NOTES for Mat 4:7

What does "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test" mean? This is a reference to Deuteronomy 6, and its continuation is: "as you tested Him at Massah" (Deut 6:16). Let us recall what is being discussed here. It is about how the people of God became thirsty in the wilderness at the rock of Horeb, and Moses struck the ground with his staff and water flowed out (Ex 17). "And he called the name of that place Massah and Meribah, because of the faultfinding of the children of Israel and because they tested the Lord, saying: Is the Lord among us, or not?" That is, to test the Lord means to call Him Himself into question simply because He does not fulfill our wishes at once. Or even worse, to do something in order to see whether He will keep what He promised in that case, because maybe He is not there at all. That is what it means to test the Lord.

Now let us think from the opposite direction about a common expression: "the Lord is tempting him." Among Christians there is a common error. They say that the Lord tempts us, evidently misinterpreting the words from the Lord's Prayer, "lead us not into temptation," understanding them as though God wanted to lead us into temptation and we were asking Him not to do it. This is a deep and very ugly delusion. The apostle James warns us against it: "Let no one say when he is tempted: God is tempting me; for God cannot be tempted by evil and He Himself tempts no one, but each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own desire" (Jas 1:13). So God does not tempt us; let us treat Him the same way.

Today’s reading describes the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry (vv. 12–25), preceded by the temptation in the wilderness (vv. 1–11). Why, one might ask, put through such a trial the One who was known in advance to be certain to withstand it? Yet there was a purpose to it. A human being always remains human, even when we are speaking of the Man in whom all the fullness of God dwells. Even such a Man is free and must therefore freely choose His path, just like every other human being. Divine will belongs to Jesus in the same fullness as to the heavenly Father, but human will has also been given to Him in all its fullness, so that for Him this choice was by no means a game or a mere formality. The trial itself was, in essence, a test of His readiness to avoid those temptingly easy paths that the devil has always tried to pass off as the true ones. The trap is that these paths promise to lead to the goal set by God, but without the effort that the path indicated by God will evidently require. The central theme of Jesus’ preaching becomes the Kingdom, which, He says, ‘has drawn near,’ and the call to turn to God, without which one cannot enter the Kingdom (v. 17). But how are people to be moved to turn to God? This is where the devil offers Jesus his ‘help.’ Turn stones into bread, feed the people, and then everyone will be ready to follow You into the Kingdom (v. 3). It seems a genuinely foolproof option: who would refuse free bread? Except that the incentive for those turning to God would then be bread, not the Kingdom. After all, humanity has always sought a convenient and profitable religion, and what all peoples have wanted from higher powers above all has been success in their affairs, military victories, and good harvests. If this is not stated openly today, it is often only because these requests have been replaced by talk of the ‘social function of religion’ and the ‘economic effectiveness’ of one denomination or another. Jesus, meanwhile, speaks of the word of God, of that living revelation and that fullness of communion with God without which there is no Kingdom and which no economic successes or achievements can replace (v. 4). Well then, if not bread, let it be a miracle: people will run after a miracle just as they will after free bread (vv. 5–6). Except that the miracles the devil offers Jesus are of a kind in which the human being takes no part at all. Something happens to a person; they see and hear what they would never otherwise have seen or heard; perhaps they change outwardly and may even sometimes see the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks. Yet inwardly they do not change at all. The question is not what a person wants or what they are ready to resolve to do for God and His Kingdom, but what God can do for that person. But God is ready to do everything for the human being; He has already proved this in action more than once, and there is no need to put Him to the test again (v. 7). Of course, if one could enter the Kingdom with a wave of a magic wand, there would be a vast number of willing takers. But simply finding oneself in the Kingdom is not enough; one must also let it into one’s heart. No magic wand can help with that: the person must decide for themselves. And so, when all his tricks have proved useless, the devil simply offers Jesus a bargain: just one act of obeisance in exchange for complete freedom of action in a world where the devil rules, and where acting without his consent means condemning oneself to certain defeat (vv. 9–10). The temptation is great: just one purely symbolic gesture, without witnesses at that, and no problems afterward. For if the devil does not intervene, neither will anyone else in the world where, before Christ’s coming, his power was truly unlimited. But Jesus understands that such a symbolic gesture means the devil will always stand behind Him, poisoning with his presence the Kingdom He is bringing into the world. Of course, the spirit of darkness seldom reveals this presence openly, but it is no accident that he shows Jesus the world precisely as ‘the kingdoms of the world and their glory’ (v. 8): wherever there is a state, especially a ‘glorious’ one, there will always be a place for the devil. Such is the nature of all power in the fallen world. It no longer matters what theory he uses to cloak his attempts to poison the life of Christ’s Church and turn the faithful away from the Kingdom: the doctrine of the ‘two swords,’ as once in the West; the theory of ‘symphonia,’ as at the same time in the East; or the idea of the ‘Kingdom of God on earth,’ as has often happened in later times. Only one thing can save us from such spiritual poison: unconditional faithfulness to God, to the living God whose fullness Jesus carries within Himself (v. 10). Only after overcoming these temptations does it become possible to dwell in the Kingdom and bear witness to it.

