Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him....
It is necessary, in order to get the value and force of Christ's words, to go back and read in the book of Deuteronomy from which the Lord quotes at this time.
If you read there in chapter 6:13-15 you will see the significance of this answer and of this temptation: "Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God; and him shalt thou serve. Ye shall not go after other gods... for the Lord thy God in the midst of thee is a jealous God".
Now you have the setting for the temptation; the jealousy of God for undivided and unreserved worship, and whether that jealousy finds genuine occasion by divided worship, or worship of other gods. Then there is judgement and destruction.
That temptation by the devil was a deeply laid plot. It is a terrible thing to admit as a possibility in the case of the Lord Jesus, but there it is. "Thou madest him to have dominion";
Thou hast put all things under his feet. That is the end, that is the object. The temptation was to defeat that end, and to offer it on a certain ground.
It does seem that many have accepted the devil's offer; that is, they have sought for and obtained a measure of power and influence, position, recognition in this world and have come to eminence by compromise, by not taking the road of utterness for God. They seem to have scored; they seem to have gained.
The truth, if this Scripture means anything, is, firstly, all that compromise lies under the judgement of God, and, secondly, the outworking is that they have lost the inheritance.
Judgement does not always come instantly, but it comes sooner or later.
Oh, how subtle this temptation! The word in Deuteronomy is: Ye shall not go after other gods lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee, and he destroy thee...".
The devil said: "...if thou wilt fall down and worship me". God save us from compromise with the subtle forces of the devil who would offer an easy way to success by letting go something of the utterness of our position for God.
Let us remember that all pressure from the enemy is related in some way to his demand for worship.
His very pressure, the intensity of his pressure, is to get you to give way, to acknowledge him, even to be afraid of him in a wrong sense.
That is worshipping him, setting him up as someone important, as high and mighty, so that he begins to block out your view of One who is still higher.
He presses to beat you down to worship, to break you to worship.
It is bound up with his lust for worship. And so what he cannot get (as he does with the world) by offering openly through compromise, he tries to get by sheer force of pressure and assault to bring us down before him.
It is all bound up with this demand for worship, and those who most refuse him that worship will most be his enemies.
That is only another way of saying that if we are going to have the Lord as the sole and utter Object of our devotion, with no compromise at all, then we shall find the enemy most set against us.
~T. Austin Sparks~
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