Expert: Thurman C. Petty, Jr. - 3/22/2009

Question
QUESTION: Well His basic temptation in 1-3 was that satan tempted Him to eat but He was fasting.
In 4-6,His answer to that was that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that GOD speaks.

But I didn't get the one about the 6 things,what do you mean by 6 things?


ANSWER: Corrina,

Great! I'll have to give you good marks for your answer.

But there's something I'd like to point out about this question/answer conversation between Satan and Jesus:

Before Jesus went into the wilderness (by the way the reason He went there was to be alone with His Father; and the wilderness wasn't a desert-- it was just a vast open area where very few people lived.); but before He went into the wilderness, His Father had spoken in the hearing of all the people by the Jordan: "This is My Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased."

Now Satan comes along, at a time of Jesus' lowest physical strength, and says: "If Thou be the Son of God . . . "

"If?" God had just said that Jesus was His Son. But that was 40 foodless day ago, and Satan hoped that Jesus had forgotten. Or at least, he hoped that in His extreme hunger, Jesus would have performed a miracle to feed himself. If Jesus had done it, He would have conceded to Satan's argument that He wasn't really the Son of God. And then Jesus would have died as a Sinner, and we would never have been saved.

But you see that Jesus didn't fall for Satan's "If." Instead He pointed Satan to Scripture and said, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that procedeth out of the mouth of God.

"Satan, weren't you listening? God told everyone that I'm His Son. I'll follow His word rather than yours, thank you!"

So actually food didn't have much to do with the temptation. Satan tempted Jesus to doubt God's word, and he simply used food as the substance with which to foil Him.

O how I love Jesus! And I want to be more and more like Him, don't you?

Thurman

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Well apparently humans don't think like Jesus because that was very clever to answer like that.I would have never answered like that.But why would Satan try to make Jesus doubt GOD's word when Jesus is GOD?

ANSWER: Corrina,

Jesus had spent time all his life (30 years) studying the Bible (the Old Testament was all that He had) from beginning to end. He had studied it so much He knew it almost by heart—perhaps he had memorized it, I don’t know. So when He was met by a temptation, the Holy Spirit brought to his mind the verse that fit that temptation—just like He can do for us if we study the Scriptures every day. So when we are met by a temptation, the Holy Spirit can bring to our minds the Bible texts that fit that temptation, and we can know how to keep from sinning. But only the Holy Spirit can do that, and only if we’ve studied the Bible.

You know that your computer can only find files that you’ve written and saved to your hard drive. It’s just like that. Our memory is our hard drive, and everything we do, read, or think, or say is saved there. When we study the Bible, what we read is saved to our hard drive/memory, and when we are faced with temptation, the Holy Spirit can bring out the file that contains that part of the Bible that we need—if we’ve put it there in the first place! That’s why I keep encouraging you to read your Bible.

Satan wanted to make Jesus doubt GOD’s word because if he could do that—HORRORS!—Jesus would no longer have been God (as I understand it) because He would have denied Himself; and he would have died like a man . . . and never ever lived again. Then all of us would have been under Satan’s power, and this earth would have ground to a halt years ago. We would never have been, because Satan would have destroyed the world!

So you see how important it is to study the Bible. If we don’t study the Bible, the Holy Spirit won’t have anything to help us fight Satan with. And we will go down to the grave (at some time) and never ever live with Jesus in His kingdom.

Read your Bible. You won’t understand everything, but what you read will be saved to your memory, and you will be better able to resist Satan’s temptations. Stay close to Jesus and do what He did. In that way you’ll always be ready for Jesus to come .

Thurman

Your next assignment: Read Matt. 4:5-11—the other two temptations. Notice how Satan tried to trick Jesus in the second temptation, and his boldface approach in the third.

PS I’ve opened a new account with Google. My email address there is pettypress@gmail.com. Why not use that address to send me your questions?


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: But didn't Jesus write the BIBLE though?

Answer
Corrina,

Jesus, before He came to earth, was known as the LORD—the Hebrew word is YAHWEH, which means “I AM” (He always was, is now, and always will be). He is the One who worked with God’s people throughout the Old Testament.

The LORD did not actually write the Bible—except for the 10 commandments, which He wrote with His finger on tablets of stone. He worked through His Holy Spirit who inspired faithful men to write it.

There were about 40 men who wrote the 66 books of the Bible (Old and New Testaments). The men lived over a 1500 year time span, so they most of them didn’t know each other, and many of the Bible writers did not have the books written by others. But all of them had access to the first 5 books written by Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

The humanly astounding thing is that all of them agree on the major doctrines, so much so that you can use one book to help explain another. This agreement would be humanly impossible. If we were to ask 40 authors living today to write an article on gravity, for example, we would have 40 different views that would, in some cases, agree with each other, but in many cases would disagree on major items in the study. But the 40 authors of the Bible–most unknown to each other–agree! That’s why Peter says that the Holy Spirit was the One who inspired them.

The Bible tells us how this can be:

2 Pet 1:20, 21 (NIV)  Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

The LORD (Jesus) through His Holy Spirit gave visions, dreams, visits of angels, etc. to the men who wrote the Bible. This is why the message, even though it was written in the language and style of the men who wrote it, is actually the Word of God.

All Bible writers wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so they had no need of human authority in order to carry out their work.

So Jesus didn’t actually write the Bible, but His Holy Spirit gave visions and dreams—and sometimes the words themselves—to the men who wrote it. So that even though men wrote it, yet the message came from the LORD (Jesus).

But when Jesus became a man He didn’t necessarily remember all that He had His men write for Him. As every person does, He had to study the Bible for Himself so that He could have the words of Scripture in His mind. I don’t know if, after He read the Bible, He remembered having giving it to the prophets; but He studied it thoroughly so that He knew it very well. That was why He could answer Satan’s temptations with a “this is what the LORD says" or, "it is written" (the Bible says).

Not only was it important that Jesus knew what the Bible said, but He obeyed it too. Every command that God had given in the Scripture Jesus obeyed. And if we obeyed these commands too, we would be like Jesus. But we must remember that we of ourselves cannot keep these commands because we’ve trained ourselves to live like the world (without really knowing that it’s what we’ve done). So we have to have faith in Jesus, so that we let Him give us the power to keep the commandments.

All this may be too heavy for you to understand right now. Perhaps it might be good to print it out and look at it from time to time, and ask Jesus to help you understand it. A lot of this is explained in:

2 Tim 3:16  All Scripture is God-breathed [given by inspiration] and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17.  so that the man of God [us] may be thoroughly equipped for [trained, given the ability to do] every good work.

God bless you as you continue to study the Bible.

Thurman