Matthew 4:1–11

First Sunday in Lent

¹Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

²And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

³And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."

⁴But he answered, "It is written, "' Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

⁵Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple

⁶and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, "' He will command his angels concerning you,' and "'On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'"

⁷Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

⁸Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

⁹And he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me."

¹⁰Then Jesus said to him, "Be gone, Satan! For it is written, "' You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.'"

¹¹Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.

It's not my fault! He started it! He made me do it! Don't look at me! I didn't have anything to do with it! Seems like it is always the other person's fault. No one wants to admit their guilt. We always try to cover it up. We try to justify ourselves any way we can to get off the hook. That seems to be the way of our society today. A criminal in court tells the jury, "It's not my fault. I was abused as a child." How many people's problems today are supposedly because of the way their parents brought them up. It's really your father's fault. Or it's because you lives in a bad neighborhood, or because you are poor, or because you were abused as a child. A psychologist tells his patient on the couch, "There's nothing wrong with beating your wife, it's just your way of expressing anger." Today we justify sinful behavior by calling it an addiction, just another illness we can't control. "He is sexually addicted" we say. Or even better, it's genetic. Recently even a rape gene was supposedly discovered. We go to great lengths to avoid guilt; to place the blame on someone else. In fact, that is what tolerance is all about; accepting the behavior of others no matter how bad it is, otherwise we are "intolerant." Since there is no objective right or wrong, there are only cultural values. Each culture has their own right and wrong, therefore, to call something right or wrong is being oppressive. We must be tolerant of what others do. If they are in the abortion culture, we have to be tolerant of their truths. If they are in the gay culture, we must be tolerant of their life style. If they are of the pop-music culture, we must be tolerant of their tastes, and so on. The easy way to justify our behavior and to avoid guilt and responsibility for what we do is to throw out objective morality and call for tolerance. We are not sinners, just victims of circumstances, our upbringing, our bad neighborhood, or our addictions.

All this is not something new that we have recently invented. It was Adam who invented it in the Garden of Eden. When God found Adam hiding in the garden and asked him if he had eaten of the tree that was forbidden to eat, Adam tried to justify himself. He said, "The woman whom you gave me, she gave me the fruit of the tree." Notice, he tried to justify himself by passing the blame to Eve. But it did not stop there, it was the woman "whom you gave me." Ultimately he was blaming God for his sinful behavior. "I wouldn't be in this mess if it were not for you, God," is what Adam is really saying. Even Eve could not resist passing the blame, "The serpent deceived me," she said.

So today, people blame God for their problems. When suffering or inconvenience comes into our life, we blame God for either not loving us or not being strong enough to help us. Atheists use the very existence of suffering and evil in the world as the bases for their claim that God doesn't exist. But we in the church are not immune either. When problems erupt it is always the other person's fault. When we say we have to repent and forgive each other, we sit there and think, "I hope so-and-so is listening to this. He really needs to get over his attitude." It seems like everyone else is wrong. Everyone else needs to repent. Everyone else needs to forgive. I'm the only one who is right!

Our human nature always wants to justify ourselves. We have developed many clever ways to pass the buck and blame others. But in the end, they are all futile. There is no way we can justify ourselves. God has told us that we are all sinners. "There is none righteous, no not one." "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." "Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned." We cannot justify ourselves.

Adam was tempted by a serpent in the Garden. Adam fell into sin and tried to justify himself but it didn't' work. He was evicted from the garden; thrown out. He came under the curse of death. Eve was cursed with pain and suffering. Adam was cursed with endless toil and labor. From now on they would live in the wilderness and their lives in the wilderness would be lives of suffering, pain, toil, sickness and death. It didn't work to blame someone else. They could not justify themselves. Nor can we. We have been evicted from Eden and live in the wilderness of sorrow, sickness, pain, and death. Why? Because of our sin. No matter how hard we try to justify ourselves, it doesn't work.

But God does what man cannot do. Take for instance, the Day of Atonement, what we know as Yom Kippur. On that day the priest took two goats and sacrificed one on the altar. He took the other goat and presented it before the lord to make atonement over it and then sent it away into the wilderness. This was called the scapegoat. It bore the sins of the people and was sent away into the wilderness, outside the camp of the Israelites. In this way the sin of the people was carried away and gone. The scapegoat removed their sin. The blame was placed on the scapegoat and was carried away from the people of God.

