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By giving attention to the reading of God's Word, as it is found in the Gospel according to Matthew, the fourth chapter, I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. "Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And

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the tempter came and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.' But he answered, 'It is written, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."' Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple,

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and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, "He will give his angel charge over you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone."' Jesus said to him, 'Again it is written, "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."' Again the devil took him

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to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. And he said to him, 'All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.' Then Jesus said to him, 'Be gone, Satan, for it is written, "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve."' Then the devil

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left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him." And may God bless to us this reading from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I have just read in your hearing the temptation story in its most complete

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form, Matthew's form. But my text this morning is not from Matthew, but rather from Mark. For Mark adds one detail to the story which Matthew omits. Listen to Mark's words, "And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him." Now when we see

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photographs of the Holy Land today, it is difficult for us to imagine wild beasts there. It is a place of barrenness, largely, silent, broken ravines. But the fact is, in the Old Testament and New Testament times, much of the Holy Land was densely wooded. Lions, quail, hyena, cheetah, jackals, rabbits, all kinds of

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animals inhabited the place. Wolves, bears, they were all there. The reason they're not there today is because the Fertile Crescent, that area about the end of the Mediterranean Sea, is probably the worst example of how man can despoil nature that you will find anywhere on the face of the earth. God taught his people that

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they were to respect, admire, enjoy, and use nature. In Deuteronomy chapter 20, for example, God lays down laws for conduct with regard to nature, even in a time of war. You're never allowed, for example, to cut down a tree. Man is given permission to use nature, but not to abuse it. But across the centuries, the Israelites and

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the many armies that have marched back and forth around that end of the Mediterranean Sea have ecologically raped that land, so that today there are very few cedars in Lebanon, there are very few fish in the rivers or in the lakes, and the Persian Gulf has been shrunk by 180 miles of silt carried into

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that body of water through the mismanagement of the soil of that land. Now there are efforts being made today to reclaim the situation. Egypt particularly has planted tens of thousands of trees and is at various places making the desert bloom again. But 2,000 years ago, much of the Holy Land

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was densely wooded, and it is to that that Mark is referring when he says that Jesus was with the wild beasts. He heard the lion roar and waken the forest in the dawn. He saw the hyena stealthily pursuing the gazelle. He saw the cheetah running full speed out after the rabbit. He heard the sound of the viper as it

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slithered through the grass at his feet. He heard the calls of the night birds as they swooped above him in the dark. And as he sat by his little fire in the night, I'm sure he could see in the distant dark the glowing eyes of the wolves. He was there in the wilderness with the wild beasts. That's what the

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record says. But interestingly enough, he was altogether unharmed. No claw, no talon, no fang ever touched him. Now how could this be? Well I would suggest to you that first of all it is because of the unblemished humanity of Jesus. We can know for a certainty that Jesus was not safe among these animals because he used

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his miraculous powers to protect him. We know he didn't do that because it was that very thing that Satan tempted Jesus to do while he was there, make these stones into bread. Jesus refused to do that. He would not use miracles to ease the gnawing in his stomach, and in like manner he would not use miracles to

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protect himself. The reason he went into the wilderness was to be tempted as we are. Now we don't have those miraculous powers with which to protect ourselves, and so it is a certainty I believe that Jesus did not use his powers as very God of very God to protect himself in that place. No, Jesus was not protected there

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by his divinity. He was protected there by his humanity. You remember back in the story of the Garden of Eden that God made a place in which there was perfect harmony between nature and man, no discord. Man was given dominion over nature and the animals were completely at peace with Adam and with Eve. But then

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the sin of man entered the picture, and Adam and Eve were driven out of that perfect place, and from that time on there was enmity and there was discord. The kind of enmity and discord which we see even today between man and nature, between nature and man. As long as Adam was perfect, there was no difficulty. But

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when that perfection was lost through sin, then immediately difficulty entered in. Now Jesus is referred to in the New Testament as the new Adam. He comes into life absolutely perfectly and lives a life that is perfect. We have this from the witness of those who were with him every day. In other words, he demonstrated

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the perfection of humanity once again. And just as there was perfect harmony between Adam while he was perfect and the animals, so there could be between Jesus who was perfect and the animal kingdom. In other words, Jesus was protected there not because he was superhuman, but because he was truly

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human. When we look at Jesus, we see what a human life is supposed to be. And that is why the greatest desire of our heart should be to be like him. When we talk about hungering and thirsting after righteousness, that righteousness is to live like him. When he says to us, "Be ye therefore perfect as my Father in heaven

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is perfect," he is calling us to that kind of humanity. We will not accomplish it in this life, though we can gain on it and it can grow within us. We will not be perfect until we reach the kingdom of heaven. But it is toward that goal, that perfect humanity that Jesus modeled for us, that we are to be moving.

