The Jesus Diet (Part 4): You Need the Wilderness

“Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, He was hungry. The tempter came to Him and said, “If You are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” But Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Matthew 4:1-4

I think I get why after leading Jesus to the desert, the Devil’s first trick was to tempt him with food. I mean it worked with Eve, didn’t it? I am sure the Tempter gleefully thought, “Let’s try this technique again with Jesus and see if it works. Hmmmm, maybe I should increase the carbs for this guy. If a piece of fruit was all it took for Eve, imagine what a loaf of bread will do!” Yes, this post considers Jesus’ battle with bread, but more importantly his willingness to walk into the solitary battlefield of his own mind. By the way, you can find the first three posts in my series here, here, and here. In the last post, I asserted that at some point we must stand and fight; our compulsive eating can only be avoided for so long. We must take on our enemy, the Tempter, if we desire to emancipate ourselves from his culinary clutches. But I also get the avoidance model. In fact, avoidance has been my calling card.

In the early days of my marriage, my wife and I would have “vacation fights”. It’s not that we planned them. The trouble is that our lives are packed with stuff: work stuff, church stuff, minivan repairs, baby-induced chaos, etc, etc. We would invariably stuff away hurts, annoyances, and relational pinches in order to deal with the daily, urgent parade of clutter that modern life sends our way. Then at long last we would have our escape. We would find ourselves on that ship. Or beach. Or airplane. Just us.

With nothing left to aid our dissociation from the pains in our relationship, those hurts, annoyances, and relational pinches would come rushing back. We would fight. Encouragingly, we would get things worked out within a day or two and blissful vacationing would ensue. In time we learned to pick those fights a little earlier, before lift off, so as to not sacrifice valuable beach time by our squabbling. This is all to illustrate the point that many of us have relied on the urgency of life to serve as a distraction from the painful aspects of our inner selves. For myself and likely most of you reading this blog post, that “painful aspect” is likely the desperate war within ourselves on the compulsive eating battlefield.

Much has been written by qualified experts about the meaning of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. I’m just a guy with a bible who is trying to see if examining Jesus’ trials can give me a leg up on my own. I want to highlight two points that matter to me. The first is that in order for Jesus to even address these temptations, he had to be alone with himself. Just like my habitual “vacation fight” I have had to stop distracting myself from the painful reality that my food choices have resulted in obesity, physical and mental anguish, and gutter-level self-esteem. I get that these are emotionally painful to the extreme. Who wants to think about them? Who wants to acknowledge that they have deeply compromised their very lives through self-damaging behaviours? It is far easier in the moment to binge on Netflix or, more acceptably, attend to the children/house/spouse/bills. And yet the battle remains un-fought. The foe is unchallenged. The devil has effectively won.

But that just won’t do. The devil doesn’t get to oppress a child of God. This is why Jesus allowed the Spirit to take him by the hand into the wilderness to face off with him. But what about you? Have you heeded the Spirit’s nudging? When will you prioritize such restorative solitude in your life? Jesus needed 40 days to get this satanic monkey off his back. Do you need any less? I contend that in order for you to do the inner work necessary to reorient yourself, beat down the Tempter, and move the needle on your issues with food, you must clear away absolutely everything.

The second point is that Jesus was never really alone. When we get away in order to face the Tempter, we realize that we can never really be alone. God is always with us. And because Jesus had taken the time to learn the Scriptures, when the Devil attacked he came ready with a response. He was not defenseless and unarmed. He had both the words of the Father and the angels of his Father at his disposal. We, too, have access to those same powerful words. I would also argue that even we have access to God’s angels; not so much in some woo woo way, but in the form of trusted spiritual friends who can be messengers of God to us in times of need.

In the end, Jesus was able to demonstrate to the world that spiritual hunger has the power to triumph over the will of the flesh. We are not mere animals, but spiritual beings created in God’s image. This means that bread need not be our master. Physical hunger need not rule us. God himself desires to feed us, both in our earthly lives and in the life to come. We just need to be willing to be led through the wilderness to get it.