Luke 4:2-4

TEMPTED THROUGH THE BODY

‘And in those days He did eat nothing.… Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’

Luke 4:2

I. Tempted through the body.—Each one of us has a body, and our body has its natural desires, yet most of our temptations to evil come through them. Sometimes the temptation comes through physical suffering; days, weeks, months of bodily infirmity or pain have to be endured, and as the infirmity or pain grows, and all human means fail to bring any relief, the tempter would have you ‘curse God and die,’ and thus escape a life of misery and pain. But Christ is here tempted

(a) To doubt God’s Providential care.

(b) To exercise His own power.

II. The Tempter repelled.—Christ, having taken our nature upon Him, felt that He had to meet the temptation, not in His Divine power, but in His human trust.

(a) The greatest peril in temptation is the inducement to gratify lawful desires by unlawful means. If Christ had yielded He would have destroyed the blessed example of His human trust in God.

(b) We should not give way to human weakness. Christ was human, but in the dignity and strength of His manhood He resisted the devil. So can we. Christ conquered, not by denying that He was an hungered, or that He desired bread to satisfy it, but by asserting the supremacy of the spiritual life, and of His trust in God.

Rev. Canon Duncan.

Illustration

‘Bread stands for earthly things—gold and silver, houses and lauds. Solomon drank the cup of earthly pleasure dry: he was by turns, for so we read in the Book of Ecclesiastes, the man of science, the man of pleasure, the fatalist, the materialist, the sceptic, the epicurean, the stoic, and at last a believer and a penitent (Ecclesiastes 12:13). He tried hard to live by bread alone, and he found it could not be done (Ecclesiastes 2:4).’