How could Satan tempt Jesus?

[FCEGM]

First of all Christ was hungry. If you were absolutely famished, you’d do all you could to obtain food. People have resorted to cannibalism, infanticide, eating grass and rats and anything else they could get their hands on, despite both a strong natural and moral aversion.

Secondly how could Christ be so sure He was the Son of God? He’d performed no miracles up to that time as far as we know, He was probably ridiculed in his village as being born outside wedlock, and there was most likely nothing that would have given Him absolute certainty as to who He really was. In that sense the test of throwing himself off the Temple would have been tempting for Christ, and instructive for the devil.

Thirdly Christ was compassionate. When the devil showed Him in an instant (and visions often show great detail in a very short time) all the kingdoms of the world, he’d have made sure Christ saw all the misery those kingdoms caused, and impiied that if He were to be the ruler, He could stop all the abuses.

That would have been a very powerful temptation for someone who loved people and no doubt animals as well. In fact, the Church states that the final deception will be a religio-political charade that promises to fix all the world’s problems without reference to God, or the basic problem of human nature - sin.

I can see why the devil did it. Obviously none of us can get into the mind of Christ. But even today, the devil knows who God’s people are and tempts them in similar ways

Sometimes I suspect he’s not quite sure just what God intends to do with these people, so he prods them to find out, as much to find out God’s response as anything else. If tempting or damaging a particular person seems to get a stronger than usual reaction form God, the devil knows that person has an important role to play and then concentrates his attacks on him or her, much more so that he would on someone destined to have less influence on events.

We are also told angels ministered to Christ after the temptations, so if the devil wasn’t sure before, he would have been absolutely positive afterwards. But by then Christ had passed the test, so now the gloves were off. The devil knew who Christ was, and Christ knew the devil knew who He was. He could also see very clearly into somebody’s soul, as when He rebuked Peter immediately after Peter’s messianic declaration, for trying to talk Him out of the cross.

But until He passed that first major test, I think even Christ might have been, for lack of a better term, a shade ambivalent.

First, God is always sure of Who He Is.

Second, He was not “born outside of wedlock”.

Third, while He had two natures, He was one Divine Person and so wasn’t confused about His identity and thus wasn’t tempted to prove Himself to Himself or to His enemy.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

First, God is always sure of Who He Is.

Second, He was not “born outside of wedlock”.

Third, while He had two natures, He was one Divine Person and so wasn’t confused about His identity and thus wasn’t tempted to prove Himself to Himself or to His enemy.

If He wasn’t tempted, then He had no human nature.

We carn argue about the “born outside of wedlock” bit - He was certainly conceived “outside of wedlock”.

Finally I also have this suspicion (unproveable) that Joseph was a cruel stepfather, for the following reasons -

1. Christ wasn’t his son.
2. He had a young, attractive wife who refused to have sex with him, if she remained a virgin. That would have driven any red blooded male to distraction.
3. He gets scant mention in the New Testament outside of the absolute minimum. The most we hear about him is that he was a “just man”.

If so, then Christ would have known what a disfunctional family background was like, as well as being ridiculed in the local village for his “virgin birth”. Hence the sense of contempt we get when He tried to perform miracles in His own local area, and they wrote Him off.

 

[Big_Ro]

First of all Christ was hungry. If you were absolutely famished, you’d do all you could to obtain food. People have resorted to cannibalism, infanticide, eating grass and rats and anything else they could get their hands on, despite both a strong natural and moral aversion.

Secondly how could Christ be so sure He was the Son of God? He’d performed no miracles up to that time as far as we know, He was probably ridiculed in his village as being born outside wedlock, and there was most likely nothing that would have given Him absolute certainty as to who He really was. In that sense the test of throwing himself off the Temple would have been tempting for Christ, and instructive for the devil.

Thirdly Christ was compassionate. When the devil showed Him in an instant (and visions often show great detail in a very short time) all the kingdoms of the world, he’d have made sure Christ saw all the misery those kingdoms caused, and impiied that if He were to be the ruler, He could stop all the abuses.

That would have been a very powerful temptation for someone who loved people and no doubt animals as well. In fact, the Church states that the final deception will be a religio-political charade that promises to fix all the world’s problems without reference to God, or the basic problem of human nature - sin.

I can see why the devil did it. Obviously none of us can get into the mind of Christ. But even today, the devil knows who God’s people are and tempts them in similar ways

Sometimes I suspect he’s not quite sure just what God intends to do with these people, so he prods them to find out, as much to find out God’s response as anything else. If tempting or damaging a particular person seems to get a stronger than usual reaction form God, the devil knows that person has an important role to play and then concentrates his attacks on him or her, much more so that he would on someone destined to have less influence on events.

We are also told angels ministered to Christ after the temptations, so if the devil wasn’t sure before, he would have been absolutely positive afterwards. But by then Christ had passed the test, so now the gloves were off. The devil knew who Christ was, and Christ knew the devil knew who He was. He could also see very clearly into somebody’s soul, as when He rebuked Peter immediately after Peter’s messianic declaration, for trying to talk Him out of the cross.

