NOTES for Mat 4:4

What does it mean that "man shall live"? Does bread, does food, not sustain life in us? Biological life, yes. But plants also feed and live. Is such vegetation even in a small degree like human life, is it worthy of a human being? Because of school education, by the word life we mean "metabolism" and nothing more. For us, life is, as one unattractive nineteenth-century thinker said, "the mode of existence of protein bodies". Students at the end of the twentieth century added: "the best mode..." No, life is not this. Life is something directly connected with meaning, with beauty and immortality, love and openness, joy and truth... And life can also be given to others without losing it.

The words from Deuteronomy quoted by the Lord Jesus say that a human being can acquire a completely different life, eternal life, like that which God Himself possesses. For the breath of life that the Spirit of God places in a person cannot be limited by time. The source of this life is only God Himself, and He shares it with a person through "every word that proceeds from the mouth of God". And the word that God speaks to a person becomes food: that which sustains eternal life in us. But one should think there is another important aspect in these words as well; to see it, it is enough to set aside the word "every". God gives us His life not only and not so much through a word that He speaks to our heart. First of all, the eternal life of a person is sustained by the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God who came to us.