You can tell a ton about the emotional and social health of a person by how they go about getting what they want. And frankly, I guess we could say you can tell a lot about your own social and emotional health if you take a minute to evaluate how you go about getting the things you want from other people. I gotta admit, sometimes I don't like what I see when I put myself to this test. But here's how it works: healthy people will tend to do the thing where they they have a thing that they want or they want to achieve something relationally, and they're like, hey, I have this thing that I want, and here's why, and this is the role that I would like you to play in that. And then they give you the respect of saying, no, that doesn't make sense for me, or okay, sure, or let me give you a counter proposal. Unhealthy people, including unhealthy versions of me, don't go through the front door. We go through the side door with gimmicks and manipulation and games because we're almost afraid to admit what it is that we actually want to get out of a situation. So because we know that if we expose our motives and our end game and what we're going for, that we'll be told no, we instead use emotional gimmicks to make other people feel guilty, or we will assume the role of the victim to try to get what we want through pity, or we will go with parallel truth, stuff that parallels truth and reality, but it's actually fiction, it's just very, very hard to detect. We will go with all kinds of biased ways to torture reality to work people around to get the things that we want. And it's just it's gross. And when you catch somebody doing it to you, you just feel sick and used and blah blah. And also you feel a little resentful toward the person who did it. And when you catch yourself doing it, or let me put this differently, when I have caught myself doing it, it's one of the most disappointed in myself feelings that I ever have. If I have something that I want that is so dark or problematic that I don't want to tell the people I love and need to work with in order to get it, then I shouldn't want that thing. But hey, we're human. So you've been there, I've been there on the giving end, on the receiving end. Grace to you and to everybody. We've all got our good days and our bad days, but I bring this up to say we know what the practice looks like. We know what healthy and truthful looks like, we know what manipulative and sleazy looks like. And boy, do we get every single version of manipulative and sleazy out of the devil. I mean, it makes sense he's the devil, it's kind of in the name and everything. When we look at his second temptation of Jesus in Matthew chapter four. So remember last time around, the devil takes him, uh, well, he doesn't take him out in the wilderness, the spirit takes him out in the wilderness and he's like, hey, turn these stones to bread. You know, you've been fasting 40 days and whatnot, you're probably real hungry. And Jesus is like, no, because man doesn't live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. And it's a direct quote from Deuteronomy 8.3, and he fends off the devil's thrust in this sword fight with a counter of Bible, and now he's going to do it again. But the devil is clever. He's going to employ the Bible in his offensive, uh, what do you call it, offensive attack, lunge as well. So here we go. Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. If you're the son of God, he said, throw yourself down, for it's written, he'll command his angels concerning you, and they'll lift you up in their hands so that you won't strike your foot against a stone. Jesus answered him, it's also written, don't put the Lord your God to the test. And then we're on to the next thing. That's it. Apparently that's what a victory looks like. Okay, nuts and bolts here, obvious stuff. It feels like we're getting into some kind of teleportation thing, and I'm not gonna lie to you. That is weird for me. I don't exactly know how they got to the top of the temple. The way this usually gets handled in movies and TV shows and stuff is almost like this is some sort of vision quest where Jesus is in this kind of loopy haze with maybe some kind of herbs from the desert affecting his mind and his judgment, and everything's kind of blurry, and there's a light-colored vignette around the edge of the screen, and then they just bamp from place to place and they appear, and you don't really know if this is reality or some kind of weird dream sequence. The text doesn't give us any indication that this is some dream sequence or vision quest. It is holding this out as the thing that happened. Now, is it possible that I am just wholesale misreading this text and that there's actually a lost genre of describing something that is more of a spiritual and metaphorical description of what's going on inside somebody's brain or a dream sequence? Yeah, of course I could be wrong about this. And of course, this could be somehow figurative or happening within the mind of Jesus, but I can only read this as I think it's being presented, and that is as though these two entities are standing on top of the temple. Well, okay, however, they got there, whether this is literal or metaphorical, and I'm operating off the assumption that's literal. However, they got there, I mean, there's obviously a ton of meaning wrapped up in that, right? I mean, one, it's it's the temple. This is where God lives. In the Old Testament theocracy, well, even before the theocracy, God, you know, he was the leader of his chosen people, and they had a place where God's presence kind of hung out. The Ark of the Covenant was representative of that, and the tabernacle was this traveling house for God that he'll dwell among his people. And then the temple is a permanent place. You'll recall uh that David is the one who was like, I am gonna build you an amazing temple. But it was actually God who said, No, you're not. It's gonna be your kid. And then God goes on to make with David the Davidic covenant about this great kingdom and this great king and all the stuff that points to Jesus, blah-b-da-t-d-dot dot. And so as a result, we've got a whole lot of history here that goes along with the idea of the temple being the dwelling place of God. Remember, the Holy of Holies, you can't even go in there. God lives in there amongst his people. And so to go to this spot, one places Jesus