Pastor Tim continues our series “the Temptations,” looking at how we are all tempted to misuse God’s faithfulness and what God calls us to do to avoid that.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor warns that Satan misuses Scripture by twisting its meaning rather than simply keeping us away from it. Can you think of examples from your own life or current events where Scripture is quoted accurately but applied in ways that contradict God’s overall character and commands?
The sermon emphasizes “diligently studying” God’s Word as a safeguard against misapplication. What practical steps can we take to study Scripture more carefully—attending to its full context rather than isolated verses—and how has that kind of study protected you in the past?
Jesus responded to the misuse of Psalm 91 by quoting Deuteronomy 6:16, drawing on Israel’s failure at Massah. How does understanding that broader biblical context deepen your appreciation of His victory, and what does it teach us about responding when Scripture is twisted?
The sermon challenges us with the pattern: “If God really wanted me to _, then He would _.” Where have you seen or experienced this mindset—in personal decisions, relationships, or church life—and what does genuine trust in God’s faithfulness look like instead of setting those conditions?
How does growing in knowledge of God’s faithfulness—through His Word, the sending of His Son, and the presence of His Spirit—equip us both to resist this temptation ourselves and to reflect that faithfulness to others?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you again tonight as we continue our new series, The Temptations. Last week, we began this series looking at the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, thinking about how he has triumphed over everything, including temptation, for us. So let’s come before our God and thank Him for His goodness and the triumph, the victory that He gives to us. And then we’ll look at the second temptation, which is to misuse God’s faithfulness.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this evening and for your word. Thank you for your faithfulness, Lord, and your patience with us, your kindness to us, even when we don’t deserve it. Lord, would you help us as we look at what the Son has done, what our Savior has done for us? Would you help us to better understand what you have given to us in your grace? Would you help us to be more of the people that you’ve called us to be through that? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I think we’ve all seen these lists. Perhaps you’ve seen it on Facebook or some other social media site. Perhaps it’s been an email someone’s forwarded to you, a letter. Maybe it’s someone just coming with some notes they’ve written down, but they’ve heard from somewhere else. We’ve seen these lists that take different scripture verses, usually just a verse or two at a time, and try to show some problem, alleged problem in the Bible.
Someone wrote into Little Hills a couple weeks ago with one of these lists that he was struggling with, and in that list, it listed out different passages that tried to argue that the Bible thought the earth was flat, trying to show that it wasn’t really God’s word, that God doesn’t really exist because of these alleged mistakes. And in that list, it was taking these verses and using them in a way that wasn’t really ever intended for them to be used.
I think the person writing was genuine that he just was confused because it looked like this convincing list of evidence against the Bible. But what it really came down to was that whoever had assembled the list originally had taken these metaphors, these word pictures like we use every day where maybe you lose your remote control for your TV and you say, “I will search the ends of the earth. I’m bound and determined to find that remote.” Taking things like that that we all know aren’t speaking to the nature of whether the earth is flat or a globe, but are simply expressing our determination, taking those sorts of things out of scripture and trying to misuse them to imply that the scriptures didn’t really understand the world and how it works.
That’s sort of a commonplace example we run into. There’s lots of different ways that scripture can be misused. And what we see here tonight in the second temptation is the devil continues to try to destroy the mission of Jesus, is that he uses scripture. We don’t normally think of that. We think of the devil as wanting to keep us away from the scriptures. But in fact, if he can cause us to misuse them and misunderstand them, he delights in that. And so as we turn back to Matthew chapter four, we see he attempts to do that, to thwart the mission of God.
Let’s go ahead and turn there right now. It says, “Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, ‘If you are the son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” Satan is trying to undermine Jesus’s determination to follow his heavenly Father.
In the first temptation, Satan’s already tried to throw Jesus off course by saying, “You know, you’ve been fasting for 40 days. You’re really hungry. Maybe you should eat something.” And that didn’t work because Jesus said, “But I know that my Father is faithful. And I genuinely, my life comes from feeding off of Him and His faithfulness, off of His word, not off of just common bread.” If the Father wants to keep the Son alive, if the Father wants to keep any of us alive, he could do it indefinitely without food. Jesus knows that.
