God 'must' do all kinds of things if He is to be counted as the true God. And therefore man, eager to bind God to him by his faith in God's purpose -- that is, this faith rushes forth and lays hold of the garment of God; and behold -- the Lord comes quietly, unnoticed by no one, from the back door of the world and lies in the stable of Bethlehem.
The Yearning to be free of God
We are doubters from the beginning: we doubt God as much as we believe in ourselves; and we have unlimited faith in ourselves. We are actually told that our rejection of God and our desire to be free from Him is present in our piety, our longing for God and even in the cunning use of God's own words. Now we turn our attention to the two figures in the foreground -- Jesus and the tempter.
Led by the Spirit into the Wilderness
The Bible always works like this: How low we have fallen is made clear to us in the effort God had to make to help us. The theologians say, "In the deepest depths it is made plain, not in the Law, but in the Gospel." It seems to me very important that the tempter meets the Lord in the solitude of the desert.
The Babylonian Heart
Or when he stood before Pilate and knew that in the moment of extreme stress he could summon more than twelve legions of angels to his aid (Matt. 26:53). And yet the tempter comes here in the wilderness, in the greatest loneliness of all, at an hour which is not, like the others, at the perilous climax of life. His ardent desire to be like God, his immeasurable hunger for equality with God, not content with mere likeness, and to be fashioned "in the image of God," brought catastrophe with it.
The Moral Sortie out of Babylon
The Mirage of the Heart
There is no use fleeing the world lest this world of temptation cause a. No, it means you and me when it talks about temptation; it is ours. The point I want to make here is that this is the great implication of Jesus being alone and isolated, that he had to go into the wilderness to be tempted.
The Horror of Solitude
It is the human being in him who hungers and thirsts to be God and Lord of this world; now he stands on a high mountain and sees the glorious land and hears the promise that all this will belong to him, if. It is not some external Satan who stands between God and us; we ourselves stand between God and us, since the evil one 'possessed' us, just as man in Christ stands here between himself and God. It is not the Tower of Babel that separates us from God: it is only an image, a likeness of our will to separate ourselves from God, projected onto the outside world.
The Vulnerable Point
Therefore he fears unredeemed loneliness, for there is nothing he can appeal to here; he is confronted with himself as with a kind of mysterious 'double', and there is nothing but a great silence. It is for this reason that the pupil flees from his 'graves', and becomes the anonymous pram of the High Street, and creeps away in cafes; he is afraid of himself. There is no checkbook that we could flourish against our creditors.
Jesus our Fate
The defining characteristic of death is that it brings the hour of greatest loneliness. We grab a step, but suddenly discover that all the steps have gone, and we grasp at the empty air. And the zeitgeist (how it carried us along, and how little we knew where we ended and it began!), the zeitgeist broods over waters from which we have long, long since been drawn, and which now carry us no more.
Between God and Satan by Helmut Thielicke
The First Temptation: The Reality of Hunger
- The Place of Temptation: The Realm of Concrete Things
- The Wish as Father to the Thought about God
- The Shadow-Art of Apologetics
- Hunger and Doubt
- The Devil on the Basis of the Fact of God
- Calculator and Intriguer
- The Devil’s Consistency
- The Obedience of Jesus
- The Masks of God
- The Spirit of Worry
- The Battle-fronts in our Breast
- The Cosmic Spectacle
In the first chapter of Romans we learn how the heathen think they see God in the four-legged, crawling, and flying creatures. Here in the body, in the reality of our life, where it is a question of eating or starving, is the most vulnerable place to the thrust of the tempter. His goal is precisely to incite Jesus to perform miracles as proof that he is the Son of God.
This is a terrible consequence of the devil's attitude towards the fact that he is God. It simply means that he regards God as a fact to be reckoned with in the course of the game, and which he must look at from the outside as the Devil's player. That hour in the desert leads directly to the second hour when the sun obscured its light and the veil of the temple was rent.
This is the argument that Jesus opposes to the inferences made by the devil: 'It is written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds through the mouth of God.' Truly, hunger calls. in him. The hunger of the Son of God is a terrible hunger; for it embodies the torment of all the temptation that arises from the suffering of mankind. It is not the fruits of the field, nor the beautiful harvests that we walk through.
