¹As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God. ²My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?

The believer’s heart, soul, and spirit longs for God. Our Creator made us for worship, and when He seems absent, we become spiritually thirsty. We long to worship Him. Arguably, the Bible rarely commands us to worship God; it assumes that we will worship. The question is, what or whom will we worship? The desire to worship is integral to our makeup as beings created in God’s image. We do not observe animals worshipping. But for us, worship is like breathing; we simply do it. Yet because of sin, worship skews off course, as we read in the book of Romans:

For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. (Rom. 1:25)

Worship is central to God’s purposes in the world, and Satan continually tries to skew it away from God, either by garnering worship for himself or turning people against the Lord. In the book of Job, he attempted to coerce that blameless, upright, God-fearing man to curse God (Job 1:1, 9-11)—to no avail. Cursing God would be the absolute antithesis of worshipping God. Then Satan tried eliciting worship from the perfectly righteous man, Jesus, who was God in the flesh:

[T]he devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory; and he said to Him, “All these things I will give You, if You fall down and worship me.” (Matt. 4:8–9)

Interestingly, this story takes place at the end of Jesus’ forty-day fast in the desert when He was hungry and undoubtedly thirsty, which is a very human response to fasting. The setting was “perfect” for Satan’s intention of knocking Jesus off His mission to glorify God. Yet it was not Jesus’ hunger that drove the interchange, but Satan’s thirst for being worshipped! He wanted to commandeer the desire to worship inbuilt to creatures made in God’s image. Scripture suggests that angels also worship God (see Rev. 7:11, Isa. 6:1-2), yet, in Satan, this desire to worship turned inward, with the epitome of rebellion being displayed in the evil one himself—this ultimately is self-worship.

Fallen humans took what God created and distorted it, so they pushed out of the kingdom of God, as it were. Satan was offering God a godless empire; how ironic! He was attempting to take God’s glory out of creation, to turn everything into a caricature of what the Creator has made. So, in exchange for Jesus’ worship, Satan tendered a world that would become secure in its godlessness, if the Lord were to worship him. But, in the end, the only thing Satan can give Jesus would be, in reality, nothing! The narrative of the devil is always void of truth.

Satan attacked the human side of the incarnation, being totally incapable of understanding how Jesus Christ could be fully God and fully man. So, he goes for broke in this, his final temptation effort; he cuts to the chase. His desperation shows in his ludicrous attempt to gain worship from the “human” Jesus at the very time when our Lord was about to begin His ministry of carrying out God’s purpose in the world. Satan’s end game was to undercut God’s glory shining in and through a sin-fallen world. With a flip of the tongue, Jesus ordered the devil, “Go, Satan!” (Matt. 4:10).

Contemplating this story of Jesus’s response as it eclipses Satan’s desperate attempt for worship is like drinking cool water that refreshes our soul. From the very beginning, we see that Jesus is infinitely greater than Satan, and He is greater than any trial or temptation we will ever face. So, we bow our hearts before Him and, in so doing, satisfy our soul’s thirsty desire for worshipping our Lord.

Lord, You are amazing! Help me continue reorienting my view of life and bringing it more in conformity with Your narrative as revealed in Your Word.