Was Christ Tempted by Hungers Like
Ours?
Sometime during the first few weeks of my Christian life I heard a radio sermon by a Scottish minister. Most of what he said I didn't understand at all. Not that his brogue was too thick. It was just right, and his diction was beautiful. Most of what he said sailed past me because I had not heard sermons in my adult life and the "language of Zion" was almost as unintelligible to me as a foreign language. But he did repeat one phrase which I shall never forget and which even I, with my utter lack of doctrinal background, could grasp easily.
His phrase struck my heart for two reasons. First, because his brogue reminded me of my own Scottish Grandfather who recited Lord Byron and Robert Burns to me when I was a child. But its impact on my heart was deeper than this. His repeated phrase, I realize now, was what my heart had longed so to hear. The preacher sounded like my Grandfather, but he wasn't quoting "The Cotter's Saturday Night"; he was declaring warmly, over and over, that "Ther-r's a Mon on the thr-rone up ther-re! Ther-r's a Mon on the thr-rone up ther-re!"
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Now, ten years later, I know as I've never known before that there is a Man on the throne up there. A Man-God walked the earth when Jesus walked. A Man-God went to the Cross. A Man-God left the tomb and returned to His Father. And the "lamb in the midst of the throne" now is still a Man-God. My heart opens to Him more and more as I realize that this Man remembers to this day what it feels like to be a human being. He has not forgotten in the midst of the joyful return to heavenly places. The bright angel bands who attend Him do not take His mind off the earth for one instant. The music of heaven does not make Him deaf to our cries. No celestial light blinds Him to our sorrow. No feast in paradise will ever make Him forget our hungers.
We have already seen that the Bible tells us He "was in every respect tempted as we have been." If we believe that God and Jesus Christ are one and the same, then we know that God understands hunger of all kinds.
Basic hunger of one kind or another is at the source of every temptation. When we yield to our own desires to attempt to satisfy our various basic hungers in our own way, we sin. Self-pity, which is sin, springs from a hunger for something which we don't have and which we feel life should give us. Self-pity can and has driven men to murder.
A recent newspaper account told of a man who had lost his wife to another man. At first, he tried to adjust to his loneliness without the woman he loved. But his "hunger" for her companionship, her presence in the empty house, was too much for him. He made many visits to a psychiatrist in an effort to recover from his confessed self-pity over his continuing longing for his wife. Instead, his hunger turned to hatred for the other man. In a blind rage one night he drove to the man's store, whipped out a gun and shot him. Then he turned the same gun on himself. The inherent bent toward sin in human nature
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had overpowered him. What began with the perfectly normal desire of a man for his wife turned, in the time of stress over losing her, into murder and suicide.
Excessive drinking can result from a basic hunger in men and women which has not been fulfilled in a more creative way.
A man whom I had known for several years returned from the service after World War II to find his wife in love with someone else. My friend had never had a home of his own. He had been supporting himself, with both parents dead, since the age of twelve. The girl he married in haste just before going overseas symbolized more than a wife. She stood for the one bright security which had held him during his long months of battle service — a home of his own. When she was gone, he tried to escape from his excruciating pain with one bottle after another. But at last someone got to this man with the good news about God. It has taken more than eight years, but now he is no longer drinking. He is married again, has a home and family, a good job, and he will tell you enthusiastically that Jesus Christ understood his hunger.
Christ did not condemn this man for drinking. He saved him from it. It took a long time. Somehow it does take a long time for some of us to realize that God is not shocked; that He understands these things. And while He cannot approve of anything that damages His loved ones, as sin surely does, He waits with His arms outstretched toward us, until we stop fighting His imagined remoteness and recognize His complete willingness.
I once heard it said that heaven is the place where man says to God, "Thy will be done." And hell is the place where God reluctantly says to man, "Thy will be done." I know of nothing outside of God's love as wide as His willingness to reach to us.
I spoke not long ago with a woman who was suffering real hunger. Not physically; as with most of us, she had all her physical needs met. Hers was a particular kind of
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searing intellectual hunger. She loved her husband, but intellectually they were incompatible. His interest in literature was completely satisfied by the financial and sports pages of the daily newspaper. Her love of good books was insatiable. He hated concerts. She loved them. She painted rather well and he laughed at her efforts. But his laughter didn't bother her as it once had. She had, in the main, accepted her husband as being the non-intellectual, but kind, hardworking and honest man he was. She had even learned to insert football into her schedule of things to watch on TV. Her problem was not so much a complaint about her husband as he was, but an honest intellectual hunger to be able to share some of the things she loved with another human being whom she loved.
