Come to the Cross.
The Cross gives perspective on perfection, for it explains the desert in the context of destiny. The Cross magnifies Jesus’ arid, hidden trial as a pathway of preparation, purification, and completion.
When Jesus was baptized several years before His crucifixion, He emerged from the waters, was blessed by a voice from heaven, and immediately was led by the Spirit into a period of aloneness. Therefore, that any record of Jesus’ time in the desert exists must mean He felt it was important enough to talk about later with His disciples, perhaps with the specific instructions to write it into the larger narrative of purpose and redemption.
Jesus’ desert duel with the Devil is not only the classic confrontation of good versus evil but also the pure alchemy of Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity. Jesus had divine authority to orchestrate each of Satan’s taunts, as well as the human obedience to accept that His power was only an administration of God’s will.
The Lord Jesus admits as much later, when He is captured and arrested – His way to the Cross now more immediate and dire. “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and He will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”1
But in the garden, as He first did in the desert, Jesus trusted in His Father’s prophesied plan. Jesus denied Himself as God and Lord and carried the Cross as Savior instead. In His final hours, Jesus let every temptation intensify His passion; with each step closer to Golgatha, He knew He could turn stones into loaves of bread and deploy angel armies in a display so marvelous and powerful that every knee would bow.
The temptation was to become what everyone was expecting, a Messiah and King robed in spectacle and splendor, but the truth was wrapped in linen and spices and placed in a tomb.
And God deployed angels anyway.
For Jesus to save others, quite simply, He could not save Himself. That fact, He must have known as He faced Satan in the desert.
Philip Yancey
God’s plans rarely make sense until they are complete, yet He whispers hints along the way. Perhaps Jesus wanted us to know what happened in the desert so that we will not fear when the Spirit leads us to strange places we cannot understand in the present context.
From the perspective of the Cross, we can look back on Jesus in the desert, and when He said, “Away from me, Satan!” we recognize the self-control and faithfulness the Lord needed to later say, “It is finished.”2
We take up our crosses and follow Jesus in this life because He gave His as both a sacrifice and example for how to navigate trials with obedience and to trust that God’s perfect plans ultimately prevail.