So what does Satan do? He goes and says, “OK, if you’re feeding off of God’s word, well, I have some scriptures to share with you, Jesus. Look at these passages from the Psalms that speak about how the faithfulness of God is going to be demonstrated. He created angels to protect you. You could jump off of this temple mount that we’re on, off the pinnacle of the temple. You could jump off of it. He’s going to protect you. So you know what, Jesus, you should do it because you might—you probably are you sure you’re the Son? Are you really confident in God’s faithfulness? Look at it this way, Jesus, if you would just do this, this is really actually the faithful thing to do, because it would prove that you believe that God’s word is true, because you’re expecting that that promise that the angels would catch you is actually going to happen. And on top of that, Jesus, you prove to anyone else that saw it. Look at the faithfulness of God. He’s not going to let me fall. So it’s really the only good thing to do, Jesus. You should jump.”
You see, one of the things that Satan loves to do, one of the things actually our own hearts love to do in our fallen state, is to misapply a verse or passage of Scripture to make it appear faithful to do what’s displeasing to God. And that’s what Satan’s trying to get Jesus to do here, to take these passages that speak about God’s faithfulness and say, “It’s time to test God on this. For everyone’s benefit, Jesus, you should do it.”
Jesus will have nothing of this, though. And we see that in verse seven. Take a look. Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” We’d like to think that we don’t do this. I’d like to think that I never do this. But I think we probably all felt the pull at some point to take a verse and make it mean what we want. And perhaps one of the prime examples of people doing this comes in politics.
Here we are in 2020. It’s hard to forget what year we’re in. And in the midst of everything else, we have a presidential campaign going. And every four years when the presidential campaigns start rolling around, what do we see? We see the candidates show up at different churches. We see this with both parties. They find a church that’s sympathetic to them and the church invites them in. They come up into the pulpit, and while marginally speaking about their faith and reading some scriptures, what do they do? They take those scriptures and they start to twist them just a little bit. So that, surprise surprise, the Bible itself says that you should support the policies of that politician. They’ve been doing it for years because it’s so tempting to be able to try to convince people to commit. And they do that.
If you just listen to me, I am the one politician who’s going to actually do God’s will. Here’s the question we should ask when we hear people, whether politicians or family or friends or even our own hearts, quoting scripture. We need to ask not only, are you quoting scripture, but are you quoting it accurately? Are you actually conveying what it means? Jesus, when he responded to Satan, says, “Satan, yeah, you’re quoting the scriptures, but you’re not being accurate to them. You’re not actually expressing what the word of God says.”
Years before in the wilderness, the Israelites were out. That’s what we see that’s so remarkable about these temptations to Jesus is that they were in the wilderness and Jesus was in the wilderness. And once again, Jesus turns to their story to answer Satan. Because when they were in the wilderness, they tested God and they separated themselves from following God faithfully.
And years later, as Moses’s ministry comes to an end, he actually makes the statement Jesus quotes. And let’s look at the bigger picture of that because we get more details as we do. Moses said to the people, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massa. You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his testimonies and his statutes which he has commanded you.” Not only were they not supposed to put God to the test, but Moses points to why they could fall into that to begin with. And that’s that they’re not studying diligently who God is, what his word says, what he commands. They were able to get off track. They were able to start focusing on the wrong things and then fall into this trap of wanting God to prove himself again to them, even though he had rescued them from Egypt, even though he parted the waters of the Red Sea, even though he’d done all these things.
They could say, “I think we need God to prove himself here,” because they weren’t studying diligently who God is. So when Jesus quotes this, what he is showing for us is that call to study diligently. A misquoted verse, a misapplied verse isn’t going to derail his mission as the Son of God because he knows the fullness of who the Father is.
We need to ask ourselves the same question when we’re trying to apply the scriptures or we hear someone else applying, whether it’s a politician, a friend, a family member, another pastor, an author we love. We should ask the question always: am I careful to pay attention to what God’s word means? Not just that I’m reading God’s word, but that I actually care about what it means. How I’m applying this passage fits with the rest of scripture. Yes, it says that the angels would protect God’s people, but there’s nothing in the rest of scripture that says that you should ever jump off a building to prove God’s faithfulness. Jesus knows that. And when we study diligently God’s word, we’re protected from those buildings we feel like we should leap off of too.
