Well, good afternoon. Today we're going to be discussing Matthew chapter four, which is right after Jesus ' baptism. And it starts right off with the temptation of Jesus. Now, one of the things that I've read this chapter, I don't know how many times, hundreds of times in my lifetime. And I'd never caught the fact that the temptation actually lasted for 40 days. We always think of the last three temptations that that was the temptation of Christ.
But in Mark and Luke, it says this, " Jesus was tempted by the devil for 40 days. " So he was undergoing all kinds of temptation during that time being alone out there in the wilderness while he was fasting. And we don't even know what those temptations were. We just know the last three. So let's just briefly talk about those. The first one was Satan said, " If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.
" One of the early Christians points out that I had never thought about that the first temptation to man there in the Garden of Eden involved food, not to eat of this tree of life. So it's interesting that the first of these actually, the first of the last three recorded temptations, it involves food to change the stones into bread. And we know Jesus ' response was, " It is written, ' Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
" Now, one of the things that I've been asked a lot during my lifetime, and I've also pondered, it's, " Well, what was wrong with this? Why was this a temptation to change stones into bread? Why would this have been something wrong to do? " Well, it's definitely a subtle temptation. And Satan's points, at least one of them, was to get Jesus to use his miraculous power for his own personal benefit.
In the Bible, we read about a lot of miracles, but we don't read any prophets unless it was commanded or directed by God to perform a miracle just for their own use. " Hey, I'm hungry. I'm going to change that stone on the ground into bread or change that bush into a plate of food. " Something like that. Miracles are always done to benefit other people. And all of Jesus ' miracles were done that way either to benefit his disciples or to benefit his general audience.
So this was a subtle temptation to use his miraculous powers just for his own benefit. And in some ways, it would have negated the whole point of the incarnation, or I shouldn't say the whole point, but at least one of the points of it was that he would live his life as a human. But you and I, if we fast and we're hungry, we don't get to change something into food and just have it right there at our fingertips. We have to go out and get the food.
And so Jesus wouldn't really be like you and I if, " Oh, he could just miraculously do this and that to make his life here on earth easier. " Or maybe he didn't really feel the pain when he was on the cross because he could just do a miracle and make the pain go away. So no, he was going to be truly man when he was here on the earth. And the other thing was Satan was trying to get him to prove that he was the Son of God by doing miracles, and Jesus always resisted that.
All right, let's look at some of the other ones. And actually, the temptations you would think of these last three, each one would get more difficult than the one before. And maybe Satan thought each one was more difficult. But actually, when you look at them, they get less and less difficult. The first one was very subtle, and it would be something that an ordinary human might get tripped up on. The second one, if you're the Son of God, you know throw yourself down from the top of the temple.
Well, yeah, why would Jesus want to do that? There was no point in it. And of course, Satan quoted a scripture to him, and Jesus quoted the Scriptures back. For us, it's educational. If Satan can quote scriptures and take them out of context, well, so much more can humans do that, or at least under Satan's direction. And so just the fact someone quotes the Bible doesn't mean they're quoting it in context because Satan himself quotes from the Bible. So we need to know our Bibles well.
Jesus, each time, he didn't have to pull out a Bible. He didn't have to undo a scroll to read something to Satan. He knew the verses by memory, and he could quote the scriptures back to Satan without looking. And if we have that same grasp of the Bible where we always know what the Bible teaches on most subjects anyway, that we can either quote them directly or at least be able to paraphrase the thought of them. Well, then we can protect ourselves from a lot of trials and temptations in life.
So Satan, again, he wants him to demonstrate that he's the Messiah by doing something miraculous. And yet Satan isn't wanting to believe. And so Jesus wasn't going to do that for that purpose. And then the last temptation, like I say, these get more and more ridiculous. He would give him all the kingdoms of the world. Well, Jesus is going to rule. He is already the ruler of all the kingdoms of the world. So yeah, that would gain him nothing and the thought that he would worship Satan.
And so after answering him on the third one, he just said, " Satan, go away. " I mean, this has become ridiculous. And we're only looking at the last three. Like I say, this was 40 days of who knows what that Satan was hurling at him, and they were a waste of time. So when he finished that, then Jesus began his work of preparing for his ministry. I mean, this was preparation, the baptism, and then the temptation. But now he travels to Galilee where he would spend the next three years of his life.
Well, he had been raised in Galilee, but he had been raised in Nazareth. He does stop briefly by Nazareth, but he heads to the region around the Sea of Galilee, and that's where he would spend the next three years. And Capernaum was the city. It was a small city, but it was an important one where he would carry on most of his miracles, most of his ministry was in the region around Capernaum.
