The Wilderness Testing of Jesus as the
End-Time Adam, Son of God, and End-Time Israel
As true Israel and a latter-day Moses, Jesus is the
micro-Israel who has replaced the macro-national Israel.13 Each response by
Jesus to Satan is taken from a response by Moses to Israel’s failure in the
wilderness (Deut. 8:3 in Matt. 4:4; Deut. 6:16 in Matt. 4:7; Deut. 6:13 in
Matt. 4:10). Jesus resists the same temptations to which Israel succumbed. The
reason, however, that Luke’s genealogy ends with “Adam, the son of God” (Luke
3:38) and is directly followed by Jesus’s temptation narrative is to identify
Jesus as an end-time Adam, the true Son of God, resisting the temptations to
which Adam and Eve succumbed. Twice during his temptation of Jesus, the devil
refers to him as the “Son of God” (Matt. 4:3, 6), which is a name for Israel in
Deuteronomy (cf. 32:20; 32:10–12, 18). Consequently, Jesus’s victory over
temptation appears to have prepared him to conquer the one who was the ultimate
satanic prince of the Canaanites and of all wicked nations and to conquer the
land in a way that Israel had not been able to do. Jesus’s ministry of casting
out demons continues his holy warfare as the true Israel. His exorcisms were an
expression of his incipient, though decisive, defeat of Satan, who had brought
creation into captivity through his deception of Adam and Eve. Jesus’s
representative overcoming of satanic evil was a victory in which his followers
would participate, since they were identified with him in this victory. This
identification of Christ’s followers with his righteous response to Satan’s
temptations is apparent since the nation Israel first faced these temptations.
Now Christ’s facing the same temptations suggests his representation of Israel
in overcoming the temptations. (G. K. Beale, Union with the Resurrected
Christ: Eschatological New Creation and New Testament Biblical Theology [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2023], 111-12)
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