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We have begun the season of Lent. Lent is modeled after today’s passage of Jesus’ time in the wilderness.
It is the forty day period between Ash Wednesday until Good Friday. It follows after the forty days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness.
This story takes place after Jesus’ baptism, and before he begins his public ministry. It is a transition between his baptism and ministry.
During his baptism, a voice came from heaven saying that Jesus was God’s Son. It was a glorious moment.
But right after that, this is what we see:
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. (Matthew 4:1)
The Spirit leads him there. It was no mere accident.
In the Bible, the wilderness is not just an inconvenient obstacle, something to get through as quickly as possible. The wilderness is an important place in the life of faith.
In the wilderness, your faith gets tested. Your deepest physical and emotional needs come into conflict with trust in God. The content and strength of your faith is revealed.
Faith is revealed not when life is easy, but when it gets tested by the tension between your needs and trust in God.
What happens in the wilderness?
Everything artificial is stripped away. What’s left is very raw and real.
When Jesus was in the wilderness, everything was stripped away. Food. Safety. Power.
Hunger, fear and power are things we feel with our bodies. The stomach feels hunger. You can feel fear in your bones and in your nervous system. Power is like sugar – with it, it gives your body a rush; without it, you feel no energy.
We feel these things so concretely in our bodies.
But you also see something else. You see Jesus relying on spiritual food. You see him trust God for safety. You see him worshipping God instead of seeking power for himself.
In the wilderness, you see these multiple dimensions of human existence.
Human beings are bodily creatures with bodily needs. We need food, safety and power. But we are also spiritual beings that seek connection with a greater spiritual reality.
St. Augustine spoke of a deep longing within every human heart for connection with God.
He described it this way:
“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (St. Augustine)
We are not only physical creatures trying to survive. We are spiritual creatures seeking communion.
But the history of human beings tells another story as well.
When people are hungry, they unravel. When fear rises, people become very irrational. When power is tasted, people become drunk and intoxicated on it.
Physical and emotional pressures have a way of overpowering principles and convictions. Under strain, instinct takes over and overpowers.
These dynamics are exposed most clearly in the wilderness, when everything is stripped down to the most raw essentials.
It exposes what truly governs your heart.
In the wilderness, Jesus’ bodily and emotional needs come under real threat. His faith is tested.
The question beneath the testing is this: What will ultimately drive him? Will he be driven by his immediate physical need? Or will he trust God?
When push comes to shove, that’s the important question you need to ask: are you driven by your immediate needs or by your deep trust in God?
Bodily needs are powerful because they are immediate. Hunger demands attention.
Many of our parents grew up in the aftermath of the Korean War. My dad used to always say that there is nothing as motivating as hunger. He would always say that I never knew what real hunger is.
Fear is a powerful emotion. Fear of not having money, fear of health, fear for your children’s safety. Fear urges control.
Power can be intoxicating, especially when you’ve had none. The pull of power promises relief for your sense of powerlessness.
In these situations – hunger, fear and powerlessness – the body and mind want resolution now.
The easiest thing to do is to turn that tension into focus and concentration.
The mind concentrates on solving the immediate needs.
Trusting God, however, requires endurance.
It requires faith. It means living with unmet need for an indefinite amount of time. It means surrender instead of control.
Faith is not revealed when obedience is easy. Faith is revealed when trust in God stands firm under pressure. It gets tested under pressure, and what’s really there gets revealed.
The tempter invites Jesus to close the gap quickly: Turn stones into bread. Demand and force God’s protection. Seize authority.
In other words: relieve the pressure. Take control.
But Jesus refuses to escape the struggle. He remains anchored in God. He chooses trust over impulse, worship over power, surrender over control.
And in that steadfast trust, his faith is revealed as strong.
On Friday, we reflected on the first of Jesus’ “I Am” statements in John.
I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. (John 6:35)
We reflected on bread. Jesus never discounted the importance of physical bread. Right before he said this, he had fed five thousand people with bread.
Jesus knows we need to feed our bodies. But he also knows we need more than that.
Jesus said:
One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. (Matthew 4:4)
This quote comes from Deuteronomy. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness after escaping from Egypt. Jesus’ time in the wilderness is modeled after the memory of the Israelites’ time spent there.
Before they entered the Promised Land, God said this to them through Moses:
Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)
The interesting point is that God gave them food – manna. But it was very different from food that they had known. It was new.
The purpose of that was twofold: The first was to feed them physically and provide for their bodily needs. But the second reason was even more important.
It was to teach them that one lives by the grace of God. The word of God is just as, if not more, important than physical bread.
God wanted to teach them not to trust in the bread, but the one who provides the bread.
TRUST and WORSHIP.
That is how you respond to the tension between your immediate needs and trust in God.
Trust God with all your heart. Worship God with your whole self.
A feature of Lent is fasting. People give up something they depend on or that they really enjoy. For me, one of the things I’ve given up is going on Apple News on my phone.
Fasting during Lent invites you into the same wilderness pattern.
When you fast, you are not punishing yourself. You are instead deepening your dependence on God.
Fasting creates tension. It reveals what governs you. It gives you space to consciously turn to God.
The goal of the wilderness is not destruction — it is revelation. Revelation of your heart. Revelation of God’s provision.
In the wilderness, God fed Israel. In the wilderness, Jesus stood firm. At the end of his testing, angels came and ministered to him.
God does not abandon his people in the wilderness. He meets them there.
That is the ultimate goal of the wilderness – for you to meet God in a real way. The Israelites experienced God in a real way in the wilderness.
When you are in the wilderness, if you turn to God in trust, you will experience God’s care, grace and peace in a real way.
When you feel the strain between what your body demands and what faith requires, do not run from it.
Remain. Trust. Worship.
Faith is revealed there.
The same God who sustained Israel, the same God who upheld the Son, will sustain you.
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