Since that Sec 2 Bible Study lesson when I first heard of the story of the 3 temptations of Jesus, my opinion of it had always been that it was easy for Jesus, fully divine, to resist those seemingly human temptations anyway.
That was, until I read this book entitled "Disappointment with God" by Phillip Yancey, in which he explored God's perspective from the things he said in the Bible, so as to attempt at an answer to questions about whether God was unfair or hidden.
What I realised was that those temptations were not exactly appealing only to the human side of Jesus. Those were temptations for God himself.
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OK, maybe not the first one, which was the bread. After 40 days of fasting, anyone would have loved to be able to turn stone into bread.
The next two, then.
Jumping from the top of a high tower so that angels will catch his feet as he fell... that's quite a public exhibition of a miracle. The Devil even quoted from the Psalm itself that it could easily be done.
The last one used to puzzle me the most. It was a 2 part temptation. "Worship the Devil" plus "to have authority over all the kingdoms of the world".
What puzzled me was that it looked, at first glance, like Jesus being tempted to worship the Devil. It was easy to ignore the "authority" part.
Tempting Jesus to worship the Devil? That's about as tempting as asking me to loop 老鼠爱大米 on my player all day.
So what exactly were the temptations about?
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Just to put things into context... in the ancient times when God himself worked visibly among his people Israel, his very nature of holiness caused so much fear in the Israelites that they exclaimed "don't let him talk to us directly, for we'll surely die!"
In coming to Earth as a human, God was able to interact with his creation on par with them. No flambuoyant exhibition of power, not even saving himself when he eventualy got nailed up on the cross.
What God wanted was faith from people, and history has shown that majestic displays of signs and miracles would not necessarily inspire genuine faith.
It was nevertheless still a temptation for God to display something visible, something public, just to prove a point.
How it pained God as well, to see what humans are capable of doing when subjected to free will. Having said that, 'absolute authority' over all nations and kingdoms does sound 'tempting' to God, who could actually have claimed that authority easily.
That was what the temptations were all about.
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Still, in the end, God gave us free will and kept his miracles as secretive as possible, throught the days he walked the Earth as Jesus Christ.
And he chose to be nailed on the Cross to reconcile us back to him, the slow and painful way.
