“Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these I will give You, if you fall down and worship me.” – Matthew 4:8-9
Satan here lays out for Jesus a very simple fact. One that we don’t like. Satan owned us. Satan is ‘this world’s prince’ as Luther has us sing it. And that’s not something we think about. It’s not something we ponder. We toss Satan off into a corner and like to forget about him once the Sunday service is over. We don’t talk about evil either – even when there’s a disaster we can’t say that someone was evil; there’s surely some systemic flaw or we were lacking some law that would have kept everyone safe.
Satan cuts across all that. See this world, Jesus? It’s mine, and its full of wickedness and evil and I like it that way. And yet, Satan seeks to cut a deal. The Evil One knows that Jesus is out to win you and I away from Satan’s clutches. He knows Jesus comes to take us out of Satan’s Kingdom into God’s Kingdom. So, Satan offers a solution. Jesus, just be my number two fella. You can have all of these people to do with as you please. All you have to do in return is worship me instead of destroying me.
Satan offers Jesus a
plan of “salvation” (if you can even call it that) without the Cross. No messy Good Friday. No battle stupendous. No pain. But, you could still gain, Jesus! And as we know from the Gospel account, Jesus will have none of it. Of course He wouldn’t. It was false worship that got mankind into this mess, therefore false worship won’t fix it. We were not created by God just to spend a few years living out lives of sin. We were created to live forever with God.
And so Jesus Christ came down from heaven into a world full of real sin and violence and wickedness. A world that always tries to justify and explain all that sin away. But, instead of mollycoddling sin and death, Jesus took it all up and destroyed sin and death upon the cross. He rose on the Third Day to trample Satan under His feet. From this alone, we can believe that Jesus is determined to deliver us from evil, no matter what, all thanks be to God.
