Forty days tempted of the devil

The Lord’s temptations follow directly from His baptism, 3. 21, 22. He is ‘full of’ the same Holy Spirit who descended upon Him, v. 1. On the other side, doubtless the devil observed the Father’s acknowledgement of Him as His ‘beloved Son’, and was eager to counter with ‘If thou be the Son of God . . . ’, vv. 3, 9. Thus, from the devil’s perspective, the temptations were an attempt to make Him sin; from the divine perspective, they were to prove that He could not sin. And the Lord did indeed triumph, so that having been ‘led by the Spirit into the wilderness’, v. 1, He ‘returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee’, v. 14.

Three specific temptations are recorded for us. In the first, vv. 3-4, the devil is attempting to make the Lord use His powers to provide for His own bodily needs, outside the will of God. Unquestionably, He was capable of producing food miraculously, as all four Gospels show, but for the benefit of others, not to satisfy His own needs, and in accordance with the will of God: certainly not at the behest of Satan.

In the second, vv. 5-8, Satan offers the Lord the kingdoms of the world, if He will worship him. The kingdoms will be His, but the timing will be God’s, not Satan’s; they will be given by God, not the devil; they will be His on a righteous basis, not by giving allegiance to the ‘god of this world’.

In the third, vv. 9-12, the enemy subtly uses scripture to try to make the Lord throw Himself from a height to the ground. How often still does he misapply scriptures in order to achieve his evil purposes! But the Lord will have none of it: the promises of preservation are there for the encouragement of the righteous, not as a basis for putting God to the test.

When Satan tempts us, he does not tell us to produce food, or take us up mountains, or to Jerusalem, but still he would have us go outside the will of God to satisfy our own desires. He would put us in positions where we are tempted to value the gains of this world above our service of God, and he would do his utmost to make us act contrary to the teaching of scripture. We should respond as the Lord did, ‘It is written . . . ’, vv. 4, 8.