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Rule Howe, who was a great pastor to pastors, in one of his last lectures talked about getting on a plane and there was a young lad sitting beside him. And in the course of the flight, the boy said to him, "What do you do?" And Howe paused for a minute to phrase his answer and the boy said, "What do you do? What's

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your work? Who are you?" And Howe answered, "I'm a pilgrim." He said, "You mean you're one of those people that came over on the Mayflower? You don't look that old." Rule Howe said to him, "No, I'm not one of the ones who came on the Mayflower. But I'm a pilgrim trying to find my way from birth to life." And the

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boy said to him, "Don't you mean from birth to death?" "No," Howe said, "I mean from birth to life." In other words, after we are born, we are to seek to move toward the goal of living the kind of life that Jesus lived. And our whole lives are to be inspired by him as goal and he is also the guide who assists us in this

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task. We are to seek to live as he lived more and more. This is what Jesus meant when he said in John the 10th chapter, "I have come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly." It's very interesting to observe how many of the names of Jesus which are given to him in the New Testament are also given to his

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disciples, to you and me. It says, for example, that he is the Son of God, but we are also described as the children, as the sons of God. It says, for example, that he is the Lord, but it teaches in the New Testament that we shall reign with him and therefore be lordly ourselves. It says in the New Testament that he is

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anointed, but we are also said to be anointed by the Holy Spirit of God. It says that he is the image of God, but it also says in 2nd Corinthians chapter 3 that we are to be formed more and more into the image of God, moving from one degree of glory to another. It says that Jesus is one with God, but it also says

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of those of us who love and believe and seek to serve him that we are moving toward a divine nature. In 2nd Peter chapter 1, it is held out before us that more and more divinity comes into us as we become closer to God. The Master is the model. We are still caught in our sin, so that the crown given to us in

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creation and that it's fallen from our heads, it has not been restored, and that is the reason there is enmity between thinned creatures and furry creatures and feathered creatures and us. But we are to become more and more like Jesus, changed into his likeness. This is the reason you see that he could be with the

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wild beasts and not harmed at all. But here's a second thought to think about. We also have here testimony to the temptation of a carefree life. It wasn't too long after this temptation experience that Jesus said to his disciples, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son

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of Man has no place to lay his head." I wonder if he was echoing there one of the temptations he had felt in the wilderness. That is the temptation to wish one could live the easy life of an animal. And haven't you ever thought about that? You look down at your dog and you pat him on the head and you say, "Boy

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Spot, what a wonderful life you live. I wish I didn't have any more responsibilities than you do." I used to have a dog named Rufus. He was a great black Newfoundland. He had beauty without conceit, he had courage without ferocity, and he had faithfulness without demand. Now Rufus used to sleep about 22 out of

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every 24 hours, and his favorite spot was right in front of the television set because there he could keep an eye on me. Now I'm going to tell something now that I've never told before, but it will help to make the point. Sometimes when what was on television wasn't too interesting and Rufus was sound asleep, I would get

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down on the floor and I would lie just about one foot away from him with my face looking right into his. Now he would instantly be aware of this and he would open his eyes and he would look at me. Now I could always stare him down. Eventually he'd move his gaze, and then when I still hadn't moved my nose just

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10 inches from his very face, he would look at me once more and then with one big paw, his paws were about like ping-pong paddles, he would reach up and gently push my face away. And what he was saying to me was this, "Look the news is on and you're supposed to be watching the news because you're a human being

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and you should get involved in the issues of the day and you should help to solve some of these problems and my job is to sleep here so get back on duty." Haven't you ever seen a cow contentedly sitting in a pasture chewing its cud and thought to yourself even for a moment, "Man that's the life." Well we ought not

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to think like that. It really comes very close to a form of blasphemy because you see it's our capacity for inward strife and struggle. It is our sensitivity to suffering that is the final proof that we are made in the image of God. This last Wednesday I was at the Pittsburgh Rotary Club. Rotary International has a

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program in which they invite students from one country to study in another and while they're in the visiting country they are to speak to the Rotary Clubs there and talk about their home. Well this last Wednesday we had a young woman, a teacher from Amazonian Brazil and she is studying at the University of

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Pittsburgh and she got up, just a tiny thing, and she said that she was going to read her remarks because her English was better when she read than when she spoke without a script. And she talked about how nice it was to be in our country and about the greatness of the university and she spoke about the

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weather here and the friendly welcome that she had received. Quite fluent, quite at ease, doing very well and then she stopped and she said, "But the thing that amazes me the most here is your..." and you could see her struggling for control and then she began to weep and the tears rolled down her face. "The thing I'm

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amazed at," she said, "is your freedom. Your freedom. And my greatest desire is when I go back to my country to take your freedom to my people." Now that bunch of Rotarians is a pretty hard group but they stood up and applauded her. Why? Well in the first place because she reminded us of how precious the freedom that we

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have is. But secondly because in that moment we saw her sincerity, we saw her openness, we saw her pain for her people, we saw her longing for her nation, we saw her values, we saw her resolve, we saw the grandeur of her humanity. The proof that she is not an animal, not something of the natural world, but something made in