That is a wonderful picture for what God did with his own Son on our behalf. For the scapegoat in the Old Testament era was in reality a symbol of Christ. When the priest placed the sin of the people on the goat and sent it out of the city walls, it symbolized God placing the sin of the world on his Son and crucifying him on a hill outside the walls of Jerusalem.

In our text today we see this Son of God in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. This is no mere accident. It says that Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit of God. This was on purpose. In other words, it was part of Jesus' work of salvation. In fact, here Jesus did the exact opposite of what Adam had done in the Garden of Eden. Jesus here in this wilderness was reversing and undoing all that had happened in the Eden. Remember how Adam had blamed Eve and then God for his sin? Now Jesus was doing the exact opposite of Adam. Jesus was innocent, but he took the blame. Instead of blaming someone else, he accepted the blame for sins he never even did.

Just as the priest placed the sins of the people on the scapegoat, so God placed the sins of the world on Jesus. "God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might be made the righteousness of God." "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows...he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we were healed."

In the Garden, Adam did not resist the temptation of the serpent in the tree. He sinned and brought death to the world. He was exiled into the wilderness. The gates of heaven were closed to him. But God promised a Seed who would crush the head of the serpent even as the serpent bruised his heal. That Seed was Jesus Christ who came into the wilderness. There, in the wilderness created by Adam, stood another man, Jesus Christ, the Second Adam facing the very same serpent. But this man, the Second Adam, did not yield to temptation. He did battle against the Serpent with the Word of God; that sure, strong word, and won the victory over temptation and sin. Starting there the Second Adam began his mission to crush the head of the serpent, a mission which he culminated on a tree made into a cross on Calvary. This Second Adam was bruised for our iniquities, but in the end he rose from the dead and the head of the serpent was crushed.

The first Adam brought sin and guilt to all mankind and could not justify himself even though he tried to blame others. The Second Adam did justify us by taking our guilt onto himself, and even though he was righteous he did not try to blame us. He was the Scapegoat. While we try to pass the blame to others, the Father placed our blame on his holy, innocent Son. The Scapegoat took our guilt and blame and was sent out of the camp to a hill outside Jerusalem named Calvary and nailed that guilt and blame to a wooden cross. The Scapegoat removed our guilt and blame from us. Our sins are forgiven. The gates of heaven are opened again to all who believe. We are invited back into the Garden of Eden, that eternal garden in heaven. Jesus Christ came to undo what Adam did. He came to take away sin and guilt. He came to change the wilderness back into a garden. He came to crush the head of the serpent. He came to open the gates of paradise so we could go back in.

Adam could not blame Eve or God for his sin. We could not justify ourselves either. But God did justify us by placing the blame for our sin on his own Son, Jesus. Jesus did not pass the blame but accepted it. That is why he did not open his mouth to defend himself when he was on trial before the high priest and Pilate. The accusations were false. The witnesses were liars. But Jesus accepted the blame and said nothing in his own defense in order to take the blame and guilt from us. He was the scapegoat that took our sin and guilt outside the camp and removed it forever.

So if we want to be justified, blaming others doesn't work. Rather we accept our guilt and sin and confess it because Christ has taken it away from us. We can repent of our sin and look to the Second Adam, Jesus, to claim our righteousness because he took our blame away.

So we repent of having tried to justify ourselves and place the blame on others. Looking to Jesus who took away our blame, there is no need to justify ourselves or blame others. We can accept responsibility for what we do by looking to Jesus who takes away our guilt and pronounces us forgiven.

We look to Jesus who stood up to the serpent in the wilderness. He is our trusty shield and weapon. Though a thousand devils surround us, we shall not fear because the valiant one fights for us. Jesus Christ, the Lord of hosts. This world's prince may scowl fierce but he can do us no harm. He's judged; the deed is done. One little word of God can fell him. That word of God who came into this wilderness of pain, sickness and death to fight for us. That Word who stood up to the serpent for us and overcame. That word who took the blame for our sins and removed it from us. That Word who turned the wilderness back into a garden and invites us to come back in.

Look to him baptism where he takes away your sin and pronounces you clean and makes you the people of God. Look to him in the Lord's Supper where he gives you his broken and crucified body and blood. Now when Christ approaches us in word and sacrament, there is no need to run and hide as Adam did. Now we are confident that our sins will not come back to us, no guilt, so shame remains. God has blotted them out and remembers no more.

Amen.