But until He passed that first major test, I think even Christ might have been, for lack of a better term, a shade ambivalent.

With all due respect, I find your entire statement at odds with scripture and the life of Christ as I understand it. Christ had already performed the miracle at the wedding in Cana. He clearly knew who he was by the time he was twelve at the very least. This is when his parents found him in the temple which he called his father’s house. Satan is most often described a deceiver. Certainly, he must have known who he was when John the Baptist baptised him in the river Jordan. The skies opened up and God himself spoke. Why would he provide Christ with a true picture of the world? I find no ambivelance in Christ whatsoever. He takes a clear a deliberate path to the final outcome. There is no clear indication in scripture that the devil knew the true nature of Jesus. I suspect that he saw Jesus as being no more nor no less than he. This is afterall his fundemental sin. He saw himself as being equal to God. Peter did not try and talk him out of the cross. He resisted it as he did on other occaisions. Jonah also resisted. Christ did not resist. Sure, he may have had moments of doubt, but like Mary, did not resist.

 

[FCEGM]

If He wasn’t tempted, then He had no human nature.

OTC, Christ has the fully human nature, i.e., one not wounded by sin. His humanity is therefore graced and in harmony with His Divine nature. For us to be tending toward sin is for us not to be fully human; therefore we are not the vantage point of healing of our wounded nature but He is. It follows that for Him to heal our infirmity He must bring health to our infirmity. We can’t give what we don’t have, so He must have this health of being fully human, i.e., in harmony with God in order to give it to us by grace. He therefore could not sin, which makes him perfectly human, not less human.

Christ as a healer must have what He is going to share, i.e., must be fully, i.e., perfectly human and Divine or He could not heal us. He gives us the health, as it were, He has. If He did not have this health we, being sick, could not receive healing. So it is not Christ Who is not fully human, it is we, in our fallen state, who are not yet fully human. Only when we by His merits are conformed to Him by divine grace will our humanity be all that it should be. Christ is the Model and Goal for humanity, not vice-versa.

It is abnormal for human nature to suffer and die; that abnormality is a result of the Original Sin. Our Lord chose to suffer and die; temptation for Him is not exactly the same as for us. The world and the devil would tempt Him from outside, but there was no concupiscence in Him that could pull Him towards sin within His humanity. What He experienced in the Passion is the natural repulsion of the flesh which ought not to die, is not supposed to die, to undergo that separation of body and soul.

Since He was fully human, He would have felt this separation and its preliminaries more than we do. Moreover, He would have felt the abandonment of His Father more than we do (since He was closer to Him than we ever were or could be). It is because He could not sin that when he undergoes this separation of death He experiences “temptation” in a way as we do. But in another way He doesn’t; He was not bent towards sin. He couldn’t even want to sin. He could be tempted by the vissicitudes of a human nature and a human will, but he could never deviate in the slightest from a desire to do good and avoid evil. He would not have experienced inordinate lust or greed, or gluttony, etc… His trials came from outside though they are experienced inside, e.g., suffering and death. While He has consciousness of being the Son, in His sacred humanity He is able to suffer from forces outside Himself (hunger, thirst, obduracy of others, etc.); and as Man He acquired sensible knowledge, had human emotions and thus could feel sorrow and fear; so He brings what He encounters in His Body to His Father because He is in relation to Him and is the Perfect Man at prayer, submitting His human will (Christ Jesus has two wills, Divine and Human) to the Will of the Father.

Whatever Jesus did from either His human or divine natures it was God doing it: God was born; God walked the earth; God suffered and God died on the cross. To think that Jesus was capable of sinning is to imply that God Himself could choose other than the good, for it was God doing, thinking, living and loving through that human nature.

Consider the doctrine of the Theotokos: Mary is the Mother of God because the Person born of her is Divine. IOW, she didn’t just give birth to Christ’s human nature, but gave birth to a Person. The Son, the Second Person of the Divinity, took upon Himself a human nature; joined to that human nature He is known as Jesus, but there is only one Person who is undivided in Himself while being both God and Man - and it is a person who sins or not, not a nature.

We carn argue about the “born outside of wedlock” bit - He was certainly conceived “outside of wedlock”.

Given that God the Father is the Father of the Person conceived in the Virgin’s womb, to speak in this manner is both sacrilegious and ignorant. Ignorant, because the Virgin through the over-shadowing of the Holy Spirit enters into a spousal relationship with God. Further, God arranges so that the just Joseph is given as the Protector of the Mother and Child and so that no condemnation such as you suggest will fall upon the Mother of God and her Child. Thus their marriage to all viewing it would be considered as just one of many in their town - that is why their Son was later viewed with disregard: He was just one of their own so “who does He think He is?!”

He had a young, attractive wife who refused to have sex with him, if she remained a virgin.

For Catholics - and for the Orthodox - their is no “if”. A Catholic must believe that Mary remained a Virgin, and it is with faith and good scriptural and cultural reasons that one does so.

