NOTES for Luk 4:1-13
What was the Saviour’s temptation in the wilderness? Why did it become possible? The simple and traditional answer is that, remaining human despite His divinity, He could be tempted by the devil just like any person. But this is only part of the answer. Every temptation is a trial; in Greek, as in Hebrew, the two concepts are expressed by a single word. What, then, was the purpose of the trial? Jesus is the Messiah, and the trial was evidently connected precisely with His messianic ministry—or, more exactly, with the possibility of distorting that ministry and thereby making it meaningless. It could be distorted in the same way that the devil had already succeeded in distorting it in the minds of many believing Jews.
They were the people who awaited a wonder-working Messiah, a Messiah who would provide His subjects with complete abundance—on earth, of course, in our world, which is still far from transformed and lies in evil. This is precisely what the devil proposes that the Saviour should do: turn stones into bread and display miracles connected with superhuman abilities hidden in human nature. But the chief temptation lies elsewhere: the devil offers Jesus a bargain. He tries to convince the Saviour that the world actually belongs to him, the devil, and not to God.
He claims that Jesus must negotiate with him, the devil, about the Kingdom—if, of course, Jesus wants His Kingdom to find any place in the world at all. The devil tempts the Saviour with the same things he uses to tempt every person who does God’s work, and that is why the account of this temptation is important for us. If He had been tempted in some special way invented only for the Messiah, the story of His temptations would interest us only theoretically—and, of course, biographically, as a crucial episode in Christ’s earthly ministry.
But in one way or another, in one form or another, all this awaits every one of us if we are Christians and want to follow Christ along His path. We shall be tempted to replace the Kingdom and its life, whether with the illusory prospect of universal earthly prosperity or with the development of superhuman powers. If that does not work, we shall be offered a bargain, a compromise that will protect us from problems and trouble on the Christian path through a world lying in evil. Every one of us has to resist these temptations throughout our earthly journey—if, of course, our earthly journey truly continues His path, the path of the Kingdom through the world lying in evil.