Matthew 4:9

And saith unto Him, All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me.

For an ordinary human being no proposition, in itself, could have been more attractive. What a dazzling picture of absolute sway over the world and possession of its glory was here offered to the lowly and rejected descendant of David! But what folly to presume upon the unlimited disposition of the wealth and grandeur of the world in the presence of Him who of right holds all the nations of the earth as His inheritance and the utmost ends of the world as His possession! The condition of Satan demanding homage to him as the superior was therefore almost naively awkward. But he staked all on this last powerful appeal to worldly ambition, involving the willful yielding to the most heinous form of idolatry.