The Evangelist could hardly even have had the thought that Jesus' trial in the wilderness would end with Him yielding to Satan's temptation and falling into some sin. Rather, in the description of this strange dispute, where the Son of God and Satan exchange biblical quotations, there lies the deep choice that stood before Jesus: what path He would choose to carry out His mission, and exactly how God would appear to people and return them to true life.

The tempter offers Him the path of an earthly kingdom: for if He truly is the Son of God, then all the kingdoms of the earth rightfully belong to Him, all the countless legions of angels will fight for Him, the earth itself will turn His realm into paradise, and stones will become bread.

But the Lord chooses another path: He will not draw people by showy miracles and power; instead of slaves He will have disciples, who will come to know His divine glory without coercion, through faith and love.

The meaning of the word "temptation" is not always clear to us, especially in a biblical context. Yet the original languages of the biblical books, whether those books were written in Greek or in Hebrew, make no distinction between temptation and trial. A trial for which a person did not have sufficient strength remains unpassed and becomes a temptation and a stumbling block for that person, much as an examination successfully passed becomes a victory and a success, while a failed examination becomes a defeat and a problem. But what is the meaning of the test that Jesus undergoes in the wilderness? Of course, a face-to-face encounter with the devil is in itself a trial for any human being, even for One who, like Jesus, bears within Himself all the fullness of God. Human nature remains human nature, and even when it is completely free from the power of sin, such an encounter can still be neither easy nor joyful. But the issue is of course not only the encounter itself, but also what Satan offers Jesus. He offers Him temptingly easy and simple ways to achieve the goal set before Him by His heavenly Father: to entice people to follow Him by promising a miracle or the solution of all their material problems; or the direct offer of a bargain, one act of worship here, where no one can see and no one will ever know, in exchange for complete freedom of action afterward. Every means is used, anything that might persuade this Man to act not according to His Father's will, but according to His own human will. This is Satan's tactic toward everyone whom God calls to His service: if a person cannot be made to forget God, then at least an attempt can be made to persuade him that he is doing God's work while in fact he is merely seeking easier and safer ways of doing it. But in the case of the Messiah, the stakes were of course especially high, indeed one might say absolutely high. Jesus' refusal to compromise, even to accept a compromise that from a human perspective seemed insignificant and purely symbolic, became the first victory over the powers of darkness on the path of His earthly ministry, a victory that marked the beginning of their complete and final defeat.

Why does Satan tempt Jesus at this particular moment? After all, He has already been living on this earth for thirty years. Perhaps the point is that Jesus has just taken our sins upon Himself in the Jordan baptism. And Satan rushes to Him, drawn by the "smell" of sin. Satan offers the most ordinary temptations: bread, miracle, and power. Usually that is enough; people turn out to be very weak. But Jesus, perhaps the first, passes through these temptations, opening for us too the path of resistance to the tempter.

Let us note for ourselves that each time Jesus answers not with His own words, but with the words of Scripture, even when the temptation is expressed in the words of Scripture. How important it is to know Scripture. Perhaps this is one of the reasons we began making this site.

Forty days is not forty years. But just as the people had to pass through the wilderness, just as John went into the wilderness before coming out to preach, so Jesus endured a forty-day fast in the wilderness. All the details of what happened during that time have remained hidden from us, but what the evangelists report about the last days of those forty speaks of their importance both for Jesus Himself and for the history of our salvation.

Whom was the tempter trying to tempt - a human being, or God incarnate? It seems he saw Who was before him, and the attempt to influence the human nature assumed by the Lord, with all its limitations and weakness, became a continuation of Satan's old rebellion against the Creator. But in passing through the hardships of the fast, Jesus strengthened His human nature. Not only by the power of God's omnipotence, but also by those spiritual powers that are now available to people thanks to Him, He both beat back the temptations Himself and showed us that it is possible to stand firm before temptations.

The order in which the temptations come is not accidental; they clearly move upward: from the elementary promise of satiety and deliverance from the need to labor for food, then through incitement to perform a spectacular miracle, and they end with the promise of power over the world. But the one who promises power offers it in exchange for worshiping him, that is, for recognizing his own authority. So the promised might turns out to be fictitious...

It is interesting that the tempter tries to tempt Christ by using a phrase from Scripture. Before us is a vivid but, alas, frequent example not simply of dishonestly tearing a phrase out of context. Here we see that Scripture can be used to cover goals not only far from salvation, but also opposite to it. So let us try not to limit ourselves to memorizing quotations, but to enter into the essence of biblical teaching.

In his Gospel, Luke tells about the temptations in a different order. Evidently this is because he wrote for the Greeks, and they had already tasted imperial power, so it tempted them less. But in all ages, in different combinations, these temptations have risen before people again and again. Therefore the victory won over the tempter in the wilderness is important for all of us today. After all, we can rely on the help of Christ, the victor over temptations.