you, you kind of put an interesting position. Because what if they forget? What if they forget? You have to trust. That's what it is.

You have to trust that they're going to do it. So for Jesus, it's God will protect me. I don't have to worry about my life but the slander is saying why don't you kind of make sure or prove it or maybe not just even to make sure but just to show everyone else how much power you actually have. Right, yes, yeah, totally.

Now, there's an interesting little connection forward like a forward hyperlink and this happens a lot in Matthew where there'll be a scene earlier in Matthew's gospel account that has wording that connects forward to something later. And Matthias Conrad, a German New Testament scholar who I've learned a lot from the Gospel of Matthew, he notes that this links forward to Jesus in the Garden of Gisemone, which has all these actually important hyperlinks back to the wilderness story in more ways than one. But when Peter tries to pull out a sword and prevent Jesus from getting arrested, he cuts that guy's ear off, what he says to

Peter is, don't you know, I could summon legions of angelic messengers. It's the same word, angel messengers at this moment. But then he says, no, but so that the scriptures have to be fulfilled. And he tells

Peter to chill out. So there's a moment where he could actually summon these angelic messengers to save him. You could walk into the most dangerous, like room in your city. full of dangerous people, and you know that you're covered,

but you choose not to flex. I don't know. Yeah. He's choosing not to flex. This is an interesting meditation also to think about Israel in the wilderness, but then also Adam and Eve. Because Israel in the wilderness does not feel like they actually have the power. They're not in a position of power.

They're not a position of power. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Like Jesus knows, yeah, I can summon a bunch of, I know. I know. Yeah. There is seemingly this invitation from Jesus to think of ourselves that way, too, right? Don't you know that God loves you and he will give you good things? Oh, yeah.

And he will protect you? Yeah. I was thinking, Paul, writing into the Corinthians, will say, don't you know that you are going to rule the world? Okay, right. Yeah. So there's like, we're supposed to actually have that psyche of Jesus. Yes. Like, yeah.

Yeah, God will protect me. I have authority. And then what do you do with that? And there's something instructive here. But the lived experience that we have generally is very different. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So that's a nice lead-in to the third test, where the slanderer takes Jesus to a high mountain.

I hope he took him to a cool one. Like, were those two up north, the big ones? Yeah, Mount Hermone. Mount Hermon is the one up. It's right on the border, modern-day border of Israel and Syrian up there. Yeah, but notice, he took him up to a high mountain. mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. It's a very high mountain.

So it's the cosmic mountain. It's the cosmic mountain. So he took him to the coolest mountain. The cosmic mountain. Yeah, higher than Everest, it's got to be. And said to him, all of these things I will give to you. If falling down, you

bow down to me. That's the line. I'll give you all of these kingdoms. There's a little assumption underneath this, a little narrative development. These belong to me? Yeah. What does that mean?

Yeah. You don't belong to the slanderer. Was there a redemption episode? Or do they? Yeah. Or do they kind of? Or is it they belong to him because only as long as humans allow the kingdoms to belong to the slanderer. Do they belong?

But there is this acknowledgement in the Gospels, especially. Jesus calls the slander the ruler of this cosmos in the gospel of John. That's what Jesus. calls the satan. So apparently holding power in this cosmos requires giving allegiance to this one. And what Jesus says is Hupage satana. And we did talk about this.

Actually, man, our deepest dive into it was in the Lord's Prayer. Conversations about the test. Don't lead us into the test. Yeah. Which was Jesus' gift to his disciples telling them to pray that they don't have to enter into moments like he experienced right here. You don't have to showdown with the Satan. Yeah. Yep, that's right. Get behind me.

Get behind me as King James. Yeah. Be gone. Be gone. Adversary. This is adversary. This is Satana. This is satana. That's right. And he quotes from just a few lines before the previous quote, which is it is written in the Torah, you will bow down to the Lord your God and serve him only. Yeah. Yeah. Worshiping Satan in order to rescue the people who are bound to death, which is bound to Satan in some way, is a very backwards kind of technique, strategy, in and of itself. It's kind of silly But there's also this sense of

The theme that we've been talking about Which is we're not ready There is a journey that needs to be done It's all about who's ready Yeah Yeah what kind of humanity What's it going to take? Would yeah need to exist to be ready

We are dying And Satan has power The Satan has power Because we're not ready So how is Jesus going to help us get ready Yeah or maybe we could tie that even closely together to say the satan has power over the kingdoms of the world because humans voluntarily give the satan that power by being loyal to the satan's way of defining power

and defining how you get power which shows we're not ready yeah which in the gospel of matthew is violence seizing power through violent coercion yeah because jesus will say these same words to Peter, get behind me, Satan, when Peter says, you don't have to die to become the son of man ruling over the world. You could do that staying alive, the way most kings do. Most kings stay alive so that they can rule the world. So you should do it that way, Jesus. And Jesus hears, this is in Matthew 16,

and Jesus hears this same voice speaking through one of his closest friends. It's interesting. So all three of these, they all have to do with power, right? Like, what do I do with my power? What does Jesus do with this power? Jesus has divine cosmic power. He is the beloved son of God. But the wilderness is supposed to show us, hey, the power we think we have to sustain ourselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You actually don't have that. That's God's gift to you. Whatever power you have, whatever gift of life that you have in this moment, that's from God.

