This year for our ecumenical midweek Lenten worship series, we are focusing on the Lord’s Prayer, looking at one or two lines per week, influenced by the devotional book The Lord’s Prayer for Lent, by Vern Gundermann (available for Kindle on Amazon here).
For this week’s service, Pastor Daniel Flucke Pastor Daniel Flucke goes all the way back to Genesis to look at temptation. Join us as we continue our journey through the Lord’s Prayer with the line “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
For this Lent series, I’m doing individual blog posts for the weeks I preach, but you can watch the entire series from myself and Pastor Joan Thomas online here. Here’s the message for March 3, 2021.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
As you heard from Pastor Joan, we continue to make our way through the Lord’s Prayer, learning how Jesus taught us to pray, and tonight we’re looking at the line “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” And to talk about temptation, I want to go back to the original temptation, way back to the beginning of the Bible, all the way back to the garden of Eden.
This might be a familiar story for you, but let me set the scene. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God makes the world out of nothing. God makes the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals, birds, fish, everything in the world, including humankind, a man named Adam, whose name means man, or humankind.
God looks at the world and declares that it is good. It’s paradise. It’s perfect. Everything is exactly the way God intended it to be. Humans are in right relationship with God, knowing God as their creator. It’s easy to love God, because what other option is there? Well, God seems to think, there ought to be some sort of option.
My son Micah has a stuffed animal dog toy that talks when you squeeze its hand, and one of the things it says is “You’re my best friend.” I don’t know exactly how to tell him, but the stuffed animal is not really his best friend. It has no free will, no choice in what it says. It can only do what it’s programmed to do.
That’s not what God wants. God wants to give humans a choice. So, Genesis 2:14-17 says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’”
God gives a choice. There’s only one commandment, so you’d think it’d be pretty easy to obey, but there is a choice. Humankind can choose to disobey God. Then we’re skipping over a few verses where God creates a woman, Eve, which means “living one” or “source of life” and we pick up the story in the garden of Eden in Genesis 3.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’“ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”
There is one temptation, and humanity can’t resist it. Sometimes people have tried to use this story to blame women, but both Adam and Eve fall for the serpent’s temptation. 100% of the humans disobey. The interesting thing, though, is what the temptation is. The fruit—notice, by the way, that the Bible does not say it’s an apple. That comes from artists’ renditions of the story—the fruit is from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Distinguishing between good and evil is God’s domain. The serpent, the tempter, knows this. He says, “God knows when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” The temptation is for humanity to become like God. Eve and Adam took and ate the forbidden fruit because they the creation wanted to become the creator.
In a sense, that’s always the temptation, isn’t it? Our temptation is always to do things on our own, to live life our own way, to be self-reliant, rather than to rely on God. We want to be gods.
But we are not God. We are mortal beings. And when we do things are way, we ultimately fall short. Relying on ourselves, making ourselves gods, doesn’t work out, because we can’t give ourselves eternal life. Death always wins. Centuries later, the apostle Paul wrote, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life.” The result of depending on ourselves, the result of trying to be God, the result of our sin, is always death. The only way to receive eternal life is to accept it from God, who gives it to us as a free gift.
So in the Lord’s prayer, Jesus tells us to ask God to lead us not into temptation, but instead, to deliver us from evil. It’s not that God would ever lead us into temptation; we do that just fine on our own. It’s human nature to be tempted to go against God, to try to find life apart from the Giver of Life, and if that’s what you want to try, God will let you try, even knowing it won’t work. What we’re really asking when we pray this prayer is for God to not leave us in temptation, but instead to lead us out, to give us the strength to rely on God for life.
After Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, they could no longer stay in the garden of Eden. There needed to be a boundary between the creator and the creation. Verses 22-24:
Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
Sin separates us from God. Sin breaks relationships. But, and this is the good news, God never gives up. The entire rest of the Bible is the story of God refusing to give up on God’s good creation, refusing to give up on you or me or any of God’s children. Eventually, the Creator personally enters into the creation. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, God in the flesh, comes and gives his life to restore our relationship with God, to forgive our sins and give us the eternal life God wants us to have.
When you are tempted to find your way on your own, tempted to think you know better than God, or that you don’t need God, remember the consequences of sin, the inevitable results of looking to ourselves for life instead of to God. And pray that God may lead you out of temptation, deliver you from evil, and lead you to rely on Jesus your Savior for the eternal life given to you by grace.
Amen