Of course, as soon as Jesus had turned the stones into bread, he would be glad to declare: "This is your work, and therefore also a gift from God (for you are the Son of God). Jesus does not believe in bread but in the promise; he believes in “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” We can tell him in what ways we think he can help us.
The Second Temptation - The Alluring Miracle of Display
- The Honour of God and the Integrity of his Word
- The Worshippers of the ‘God of Power’
- Will and Power of God
- The Godly Demon
- The Word of God in the Twilight
- Powers and Slaves
- Technology as Tool and as ‘Power’
How is it that the worshipers of the God of Power can always believe that their God has to do with the beyond, when their job is to shape this world. Through these hours vibrate the birth pangs of the god of power; for this God is born of men. That is his reason for speaking of the God of power, who imposes no obligation, and whom he can do as he pleases.
This is the secret of this hour: The Son of God, who brings the kingdom and the turning point of the ages, stands before the Accuser and is tempted. And in the same moment the pinnacles of the temple rose in light before God's Son, a paradisiacal sight, alluring, stirring, and full of promise. We must go even deeper into this mystery of the power that fights against God.
What philosophical and heretical system of the Occidental did not refer to the Bible in this same. All of us (both the writer and the reader of this book) are on the payroll of one or the other (Rom. 6:16ff). Yes; we always belong to the lord and we are always carried by a wave that can be in the ocean of God or the ocean of the wicked one.
Ultimately, technology is one of the decisive factors that dictates how our century should act.
The Third Temptation: Jesus’ Kingdom of This World
- The Shining Landscape
- The Globe in the Devil’s Hand
- Jesus’ Vision on the Exceeding High Mountain
- The Faintheartedness of Christians
- The Clash of the Tempter with God
- The Mystery of the Defencelessness of Jesus
- Grace and Judgment in Jesus’ Defencelessness
The conscience of the son of God -- as of the sons of men -- must be handled with care and tact. You can be announced to the world by a miracle and jump from the top of the temple -- if you will fall and worship me.' You can have all the kingdoms of the world and their glory if you fall down and worship me.'
And he also saw the other side of the picture, the darkness of his own future, and questions formed in his mind. Why should he cause such turmoil through his weakness -- through the mystery of the weakness of God. And like all the other answers; this answer stems from the fact that Jesus Christ withdraws from the center of the conflict, and goes after God.
Does it not stand at the end of his love path towards you. It is grace when he sometimes casts off this concealment and his disguise as the brother, the servant, the crucified, the tempted, the defenseless, and even in the beggar's garb and in the shadow of the cross becomes visible as the Lord of lords. and the king of kings (Matt. 16,16). So all the defenselessness of the Son of God and his grace is a prophecy for his time, for God's open reign, which here has only begun, and is only secretly present, while he waits at the back door of the world like a despised Lazarus, because the rich master of the house does not wants him to pass his threshold.
And he lays expensive carpets on the stone, so that the growling of the deep no longer disturbs him.
Epilogue
It is the wonder that elevates him above us and does not allow his being to be fully defined by saying that he is simply the brother who shares our suffering. Thus we see him, in the midst of his humility and brotherhood with man, high above all. We see him exalted as the Lord who trampled sin under his feet, as the high priest who is more than all the priests of mankind, in their fall into sin and death.
And since he is the Lord who stands in the purity of heaven beyond all sin, we can pray to him to keep us from temptation. Christ not only walks at our right hand against death and the devil; but he also supports us from his height, because he is Lord. Knowing that we are protected by his power gives us that peace that the world cannot give or take away.
Perhaps it is the silence attained by those who believe that they have revealed the meaning of world history, and leave themselves with it in peace, because they have found a point of rest in the stream of outward appearances; or perhaps it is the disinterested indifference of those who take it as it comes. But the peace of Jesus, which the world cannot give or take away, is the peace of the double. And it is the peace given by the other certainty that even in that event, and even in these depths, Christ is with us.
Lord and brother, King and friend, our ruler and sharer of our sufferings; that is.
