Matthew 4:5-7

It seems to me that this second temptation the devil brings to Jesus is essentially an attempt to push the buttons of pride and arrogance.   There doesn't seem to be any specific advantage to cooperating with the devil here.  Yet, it must have been difficult to have this lesser being mocking and insinuating and saying, "If you are the Son of God, why don't you throw yourself down from this high place and see if angels will come to your rescue?"

On the one hand, there is no doubt that if Jesus called on angels to rescue Him from any circumstance, angels would have shown up.  On the other hand, as with the first temptation, if Jesus had laid aside his humanity and used Divine God-powers, He would no longer have been living as a Spirit-filled human -and would no longer have met the conditions of sinless Savior to fulfill God's justice.  What seems a simple power struggle, is much more.  Jesus mission to save humanity and destroy the works of the devil would have been derailed before it started.

There is probably a huge lesson for us to learn from this encounter.  Living here in this world where Satan is actively seeking to harm and destroy the Kingdom of God, we are going to have spiritual encounters -we will be tempted, harassed and attacked.  We often face these encounters either in a spirit of fear or a spirit of arrogance.  We either are intimidated by the enemy -or we as we operated in the authority of Christ we become prideful as if it is somehow our personal faith and our personal righteousness and our personal spiritual power that is going win the battle.  Neither of these attitudes is an appropriate response to temptation and spiritual attack.

Jesus was not intimidated nor was He prideful.  He was matter of fact.  In essence, Jesus simply refused to participate in the devil's little scenario.  He just said, "No.  I am not going along with you on that."  There was no long power encounter.  There was no long argument.  And even though Jesus used Scripture, it was not a debate with the devil matching wits and Bible knowledge.  The attitude Jesus displayed was a simple, resolute, "No."

I wonder how often we would experience spiritual victory if when faced with temptation and spiritual attack we refused to argue  and refused to cooperate -if we just simply said, "No."