Her hungering heart seemed to be encouraged as she began to see that the Lord had Himself experienced agonizing, basic hunger when He was on earth. In a deeper way He was able to enter her life when she became convinced that He did not condemn her honest hunger, but understood it.
It is obvious that the teen-ager who becomes a delinquent is driven by a basic hunger to be wanted and noticed. To be important. If we face facts, we see that hunger of some kind motivates every uncontrolled, sin-crippled human personality.
I have found great help in a careful examination of Jesus' temptations in the wilderness. Not from the standpoint at first of how to resist temptation, but from the fact that not once during His earthly life did He try to protect His humanity. As I see this, I find myself more willing to take His promised strength in order to resist temptation in my life.
Jesus Christ was all that could be contained of God in a human being. He could have protected His humanity, but He did not. And the realization that He did not,
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melts my heart into a new willingness to obey. The melting of our hearts by love is God's way of getting at us. We, of course, must expose our hearts to His. But as I see that Jesus on the Cross is God Himself exposing His heart to me, I find myself willing to open mine to Him. And the why of His visit to the earth takes on a new meaning.
In Luke's account of the wilderness temptations of Jesus (chapter 4:1-13) the Lord was tempted first to satisfy His own physical hunger. And according to verse two, He was tempted. Anyone who has ever dieted knows a little of what hunger can do to our personalities. Perhaps some who read this book may have known periods of real hunger. At any rate, physical hunger can cause havoc in many areas of the total person other than our bodies.
It is of the utmost importance here that we remember Jesus was not only the Son of God, He was a human being, too. A Man with a digestive and emotional system like ours. He did not have some special dispensation which made His hunger-pains of a gentle, ethereal nature. He was suffering intensely, in the wilderness, both physically and emotionally. Food is definitely tied up with our emotions. So, His sufferings had to be emotional as well as physical.
He was starving, but He did not turn the stones into bread, as the tempter invited Him to do. Because He was One with God, and because "without him was not anything made that was made," He could have done it. He created the stones in the first place and He also created the wheat for the bread. Nothing more than a momentary re-creation would have been involved in turning those stones to bread as Jesus stood there in the wilderness alone and hungry. The fact that He could have done it does not amaze me. The amazing thing to me is that He did not do it!
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If we look at Him closely as He really is, we see that He could not have done it without sinning against His own nature. "God is love." He doesn't merely have a loving heart, He is love. And if He had satisfied His own physical and emotional hunger that day in the agony of the wilderness hour, what emotionally or physically hungry man or woman down through the ages would have listened to Him?
He was thinking, during those hours of His own intense hunger, of every other hungry person who would ever live. Because I see this, I can now speak quietly and confidently about Jesus Christ to a mother whose child has just died of leukemia. I don't need to have shared her particular hunger. I can remind her that He shared a kind of hunger that day which gives Him access to every hungry human heart. I can speak about Jesus Christ with great certainty to the woman who has just been deserted by her husband and whose emotions are at the starvation point. I can assure her that Jesus knows. And because I can assure her of this fact, her heart can then bear to open toward Him and to believe that He will, in His way, fulfill that hunger.
The fact that Jesus Christ is God and has a right to make claims upon our lives is not enough to open a heart bruised and swollen shut with suffering. And He knew this. To point to God's rights often only hardens our hearts. We don't mean for it to happen, but a demand (even if it comes from God) upon a heart already battered by suffering, causes us to throw up still another defense around it. Still another layer of protection.
Seeing that Jesus Christ did not once protect His own humanity not only melts my own heart into more willingness to obey, it has made witnessing to other persons increasingly simple. I am no longer trying to "sell" anyone on God. I am merely allowing God to show me first that He has already done all that is required to handle all con-
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ditions of all human hearts in Jesus Christ. Then I can quietly pass on my certainty.
Whatever the outward or inward hungers of the human heart, the basic hunger in all humanity is to know God. Jesus Christ has not only experienced hunger for you, He offers Himself to satisfy that one basic hunger to know God.
Humanity cries: "Lord, give us this bread all the time!"
Jesus replies: "I am the Bread of life. He who comes to Me will never starve and he who believes in Me shall not suffer thirst anymore."
