Today I'm Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast. You remember a couple weeks ago as we were working on the beginning of Matthew chapter 4 as we work our way all the way through the book of Matthew, a tiny little bit every weekday. Do you remember we were talking about the temptation conversation

and how we think of temptation as being this thing that pulls us toward naughtiness or

scandalous behavior, super sneaky dirty stuff, or maybe it pulls us toward indulging

a little bit too much and delicious things we like to eat or drink.

And all of those things are, you know, of course valid expressions of what temptation just means definitionally as a word.

But as we talked about that, I was kind of making a case for the stakes of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness with the devil at hand being much

much higher than I might indulge a little bit or be a little bit naughty.

And so we see these three temptations come and go, one that appeals to Jesus'

base physical human needs, one that appeals to the human propensity to want to be very, very exalted and popular and famous,

one that appeals ultimately to the final thing that people who succeeded a lot of

stuff and get their way a lot will ultimately want which is power and control over an increasing and increasing amount of

Dominion eventually wanting to be God themselves or maybe I should say eventually wanting to be God ourselves because I'm no better and I suffer from the same temptations.

Well, where we all fail these temptations and the only two reasons we don't give into them is because I think of

reason or God's work in somebody's life that would cause us to demonstrate some kind of restraint

and the other reason we don't give into them is because lack of resources

or ability to do so, lack of ability to get other people to go along with our plan for

self-indulgence. Unlike us, Jesus resists these things exclusively based on his character, that is God in the flesh,

and he does so, I think for the benefit of everyone who will hear about this story by leaning into the

word of God.

Now we've talked about this.

The word of God, I don't think just refers to stuff God wrote down or inspired, but it refers to truth, who God is, what God has done,

what is revealed about God in any of the many ways that revelation occurs.

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