Response to Satan's Wiles

In the Bible study I hold in my home (open to anyone who would like

to come!), we are walking through the book of Matthew. We studied Chapter 4, and here are some of my thoughts, some stuff from Matthew Henry, and a point to ponder.

While Jesus was fasting the 40 days and nights, He was not hungry… He was filled with sustaining spiritual food. We do not know if He had water, but He was in the desert. We do know that the human body can only survive without any water for 3 days or 72 hours; it can live for 3 weeks without food. That is only 21 days. Jesus survived for 40 days. That tells us that He was supernaturally sustained as He prepared for His temptation. Only after the 40 days does Jesus become aware of His hunger.

It is one of the wiles of Satan to take advantage of our outward condition, to exploit our environment, and to sew seeds of discontent over our plight.

Want and poverty are a great temptation to discontent and unbelief. Using unlawful means for our relief from any plight (as in Jesus' case, hunger), under a pretense that necessity has no law is no excuse for doing something dishonest and illegal.The law of God ought to be stronger to believers than any condition we find our selves. Yes, I know, what must it be like when your baby is squalling because of hunger. This is the crossroads of the point.

1) Christ was lately declared to be the Son of God when He emerged from the Jordan River after being baptized. Here, after 40 days without food, the Devil tempts him to doubt His Sonship; If thou be the Son of God... If God were your Father, he would not see you starve, for all the beasts of the forest are His. 

The first thing Satan tries to do to believers is to cut off their fellowship with God. He tries to drive a distrusting spirit into the heart. Outward afflictions, wants and burdens, are the great arguments Satan uses to make people of God question their sonship. The Devil aims to shake our faith in God, and bring us to question the truth. When believers think the only way to feed their baby is to steal food, then the devil has won. Their faith has withered. God has never failed a believer! Miracles happened because of people's faith! But Satan won't rest until he can whittle our faith into a splinter.

Satan is not so subtle with us as he was with Jesus.

The Devil carries on his designs very much by possessing people with hard thoughts of God, as if he were unkind, or unfaithful, and had forsaken or forgotten those who had ventured their all with him. He planted in Adam and Eve the seeds of a notion that God forbade them the tree of knowledge because he grudged them the benefit of it; and so here he insinuates to our Savior, that his Father had cast him off, and left him to shift for himself. - Matthew Henry

Then Satan tries to make Jesus prove He is the Son of God by using the power of God to turn stones into bread. He does not say, “Pray to the Father that He turn the stones into bread,” but urges Jesus to command the stones. 

It is so subtle. 

He tries to get Jesus to turn from dependence upon the Father and strike out under His own power. Doing that would question the truth of the Father, distrust the Father’s love, providence, and care, set Himself up as a separate power, and gratify Satan by doing his bidding.

It is written…man does not live by bread alone Deut. 8:3. The Word of God is the Sword of the Spirit. Jesus answers from the book of Deuteronomy, which is the moral law and the marriage covenant. Christ need not turn stones into bread, but trust God to keep him alive some other way now that he is hungry.

Remember how the angel told Satan, "The Lord rebuke you!" God's word is powerful. So powerful it defeats Satan before he can begin if we stay fueled up and plugged in to that power.