5 RISK-FREE LIVING: POWER RELIGION(1) And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God (Luke 4:9-12).
This is the second temptation in Matthew. I think the chronological sequence in Matthew is correct.
The theocentric principle of this law is the holiness of God. He is not to be trifled with for man's purposes. He is not to be called to account by man -- the message of the book of Job.
The offer here was risk-free living. This is a long-desired goal for man. It cannot be attained in this life, but risk-reduction is a universal practice. The modern science of statistics was initially developed by men who were seeking to lower their risk.(2) Risk-reduction does not come at zero price. The question is: How high a price? What was Satan asking Jesus to exchange in order to demonstrate His legal claim to this promise? What was this demonstration worth to Jesus? Did Jesus even possess such a legal claim to this promise? If He did, why did He surrender it here?
Tempting God Jesus answered the devil in the first temptation by an appeal to the Bible, i.e., the word of God. Having allowed the text of the Bible to establish this principle of authority, He cited the Bible again: "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." The full text of the verse throws light on the context. "Ye shall not tempt the LORD your God, as ye tempted him in Massah" (Deut. 6:16). The context of the Israelites' infraction was their cry for water in the wilderness, and their accusation that God had to prove Himself by the provision of water.
And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no water for the people to drink. Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst? And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me. And the LORD said unto Moses, Go on before the people, and take with thee of the elders of Israel; and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest the river, take in thine hand, and go. Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the LORD, saying, Is the LORD among us, or not? (Ex. 17:1-7).
God provided them with water. Moses struck the rock, and water flowed out of it. This was a demonstration of God's power. But it was a demonstration that condemned them to second-class citizenship. They became psychologically dependent on repeated supernatural displays of God's power over nature. They did not learn to trust His covenant law. They learned to complain again and again, whining for their desires. "And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul" (Ps. 106:16). They never grew up. Even Moses was later snared by their commitment to magic as a way of life. He struck the other rock twice to draw water out of it, despite the fact that God had told him to speak to the rock, not strike it (Num. 20:10-12). He used ritual instead of relying on God's word -- the essence of magic.(3)
To Protect the Messiah The devil cited a portion of Psalm 91.(4) This is sometimes regarded as a messianic psalm. It refers to long life for the person spoken of. But long life was what was not granted to the Messiah in his role as redeemer. Jesus died young. How could this passage have applied to Him? "There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet. Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation" (Ps. 91:10-16; emphasis added).
A Suffering Messiah
Satan cited a verse which, if applied literally to Jesus, would have meant that He could not serve as the Passover's sacrificial lamb, a young sacrifice. The Old Covenant's sacrificial animals were young.(5)
If this passage applied literally to Jesus in His pre-resurrection phase, then it meant that the world would not have a savior. He would survive the fall from the temple, but mankind would not survive a Messiah blessed with longevity. Israel might gain a long-lived king; it would not gain a savior.
The difficulty in interpreting this prophecy as messianic is the opposite message in a crucial messianic prophecy, a prophecy of substitutionary atonement.
Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isa. 53:1-12).
If this applied to Jesus, then the prophecy in Psalm 91 either did not apply to Jesus in His office as Messiah, or else it applied as an inheritance that He abandoned. The question is, if the passage in Psalm 91 did not apply to Jesus, to whom did it apply? No one in Old Covenant history claimed it as his own. If not Jesus, then who? I conclude that this psalm offered this set of unique conditions to Jesus, but He refused to claim the inheritance as His. He refused it here, and in response, God the Father refused to honor it on Calvary. On the cross, Jesus called out to God: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46b). God remained silent. Yet the passage affirms: "He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation" (Ps. 91:14-16). This promise was no longer in force. Why not? Because Jesus forfeited any claim to it by fulfilling the role of the suffering Messiah. So, the psalm was not messianic.
A Leap of Faith
Satan proposed a test. If Jesus failed it, there would be no substitutionary sacrifice, no execution. There would only be a dead body on the ground. On the other hand, if Jesus survived, then He was a premature heir to this promise, and therefore He could not be the prophesied lamb led to the slaughter. It was a lose-lose situation for Jesus, and a win-win offer for Satan. Jesus declined to accept the challenge.
Jesus cited the law against tempting God. Yet Gideon had doubted and had proposed a pair of tests involving a fleece (Jud. 6:37-40). What is wrong with such demonstrations of God's intentions? Nothing, just so long as the information desired has not been revealed authoritatively in the Bible. Gideon had no way to be sure that he was speaking to a representative of God. There was no written revelation that applied to his situation. Not so with Jesus. He knew that the verse cited was applicable to Him, but only as a statement of the protection available to Him, not as a prophecy the actual details of His life. He was not going to prove its applicability in a way that might produce His immediate death or validate His non-messianic long life. Neither result was appropriate for His work on earth.
