Matthew 4:7 Commentary and Bible Study

Christ responds with Scripture. His answer comes from Deuteronomy 6:16: ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord’, where Moses referred back to the incident at Massah (‘temptation’) and Meribah (‘strife’). These were the names that Moses gave to the place where Israel had chided him for not giving them water and had said ‘Is the LORD among us, or not?’ (Exodus 17:7). The people were about to stone Moses, because they had no water and were not prepared to wait for it; they failed to remember all the wonderful things that God had already done for them; they failed to draw the proper conclusions. For Christ to have yielded to what the devil was now suggesting, would have been a parallel to this incident recorded in Exodus. God the Father was with him and had audibly assured him of this at his baptism. To presume on the Lord’s deliverance by casting himself down from the pinnacle would have been to have unnecessarily questioned this, and faith should not doubt God or put him to the test. Christ as a man had to exercise faith as his people do, indeed this was the proof of his true humanity (Hebrews 2:13).The line between trusting God and putting him to the test is the subtlety of this temptation. Satan’s subtlety which brought down Eve is going to totally fail this time. Christ will not move an inch in the direction that Satan wants him to go. Of course Satan sees through his own temptation, and he knows that if it succeeds he will follow up with cruel accusation using all the skill of the deceitful advocate that he is. Those who trust God do not ask the Lord to repeat clear words that he has already spoken. His promises do not fade with time. To test is to doubt; it is to want reassurance that faith is warranted, when God’s word, once spoken, should be enough for us. The promise in Psalm 91 was given to Christ to assure him that the mission that he had been given would succeed, and that providence would come to his aid in every circumstance, but that did not mean that he could deliberately provoke the need for help. He must follow the path assigned for him, and where help was genuinely needed, it would come.