Matthew 4:2-4 (NIV)
After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'”
Jesus fasted in the wilderness as many God called had done before. And He fasted for 40 days and nights, as many had done: for example, Moses on the mountain with God (Exodus 34:25), and Elijah on his trip to Sinai (1 Kings 19:8).
At the end of 40 days with no food, Jesus was understandably hungry. That was when the tempter struck.
At first glance, the temptation seemed harmless enough, even logical. Jesus was hungry; He should eat. There was no house or store nearby where He could find food, so He should make some. Both Jesus and satan knew the kind of power that Jesus had available to Him. He could heal the sick, cast out demons, even raise the dead! Surely making bread out of a rock or even out of thin air, would be no problem for Him.
But for Jesus this was not a question of ability, but of God’s will. In the Garden, both Adam and Eve had decided, contrary to God’s expressed will, to eat the forbidden fruit, in part because it look to be “good for food” (Genesis 3:6 NIV). And the consequences were horrendous. In the desert on the way to Mount Sinai, the children of Israel had railed against Moses, claiming that God had led them away from Egypt to starve them to death in the wilderness (Exodus 16:2-3). If they had had the power to turn rocks into loaves of bread, they would have done it in a heartbeat, and, by choosing to act in their own strength to provide a temporary fix, would have disqualified themselves from receiving God’s long-term solution of daily manna.
It was actually to this provision of manna that Jesus was referring in His response to the tempter, taken from Deuteronomy 8:3. The whole context of the sentence He used is enlightening: Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3 NIV)
Jesus, like the Israelites, would emerge from the desert as God’s chosen one. Unlike them, however, He would come forth with no baggage of rebellion or self-will, but only with such complete submission that He would be enabled to walk in the full power of the Godhead.
By refusing the tempter’s test to use His own power and means to meet His needs, Jesus was choosing instead to look to God; to ask the Father for His provision of daily bread (Matthew 6:11), and to eat what His Father would provide for Him, like the birds of the air (Matthew 6:26). Jesus knew that God had the power to provide for every one of His legitimate needs, and that, by God’s claiming Him as His Son, He had promised to do so. And, of course, He discovered that His Father in heaven was as good as His word.
Father, every day seems to bring multiple opportunities to meet my own needs in my own strength. And doing so has become pretty much second nature. Even when I pray the words asking You to provide what I need for today, my “daily bread,” I still tend to try to figure out how to do it with my own resources. Lord, I want to be like Jesus! I want to look to You in faith each day, knowing that You will provide for me better than I ever could provide for myself – not in laziness on my part, but guiding and directing me in Your ways of providing, and even providing miraculously when the need arises. Amen.