Why Did Jesus Suffer When Tempted and How Does it Help Us?
It has always bothered me when people have said that Jesus was tempted so He would know what it feels like for us, and help us. That doesn't make sense to me. Because Jesus is God, He would have known that before He ever came to the earth. So was it that He was tempted so that we would know that He knows? Or is it simply part of Him being fully man?
Then Hebrews 2:18 tells us that because Jesus "suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted." Why did Jesus suffer when tempted and how does that help us?
Obedience is not always easy and we are faced with the temptation to not obey every day. Just making those decisions can be painful and choosing to obey even more painful. We don't always stand up to temptation very well. Sometimes we do okay but other times we don't suffer at all as we choose to disobey.
But Jesus learned obedience when tempted and it was painful. While He never sinned, as a man He was susceptible to sin. Suffering temptation became His teacher. Each temptation must have gotten harder because it matured Him. Each temptation prepared Him for the next. He faced increasing temptation after temptation and experienced victory after victory until the ultimate temptation and the ultimate victory. He always obeyed. All the way to the cross.
In The Life-Changing Power in the Blood of Christ, Jennifer Kennedy Dean tells about some scientists in South America who developed an antidote for the deadly poison from some snakes. They took the venom from a snake, diluted it and injected it into a horse. Each day they increase the concentration and eventually injected the horse with pure venom. By then the horse had developed antibodies against the venom and was not overcome by the poison. That helped the people when they used the antibodies in the blood of the horse as an antidote for them.
Jesus was never overcome by temptation. Instead God the Father made it serve His purpose to prepare Jesus for the very reason He came to earth. You see, He didn't come to earth to show us how, He came to do it for us! He suffered temptation for us because we could not do it for ourselves. He provided an antidote for us as surely as that horse did for the people in South America. But unlike those people, we don't just get the antibodies, we get a total blood transfusion! The blood of Jesus is our life!
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