You need to learn that. And one place to make that very clear is in the wilderness. That's right. Yep. So Jesus chooses not to force his father's hand or make the father prove before the time that he's going to protect his life. He also trusts that God will provide

for his daily needs, bread, and that God will fulfill the destiny as the divine son to become the ruler of the world. But how? How will the son have his needs met? How will the son assume cosmic rule and authority? How will the sun come to discover that his life will be protected by the father? This is the first mountain.

We talked about this in the mountain series. This is the first mountain in the Gospel of Matthew. On the other end, the last mountain that appears in Matthew is where Jesus stands, risen from the dead. Commissioning his disciples in the Great Commission. And the first line is, all authority on the land and in the sky has been given to me.

I have authority. So he's gone through the test, both in the wilderness and then on the cross. He is going to provide bread for others in the wilderness two times over after this. So he has clearly, that's the power to make bread.

He's going to be protected from death itself, not by avoiding it, by going through it. Every one of these tests matches a moment that Jesus will experience later that shows the success of this test. So when I think about when he framed it that way and how this psyche that Jesus has,

this belief that he has about God and how that brings him through the rest of his life and then death and resurrection and everything and how he shows up for people, the wilderness has the potential to shape us into the kind of person who can live these abundant, selfless

lives that bring life to others. That's the goal. That's the goal of the wilderness. That's the goal of human... Or that's God's goal of using the wilderness. That's right, yeah. The wilderness is just the reality that we are not in the garden.

Yeah, and that we don't sustain our own existence. And that we don't sustain our own existence. Well, that becomes just much more apparent in the wilderness. That's right. That's always the case. That's always the case. Even in the garden. In the garden, that's the case. Exactly right.

In the wilderness, that just becomes very clear, and we're there because of our own folly. But God allows us to be there and doesn't just bypass it because we're not ready. And we need this time in the wilderness, and it's an opportunity to learn something. And that thing to learn is to trust God's timing. You'll trust God's timing if you trust God's character. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, I mentioned just a moment ago how the last lines of Matthew, echo back to this

all authority in heaven and earth therefore go out to all the nations teaching them everything that I've commanded you and baptizing them in the name singular of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit

what did Jesus just come from here as we're now in the wilderness in Matthew 4 he just came from his baptism so what Jesus wants to invite his followers into is to see that through baptism you begin to identify yourself with Jesus so closely

so that you become a part of the Father, Son, Spirit community so that we see what Jesus is doing is doing for us what we fail at doing. And that now changes my position in these wilderness moments of my life. Because I might succeed, I might fail, it might be two steps forward 14 steps back or three steps forward

two steps back but Jesus becomes the thing the image into which God is making me because you asked earlier and if so many of these stories in the Hebrew Bible were like the wilderness is supposed to get us ready

but it just doesn't ever seem to this story is meant to both show us the ideal of what humans are made for but then also to give us a comfort to say, and even when I show through my choices, I'm maybe not ready for the garden yet. But there is one who loved me and did it on my behalf

and wants to include me within the Father's love through the Spirit, and he'll let me pass the wilderness, so to speak, in him. I don't know, I'm trying to put language to how the incorporation into what Jesus did on our behalf that it becomes true of us. He passes it.

Right. With us and for us. It's kind of like this burial with Jesus, dying with Jesus. Baptized into Jesus. By Jesus dying on our behalf doesn't mean we don't have to also die. Right. Yeah, that's right. We're going to die.

That's right. And in fact, we can kind of then do that in a Jesus way. That's right. Now. Yeah. Yes. Jesus going into the wilderness doesn't mean that we won't also go through our own cosmic, communal, lifetime or

season of life wildernesses. Yeah. The wilderness will happen but we can go through it in a new way now and this pattern of people don't know how to deal with the wilderness and even the wilderness as an opportunity

is just not, it's failing the wilderness can have its right effect in my life and that right effect is becoming someone who can in a moment of scarcity and fear and just things are going wrong, I can still show up with a sense of abundance and trust.

Yeah. And I can still decide I'm going to love other people and I'm going to suffer on people's behalf. And you imagine a whole community of people doing that. Suddenly a wilderness is not going to really feel like a wilderness. Yeah. If everyone's acting that way. It's going to feel like a spring of water popping up in the wilderness, right?

the little orchard oasis in the desert If I was the only one doing that I can imagine the isolated wilderness feeling If you're in a community of people They're showing up that way with each other That's not going to feel like wilderness

It's going to feel like an oasis in the wilderness Yeah So Jesus like slogging it out Here in this scene Is in a way What he's inviting his followers to At the end of Matthew's Gospel Is to go

Do this communally. Do this so that you can go through the wilderness with me together. Yeah, that's one way to think about it. So the poetry of Isaiah of God saying I will open a river in the middle of the desert and plant juniper trees and cedars in the desert. You could be one of those. That's it for today's episode. Next week we continue looking at the stories of Jesus.

as he starts to announce the good news of God's coming garden life. Matthew portrays Jesus as a new Moses shepherd of Israel as a flock in the wilderness, and he's going to do what Moses did for Israel. He's going to provide bread for the lost sheep of Israel who come to him in the wilderness. Bible Project is a crowd-funded nonprofit, and we exist to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. Everything that we make is free because of the generous support of thousands of people, just like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.

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