The reason why this leap of faith would have constituted the tempting of God was because such a life-or-death test was imposed by man on his own authority. The Israelites had made this mistake: "Is God with us?" they had asked. "Let him prove it by offering us life-sustaining water." But God had already done so: at the Red Sea. The life-sustaining water for Israel was the death-inducing water for Egypt. They had seen this miracle. It no longer made any impression on them. They required another test. And another. There would be no end to the required tests if the Israelites of the exodus had anything to say about it.
Their addiction to miracles was very great. It was part of their slave's mentality. The slave relies on someone else to sustain him with capital. He is not ready to become an independent person. The exodus generation had not been willing to accept the responsibility of war against Canaan (Num. 14). They had to wander for a generation until they died off.
Jesus was not addicted to miracles for His own sake. He provided them for Israel's sake. He used them to establish a covenant lawsuit against Israel. "And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee" (Matt. 11:23-24). That generation would die in its sins as surely as the exodus generation had.(6)
Life Has Risks Life has risks. We dash our feet against stones. We slip and fall. Because of sin, we suffer the negative sanctions of pain and failure. We suffer death. In this sense, we live a high-risk existence.
Satan was offering Jesus risk-free living. For the Messiah, such risk-free living would mean the death of man. The Messiah was to experience separation from God on behalf of man -- the ultimate risk. For Him, there was no escape, so that for His people there is an escape. There was no way that Jesus could live risk-free and still perform His work as redeemer.
Men want to lower their risks. This is legitimate, in the same sense that seeking to lower any of our costs is legitimate. But to seek risk-free living is to seek slavery and death. It is comparable to seeking cost-free living. Such a quest is demonic in history: the overcoming of sin's curse without overcoming sin.
The most successful technical means of reducing risk is economic growth. We gain more wealth, which can be used to shield us from unpleasant events. Then there is the discovery of the laws of mathematical probability.(7) This has drastically reduced risk. But no means of risk reduction should be elevated above God's offer of protection: not insurance, not wealth, not power. Any rival source of risk reduction will eventually be worshiped by man. It will then demand sacrifice.
Bureaucracy
In the second half of the twentieth century, a vast bureaucracy has been created by law that seeks to reduce risks for all people under the jurisdiction of the State. But risks must be borne by someone. The cost of paying for unforeseen negative events must be borne by someone. Increasingly, the State insists that it will pay for the errors of men. The State imposes taxes on the successful in order to compensate those who have failed. This is not an insurance transaction in which men contract with each other through a third party to insure against statistically predictable losses. It is not a transaction based on a cost-benefit estimation of those who are asked to pay. The costs are imposed by coercion on those who do not posses effective political influence.
This coercive wealth redistribution policy raises costs. Employers bear a heavy load of responsibility in the government's many systems of risk reduction. So, employers seek out employees who are less likely to be injured, fail, or in other ways cost the employer extra money. Those who are required to pay seek ways of excluding from the arrangement those who are statistically more likely to be paid.
The modern administrative law order has extended the definition of social risk and has extended its net to haul in more people to bear such risk. Men seek to be protected by the State's many economic safety nets, yet they also seek to escape the nets tossed out to entrap those with capital. The end of such a game of hide and seek is sure: the increase in the number of those who are promised safety and the loss of freedom for those who are required to pay. At some point, the safety net will break, breaking men's faith in the State, and breaking the State's nets of entrapment. When this happens, all those who are dependent on the broken safety nets will find themselves weak and defenseless against social change. The very collapse of the nets will accelerate social change, increasing risks for all.
Conclusion The Messiah had to bear risks. The messianic State must also bear risks. The Messiah did not attempt to test the existence of a safety net from God. He bore His own risks and ours as well.
The messianic State seeks to transfer risks to taxpayers and others with capital. The result will be an unprecedented disaster. Hundreds of millions of people have been lured into one or another of the safety nets. When these nets break, those caught inside them will have a great fall.
The top priority of this passage is to live by God's word, but not by expectations of abnormal supernatural intervention. A religion of risk-defying acts in defiance of God's law is a religion of magic. Biblical religion is not magical. It does not rely on man-invoked supernatural miracles to enable man to achieve the good life. It also does not invoke the State as a provider of safety nets against the economic results of either risk-avoiding failure(8) or needlessly risky foolishness.
Footnotes:
1. This is adapted from Chapter 2 of Gary North, Priorities and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Matthew, electronic edition (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics), published on the freebooks.com Web site.
2. Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Odds: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: Wiley, 1996).
3. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1997), ch. 11.
4. In Luke's account, the citation comes from the Septuagint, Psalm 90:11, 12. William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: An Exposition of the Gospel According to Luke (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1978), p. 238.
5. Leviticus 1:14; Numbers 28:19; Numbers 29:13; Luke 2:24.
6. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
7. Bernstein, Against the Odds.
8. The parable of the pounds: the man who buried his (Luke 19:12-15). See Chapter 44, below.
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