Sabbath study, ii: sin’s three recurring temptations (and how Jesus overcame them)

A study of true victory.

Paul, writing to his disciple and companion Timothy, stated:¹

…For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.

There is much consternation over (what is commonly demarcated as) the second chapter of Paul’s first letter to Timothy, as accusations of misogyny rage about. While that is not the primary focus for me to address today for sake of time and brevity in this particular moment (I did write, as I recall, a post to roughly address a very adjacent topical facet a year prior to explain that Paul’s doctrinal injunction has nothing to do with anti-female polemics), this particular highlighted passage is interesting to consider. Paul, referencing the Genesis creation account, asserts a clear distinction between the sin of Adam and that of Eve—unlike Adam, who sinned without being deceived into it (in other words, he sinned consciously with the full knowledge he was sinning), the woman was deceived and therefore in transgression.

Now, obviously at face value, Paul is simply using “the woman” in reference plainly to Eve, although the from a type-antitype standpoint, the application is not necessarily singular, because a woman represents a church—as the apostle penned in his letter to the Ephesian assembly:²

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. THIS IS A GREAT MYSTERY: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

Jesus is, of course, the last Adam.³ What does the typology mean? First off, it must be clearly understood why Adam sinned against God and consciously disobeyed the commandment against eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil: before the narrative documenting Eve’s encounter with the serpent (a.k.a. Satan), it was already asserted previously:⁴

…therefore doth a man leave his father and his mother, and hath cleaved unto his wife, and they have become one flesh.

Now, it is very plausible that this statement was inserted by Moses and that Adam himself did not publicly state this, but in any case the affixed narrative appears to signify that such a principle was already instituted into effect before sin entered into humanity. Adam left his Father (God⁵) as well as his “mother” (spiritually, God’s holy and sanctified Jerusalem,⁶ a.k.a. the true biblical Zion (as I’ve said before and will restate, the biblical Zion has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with this genocidally Holocaustic ideology of so-called “zion”-ism), at that time the Garden of Eden), to remain with his wife—Adam knew that his wife sinned, and that if he didn’t join her in sinning, he would be separated from her as she would be expelled from the Garden of Eden while he remained, and so out of attached love for her (in an earthly and temporal-rooted sense, not a biblical heavenly-rooted one), he sinned with her in transgression against God.

Jesus, as the second Adam, redeems humanity accordingly: because Adam left his Father and “mother” to indulge in sin out of love for his wife Eve and remain with her, so Christ therefore left His heavenly Father and His earthly mother to die for sin (not only was He forsaken from His Father in the last hours on the cross, but He also, before His earthly death on the cross, left His earthly mother into the care of His beloved disciple John in consistent alignment with the typology⁷) out of love for His wife (and remain with her for all eternity), a.k.a. His faithful and penitent adherents out of all peoples, tribes, nations, and tongues who comprise the spiritual body of God.

Therefore, as a corollary, Jesus must have overcame—in all the points where Eve backslid into sin and death—in order to provide a concise blueprint for His faithfully adherent, commandment-keeping people—as the antitypical woman—to understand in order to overcome and walk in His footsteps unto perfection.

Temptation #1: questioning the authority of God

And the serpent hath been subtile above every beast of the field which Jehovah God hath made, and he saith unto the woman, ‘Is it true that God hath said, Ye do not eat of every tree of the garden?’⁸

Eve’s first temptation was being posed a seemingly truth-bearing question that is imposed under duplicitous guises to question and scrutinize the authenticity of Jehovah by portraying a crisp-clear commandment as potentially spotty, ambiguous, unbinding, or otherwise unconfirmed. Lacking the discernment and faith to fully believe in God’s authorized decrees as absolute universal truth, Eve contended with the serpent on his own duplicitous grounds of questioning God’s authority, leading inevitably to the second and even more sinister temptation.

Temptation #2: co-opting the authorized word of God to deliberately distort its end meaning

And the serpent saith unto the woman, ‘Dying, ye do not die, for God doth know that in the day of your eating of it — your eyes have been opened, and ye have been as God, knowing good and evil.’⁹

The serpent a.k.a. Satan did not offer a “pure,” necessarily “100%” lie, because after both Adam and Eve sinned, God Himself states:¹⁰

Lo, the man was as one of Us, as to the knowledge of good and evil; and now, lest he send forth his hand, and have taken also of the tree of life, and eaten, and lived to the age.

