Where the First Adam Failed, the Second Adam Succeeded!

1st Sunday in Lent, 3/6/22 Luke 4:1-13 Where the First Adam Failed, the Second Adam Succeeded! I. Regarding whom to trust II. Regarding whom to worship III. Regarding what the Scripture says We’re practical people, right? We don’t have time in our busy world to mess around. We need to get things done, get them done right, and get them done quickly. That’s certainly true in the business world. In business, time is money. There’s no time for methods that might not work or aren’t working. You need a strategy that works, and you need it now. That’s why there are seminars on effective business strategies. The same is true regarding your savings and investments. You need a strategy that is going to accomplish your investment goals. You don’t have the time or the money for something that might not work or isn’t working. Unfortunately for us, Satan knows that as well. He has work to accomplish—the damnation of every sinner. And he knows his time is limited. So, he doesn’t have time to mess around with temptation strategies that don’t work. In the Garden of Eden, Satan discovered a few temptation strategies that worked beyond his wildest imagination. In what might have taken only a few minutes, he succeeded in luring Adam and Eve into sin, plunging the entire world into sin, and filling our world with unimaginable evil. We cringe each day as we see the tragedies that evil brings. Satan has implemented the same temptation strategies he used in Eden trillions and trillions of times ever since, with satanic success. It should come as no surprise, then, that he used those very same strategies when he assaulted our Lord Jesus as Luke describes for us in this morning’s sermon text. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul refers to Jesus as the Second Adam. He does so in order to point out that Jesus came to undo the damage Adam had done. We hear that very thing occurring here in these words of Luke. Where the first Adam failed, the Second Adam succeeded. And his success—his victory—is our success by faith in him. Join me as we watch our Victor in action against temptation, and receive the confidence and strength from Christ to do the same in your daily battles with Satan I. I realize that you don’t have the account of the Fall into Sin in front of you this morning, so let me refresh your memory about one of the strategies Satan used in luring Adam and Eve into his hellish clutches. When Eve informed Satan of what God said—that they would die if they ate of the fruit of the tree—Satan called God a liar. “You won’t surely die.” And then he suggested a different reason why God would forbid them to eat that fruit. He falsely claimed that God was keeping something from them—the knowledge of evil. His false insinuation was that God can’t be trusted. He doesn’t really love human beings. Satan used that same strategy in the first temptation that Luke records. “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.’” It was the Father’s will for Jesus to be tempted by Satan. It was also the Father’s will for Jesus to rely solely on his Father to sustain his body and life while Jesus fasted. The Father called on Jesus to wait and trust in him for when and how that fast would end. Satan’s temptation recognized a tremendous need. Jesus was hungry. He needed to eat. He had no idea how much longer he was going to have to fast. So, Satan proposed a solution. In effect, he told Jesus, “You have the power to make bread out of stones. You’re hungry, for goodness’ sake. It’s insane that your Father expects you to go without food. So, make some bread and eat it! You can’t trust God to do this for you.” That was the same temptation he used with Adam. You can’t trust God. But where Adam failed Jesus succeeded. He put the dagger into Satan’s temptation using the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. “Man does not live on bread alone.” Jesus fought Satan’s lie with God’s truth. Satan wanted Jesus to miraculously make bread and, in doing so, distance himself from his Father. Jesus correctly stated that enjoying physical bread means nothing without a loving connection to the Father. Life with bread without the Father is death, not life. Jesus one. Satan zero. Where the first Adam failed, the Second Adam succeeded. II. Back to the Garden of Eden. Satan convinced Adam and Eve that when they ate the fruit of the tree, they would be like God. No longer would they be under God (as if that were a bad thing!). Instead, they would be right alongside him. They would be calling the shots just as he was. Better yet, they could decide what was good for them instead of letting God decide that for them. They could have it all! Satan used a similar strategy with Jesus. Luke writes, “The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours.’” His temptation in effect was this: Jesus, you’re destined for eternal glory. But your Father’s path to that glory is asking too much of you. It means you’ll have to suffer and die. I have a much easier way. Just bow down to me, and I’ll give you everything. You want to be like God? Just get on your knees for a minute. It’ll be painless. But where the first Adam failed, the Second Adam succeeded. Jesus met this temptation head on. Once again, he put the dagger into Satan’s temptation by using the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’” And that was the end of that temptation. Jesus chose always to place his Father and his word first in his life. That was his worship of his heavenly Father. Jesus two. Satan zero. III. Back to Eden one more time. As far as we know, these are the first words that Satan spoke to Adam and Eve. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1). Eve replied, correcting Satan on what God had commanded them. They can eat from any tree in the garden, but not this one. Satan knew that. Satan knows God’s word back and forth, better than we do. Jesus had used the word of God to defeat Satan twice, so now Satan tried using that same word of God to defeat Jesus. He quoted two passages from Scripture, one about God’s promise to send us his angels to protect us and another about how those angels will do that very thing. Jesus had met the previous temptations by relying on God’s word, Satan now challenged Jesus to put his money where his mouth was. Let’s see of God will do what you trust him to do. And Jesus successfully resisted that temptation with another dagger from God’s word. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” When dangers confront us because we live in an evil world, we can count on our God to protect us as he sees fit. But that doesn’t mean we can create the evil situation and expect God to deliver on his promises. Instead, we need to pay attention to what God says in his word and correctly apply it to the situation at hand. Where the first Adam failed, the Second Adam succeeded. Jesus three. Satan zero. And then account of this current satanic attack concludes with these words from Luke, “When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.” Satan would use a different strategy at a later time in Jesus’ ministry. Where the first Adam failed and where we fail countless times, the Second Adam succeeded. We’d like to think that we would have defended God’s love for us had we stood there in the Garden of Eden, but the truth is that we daily doubt our God’s love for us and the way he cares for us. So, we push our God aside and trust in our own efforts to work things out and make ourselves happy. We’d like to think that we’re always willing to let God be God, that we live our lives under him, but the truth is we daily struggle against that “God first” order in our lives. We know what he says but we close our ears and bow to ourselves by doing what we want, not what he wants. That’s right…we know what God’s word says, but we struggle daily to apply it properly in our lives. We pick and choose what we want to follow and what we want to ignore, because that’s what will be best for us. And we lose. Satan three. Our team zero. But where the first Adam and we failed, the Second Adam succeeded. That’s the divine, saving truth that this account shares with us. At first, these temptations might not seem to be temptations at all for Jesus. But when you see that these are the same strategies that Satan still uses against us and wins with them, you can see how much we need Jesus to be the Victor for us. And he won every time. He defeated Satan’s temptations for us, and then he crushed Satan by his death on the cross. There on the cross Jesus removed our sins and their guilt and, in doing so, he ended the hold that Satan had on us. By faith in Jesus as our Victor and Savior, that forgiveness is ours. By faith in Jesus, we, too, can confront Satan’s temptations with the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God and put the dagger in them. Jesus wins. He always wins. And by faith in Jesus we win, too. Dear Christians, live in that victory, now and forever! Amen.