NEW TESTAMENT CONTEXTUAL COMMENTARY

by Dr. Robert R. Seyda

GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

CHAPTER FOUR

Part I

Verse 1: “Then the Spirit led Jesus into the desert. He was taken there to be tempted by the devil.”

Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness was not by accident nor an arbitrary event. As the first man Adam was tested, so the second Man Adam was as well. In the garden Adam was tempted to disobey with the offer of become like God. Here, God the Son is tempted to disobey with the offer to become like man. In the beginning Satan used a lie to disguise reality; here he attempts to use truth to perpetrate a lie. How can we reconcile this action of the Holy Spirit with other aspects of His ministry. Did not Jesus say that our prayer should include, “Lead us not into temptation.”

The Greek word rendered “lead” has a more descriptive meaning and that is: “to bring;” and the word “temptation” refers to being tested and tried. In other words Jesus was saying that we should request that God not cause us to go through a trial or testing without a reason. After all, isn’t the Holy Spirit supposed to be a comforter instead of an observer? But this is only half the light that emanates from what our Lord taught about praying. The same prayer goes on to say, “But deliver us from evil.” To put it another way, “Don’t cause us to go through trials and testing without giving us the necessary tools to overcome and survive.” We must remember, we cannot be delivered unless we are in or facing danger. Christ had to pass His ordination test before entering the ministry.

The Holy Spirit is the testing agent. If we are to be led by the Spirit we can expect battles, trials and hardships. But do not despair, for even as we see in verse 11, after the turmoil God’s angels will come to our aid and comfort. The purpose of the temptation by the devil was not to conquer Jesus nor kill Him, He was bound to die anyway, but rather, to cause Him to disobey the Father. Had the devil succeeded in persuading Christ to perform one of the contrived acts that he suggested, this spot on our Lord’s record would have caused Him to be rejected as the perfect sacrifice and spotless lamb. The elimination of Jesus as the Lamb of God would have sealed man’s doom forever, because after Jesus there would have been no other Savior, because there was no other only begotten Son.

We can be sure that the three temptations listed here were not the only ones which the devil used during these 40 days and nights Jesus was alone in the wilderness. We can believe that He was tempted with every conceivable temptation that would come to any normal human under those conditions. To get a better grip on this suggestion, try thinking of what might bother you and bring you stress, if you were stranded in a remote area such as this. But not all readers of this Gospel were as impressed with what Jesus went through. This we find in one Jewish German Rabbi’s polemic reaction:

“Now what was the need for relating that he fasted forty days and forty nights? What sort of praise of God is it to say that he needs food and drink? Why, all the angels of our God who served him need no food or drink. Moreover, Moses, who was flesh and blood, was sustained by the glory of the divine presence forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water, and so was Elijah. Furthermore, the Jews were unable to look upon the countenance of Moses until he placed a veil over his face because he had approached his creator; how much more, then, should this be true of this man, who called himself God. Also, why did he become hungry? If you say that it was because of his flesh, the flesh could not fast forty days and forty nights if not for the holy spirit. It was the holy spirit, then, which gave him the strength to fast forty days and forty nights, in that case, why did it not sustain him indefinitely without food or drink and without hunger or thirst? In addition, when Satan told him, ‘If you are God, make these stones into bread and eat it,’ why did he reply, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone”? This is a faulty response, for Satan could have answered him. Moreover, why did Satan tempt him in all these ways? After all, everyone knows that Satan is an evil angel who knows both manifested and hidden things just as any other angel does, and if it had been true that Jesus was divine, why should Satan have troubled him so much and not been afraid of him?”¹

You need not to be an astute theologian to see the faulty reasoning in this man’s thinking. First of all, he does not understand that Jesus went through this ordeal to show that the God who sent Him was different than what mankind had come to expect. Throughout Jewish literature we see a judgmental God. The Stoics taught about apathetic gods; and the Epicureans spoke of completely detached gods; the Romans presented gods with destructive power. But it was Jesus who brought into the world an incredibly dynamic concept of the One True God, One who was willing to deliberately undergo every human experience, so that those who come to Him will know that He understands.

Plutarch, one of the most religious of the Greek philosophers, declared that it was blasphemous to involve God in the affairs of this world.² With Jesus depicting God as One identified with the suffering of this world, it was bound to revolutionize man’s understanding. This came after centuries where the idea of the untouchable God was paramount. But through His temptation and suffering, He would now be identified with those who faced such sorrows. This was the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah, that the Messiah would be: “a man of suffering, well acquainted with grief.”³

As to this previous critic’s notion that if the Holy Spirit sustained Jesus in the wilderness as He went without food or water, why did this not then become a permanent source of sustenance. To this I would ask this Rabbi, since the fourth man joined the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace and the angel sealed the mouths of the lions for Daniel while he was in their den, then why didn’t they continue to follow them as body guards? This was testing, a trial to prove, as in the case of the three Hebrews and Daniel, that their faith in a God who would deliver was proven true. Therefore, by faith they knew that when needed, their God would command His angels to take charge. This was also only a prelude to what Jesus would go through in His appearance before the high priest Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, and then what He went through on the cross.

Verses 2-4: “Jesus ate nothing for 40 days and nights. After this, he was very hungry. The devil came to tempt him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these rocks to become bread.‘”

From the context of these verses, we conclude that the devil came to Christ on the 40^th day of his fasting with these last three temptations, because it says of Jesus: “He was very hungry.” They were a culmination of all temptations He endured during this period because they vexed the body, soul and spirit. Jesus could have turned anything into bread to satisfy His hunger, but He was not about to give in to a desire of the flesh that would give the devil something to brag about. A 40 day fast was not new, and struck a familiar note to any Jewish reader of Matthew’s Gospel since they had read: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write everything that I have told you. This is the agreement that I made with you and the Israelites.’ Moses stayed there with the LORD for 40 days and 40 nights. Moses did not eat any food or drink any water. And he wrote the words of the agreement (the Ten Commandments) on the two stone tablets.”⁴ And we also read elsewhere: “Then Elijah walked for 40 days and nights to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. There Elijah went into a cave and spent the night.”⁵ The phrase, “day and night” was the old way of saying, “twenty-four hours.”

For Jewish devotees who fasted, their regimen did not require restriction of movement or activities. The Rabbis taught: “One is not permitted to eat after sundown until sundown the next day for it to be a full day’s fast.” What one did during this time is clearly outlined: “From morning to midday they look into the affairs of the city; from then onward they read for a quarter of the day from the Torah and the Prophets and the rest of the day is spent in praying for mercy, as it is said, And they stood up in their place, and read in the book of the Law of the Lord their God a fourth part of the day; and another fourth part they confessed and prostrated themselves before the Lord their God.⁶”⁷

We have no record that Jesus took food or drink after dark on any of these days. It seems obvious, that after forty days and nights our Lord would be physically tired and emaciated. But the real challenge during this period of 40 days was more than just physical hunger or stress due to depredation. It was the trial of His commitment to the mission His heavenly Father sent Him to accomplish. As we all know, sometimes thinking day in and day out about something we are facing can only make it more difficult. But the most difficult contest was yet to take place.