Does this mean Satan is a truth-teller? Not in the sense of telling the truth for the sake of informing people with the truth unto a truthful direction—rather, Satan cynically and deliberately exploited (in other words, hijacked, or co-opted) a cherry-picked, out-of-context version of the truth for its raw utility to undergird a larger duplicitous narrative revolving around a false premise: promising to Eve that she would not die from eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, even though Jehovah already charged Adam the following:¹¹

Of every tree of the garden eating thou dost eat; and of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou dost not eat of it, for in the day of thine eating of it — dying thou dost die.

Satan, in order to cloak and sugarcoat his blatant lie outright contradicting God, by telling Eve that she would not die from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, exploited a truthful premise about being “like God” and “knowing” good and evil by framing that justification through a positive lens of accumulating esoteric knowledge (a.k.a. a Gnostic deception tactic) to spin it from a completely distorted angle, intentionally not informing Eve that “knowledge” of good and evil would entail a sin-stained, miserable corrupted existence of mankind into grotesque degradation spiraling down an abyss of deceit, extortion, robbery, r*pe, murder, and sadism. Alas, the very point was that Adam and Eve simply wouldn’t have understood what an evil sin-stained world would entail without consuming the forbidden fruit, because only through eating of that forbidden fruit would they have understood the harrowing consequences, a.k.a. after it is too late to reverse the effects of their decision.

In a nutshell, it was practically inevitable that humanity would plunge into sin at some point, even “if” the fall didn’t transpire so quickly, because for pre-sin Eden humanity to have remained sinless, they could only perpetually have remained pure from sin if they remained in absolute rigid 100% faith towards God and never fell for any temptation to understand the knowledge of good and evil by eating from that forbidden tree. Due to the ability of created human beings to cognitively act upon their agency of choosing for themselves, the possibility that even one of them would eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil would inevitably rise to 100%—and how quickly it did.

Temptation #3: love of the world

And the woman seeth that the tree [is] good for food, and that it [is] pleasant to the eyes, and the tree is desirable to make [one] wise…¹²

Note that for the third temptation, the devil didn’t need to impose any further self-contrived duplicity to Eve—he already unmasked his own modus operandi of deploying the revelation of the method in Temptation #2, and therefore all that’s left is for the beguiled human being to fall into a trance of seeking after the acquirement of that which is not providentially meant for them and stumble by their own weakness.

What was the end result? Eve, succumbing also to the temptation of seeking after a “wisdom”¹³ apart from God’s, was ultimately tempted into eating the forbidden fruit, and then Adam joined along in disobedience against God, leading to their “knowledge”-acquired shame of their nakedness and expulsion from Eden.¹⁴

Jesus overcame sin and paid the price to impute His righteousness unto His penitent adherents

After fasting forty days and forty nights, Jesus “did hunger”—and the same three temptations which befell a luxury-basking, nourished Eve came upon the physically weakened, emptied-out, and emaciated image of the invisible God:¹⁵

And the Tempter having come to him said, ‘If Son thou art of God — speak that these stones may become loaves.’ But he answering said, ‘It hath been written, Not upon bread alone doth man live, but upon every word coming forth from the mouth of God.’

Then doth the Devil take him to the [holy] city, and doth set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith to him, ‘If Son thou art of God — cast thyself down, for it hath been written, that, “His messengers He shall charge concerning thee, and on hands they shall bear thee up, that thou mayest not dash on a stone thy foot.”’ Jesus said to him again, ‘It hath been written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’

Again doth the Devil take him to a very high mount, and doth shew to him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and saith to him, ‘All these to thee I will give, if falling down thou mayest bow to me.’ Then saith Jesus to him, ‘Go — Adversary, for it hath been written, The Lord thy God thou shalt bow to, and Him only thou shalt serve.’

Then doth the Devil leave him, and lo, messengers came and were ministering to him.