Now, a verse that gets overlooked in most preaching today, but is one of the really important verses to take notice of in Matthew. Matthew 4:17, it says, " From that time, Jesus began to preach and say, " Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. " And this wasn't just, " Oh, something he preached on that particular day or that episode. " That's what he preached throughout his whole ministry. The kingdom of God was the theme of Jesus ' preaching. And this is what he focused on.
John the Baptist had been sent to prepare people, and he preached, " Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, that it was coming. " Jesus picked right up from there, and he preached the kingdom of God. So when someone uses the term gospel preaching, if they're not talking about the kingdom of God, it probably isn't gospel teaching. Now, I realize you can preach from the Bible and it be accurate preaching, and maybe you don't talk about the kingdom of God on that episode.
But to completely preach about the gospel, what it all entails is got to talk about the kingdom of God because that's what Jesus talked about. That was the gospel that he preached. He called it the gospel of the kingdom. That's the only phrase he ever used to describe the gospel. And we get that mainly from his teaching in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those are the books that talk about the kingdom of God the most. And I think Matthew uses that term kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven more than the other writers.
Now, another thing to take note of is that this is when the gospel of the kingdom began. The period of John the Baptist during his lifetime or during his ministry, we have a transition period. Perhaps you could say the gospel age began with John, or you might say it began with Jesus ' baptism. But either way, that's when it began. Just this past Sunday, a brother from our church, Daniel Willis, was exposing some false teaching in his message.
And we were watching a video clip of somebody on the internet who was talking about rightly dividing the Word. And his concept of rightly dividing it was that everything in the four gospels, that's for the Old Testament period. That all ended with the cross. Once Jesus died on the cross, all of his teaching was for a past age, and now we start getting new teaching. In fact, this particular teacher said the new teaching doesn't begin until after the beginning of Acts even, not until Paul comes along.
But that's absurd. Jesus himself said, I'll read to you from Luke. He said, " The law and the prophets were until John. " So either until the beginning of John's ministry or until the end of it, whichever way he means. But he says since that time, the kingdom of God is preached and every man presses into it. So the Kingdom Age began at a minimum with Jesus ' baptism, if not back with the ministry of John. And he said that now the kingdom is preached and people are pressing into it.
So people were pressing into it during Jesus ' ministry. It's not something that happened after he died. He didn't spend three years here on the earth teaching us all of these things and setting an example for us just to say, " Oh, now that's all erased. Once I die, you can forget about everything I taught you. " No, that was the whole purpose of his teaching. In fact, the early Christians would have called that a very serious heresy, and they weren't quick to label people as heretics.
I mean, you had to really be preaching something way off the mark to be called a heretic in the days of the early church. But to preach that we aren't under Jesus ' teaching, that Jesus ' teaching was for a different age than what we're living on, that would have been horrible heresy to them. It went against everything they preached because they quote from the book of Matthew more than any other book of the Bible. Now, in the last part of Matthew chapter 4, Jesus picks his first apostles.
And interestingly, the first two are Andrew and Peter and James and John. And we have two sets of brothers. One of the early Christians points out the parallel with the Old Law Covenant that it began with two brothers, Moses and Aaron, and the gospel showing the superiority of the gospel over the law, it starts off with two sets of brothers. You have Andrew and Peter, as I mentioned, and James and John. Now, what kind of men were these? Were they highly educated?
Had they gone through one of the Greek schools of philosophy? No. Had they gone even through the rabbinical schools? No. They were unlearned fishermen. They knew how to read and write from what we can tell because they wrote letters. But the scribes and Pharisees described them as being unlettered, that they had not gotten any advanced education. Jesus was interested in the heart of people, and he was interested in people that he could mold into the image that he wanted.
So yes, they are rough stones, no rougher than any of us, but they had hearts that were willing to learn. In fact, it's very interesting with Peter and Andrew that they witnessed one miracle only, and that was a miraculous catch of fish. And then Jesus said, " Follow me. " They immediately abandoned their nets, their whole business, their whole way of life, and they followed Jesus Christ.
Just from that one miracle, when you think about the rest of the Jews, they saw enormous miracles, people being raised from the dead, something far more marvelous than a huge catch of fish. And yet, they didn't follow Jesus for the most part. And these two brothers had such hearts that they followed from just such a single miracle like that. And the same with James and John. And it's interesting that he called them right when they were in the act of fishing. And I don't think that was accidental.
It was to make the parallel between what they were doing fishing for literally fish to becoming fishers of men, which is what he molded them to become so that they were ready to go out and take the gospel to the whole world by the time he was finished with them at the end of his ministry. And interestingly, when he sent them out, he told them to preach the gospel of the kingdom. So it's not just something that Jesus preached, but it's something the apostles preached after Jesus was dead.
That's what they had been commissioned to do to preach the kingdom of God.