Christ’s answer to the last temptation is quite interesting: Begone, Satan: for it is written, The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and him only shalt thou serve.
It is simple enough that Christ could not adore Satan, violating the First Commandment, and leading to the manifest absurdity of the Creator adoring one of His creations. However, what is especially intriguing in the answer is His statement that God alone was to be served. An Earthly Kingdom for Christ would take away the concept of free will. God wants us to be His servants, but we cannot be true servants if our service is coerced. Even in the best of human states, there is much coercion, human law always being backed up by it.
Christ of course constantly said that His kingdom is not of this world and fled when the mob was going to crown him King. Coming to win remission of our sins and to give us a path to Heaven, Christ was simply not concerned with the mundane matters of Earthly kingdoms. When he was asked by one man to tell the man’s brother to hand over his share in an inheritance, he asked who had appointed Him arbiter in the man’s case. At a time when every patriotic Jew rightfully hated the Roman yoke, Christ said not a word regarding that struggle. He was so far beyond such concerns that Pilate was genuinely puzzled when Christ was brought before him, an alleged rebel against Rome, and would not speak a word in His defense.
Christ came to do the will of God, and as Lincoln noted one hundred and fifty-nine years ago, the Almighty has his own purposes. By dying on the Cross and rising from the dead, Christ brought more good into this world than any benevolent ruler could ever hope to accomplish. He did it by following the will of the Father, and gave us His great example to do likewise.
Satan, when it comes to the love that was the essence of Christ’s mission, is like a man blind from birth trying to grasp the concept of the color green. CS Lewis nicely states this:
The truth is I slipped by mere carelessness into saying that the Enemy really loves the humans. That, of course, is an impossibility. He is one being, they are distinct from Him. Their good cannot be His. All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else—He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them. The reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is our utter failure to out that real motive. What does He stand to make out of them? That is the insoluble question. I do not see that it can do any harm to tell you that this very problem was a chief cause of Our Father’s quarrel with the Enemy.
All of Satan’s temptations seemingly offered Christ an easier way to accomplish His mission. However, the love of the Son for the Father, meant that Christ would reject these temptations and follow the course set by the Father before time began. Lent is all about us turning away from sin and accepting God’s love, and living our lives in accordance with His will and not ours, and that is the great lesson of the temptations of Christ.
I notice that our Lord, in response to the devil’s first temptation, did not turn one large stone, and two smaller stones which together did not equal the large stone, into bread.
I find it interesting that many seek to marry worship of God to a myriad of secular interests in seeming hope of bettering their station on earth as well as obtaining salvation. The promoters of the prosperity gospel appear a good example, as well as seekers of political power who turn to favorable examples in religion to support their cause.