Because as we look at the whole of scripture, that misapplied verse comes up. Sometimes it’s an unintentional misapplication. A lot of times. But that misapplied verse comes up and we say, “I’m feeling like I should apply it this way. I’m being told I should apply it this way, but I know what God’s word says and that doesn’t make sense. I need to think more. I need to pray more. I need to seek wisdom from others.”
And sometimes, here’s the second challenge in that for us. Sometimes we don’t want to. Sometimes when a verse comes to mind and I desperately want it to mean something that affirms what I want to do right now, what I want to accomplish, what I think God’s going to do for me right now. My temptation is to think, “I don’t want to know the context around it, the rest of the chapter it comes from, or the rest of the book, or the overall story of scripture in relationship to it.” Because I want it to mean what I want it to mean.
Friends, if we fall into that spot, it’s such a dangerous place to be. Because then we’re falling into this very temptation that Jesus resists here. Because it’s no longer about what does God’s word say, it’s about what I want it to mean or what someone else wants it to mean. And that can lead to all kinds of awful places. And we see that in the implications of what Satan is doing here.
Because it’s not just a misuse of God’s word. In that then, Satan is turning to a misuse of God’s protection and care for his people. When you think about Jesus’ rejection of turning rocks into food that we talked about last week, that I referenced earlier. When you think about that, what does it really boil down to? It’s that Jesus is confident in his Father. He’s confident that he doesn’t need to do that because God the Father is faithful to the Son. And we don’t need to turn to the temptations that we face, because the Father is faithful to us too.
But Satan tries to attack that. He tries to put a little wedge in there and say, “Jesus, are you sure that you know that the Father is faithful to you? Are you sure that the Father isn’t going to fail you this time? You would know for sure if you jumped off that temple, if you were plunging down, and those angels sweep you up and not even your little toe is a tad bit stubbed. You would know without a doubt in that, that the Father is faithful.”
And it sounds so good, but it’s so, so wrong.
We turn again to the story of the Israelites that Jesus references by quoting that passage from Deuteronomy. The incident that that Deuteronomy passage is remembering actually comes in Exodus chapter 17. And we see where the Israelites go wrong, because they set their success as having water and not having the God of the universe with them.
Let’s take a look at Exodus 17 verse 7. It says, [Note: Verse text not included in the transcript.]
You see, the problem for the Israelites wasn’t simply that they said they were thirsty. God calls us to come to him and pray for our daily bread, our daily needs, and water certainly fits in there. The problem was, they said, if the Lord provides us with water on demand, if he rolls out the heavenly water coolers and we’re able to be refreshed in this moment, then we know that God is faithful. But forget all the stuff he’s done in the past. If he doesn’t do this, then he’s not really with us. Is the Lord with us or not? There’s the critical thing.
They’ve turned what they envision as being the way that God should prove himself as being faithful to them as the test of God’s faithfulness. They’re testing God. And one thing that they needed to remember, one thing that we need to constantly remember, is that God’s presence is not dictated. God’s presence isn’t proven by our stipulations of how it should be fulfilled. How God should show his presence to us. How he should show his faithfulness to us.
That’s crucially important as Satan tempts Jesus. Because Satan isn’t just saying, “Hey Jesus, at this point, you’re hungry, you should have some food,” or “You’re thirsty, you should have some water.” He’s saying, “Create a crisis so that God the Father can prove that God the Son is really God the Son, that the Father is really with the Son. Create a situation where your Father has to act and then you’ll know.”
So it’s ramping up what the Israelites did. It’s in the same vein though, because if Jesus had leapt, he would have been saying that, “Is the Father with me or not? I’ll know depending on if I hit the ground or not.” And I have to think of that moment Satan was wanting Jesus to go down the track that, “I don’t know, would he really rescue me? Maybe I should just jump because if he doesn’t rescue me, then it’s just as well that I hit the ground and die. But if he does, then I’ll finally have confidence.”
That’s what Satan wants Jesus to do. Jesus won’t bite, but that’s what Satan wants. And we fall into that. We want God to do certain things on our own terms so that he can prove that he’s with us, so that he can prove that he’s faithful to us.
