Topical Studies
What the Bible says about
Fasting as a Spiritual Tool
(From Forerunner Commentary)
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Fasting can humble a person if it is properly used. It is undoubtedly an uncomfortable experience requiring a measure of faith, discipline, and willpower. It requires a measure of faith if one is going to do it God's way. It can be done. Fasting is a tool. It is a self-imposed affliction. Human nature seeks to gratify itself, which is exactly what we do when we sin. We gratify natural desires: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Fasting, then, can bring a person face-to-face with what he really is, not what his human nature tells him he is. Human nature always puffs us up to be more than we are. We are, in reality, mortal beings. We need all the help we can get just to stay alive. Fasting makes one weak and makes one aware of how much we need what God provides. God's part in this equation is to forgive sin and dispose of Satan, so it is no wonder the world is so ignorant of what the Day of Atonement is all about. This day is a thorn in Satan's side, and he would like nothing more than to forget it—and for all of mankind not to even know of it. He has done a good job of doing that! Though God is the giver of every good thing, He does not owe us anything. He has taken the steps to bring us to be at one with Him; we did not do it on our own. His actions allowed us to have peace with Him through Jesus Christ. His and Jesus Christ's actions enabled us to have our sins covered through the blood-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. God leads us to repentance and gives us a true picture of what we are. God reveals Himself to us so that we can have faith in the true God, opening the way to repentance. He shows us the need to turn our lives around because of what we have done. It is God, too, who supplies us with the will to humble ourselves before Him and to begin to submit. God has ordained our High Priest, Jesus Christ, who helps us strengthen this oneness. He is daily serving before our God in appealing the case against us, which separates us from Them. He is also supplying us with the Holy Spirit, enabling us to grow and overcome. We think that our part in this whole process is so difficult, yet by comparison, it is the smallest part. We think it is the largest part, but it is not. God has done 99% of the work, and all He wants us to do is to submit humbly before Him. Make use of this holy day. Think about the resultant weakness and sickness from going just one day without food and water. Then consider how quickly we would deteriorate spiritually if we did not have God doing His 99% of the work of salvation. We would be spiritually dead in practically no time at all! Let us rejoice in what He has done and in what He has supplied for us in His grace. Because of this day, we can look forward to the Feast of Tabernacles and observing the final two holy days picturing this great work of salvation. He is making possible the fulfillment of His purpose—an essential part of which is being made "at one" with Him.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Division, Satan, Humility
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Isaiah 58:3-12
The members of Isaiah's audience were fasting for all the wrong reasons! They fasted to get things from God and hypocritically appear righteous. God says, though, that we should fast to free others from their sins, to intercede with God for their healing, to help provide for their needs and to understand His will. Fasting is a tool of godly love we are to use for the good of others, and any benefits we derive from it are wonderful blessings! On the Day of Atonement, we fast to implore God to bring to pass the greatest blessing of all upon ourselves and the world: unity, oneness, with Him!
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Holy Days: Atonement
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Luke 4:1-3
Luke 4 contains Satan's temptation of Christ, and it is instructive to see what Jesus did in the face of evil. Just before this, Jesus had been highly complimented by the Father: "You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22). Jesus, then, must have been feeling confident, for the voice booming such praise out of heaven was a massive pat on the back. Then, Luke 4:1 relates that He was filled with the Holy Spirit; the power, the strength, of God was pumping through Him. It was at just this point—before He commenced His ministry—that Satan pounced. We should not think that Satan tempted our Savior with merely three or four temptations, as recorded in this chapter, as well as in Matthew 4. The text says that He was "tempted for forty days," meaning that He was under constant attack for the full forty days, every day! This was an intense, prolonged test and more personal and powerful than we have ever experienced. The terrible evil He faced in the wilderness would likely have crushed us. The passage implies that Satan left the worst temptation to the very end, when Jesus was seemingly at His weakest point. He had not eaten food or drunk water for forty days. But was He passive all that time? Did our Savior just sit or lie on the sand for those nearly six weeks, allowing the Devil's temptations to batter Him like one sandstorm after the next? Luke does not present Him like that. Jesus did not fast because He had nothing to eat in a barren land. Remember, He is the One who inspired the instructions about fasting in Isaiah 58, so He clearly knew the spiritual strength that fasting provides. At the end of the forty days, He may have been weak as a kitten physically, but spiritually, He was the powerful Son of God. Perhaps the temptations advanced, not like one storm after another, but like an ever-strengthening tempest that culminated in a hurricane. What did Jesus do? Each successive onslaught was harder to resist. How did He face it? He bent all His will and strength on overcoming each temptation as it broke on Him. He pulled out every spiritual weapon to defeat each one. Luke does not say that He pulled out His scroll of Deuteronomy and began instructing Satan on the finer points of God's way of life. Our Savior already had them deeply embedded in His mind. He was prepared—by long years of study and deep meditation on what He learned—to face Satan's attacks. We also know that, not only was He fasting when out in the wilderness, but as His everyday practice, He prayed regularly, almost constantly. Here are four tools we must also use to rid evil from our lives: 1) Bible study, 2) meditation, 3) fasting, and 4) prayer. When Satan hit Him with temptation, Jesus did not need to do some emergency Bible study. Not only was He the Word of God in the flesh, but He also knew Scripture by heart. When Satan sent a temptation, Jesus quoted an opposing scripture verbatim. The right words—words that He had inspired as God of the Old Testament—came immediately to mind, and He hurled them at Satan like a razor-sharp weapon (Ephesians 6:17). Christ never treated evil as if it did not exist. In addition, He knew the weakness of His own flesh. He is the only person who has ever totally resisted the pulls of the flesh, though He suffered them just as we do (Hebrews 2:14, 18; 4:15). However, He was strong in the Spirit of God and able to resist them. We see in this vignette from His life that, even so, it was no easy task for Him. We know it is certainly not easy for us, but if we want to be like Him, we must approach it just as He did.
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Evil Is Real (Part Five)
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