The devil came to Jesus after his forty days fast and urged him to use his divine powers to turn stones into bread and satisfy his hunger. I did not fully capture the devil’s maneuver here until I visited Israel for a pilgrimage.
Our group of pilgrims visited the desert of Masada. Most conspicuous in this desert for me was the fact that the ground was littered with little stones of different sizes. That made me immediately think of how easy it was for the Jews to pick up stones against those they considered as lawbreakers.
Bread
Nevertheless, these stones remained just stones until I became very hungry later in the afternoon. Only then did the stones look exactly like the little loaves of bread I loved to eat with butter and honey in Germany. I really wished they were loaves of bread and then recalled the temptation of Jesus in this same wilderness. I thought of how much he could also have wished that the stones were bread after forty days of fasting and understood how clever the evil one was to strike at this particular moment of vulnerability.
What made this temptation a classical one was that Jesus, unlike me in the desert of Masada, had the powers to turn the stones into bread. That made him more vulnerable than we can imagine and the evil one knew it. His strategy has always been to identify our moments of weakness and exploit them.
Temptation
The tempter began by reminding Jesus that he was the Son of God. His statement was like, “since you are the Son of God, why must you starve, when you could easily use your divine powers to turn these stones into bread and take care of your hunger? Surely, God would understand that you were only fighting for survival.”
His attempt here was to incense the spirit of pride in Jesus and make him act out of haughtiness. However, his basic intention was to make him use his powers recklessly for a selfish purpose, an act that could have compromised his mission. The tempter wanted him to arbitrarily use his divine powers out of desperation to satisfy his hunger and prove his divine authority. And the condition of Jesus was optimal for the devil to achieve his purpose. For desperation can push a starving person to do anything to get food and pride can push a person beyond the red line.
Desperation as a Sign of Lack of Faith
Thus, when life’s weather becomes stormy, do not be desperate to end the tide. Desperation is not evidence of hard work; it is a sign of lack of faith. Desperation means the readiness to do anything whatsoever to get what one wants. A desperate person does not care about rules, including divine rules. A desperate person can easily despise God if it appears to him the only means to achieve his end.
When one is desperate, one becomes blind to the consequences of the choices one makes because desperation obliterates both reason and faith. Thus, a desperate person lacks both natural and spiritual insight. With this debilitating disposition, one may make regrettable eternal commitments in the bid to solve a fleeting problem. Desperation can lead to ungodly compromises and cause one even to mortgage one’s soul.
Exercising patience in moments of tribulations can save one from this grave danger. Often, it seems to our human calculations that God is too slow in answering our cries for deliverance. Though He might not be in a hurry, He will never be late in his avowed interventions to save us. He has his appointed time for all that He does. It pays to follow his timing patiently. Otherwise, one may pay dearly for desperation and impatience.
