Worship and Serve Him

Matthew 4:9-10

And he [the devil] said to him [Jesus], “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me [lit., ‘if falling down, you worship’].” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’”

A. Orendorff

In response to the tempters final advance, rather than citing one particular OT text, Jesus instead draws upon a pair of words that are coupled at least three times in the Pentateuch. Exodus 20:5, 23:24 and Deuteronomy 5:9 all begin with the same command: “You shall not bow down to them nor served them” (referring in each case to the so-called “gods” Israel would soon encounter in Canaan).

Exodus 20:5, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God . . .”
Exodus 23:24, “. . . you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them . . .”
Deuteronomy 5:9, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God . . .”

In this Matthew provides a model for his readers in the areas of both temptation and defense. As Tom Wright explains,

The temptations we all face, day by day and at critical moments of decision and vocation in our lives, may by very different from those of Jesus, but that have exactly the same effect. They are not simply trying to entice us in to omitting this or that sin. They are trying to distract us, to turn us aside form the path of servanthood to which our baptism has commissioned us (26).

They are trying, in other words, to turn us away from an authentic and truly human existence. To be human (in the truest sense of the word) means living in grateful dependence and joyful submission to the God who speaks in and through the words of Scripture. This means ordering our lives in keeping with those words—whether, as Matthew makes clear, this ordering will mean famine or feast.

Moreover, that very same word is the primary means of our defense, the primary means of deconstructing and resisting the temptations of Satan, the flesh and the world. “Store scripture in your heart, and know how to use it. Keep your eyes on God, and trust him for everything. Remember your calling, to bring God’s light to the world. And say a firm ‘no’ to the voices that lure you back into the darkness” (ibid).