You truly think God would set His Son in the midst of a family situation out of some infernal soap opera?! Your incredible opinion of Joseph and his chaste relationship with the Blessed Mother is so anti-Catholic and crude as to be worthy of Bill Maher.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

It is abnormal for human nature to suffer and die; that abnormality is a result of the Original Sin. Our Lord chose to suffer and die; temptation for Him is not exactly the same as for us. The world and the devil would tempt Him from outside, but there was no concupiscence in Him that could pull Him towards sin within His humanity. What He experienced in the Passion is the natural repulsion of the flesh which ought not to die, is not supposed to die, to undergo that separation of body and soul.

For Catholics - and for the Orthodox - their is no “if”. A Catholic must believe that Mary remained a Virgin, and it is with faith and good scriptural and cultural reasons that one does so.

You truly think God would set His Son in the midst of a family situation out of some infernal soap opera?! Your incredible opinion of Joseph and his chaste relationship with the Blessed Mother is so anti-Catholic and crude as to be worthy of Bill Maher.

What Christ experienced in the passion was being scourged with a whip laced with bones and bits of metal, humiliation, spitting by the crowd, mockery, and crucifixion. That’s more than just “death”. Secondly if we’re not supposed to die, why is the whole of the ecosystem set up on life and death, including human life? After all, if we didn’t die, it wouldn’t take long before there was standing room only, particularly if our sexual urge was combined with Catholic teaching on contraception.

Finally I don’t think of the Holy Family as a soap opera at all. If anything, it is the common religious sanctified view that has elements of soap opera about it. I see a Joseph sweating in his hot, dusty carpenter shop, with some customers not paying their bills, trying to care for a young wife who remains a virgin, with a son who isn’t his, living in an occupied country, and copping the ridicule from the village in the process.

I mean if you had a teenage mother next to you who insisted that her son was the result of a virgin birth, while the rumour went the rounds of the street that she refused to sleep with her older husband, what would be your reaction? Or the reaction of less well behaved neighbours than you, and particularly the kids of her own child’s age?

I’m afraid I see a family like any other that has to do the hard yards, divinely chosen or not, with all the human dynamic that entails.

I’ll stick by my opinion. When we both die, we can find out for sure.

 

[FCEGM]

What Christ experienced in the passion was being scourged with a whip laced with bones and bits of metal, humiliation, spitting by the crowd, mockery, and crucifixion. That’s more than just “death”. Secondly if we’re not supposed to die, why is the whole of the ecosystem set up on life and death, including human life? After all, if we didn’t die, it wouldn’t take long before there was standing room only, particularly if our sexual urge was combined with Catholic teaching on contraception.

Finally I don’t think of the Holy Family as a soap opera at all. If anything, it is the common religious sanctified view that has elements of soap opera about it. I see a Joseph sweating in his hot, dusty carpenter shop, with some customers not paying their bills, trying to care for a young wife who remains a virgin, with a son who isn’t his, living in an occupied country, and copping the ridicule from the village in the process.

I mean if you had a teenage mother next to you who insisted that her son was the result of a virgin birth, while the rumour went the rounds of the street that she refused to sleep with her older husband, what would be your reaction? Or the reaction of less well behaved neighbours than you, and particularly the kids of her own child’s age?

I’m afraid I see a family like any other that has to do the hard yards, divinely chosen or not, with all the human dynamic that entails.

I’ll stick by my opinion. When we both die, we can find out for sure.

You can get beyond mere opinion by reading and listening with a Catholic mind and heart; you can wait if you want to, but in doing so you’ll simply continue in your irreverence regarding the Holy Family which does you no spiritual good here and now.

 

[brumano]

I think the only answer from a Catholic perspective is that Jesus was only tempted in his human nature. His divine nature as Trinitarian Son was unaffected by temptation. After all, what is the point of offering the very Creation Agent “all the kingdoms of the earth”? What a paltry, insulting, cheap offer, if made to the Trinitarian God-Son. Therefore it would appear that Jesus could only be tempted as a man, a human being. His “God-nature” by definition cannot undergo temptation.

Well for what it may be worth to you as a “mystical seeker” this catholic’s perspective is that the Lord Jesus was fully tempted as a whole being and not only in His humanity which He truly took on, but as the Son of the Most High that He was is and will always be.
There is no disintegration in His being, such as with us as we often feel torn between good and bad. There is a part of this that remains incomprehensible to us, so that part is relegated to an area called mysterious. The Lord was tempted mightily beyond any temptation any of us ever undergo; I think the passage in Hebrews…“for we have a High Priest like us in all temptation…” * not only in the desert, but at many other times also. In all the temptations put forth by the evil one in the desert there are myriad temptations imposed. Again, the Lord Himself overcame temptation He was by no means immune from it. God of course can be tempted, which is why in His goodness He strictly orders, not only warns but commands us not to tempt Him: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”.*

 

[Curious_Seed]

In Mathew 4-1-11, Jesus was tempted three times after a 40 day fast in the desert. I don’t understand how and why the devil could challenge Jesus to obey him knowing that he was the Son of God.

To me, Hebrews 4:15, is your answer.

 

[brumano]

To me, Hebrews 4:15, is your answer.

Thanks for Heb4:15 I’d post it but all I have available right now is a Revised New American which mangles the scriptures so badly, that I’m hesitant to take an exact qoute for posting. Thanks much.