The Wilderness, Portrait | Christ's Temptation in the Wilderness

Available in Portrait and Landscape Orientations You are viewing the Portrait version. View Landscape version → About The Wilderness A note from Mark Mabry The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. Forty days. No food. Then the devil came. Three temptations. Three refusals. Jesus did not yield. The devil left Him, Luke says, until an opportune time. The fight would never be over… just paused. There is a war on men. The devil goes after husbands and fathers and sons, young and old, the way he went after Jesus that day. Sometimes the wilderness is financial collapse, family pressure, feeling our own mortality, or the quiet killer of a phone in our pocket… Casting him out is rarely elegant. Not long ago my son asked me to take him to a bridge near our house so he could throw his phone into the river. He did not need a sermon. He was in his wilderness and he needed to take a dramatic stand. (I took him.) Facing the devil rarely feels elegant. It feels like a fight. It hurts. But on the other side of that pain are the prizes worth living for… love, family, peace. Every man needs to remember that Jesus faced temptation. The women who love us need to know what their husbands and sons are walking through every day. Their men are being attacked, the way Jesus was attacked. I collaborated on "The Wilderness" with my friend, a South African painter named Pieter Van Tonder. It's based above the Dead Sea in the Judean Wilderness. I have stood there. It's a harsh environment. The light is not flattering. We were not trying to make this pretty. We wanted a piece of art that honored the ruggedness every man feels when life gets heavy. "Jesus… was led by the Spirit into the Wilderness…" — Luke 4:1 (NKJV)