AP

Acts 8:11-12  They followed [Simon] because he had amazed them for a long time with his sorcery.  But when they believed Philip as he proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.

I find it is interesting that in Matthew’s account of the Temptations of Jesus, he puts the temptation to ‘jump off the pinnacle of the Temple and be rescued by angels’ in the second place of the three (Matthew 4:5-7).  It thus corresponds to the second aspect of Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, when they ‘saw’ that the forbidden fruit was ‘pleasing to the eye’ [spectacular] (Genesis3:6).  Satan was tempting Jesus to reject the Father’s Plan of Salvation, which involved the way of the cruel cross, and to induce people to follow him by doing something spectacular to the eye.

Thankfully for us, Jesus chose to obey his Father’s Plan “by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:8b)  In contrast, Adam and Eve ate the fruit and placed themselves, and all their descendants (including us), into a state of enmity with God and therefore subject to eternal death.  Jesus’ obedience, on the other hand, provides eternal life for all who will turn to him in repentance-and-faith (John 3:16).

As with the other two aspects of the temptation in the Garden of Eden (‘good for food’ and ‘desirable for gaining wisdom’), Jesus resisted the temptation to turn stones to bread to feed the hungry and to compromise with Satan in order to gain a following.

Perhaps the Apostle John had all this sequence in mind when he wrote: “Do not love the world or anything in the world.  If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him.  For everything in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – comes not from the Father but from the world. (1 John 2:15-16)

Sadly, in the history of the Church, we have not always been so astute and careful.  There have been times when we have become so involved in a ‘social gospel’, a dependence on ‘signs and wonders’, or compromise with the prevailing culture, that we have failed to “proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God [the substitutionary death of Christ] and the name of Jesus Christ”  Even in our present day we are too often ‘ashamed’ of the stigma associated with aligning ourselves with ‘the name of Jesus Christ’.

Let us learn from Philip’s example and his experience in Samaria to be “not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).

– Bruce Christian