So What's Wrong With a Little Bread?

Ok, so I admit, with Christmas and shopping, and tons of snow, and Christmas Eve service, etc., etc., etc. - I didn't do a very good job of keeping up on my blog. Sorry about that.

Any way, we come today to a passage of scripture (Luke 4:1-15) that has always baffled me just a little bit. I understand what Jesus was saying about and worshiping only God and not testing God - test number two and three seem very straightforward. Of course it would have been wrong for Jesus to do either one of those, but even today as I reread this passage again - I found myself asking - what was so wrong about the idea of Jesus turning a stone into bread to feed himself after not eating for 40 days.

Man shall not live by bread alone - in no way implies that man can't eat bread. I have heard and read in the past that the issue was the fact that Jesus would have been misusing His abilities and position as the Son of God to provide for His physical needs. And while there may be something to that, I think there is more to it than just that.

Jesus responds to this temptation by quoting from Deut. 8:3 where Moses is reminding the people of Israel how God provided for their physical needs to teach them to depend upon and obey the word of God. To me this makes me think of a few things - The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested - for Jesus to take matters into His own hands and either leave the wilderness early or provide food for Himself earlier than the Spirit led him to would have been a sin. I don't think that it had necessarily anything to do with turning a stone to bread, but rather the sin would have been to stop following the Lord and take matters into His own hands. How often do we do this? We go someplace confidently believing that "God led us" or "God told us" to do something but then when we get in the mix we find out that it is hard and we convince ourselves that just because it is hard, God must be leading us to do something different.

God is not a fickle God that changes His mind on a whim. If God leads you somewhere to do something - chances are pretty good that He will not lead you to do something different until you have accomplished your initial calling. If you believe that God is calling you to do something different, you have to ask yourself if you have accomplished everything that God called you to accomplish at the outset.

The other thing that comes to mind is that even if it wasn't wrong for Jesus to turn a rock into bread the motivation for doing so came from Satan, not from God. The moral here is that if we do the right things for the wrong reasons it is still wrong. I'll let you ponder that one for a while - I would love to hear your thoughts on why it would have been wrong for Jesus to turn a stone into bread.