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the image of God. My friends, we must never laugh or scorn or even think of laying aside the echoes of the divine that are in us. We can cry and care, we can suffer and sacrifice, we can dream and we can dare and we can love and we can lift and this proves that we are the children of God. The fact that we

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condemn our cicate ourselves to things of vast importance, hold Jesus as our goal, seek to grow in his image, to have the nobility of our divinity come full flower within us, that is something that no animal can ever know. So when I read "he was with the wild beasts" I noticed it says "he was with them, he was not of

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them." Let me throw one last pebble into the pool of this text and see where its ripples might take us. I think there's also testimony here to the full victory that Jesus Christ is going to have over evil and ugliness in life. We remembered together just a few minutes ago how when man sinned there in the garden, all of

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life was thrown off-center. The sin of man profaned all of the planet, even all of nature. The Apostle Paul says that the whole creation groans in travail and in pain together. It is as if the sin of man has somehow put a spin on this planet and we go through life on this world of ours not as we ought to go. But the

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promise is also there in Scripture that Jesus Christ through his death upon the cross and in his coming again will set right everything that is wrong. You know how sometimes at Christmas you get cards and on those cards there'll be a picture of a lion and a lamb lying down side by side. That of course is an echo of a

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biblical prophecy. What the Bible says is that God in the end through the power of his Son will bring all things to the peace and harmony with which he made them so that the lion and the lamb can lie down side by side. And another one of the images is so that a child can play upon the nest of rattlesnakes without

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danger. And I wonder if when Jesus was there in the wilderness looking at those wild beasts, if he didn't see in them some brooding expectation about his victory, I wonder if he could not see in them a yearning, the same yearning that is in us for Jesus Christ to come again, not as a baby this time, but as the King

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of Kings and the Lord of Lords in awesome power and magnificence to set things right once and for all. You know in the old novel "The Cloister and the Hearth" there's a hermit named Clement and one night he's living in his hermit's cave and he's singing and as he sings he begins to hear the sound of

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another voice, a kind of a moaning, but it is melodious. And he goes over and he looks through one of the chinks in the very rude door to his cave and he sees in the moonlight outside a great red wolf with his chin lifted to the sky and he's howling. And yet there is in the howling something of melody so that it

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sounds almost like a song. And Clement says, "My sins are going. I am becoming more one with the creatures of God. Praise him, all ye creatures of his. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord." I think that Jesus saw in his safety with the animals there in the wilderness, I think he saw that day when

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he will return and evil will depart, when all that is savage and restless in life will disappear away and that final victory will be his and ours because we belong to him. You know Norman Cousins has a book "The Healing Heart" and in that book he tells about coming off the golf course one day and there was an ambulance

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there and he knew right away that something was wrong of course and there was a man there in the ground and they were working with the man and they were so busy working with the man trying to save his life from heart attack nobody was talking to the man. Cousins could see that the man was terrified, fear all

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over his face and he looked up and he could see the monitor there in the paramedic van and he could see that the heartbeat was very very rapid and very very jagged and and so he knelt down and he said to this man while the attendants were still working on it, "My friend you're going to be all right." And

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the man, this is the first word that had been spoken to him, the attendants being so busy with their medical procedures, the man said, "How do you know?" He said, "Well I'm looking at the monitor there in the van and I can see you've got a good heart. God's given you a good heart and you're going to be in a few minutes

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in one of the great hospitals of the land and with that heart and with that hospital you're going to make it. You're going to be all right." And the man said, "Are you sure?" And he said, "Yes you're going to make it. You're going to be all right." And within 30 seconds the heart began to slow and the rhythm became more

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normal and the jagged irregularities began to lessen. You see the promise of victory began to have effect immediately and that I think is what God is saying to us today. He is saying, "I made you all and I made you all to be in harmony with nature and with all of the world but the sin of mankind has disrupted that

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harmony. My son has restored it and is restoring it and one day things will be perfect again and I invite you, I call you, I command you to join in the struggle with him for good. Don't be anything less than everything you can be because you've got a great heart and I know it because I put it in you. If

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anyone knows, I know. So share as mine and care as mine and love as mine and serve as mine and we will win and I swear by the stars and I promise by the planets and I pledge it in my own name and the name of my son." That's what God is saying to us. Look at the text one last time, "And he was in the wilderness forty days

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tempted by Satan and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him." Today, wilderness, temptation, discord, but tomorrow the song of the angels. Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift. Let us pray. We thank thee that our Savior was tempted as we have been tempted and we thank thee that

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he knew victory and that we by the indwelling of his spirit can become more victorious until joining thee in the kingdom of heaven we can be perfect even as he is perfect. Oh Lord, call out of us the best that's in us. Help us to wrestle with our humanity, to see Jesus always as our golden guide. Claim us by the power

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of his love. May we give ourselves with him to the saving of all those who do not know him yet as Lord and to the saving of this beautiful, beautiful world. We pray it in his name. Amen. [Music]

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