By Pastor Doug Cox

At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry and after being water baptized and filled with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit led Him into the wilderness to take care of the business of fasting and prayer for forty days and to be tempted by the devil. At the end of His fast, no doubt, the ‘Son of Man’ was hungry. And right on cue the devil came to try to take advantage of Him in His weakened state.

You probably know the story in Luke chapter 4. Jesus was tempted to turn a stone into bread to overcome His hunger and prove He was the Son of God. He was tempted to worship the devil to gain authority over all the kingdoms of the world and tempted to throw Himself off a pinnacle to prove God would command His angels to save Him.

Jesus resisted each temptation with what was most important to Him, the Word of God. God’s Words were not empty religious jargon to Jesus. To Him they were powerful and applicable to every aspect of His life and Jesus used them to push back the Tempter. Jesus said, “It is written man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” “You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve”. And finally “You shall not tempt the Lord your God”. (Luke 4:4,8,12) Amazingly, after pushing the tempter back Jesus came forth “…in the power of the Spirit” (Verse 14).

Once home from that wilderness trial Jesus did what He was raised from a child to do, He went to synagogue. There He was asked to read from the scroll of Isaiah. Jesus unrolled it to the place where it is written, “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. To set at liberty those who are oppressed and to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD. Then He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him.” (Luke 4:18-20)

There must have been something different about Jesus’s delivery that day that the synagogue wasn’t used to. It wasn’t the usual ritualistic reading of the standardized text. That day the words of the long dead prophet Isaiah no longer seemed like ancient history. They popped to life in the face of tradition and went straight to the heart. How shocked they must have been when Jesus personalized the ‘me’ reference. Verse 20 says, “the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him.” That’s when Jesus said “…today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Verse 21)

That day unfortunately, Jesus’s gracious words fell on tradition lovers, not truth seekers who were filled with anger. They refused to ‘sustain’ the sunburned, parch lipped son of Joseph for anything other than a candidate to be thrown over the nearby cliff. (See verse 29).

This story teaches us that tradition can get in the way of truth and cost a person their salvation. What Jesus said in John 14:6, that “He is the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Him,” must be true because if it was a lie He couldn’t have risen from the dead. This leaves each of us as individuals with the difficult task of carefully examining what we believe. Are we totally reliant on Jesus for salvation or some other tradition? Jesus transcends tradition, why not choose Him?