Round 1/3: Jesus wins, overcoming the temptation of unfaithfulness

In his first temptation of the Messiah, Satan begins by imposing an “if” to question whether Jesus really was the Son of God and leverages that daring challenge, exploiting Christ’s physically hungry state, to beckon Him to prepare for Himself additional “food” He is not supposed to eat, just as Eve was not supposed to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The temptation which overcame Eve in her basked condition of luxury and led her into being snared into the very false and completely duplicitous binary premise (a.k.a. false dilemma) imposed by the devil, was overcome by Jesus in a state of absolute starving hunger—out of obedience to His Father who sent Him, Jesus affirms the Torah¹⁶ in rejection of satanically constructed false premises by the devil whose aim is incitement to sin and perdition.

Round 2/3: Jesus wins, overcoming the temptation of Gnostic duplicity

In his second effort to cause Jesus to sin, the devil again began with the same premise of questioning His divinity and proceeded to quote an extract from the Psalms out of context for the purpose of exploiting a simplistic, one-dimensionally portrayed version of its end theme as a line of reasoning for justifying rebellion against God—because that particular passage pertains to Jehovah’s promise of protection against injury, Satan misrepresented that “concluded” protection to be a blank-check universal license for any practice according to one’s heart’s desire, even overt sin and transgression against God. IOWs, Satan completely inverted the intended meaning and turned it upside-down in order to spin his own preferred narrative.

Note that Jesus is not listed in the gospel account of offering a detailed explanatory refutation that explains how Satan is distorting that Psalm verse. To the contrary, all that He is listed as responding with (as corroborated in Luke’s gospel account¹⁷) is a simple condemnation against the temptation of God.

Why did Jesus apparently not preoccupy Himself with extensively offering a refutation of the devil’s modus operandi of cabalistic lies and distortion? Almost certainly for this reason: if Jesus did, He would have capitulated into arguing with the devil on his own terms in an argumentative arena where the devil would just endlessly talk Him into exhaustion one whataboutism after another, and the end point was that Satan attempted to beguile Christ to sin, and so Jesus cut to the chase and demolished that attempt of the devil’s by asserting His truth-grounded refusal to tempt Jehovah, very plain and simple.

Rather, it is up to the reader to understand the scriptures for themselves by studying the parallels and to seek after the Holy Spirit’s guidance for one’s sanctification.

Round 3/3: Jesus wins, overcoming the temptation of the world’s temporal lusts

For the third and last of the three temptations, Satan didn’t even bother any more resorting to his “subtle” sugarcoated, duplicitous mechanisms in his previous two, and instead tore off the mask entirely, simply encouraging Jesus to sin for an “incentive” of receiving the kingdoms of the world and becoming an earthly ruler, no longer even pretending to try and dress up under sheep’s clothing any longer.

Jesus’s ultimate rejection of Satan’s temptations demonstrates the absolute final separation between those who seek after God’s salvation unto eternal life and those who drown in perdition unto eternal death: the former serve the perfect, righteous, and omnipotent God of the universe, while the latter bow down before the mortal authorities of temporal-minded, earthly governance(s). The one camp affirms out of self-abased penitent humility and faith-informed, God-imputed revelation that the heavens are higher than the earth,¹⁸ while the other camp believes out of presumption that the earth is higher than the heavens.

In the Book of Revelation, you find two women, a.k.a. two churches—the one represents the antitypical Esther as God’s redeemed covenant people,¹⁹ and the other woman, termed “Jezebel” and “Babylon,” represents the mother of whores and abominations of the earth whose end is to be burned with fire.²⁰

Which one will you join to?

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. —I John 2:15-17

Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment is come: and worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters. —Revelation 14:7

In those days, and in that time, saith the LORD, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together, going and weeping: they shall go, and seek the LORD their God. They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, saying, Come, and let us join ourselves to the LORD in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten. —Jeremiah 50:4-5

1. I Tim. 2:13-14.

2. Eph. 5:22-33.

3. I Cor. 15:45.

4. Gen. 2:24.

5. Lk. 3:38.

6. Gal. 4:26.

7. Jn. 19:25-27.

8. Gen. 3:1.

9. Gen. 3:4-5.

10. Gen. 3:22.

11. Gen. 2:16-17.

12. Gen. 3:6a.

13. I Cor. 1:19-21.

14. Gen. 3:6b-7, 23-24.

15. Matt. 4:3-11.

16. Cf. Deut. 8:3.

17. Lk. 4:12.

18. Cf. Isa. 55:8-9.

19. Rev. 12:1-17, 21:9-23.

20. Rev. 2:20, 17:1-18.