That’s not what God calls us to do. And it’s not how we learn about his faithfulness.
Imagine if you were trying to decide if you wanted to accomplish something, and so you say, “I am going to put the tools I need for that in the back of my car.” And then this happened: as you can see, this truck’s driving down the road, and the box falls out of the truck, and it bounces back in. And then the box falls out of the truck, and it bounces back in again. It’s incredible.
And if I were using this as a test of whether God wanted me to do something, I would think, “Wow, this is amazing. Clearly God wants me to do this because he’s keeping that box in my truck.” Because he’s keeping that box in my truck.
But that’s not how God works. I think we all know boxes normally don’t bounce back into trucks. And I read after I saw this video about how it happened, I think the way that the force of the wind was working and all these different things. But if I tried to do it, if I decided to test God by putting a bunch of stuff in the back of my car and seeing if it could fall out and bounce back in, you know what would probably happen? It would probably stay on the road and someone would drive over it, because that’s not how God works.
He doesn’t call us to create an artificial crisis, an artificial demand for a miracle to prove that he is faithful.
It’s like the old joke that you hear about the pastor who, after the service, takes up all the money in the offering plate and throws it up in the air and says, “Whatever God wants, whatever is for him, he can catch; and whatever falls to the ground, that’s for me.” Well, of course, that’s not the way that any church should handle its money because that’s not how God works. It’s a good way to take all the money in the offering plate.
We laugh about it because it’s silly. And yet then we go and do the very same things. And I have never seen a pastor actually try that joke and do it. But I have seen pastors who will create artificial crises in their church and then try to use the situation that they created, that they were responsible for, as evidence that the thing that they want should be done and say, “Well, God would intervene and prevent this if he really wanted something different.”
And we do it in our normal, everyday lives, too. We say, “If God really wanted me to share the gospel with this person, he would create a situation where I had to share the gospel with this person. We’d be locked in a room together for five days and have to talk about everything.” Or it seems like you’re in a job that’s causing you to have to do things that you know aren’t good and pleasing to God. You have to cheat on something or steal something or whatever the case may be. And you think, “Well, if God really wanted me to move on, he would force me out. He would provide a wonderful new job for me that was just waiting for me.” He’d do all these things.
Or on the flip side, you’re in a job and you say, “Well, I’m just going to quit because God is faithful. He’s going to prove to me where I should be next because I’ll just quit.” And then the offers will come rolling in. That’s not how it works.
We do that in all sorts of areas in life, whether it’s work or relationships or hobbies or family matters. Whatever it might be, we find ways to create these little artificial crises, these little artificial demands that God has to respond and show his faithfulness, that he’s with us, or he has to show us exactly how we think we should move forward.
And when we’re doing that, we might not feel like we’re saying, “I’m going to leap off a temple and see if God catches me.” But it’s that same temptation that we’re falling to, just like the Israelites did. It doesn’t seem like a big thing to say, “If God’s with us, he’ll provide water.” But the problem was, they weren’t looking at God’s faithfulness. They weren’t diligently studying his word.
What were they doing? They were setting the standard by which God would have to work in their minds for him to prove himself. And that’s our second question we need to guard ourselves on that we’re going to talk about tonight. Do I fall into the trap of, “If God really wanted me to do blank, then he would do…” And what I mean by that is, we create these things, we fill in that blank. We say, “If God really wanted me to be more faithful in this area of my life, if God really wanted me to take time to read his word, he would prevent me from doing some of the other things I do that keep me too busy for it.”
If God really wanted me to be nice to that neighbor that drives me nuts, he’d cause me to get a flat tire as I was backing out of the driveway, so I’d have to talk to the neighbor.
We do these sorts of things, we rationalize them, but they become more of an excuse for us to ignore God’s faithfulness and God’s calling in our lives than they do an actual presentation of our dependence upon Him. They sound often very spiritual. We can make them sound really good, that “I’m just trusting that God is going to miraculously work because I believe he can.” And that’s a great thing. We should believe that God can work miraculously. He does work miraculously.
