“Waywardness and wandering. Since the day Adam wandered from God’s word and will and way in the garden of Eden, eating from the forbidden tree, we have been a race prone to wander. Wandering reflects waywardness; it is a manifestation of our human condition in Adam.
As such, it is another way of describing our sinful tendencies. We wander instead of worshiping because we are wayward. We leave the God we claim to love and instead cleave to the sin we claim to hate. Even as the godly offspring of the woman, we are not immune from this waywardness:
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love.
Scripture’s answer to our waywardness and wandering is not, in the first place, to work our way out of it. It does involve work. It involves watchfulness and wariness 1 Cor. 16:13; 1 Pet. 5:8); it involves sobriety and sanctification (1 Thess. 4:3; Heb. 12:14; 1 Pet. 4:7); it involves working out one’s salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12-13).
But that work first begins with returning to the one who worked it out for us- Jesus Christ, the righteous pilgrim and faithful worshiper. Hebrews 4:15 tells us, ‘For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.’
Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses because He has been tempted (tested) as we are in every respect. As one born of a woman, born under the law and placed in a life context of suffering, Jesus’s commitment and obedience to His Father is tested just as ours is. His spirituality is put under scrutiny.
The wilderness temptations provide a focused, intensified example. As with Israel before Him, Jesus is taken into the wilderness to see what is in His heart, to see if He loves God with heart and soul and mind and strength (Matt. 4:1; cf. Deut. 8:2). Adam failed in this respect; so too did Israel, so too did David and Solomon, and so too did every king after them.
Each of them a ‘son of God’ in his own way— Adam as the primal son (Luke 3:38), Israel as the national son (Ex. 4:22-23), David and Solomon as royal sons (Ps. 2:7; 2 Sam. 7:14); each of them placed under God’s law and tested to see what was in his heart; and each of them revealed as wayward and wandering.
But not so with Jesus, the final Son of God. Faced by the same ancient serpent, the devil himself, Jesus stands resolute in His devotion to God and in His obedience to God’s word and will and way.
He refuses to bow to the devil’s temptations; instead, He feeds on the word of God to sustain His life (Deut. 8:3); He trusts God’s presence to protect His life (Ps. 91:11-13); and He worships God only (Deut. 6:13), so that He may take the long road to suffering at the cross and then receive the kingdoms of the world. His heart attitude is one of delight and devotion to His Father and His word and will and way.
As the writer of Hebrews states, when Christ came into the world, he said,
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’” (Heb. 10:5-7; cf. Ps. 40:7-8)
Among the godly offspring of the woman, there is finally a worshiper who is not wayward and therefore does not wander. As He sings the Psalms, Jesus prays in His heart, ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!’ (Ps. 139:23-24)
And His Father replies, ‘I have searched him and known his heart; I have tried him and known his thoughts-there is no grievous way in him; he has walked in the way everlasting. Behold, this is my beloved Son in whom is all my delight’ (cf. Matt. 3:17; 17:5).
Personally, perfectly, and perpetually (throughout the whole of His life), Jesus does what Adam and Israel and David and Solomon were supposed to do under the Law but never did. He keeps God’s law entirely and exactly, offering up the whole of His earthly life as an act of pure worship to His Father.
Jesus achieves what the ‘sons of God’ before Him failed to achieve, and because of that, we who are now united to Him by faith may enjoy a perfect, righteous standing before God the Father.
The worship we now render is acceptable to a holy God because it is offered in and through the perfect worshiper, Jesus Himself.”
–Jonathan Gibson, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing: A Liturgy for Daily Worship with the Psalms (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2026), 11-14.
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