Luke 4:1-13 Commentary

Jesus Is Tested in the Wilderness
1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted [a] by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

3 The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread."
4 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'People do not live on bread alone.' [b]"
5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 If you worship me, it will all be yours."
8 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.' [c]"

9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:
" 'He will command his angels concerning you
to guard you carefully;
11 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.' [d]"
12 Jesus answered, "It is said: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.' [e]"

13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.


Dig Deeper
From reading the historian Herodotus, among other sources, we know that In 490 BC the Persian King Darius launched an invasion into Greece. Despite the fact that Darius was a powerful king with a powerful army behind him, Darius failed miserably. His Persian forces were defeated by the Athenians in a great victory for the Greek city-state at Marathon. After Darius died, his son Xerxes came to power as the new ruler of Persia. Above all else, Xerxes seems to have been resolved to succeed where his father had failed. He would go to the very spot of his father’s defeat and gain a great victory that would both avenge his father and show him to be greater than his predecessor. In 480 BC Xerxes invaded Greece with an army that probably numbered around 150-200,000 (although Herodotus claimed that the number was 2.5 million soldiers). He was briefly stalled at the battle of Thermopylae by 300 Spartan soldiers and about 4,000 other Greek soldiers, but he eventually broke through and seized Athens. Xerxes then turned his attention to defeating the Greek navy as his fleet outnumbered them about 3 to 1 but the Greeks drew him into a clever trap and he was defeated at the battle of Salamis. Xerxes was forced to retreat with his army and end the invasion. He had failed in the very same spot that his father had failed.

Luke has just finished telling us that Jesus is the Son of God. We know that for Jesus, his father never fails so the comparison to Xerxes isn’t exactly precise. Yet, Jesus was on a mission as clear as the one the Xerxes had picked up. God had not failed but the Old Testament scriptures describe the sad failure of two other sons of God, Adam and Israel. Jesus would follow in their footsteps and would go where they went. He would face what they faced and would succeed where they had failed. As Luke takes us into this stunning and inspiring scene of temptation that is so instructive for us as we face our own temptations through life from the same enemy, let’s take care to not lose site of the echoes throughout this story. Unless we hear the echoes we will miss the profound and true meaning of the initial victory that Jesus secures here in the wilderness. A victory that those who went before him couldn’t secure.

We would probably like to think that temptation only comes when we are straying from the will of God but this passage won’t allow us such simplistic thinking. Jesus, who never strayed from God’s will, was full of the Holy Spirit and was led directly by the Spirit into the wilderness where he would fast for forty days which would have left him in a physically weakened state. As we all have surely experienced, temptation seems all the more powerful when we are physically or emotionally weakened but Jesus was going exactly where the Spirit was guiding him. This means that it was God’s will for him to be tested in this way and that there was a specific purpose for this testing.

At the end of the forty days Jesus has an encounter with the devil. None of the gospel writers make it clear whether this episode with Satan was a physical meeting or whether Satan came to Christ in the realm of his own thoughts, a realm through which Satan usually approaches us. It is quite permissible in the texts that we have to either see this as a real, physical encounter or one of a more mental level in which Satan was offering these thoughts up and Christ had to deal with the thoughts and visions of these particular temptations. It is decidedly impossible to choose between those two option and probably unnecessary in the end.

As should be familiar by now, this passage in Luke is full of echoes of other passages from the Old Testament that point to this moment in Jesus’ life and help us gain the full significance of it. There are at least three biblical stories that are alluded to by this one that help us to see exactly what was going on here. Moses went on a forty day fast in the wilderness just before he received and proclaimed the word of God (Ex. 34:28; Deut. 9:9-18). In the same way, Jesus would go into the wilderness for a forty day’s fast where he would declare the word of God to Satan and prepare himself to proclaim it to all of Israel. But there was an even more specific purpose for this time of temptation. Adam had faced temptation from the tempter in the Garden of Eden and had failed, choosing to do his own will rather than God’s. Luke has adeptly planted the idea of Adam as the Son of God in the last passage, intentionally connecting it this one.

As we discussed in the last passage of Luke, God had another son after Adam had failed to do his will. God raised up the nation of Israel as his firstborn son (Ex. 4:22) and gave Israel the vocation of doing God’s will. God took Israel into the wilderness where they faced the temptations of Satan and failed just like Adam to do God’s will. As a result of their disobedience they wandered in the desert for forty years.

Jesus, as Luke has already demonstrated, was now the third of God’s sons sent into the world to succeed where the first two had failed. He would go to the wilderness, the place where Israel had failed and would succeed in doing God’s will. Jesus would be the Son of God that lived according to the will of God where the others before him had failed. In fact, each of the temptations that Jesus faced during his forty days echoes and reflects temptations that caused the fall of Israel during their wilderness wanderings for forty years.

