Hungrier Than We Know When we’re starving, only one thing can satisfy our souls. My wife might disagree, but I don’t consider myself a picky eater. As I recall, the only food I absolutely cannot keep down is Brussels sprouts. When I was a child, my mom forced me to practice good manners and finish what had been dished onto my plate. This demand to polish off the sprouts happened only once; the trauma that ensued convinced my mom to never again serve me those miniature cabbage-like globes. When it comes to our life as well as our palate, experience and initial intuitions are often too thin. Perhaps we don’t really know what is good. Much of the time, we don’t know what we’re really hungry for. When Satan tempted the Son of God, his opening salvo literally hit Jesus in the gut. The Lord had traversed the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, exposed to the sun by day and the cold by night, without so much as a morsel to eat. He fasted the entire 40 days, and Scripture notes the obvious: Jesus was “famished” (Luke 4:2 NET). The Devil, pushing into that empty and ravenous place, pointed at rocks and said to Jesus, “Command these stones to become bread” (Luke 4:3 NET). Jesus’ response was quick and decisive: “It is written, ‘Man does not live by bread alone’” (Luke 4:4 NET). Of course, one does live by bread, but not only by bread. In fact, tracing these words to the Old Testament passage He was quoting (“Man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord”), it’s clear Jesus rebuffed the particular kind of bread Satan offers—any bread we craft on our own, any bread that does not come to us from God. It’s important to note that Jesus didn’t say to the Tempter, I’m actually not that hungry, thank you. Rather, He said, Devil, I may be starved, but what you suggest can’t provide the bread I desperately need. Jesus was resolutely certain of what He needed to live, and the Devil’s recommendation didn’t even come close. Deuteronomy 8 described Israel’s preparations to cross into their long-promised homeland after 40 years of wandering the wilderness. As the people gathered their belongings and their courage to embark on that final trek, Moses reminded them why they had sojourned aimlessly in the desert for so many years: You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord (Deut. 8:2-3). Israel needed the long, rugged years—the years when their bellies ached and their hope sagged—to understand what they were genuinely hungry for, to grasp what they truly needed in order to live. What Israel needed was God. Without His life-breathing Word, they would wither and die. To communicate this reality, He fed them with manna, a strange food that fell out of the sky, a food only the Lord could send. The plainest truth of our existence is one we easily miss: We are starved for God; we need God in order to live. There are crucial questions we must confront: What are the other breads that we think will assuage our hunger? What other breads do we believe we must have in order to live? Is there a relationship, an academic degree, a vocation, a boost to the ego, a financial accomplishment that we crave? Have we bought the lie that any of these are our deepest hungers, our deepest needs? When Jesus refused the Devil’s offer, His obedience was not merely a commitment to an abstract ideal or religious principle. Rather, Jesus refused Satan because Satan could not deliver what Jesus required for His survival. The Lord’s rebuke was quite literal—one cannot live by bread alone. It was a choice between life and death: Listen to Satan and die, or listen to the Father and live. For Israel, one of the gifts the wilderness decades provided was the revelation of how hungry they were, of how necessary God was to their very existence. They needed food, but they needed God more—they needed the food only He could provide. God was their deep hunger, their only provision, their true life. As Psalm 34:10 (NIV) says, “The young lions do lack and suffer hunger; but they who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing.” For all of us, one of the gifts our wilderness provides (and by wilderness, we mean those moments when we are isolated or destitute or spent or angry—or even the barren stretches where we pretend we don’t care a bit about God or faith) is the revelation of how famished we are for God. And the good, good news is that God stands ready to fill us. Part of the church’s job is to help us unearth how hungry we truly are. In worship, we often conclude with the Lord’s Table. Perhaps we have to save communion for the end because it takes us at least an hour to even begin to come to terms with our hunger for grace, with how ravenously desperate we are for the life only God can give. St. Augustine’s well-quoted words are powerfully true: “Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” This is another way of saying, “Our hearts are starved until they find their feast in Thee.” We are hungry, and God stands ready to feed us.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 01:40:09 +0000
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