Away with you Satan!  For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only will you serve.  Matthew 4:10

Jesus is the Son of God, one of the Three Heavenly Triune.  As God on earth, He showed His power over Satan by easily casting out demons.  Before Jesus Christ could even take action, the demons recognized Him and were deathly afraid, knowing of His power and might.  Jesus could have easily answered Satan’s temptations in His own words.  Yet what did decide to use?  Not new words that would have shown His wisdom, power and majesty, no He chose to use His Father’s words.  Words given to Moses in the wilderness (see Deuteronomy 8:3, 6:16 and 6:13).

Again I am no scholar in the least, but I think this is why Jesus felt it important to tell the story of His temptation (remember the disciples were not with Him yet).  Jesus knew that we would all face temptations, not having the power that He has to resist.  So what He did was to give us the reference material that would provide the strength to ward off and overcome the temptations.  With Power and Humility, He called upon the words of Almighty God, the same words available to us, and Satan fled.

We have so many resources today.  Some are of an older nature.  I admit that I have a set of encyclopedias and I will from time to time, just to relive the experience, go and look some topic up in them.  Yet today there is so much more available for us to choose from to find our answers.  Wiki followed by some word has become synonymous with instant if perhaps questionable information.  Don’t know where to find something?  Well just Google it.  In classes that I teach I tell a story of horses pulling a specific wagon.  I wanted to know how much the empty wagon weighed, so what did I do?  You guessed it; I Googled it.  Now here is another frustrating aspect of the information/internet age.  I searched for the weight of the wagon.  Well don’t you know I found who made the wagon, what it was made from, the diameter of the wheels, nicknames for it, all sorts of information but after hours of searching I couldn’t find the weight of the wagon.  So I told that story in class and you can guess what happened.  Out came the smart phones and within five minutes someone came up to me with the answer I was looking for.  It took all my strength not to take that smart phone and chuck it across the room.

And that’s the challenge today.  We have so many resources out there to help us live our lives.  Often they are contradictory.  I will admit to reading some of the plethora of self help books out there.  Yet in the end I know where my greatest resource lies, the Word of God, the bible.  Yes some of what I read I don’t understand.  Yes some of what I reread I get either for the first time or because of life’s circumstances I get something new I had not seen before.  But I always get something, the right thing.  And it is all right there in one source

Jesus Christ does not lie.  He was tempted.  We are tempted so much more than He.  He understood and understands that.  That is why He came to earth in the first place.  He gave us the answer and where to find the answers.  The answer is His Father, the Creator and the answers are in His word.

May we find that to be the ultimate resource that we daily turn to.

Prayers of blessings to you.  Amen