³¹ “… but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let us go from here.”

Just as He followed the Spirit’s leading into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan at the beginning of His ministry (Matt 4:1), so now Jesus submits to divine leading onto the spiritual battle where temptation again awaits Him. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the place of temptation (Matt 26:41), He will be tempted to avoid His suffering as evidenced three times in His prayer for the cup of God’s wrath to pass Him by, but then He three times concludes, “Not my will but yours be done” (Matt 26:36-46). He was certainly led like a sheep to the slaughter (see Isaiah 53:7) and He would absolutely not disobey His Father.

Neither was His obedience a passive acquiescence. To use the words of the writer of Hebrews, He “resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin.” (Heb 12:3). He endured the suffering with “joy” (Heb 12:2) and became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). So when Jesus told the disciples, “Get up, let us go from here,” He was advancing to engage the “ruler of this world” (vs. 30) in final battle.

Interestingly, Jesus’ relationship with and love for the Father are demonstrated through the adversarial agency of the unwitting tempter himself. The one who presumed to rule over the world could not gain mastery over Jesus, the One who was made “for a little while lower than the angels” (Heb 2:7). The tempter found an impenetrable foe, an impervious barrier to world domination.

Only Jesus could say that Satan “has nothing in me” (vs. 30). He and Satan have absolutely nothing in common. The very thing that Satan is all about, namely temptation through lies and deceit (John 8:44), carries no sway with Jesus, because there is absolutely no operating principle within Christ that can give Satan’s temptation any traction. To be sure, Jesus was tempted in every way as we are (Heb 4:15), but those temptations had no power over Him. He was absolutely committed to do what the Father commanded. It was His “food” (John 4:34). With us, temptation finds common ground with our fleshly desires. But not so with Jesus. The sequence of temptation to sin as depicted in James 1:14-15, cannot even take root. He cannot be “carried away and enticed by his own lust” and so it cannot be said of Him that, “when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.” The death He was about to die was not for Himself, but for the sin that had taken root in us to bring death to everyone. It was His joy to follow the Father’s will to die for us (Heb 12:2).

Lord, teach me to find joy, real joy, in doing as You command me in Your word.