But the problem becomes when we say, and this is how God is going to work miraculously, and if he doesn’t do this, then I don’t think he’s faithful, or I don’t think he’s calling me to do this thing that his word clearly calls me to do.
Those are the sorts of areas where we get trapped in this temptation.
That’s exactly what Satan is trying to do to Jesus here. He’s saying, “If God is faithful, if the Father is faithful to you, Jesus, then have him prove it. Just say, all you need to say is, ‘If the Father really wanted me to go do the rest of the ministry I’m going to do, then I should be able to jump off this building and survive.’”
But Jesus doesn’t do it because he studied God’s word diligently. And this is what’s wonderful about who Jesus is. Yes, he is the very God of the universe, but he’s also a human being. He’s feeling the pull of this because we’re told that he has faced every temptation that we face. Yet he was without sin. He didn’t fall to it. And we do.
So how do we avoid that? It comes back to that diligently studying who God is. The solution to avoid misusing God’s faithfulness is to get to know him better. To get to know his faithfulness better. Because when we immerse ourselves in God’s word, when we see scripture being misused, we can far more quickly detect that. We can say, “That doesn’t seem to fit.” Or, “Yes, you seem to be trying to do something righteous, but clearly the way you’re trying to do it, or these ten other things you’re advocating for, aren’t righteous.”
Or, when we’re in that spot and we’re doubting God’s faithfulness to us, we say, “Yes, it would be great if I’m thirsty that God hands me a glass of water right when I want it. But that’s not how I know that God is faithful. I know God is faithful because I can see it demonstrated throughout all of eternity that God is faithful. I can see it in every page of his word that he has given you and he’s given me.”
How do we know that God is faithful? How do we avoid misusing his faithfulness? We simply need to better know his faithfulness. And that’s my prayer for each of us this week, that we would better know God’s faithfulness. And as we turn to Him more, that we would show that faithfulness to others, just as Jesus showed the Father’s faithfulness when he turned away from Satan’s temptation. And he turned instead to the one who is faithful.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your faithfulness. As the old hymn goes, “Great is your faithfulness, O God our Father.” Lord, we see that demonstrated in every page of your word. We see that demonstrated in that you sent your Son to live, to suffer, to die for us, to triumph over death for us. We see that in how you’ve given your Spirit to us, that we go through life with you present in it. And we know, as hard as it is, and as much as we feel tempted, as much as we want those proofs, that your presence is with us whether or not we set conditions. That you don’t call us to set tests to prove your faithfulness. You call us to know you and know your faithfulness. And Lord, as we do that more and more, would you encourage us and help us to better understand who you are? Would you help us to show who you are to others? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We’re going to continue next week with the third temptation that Satan brought to Jesus. And that’s the temptation for power. I think all of us at some point or points in our life are going to feel the draw for power. There’s power over some circumstance in our life. Power over other people. Power through money. There’s lots of different kinds of power.
But what can we say, just as we’ve been able to say with these two other temptations, that the God of the universe understands when we feel that. Because Jesus willingly gave up all the power in the universe, emptied himself, coming into this world as a servant, and rejected Satan’s temptation to quickly retake that power. Instead, staying on his mission to please the Father and to rescue us.
So I hope you’ll join me next week, and I hope that tonight has been encouraging to you. If it has, I would really appreciate it if you’d like us, if you’d share this on your social media, or send an email to someone and share it. You can help us declare that God is faithful by simply spreading the word, by simply sharing one of these messages. Someone else you know probably needs to hear that God is faithful, and that even if they’ve come up with these tests that we all feel tempted to set, and God doesn’t answer it because that’s not what God’s called us to do, that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love that person or isn’t faithful. In fact, quite the opposite.
So I hope that you’ll do that. Because we have a faithful God, too. I would love to pray for you this week. And if there’s any way that I can do that, my email address is on screen. I would love to hear from you. Or you can leave a prayer request in the comments below the video, and we can pray for each other as a group. Likewise, if you have any comments or questions about what we’ve discussed tonight or anything else, feel free to leave them in the comments. Shoot me an email. It is always a joy to hear from you.
I can’t wait to join you again next week as we continue this series and we look at what Jesus has done for us. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week. Thank you again for joining me tonight.
Amen.