“Then the devil taketh Him up into the holy city, and setteth Him on a pinnacle of the temple.” Again the tempter challenges Jesus: “If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee: and in their hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone.” Perhaps we may frustrate Satan once by our dependence upon God, but he will come back again. If he cannot get in the front door, he will try to come in the back door.
The Lord Jesus had quoted Scripture in answering the devil. Now the devil will quote Scripture also. But since he had not loved the truth from the time of his fall, he distorts the Word. He quotes from Psalm 91, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most high,” which speaks of the faithful Messiah. But he leaves out part of the verse. For where it mentions “He shall give His angels charge over Thee,” it has for its purpose, “to keep Thee in all Thy ways.” Those are the ways of Messiah as the faithful, dependent Man. Had He heeded Satan’s suggestion, He would have placed Himself in Satan’s ways. It was as if Satan said, The promise in this scripture plainly applies to You. Cast Thyself down; the Almighty has promised to keep You; test Him to see if He will be as good as His word. But surely we ought never to doubt that the Lord will be for us. If we do anything to prove Him, to see whether He will be for us, this is at once unbelief of the goodness of God and disobedience. The Lord would not allow for a moment the thought of putting God to the test to see if He would be true to His word. So He answers Satan in a way that is wonderfully instructive for every child of God when confronted by the enemy who distorts Scripture: “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”
In the Lord’s saying, “It is written again,” it shows that we are not to direct our ways in this life by the application of only one scripture. We need the whole Word of God.
No Easy Path
In the third and last temptation the devil tries the Lord in a different way still. “The devil taketh Him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and saith unto Him, All these things will I give thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me.” Satan must have put on a grand display for the natural eye, because men like glory and power. But the Lord Jesus is the only one who is worthy of these as we learn from the Revelation. No doubt Satan knew that all glory and power and blessing belonged to Jesus. They would be His in a future day, after His time of suffering was over. Yet he would show the Lord an easier way of obtaining them. But here the Lord says, “Get thee hence, Satan,” and He silences him with another word of Scripture: “It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” So the arch enemy leaves, defeated. God receives glory in the victory by the obedient and dependent Man. Jesus is seen here as the moral Conqueror of that one who has upset every man but Himself.
Further Meditation
1. What did the tempting of the Lord Jesus show about Him?
2. How did the Lord respond to Satan’s misquoting of Scripture?
3. For an in-depth study of this and the rest of Matthew’s gospel you would probably find Lectures on the Gospel of Matthew by W. Kelly to be quite helpful.