As Israel moved into the wilderness they were told to “Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands” (Deut. 8:2). This was done to teach them “that people do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deut. 8:3). A good part of that testing was their lack of food and need to rely on God to provide for them but the people did not trust God’s promises to care for them and instead grumbled against Moses and Aaron (Ex. 16:1-21). In the same way, Satan tried to convince Jesus that since he was God’s Son (the term translated “if” in this passage should almost certainly be translated “since” in this context, meaning that Satan was not questioning whether Jesus was God’s Son but was tempting him to be a different kind of Messiah than the one according to God’s will) he should not have to go without food and be hungry. God surely wouldn’t want him to go without. But Jesus refuted the temptation by turning to the word of God (all of Jesus’ quotes come from Deuteronomy which is further proof that Jesus intentionally meant to connect his own experience with the failure of Israel in the wilderness). Jesus affirmed that he relied on nothing to provide for him apart from God’s will, the precise thing that Israel and Adam had failed to do.

The second temptation connects with Israel’s constant tendency to engage in idolatry. As Israel prepared to enter into the promised land and take up their vocation as the firstborn son of God, they were reminded to “Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you” (Deut. 6:13-14). Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world if he will only bow to him and serve the devil. Satan often works this way through temptation in that he offers us things that are not his to give and it always turns out to be nothing more than allusion. False gods (in whatever form they take whether it be a statue or money or something else) can seem comfortable but always turn out to be an allusion. Satan offers Jesus another way to realize his mission of ruling over the kingdoms of the world other than through God’s will. Throughout all of the temptations, though, Satan is not offering Jesus just strength or comfort but primarily he offers independence. The Israelites were constantly ensnared by idolatry and Adam was swayed by the prospect of reaching something that he desired through his own will rather than God’s but Jesus stood resolutely loyal to God’s will and the fear of God. He would succeed in following Deut. 6:13 where Israel and Adam had failed.

The third temptation involved putting God to the test. While in the wilderness, Israel complained and argued with Moses over having no water. Rather than trusting God they demanded a response. Moses’ response was to rebuke them for putting the “LORD to the test” (Ex. 17:2; Deut. 6:16). Unlike Israel and Adam, Jesus would not put God to the test despite the temptation of Satan. Satan took Jesus (whether in a vision or in person) to the Temple, probably to the Royal Porch which looked over a cliff in the Kidron Valley and loomed about 450 feet above the bottom of the cliff (the historian Josephus reports that it made people dizzy to look down from that point because it was so high). The Jews of Jesus’ day expected that when the Messiah came he would renew the provision of manna, would defeat Israel’s enemies and exalt Israel, and would perform incredible signs and wonders that would convince the people that he was the Messiah. Satan was appealing to Jesus to act before his time but Satan also failed to understand that Jesus’ vocation and allegiance to God’s will did not mean that he would be kept from sacrifice, struggle, and death but that he would walk right into those things as part of his submission to God. We often think of the hard times in life as our temptations, and I suppose that sometimes they can be, but far more often it is the desire to avoid those trials that we need to help us grow in our walk in Christ (James 1:2-3) which brings us the temptations. The hard times are not the temptation, the desire to avoid them is the real temptation.

God’s first son Adam had failed to do God’s will. God’s firstborn son (a term that referred to role as the receiver of the inheritance rather than strictly birth order) Israel had failed to do God’s will in giving into temptation (note that Psalm 106 charges Israel with their failures in the same order that Luke gives: food, false worship, and putting the LORD to the test). Jesus succeeded where they failed. He was the true and eternal Son of God who demonstrated himself to be the Messiah not through spectacular signs and wonders but through self-sacrificial and quiet acts of humble obedience to God’s word. This was truly God’s unique (the true meaning of the word often translated “only begotten”) Son who would do what Israel had failed to do. Jesus wasn’t interested in public displays of power so much as he was in private obedience to God’s word. That is after all, when obedience really matters. That is when temptation is it’s most dangerous and powerful. Jesus responded the same way that we should learn to do. He didn’t entertain the ideas of temptation or even argue with them, which is often just an excuse to mull it around until we can’t resist it anymore. Jesus dwelt on the word of God and trusted in it alone to guide him to God’s will.



Devotional Thought
When you are tempted, and you will be, there are two important things to learn from this passage. The first is the realization that often times, the temptation is not the trial we face but the desire to avoid it. The second is our need to rely on the Word of God alone. When temptation comes do you rely on nothing but God’s Word to carry you through the tough times? Where are you being tempted right now? Are you applying God’s Word to that temptation?