He Defeated the Desert

There is an unfortunate tendency to think of Jesus as omniscient, and also an unfortunate tendency to think of Satan as omniscient.  That Satan might fail to realize something or another is scarcely surprising, for there is no warrant to attribute to him the all-knowing of God, and there are times in the Bible when Satan is mistaken.  Jesus, it must be admitted, is more difficult to conceive of as limited in knowledge, yet he describes himself so.  This lack of all-knowing must be kept in mind, especially when the contrasts and conflicts between Jesus and Satan are in mind.

There is something else to keep in mind.  Fancies aplenty are conjured up about the origin of Satan and about his supposed history before the creation of the earth.  All such conjecture is as nothing compared to the question of proper apprehension of the nature, from the first, of Jesus.  It would be as nothing, indeed, to opine about this or that manner in which Jesus gets the better of Satan--who would like nothing more than to show Jesus as somehow lacking--if one is mistaken about the character of the Jesus that Satan wants to impugn.

We must look to the origin of Jesus and his history before the creation of the earth.

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.  And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.  I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.  And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. John 17:1-5, KJV

Of all the things that might be said about Jesus, it would be scarcely controversial (in the mere saying of it) to say that Jesus (at the very least) is the perfect human being--and was so in his time on earth.  We can say--and truthfully--that Jesus is without sin, but we do him only dishonor when we imagine that "without sin" might apply only to the episode of the tree and the snake and its aftershocks.  Sin did not start with the tree and the snake, a point that I have made continually.  Sin dates back to God's appraisal of Adam:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. Genesis 2:18

Adam was unable to accept God's gift of the original relationship.  To echo the passage from John 17 above: "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ . . . . "  Adam, in the first burst of creation, was "given . . . power over all flesh," and (in the same vein as the proverbial "well done, thou good and faithful servant") Adam might have said to his Creator, "I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do."  No, Adam--as all of us--was sinful, and drew away from simple fellowship with his Creator.

It is the perfect, non-Adam human being--Jesus The Son of Man--who squares off against Satan, most notably in the desert of the Temptation.  Jesus responds to Satan as Man ought always to have done, and this is lost when we shrink Jesus down to the size of ourselves by making both Jesus and Satan into self-propelled chess pieces in an imagined game between two mythical super-minds.

When Jesus is responding, as in Matthew, to the challenge of stones turned into bread ("Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God") he is recapitulating the original design of Man in communion with God.  That is what the exchange is all about.  As far as Jesus' fast goes, there is no hint that he intends to starve himself to death, and the span of "forty days and forty nights" gives every indication of meaning to symbolize (as does "forty" elsewhere in the Bible) completeness.  Given what Jesus can anticipate in his earthly sojourn, collapsing and dying of hunger at this point would be a mercy, and the ministrations of the angels described in the text must surely have been a mixed blessing to their gaunt master.

When Jesus is responding to the challenge "on the pinnacle of the temple" ("Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God") he is giving good advice to Adam (and Eve.)  It really is a good idea not to entertain risks for their own sake, or to prove (or better, "test") a point.  If Satan were omniscient, he would know that Jesus would never fail God and God would never fail Jesus, yet here Satan acts in the same manner as in his failed wager with God in the Book of Job.  On the other hand, if Jesus were omniscient in his earthly state, his trepidations and agonies would have been but cynical shadow-plays.  Ultimately, Jesus responds to uncertainty by trusting, rather than tempting or testing, God.

When Jesus is responding to the challenge of "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me," Jesus could really just respond (as he does in part) with "Get thee hence, Satan."  Satan probably does not really need to hear the second part: ". . .  for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve."  What Satan does seem to need to learn, though, is the fact that his lordship of the earth and its kingdoms is illusory (or perhaps dependent on humanity ratifying the illusion.)  Commentators love to dwell on the idea of the earth as being under Satan, but Jesus does not stint to tell his disciples that the boundaries of possession (in the true and wholesome sense) will fall before them.  The people and things that Satan believes he possesses are ever and always the true possessions of people with proper dispositions:

There is no man that hath left house, or parent, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake, Who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting. Luke 18:29-30

Matthew's account throws in "lands," for good measure.

Jesus is the perfect man, reflecting the nature of God.  He existed before flawed man, and the strength of his existence, as far as we are concerned, is manifested in an over-arching and ever-present reality: any worthy conception of religion, spirituality, or faith must reckon on the eternal truth of God's perfection as an inescapable premise.  We can try to develop notions about God, and some of them are good, but they always fold back into the ineffable nature of God.  Any time we try to celebrate God's activities in some realm of our conceptions, we are acting as though he could be confined--in any meaningful way--to the boundaries that define that realm.

Thus it is often, regrettably, with rehearsals of the story of the Temptations.  Really, Satan did not take Jesus on in some realm of consequence, since Jesus responded not by acting as though it mattered to respond to the questions at hand, but rather by acting as though it mattered to invoke the conceptual refreshing of the un-encompassed reality of God.  Jesus did not merely defeat Satan in the desert--he also defeated the desert.