metaphorically and literally above God who dwells inside that temple, down below. I mean, just think about that. He's dancing on God's roof right now. Additionally, he's on top of everything. When I was a kid, I used to read uh the Uncanny X-Men and the additional X-Men series that came out. And I really liked just keeping up with all of the characters and you know, what whatever stories you ingest when you're drifting off to sleep or daydreaming, you imagine yourself being in the position of the heroes and interesting characters that you've familiarize yourself with. And I always liked Archangel, Warren Worthington III. He's, I mean, he's really a lame character by comparison to others now. He's just the guy with wings, so he can fly around. But that was really novel in the 1960s when Stanley introduced the X-Men. And I just always thought he was a really cool character. And I always thought it'd be really cool to have gigantic wings and that shot super sharp razor blades out of them if you wanted to, because that's angsty and sweet. And well, also the flying thing would be cool. But also, when you're the smallest kid in school and you get pushed around a little bit and stuff isn't going your way, you're probably gonna have some kind of daydreams about how cool it'd be to be like, I'll show you. Look, I'm in a unit hard and I'm muscle bound and I have gigantic metal wings, because that would make everybody think you were the awesomest. But I remember drifting into this place, like, just how cool would it be to just like show everybody? Like, look what I can do, and you can't do it. I am completely exceptional compared to all of you. And I'd like to think I've become emotionally a little bit more healthy, though, as we discussed at the beginning of the episode, I probably have a ways to go. And so kid me would daydream about that stuff because of the way it would bring attention and glory and fandom and adoration from fifth grade girls to me because of my cool wings. Well, likewise, I think even as an adult, that is still here because this isn't just the place where God lives, it's also the place where everybody hangs out. And not just like all the Jewish people, but all of the Roman occupiers hang out here. They had a fortress, the Antonia, it was, yeah, I think that's right, Antonia, right? It's the fortress that was kind of adjacent right there around the temple and the walls, and it was kind of a place to supervise what was going on, you know, on the part of the Romans. And so the point is this you would have had this cosmopolitan crowd always standing right there under the temple, ready to be awed and impressed by how awesome you are. So the temptation here is kind of twofold. One, put yourself above God. Two, show everybody that all the attention belongs to you. And I guess if there's a third, it's skip to the end. Don't wait around for all the other stuff that needs to go down, for all of this righteousness to be fulfilled. Don't do the whole cross thing. I mean, you're gonna sweat blood, you're gonna be freaking out so much about having to face that. I mean, you're gonna ask your own father to find some other way to get it done and for this cup to pass from you. Don't put yourself through all of that. Everybody will know that you're God. You'll be protected, you won't die here, you don't have to suffer that death. Just throw yourself off of it. The gist will get through, it'll come across. And if you have any questions about that, Jesus, like, look, there's Bible. He'll command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against the stone. What a lovely thing to throw out there. And we're going to break down what he's doing with that verse tomorrow as well as what Jesus is doing. So if the last temptation was an appeal to Jesus' just basic human need and hunger and desire, this one is an appeal to pride. It's an appeal to something that frankly most of us lose the battle with all the time. This just kills me. How easy is it for us to write narratives about our own awesomeness, or even motivated by pride and self-obsession, to write loathsome narratives of ourselves about how bad we are, how terrible and disastrous the things we've done are. Both of those are enormously self-centered, and both of those produce nothing in terms of us paying attention to or caring about those around us. Those are both ugly, prideful cycles. And Jesus looks like he just passed a test that literally every human ever has failed repeatedly. Even the humblest of us and the best of us don't get this right. But Jesus absolutely does. And again, we'll break down his response later on. But he says it's also written, don't put the Lord your God to the test. So Satan pulls out the manipulative stops to be like, Well, if you're this, do this. If you're my friend, you'll do this. We know all of these gimmicks. We see through it, of course, but even though we see through it, it's a pretty good temptation. Skip a miserable, torturous, horrible death. Have everybody know that you're awesome. I mean, this could still be redemptive, right? It's just it's just skipping to the end and doing a little different way. Yeah, but still ringing in the ears of the original audience would be that passage we looked at a couple days ago where Moses just sort of skipped to the end. I mean, the point is that water comes out of the rock, right? Doesn't matter how we do it. I was whack this thing a couple times and point out the, you know, my own awesomeness in the process. Like I'm the only one who can smack the rock and water comes out. Yeah, he didn't get to see the promised land because of it, though, because that wasn't the God-ordained route to resolving the problem. The God-ordained route brought glory to God and did things in his time and through his ways and pointed to Moses' submission to God. Moses' route screwed that up. If Jesus behaves like Moses here, the stakes are a lot greater than you just don't get to see the promised land. So once again, the temptation, though it is manipulative and childish, is very real and probably it would have worked on every single one of us if we were in that position. We're gonna break down exactly how we got to this point and what the little sword fight involving Bible verses from the Old Testament is that's going on here. All right, I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. More of this tomorrow.