Matthew 4:2-4

THE ATTACK ON DIVINE SONSHIP

‘And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He was afterward an hungred. And when the tempter came to Him, he said, If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But He answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’

Matthew 4:2

Herein Christ and Satan represent two great antagonistic principles. The whole object of Christ is to unite God and the sinner; but Satan is always doing the reverse.

I. The attack on sonship.—At our Saviour’s baptism, only a few days before the Temptation, there had been a voice from heaven, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!’ If Satan heard those words, he heard them with bitterness; and by a bold and wondrous stratagem, he made that very voice, which assured the world of its restoration, the base of the plan by which His own truth should be frustrated: ‘If Thou be the Son of God.’ Observe the depth of the intention of that question. It opens at once a dilemma. ‘Canst Thou be thus without bread, and yet be the Son of God?’ Or, ‘Art Thou indeed the Son of God? Make these stones bread.’ On that same fulcrum, Satan will very often apply his fatal lever to your soul. His great aim is to cut off the sense of sonship. Therefore, he does everything in the world to check that confidence in a man’s soul. He will disparage baptism; he will deny your conversion; he will darken your evidences; he will make light of still, small heavenly voices; he will misrepresent the character of the Father; he will arm against you external circumstances; or, he will try to attain the same ultimate end by a directly opposite method of attack. ‘You are a child of God. Enjoy your liberty; take your fling: “command that these stones be made bread.” ’

II. The sin of yielding.—What would have been the result? Where would have been the sin of it? It would have been (a) to do what Christ never did, to work a miracle for Himself, and exert His omnipotence only for His own gratification; (b) it would have been distrustful of the Divine Providence; (c) it would have placed the material above the spiritual.

III. Ample provision made by God.—It was chiefly to this last part of the sin of the compliance that our Lord directed His reply. He reminded Satan of whit God said respecting Israel, when Israel, in another part of the same wilderness, was in an exactly parallel position. Then, there was no natural bread. But hear what God said: ‘He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna; which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word,’— word is not in the original; it is larger—by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.’ Therefore ‘the manna’ was evidently, in the first instance, part of the ‘everything’ which ‘proceeded out of the mouth of God.’ ‘The manna’ came at the simple word of God; so that those who ate it, fed at God’s mouth. But that ‘manna’ was itself the emblem and the type, both of the Written and the Living Word. How this sublime answer fits our necessity!

—The Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustrations

‘To bring in here His Divine power, or to suppose that He fasted otherwise than as a man, is to rob the transaction of its whole meaning. Upborne and upholden above the common needs of the animal life by the great tides of spiritual gladness, in the strength of that recent Baptism, in the solemn joy of that salutation and recognition from His Father: He found and felt no need for all these forty days.’

(2) ‘The second Adam, no less than the first, had to pass through His probation. That probation of the Incarnate Son is by no means easy to understand. It is clear that Christ could not sin, being a Divine Person. But his very Divinity made it possible for Him more fully than for others to taste the ingredients of human life. And though by His freedom from original sin He had none of the vicious and depraved desires which are congenital to us, and could only think of such with an instinctive abhorrence, yet, being human, He could not fail to be tempted by the same things which had tempted our first parents. The crafts and assaults of the Tempter were more artfully and persistently concentrated upon Him than any other.’