Are You the Christ, the Son of God?

Satan said to the Lord Jesus: "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread". The criminal on the cross told him: "If you are the Christ, save yourself and us".

By uniting both temptations, we have: "If you are the Christ, the Son of God". John wrote near the end of his gospel: "But these (things) have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name" (20:31). .

In his first epistle, the same apostle writes: "Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God", and later adds: "Who is it that overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?" (John 5:1, 5).

When Satan and the evildoer tempted the Lord, they did so at the most critical moments of his earthly life: in the midst of the famine in the desert and in the pain of agony on the cross. They aimed their darts at the most painful part, because with each of them they were unaware of two fundamental attributes of Jesus: his character as Anointed, and as Son of God. They were attacking nothing less than his person and his qualification to do God's work as Messiah.

The temptation consisted in moving him to act: in the first case, to turn stones into bread, and in the second, to save himself from death on the cross. The Lord Jesus had power to do both; however, having it, he did not act either one way or the other. It was harder for him to hold back than to act, because he had the power to do it.

But that is not all: if he had given in, not only would he not have overcome the temptation, but also, John would not have been able to write what he wrote: that he who believes in him has life in his name, that he is born again, and overcomes to the world. Wouldn't that have been a great misfortune, the greatest? But that didn't happen. Jesus overcame both temptations, and today Christians can resolutely affirm what the devil and that wretch tried to ignore in those days: "Lord Jesus, you are the Christ, the Son of God!".

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