The record of our Lord's temptation, which is specially commended to our consideration in Lent, must needs be momentous, first, in its import for the comprehension of the spirit of His ministry, and secondly in its example to ourselves.
I. Consider especially the first temptation, to turn the stones into loaves of bread. This, as we are expressly told, was addressed to our Lord's sense of physical necessity and suffering, combined with His consciousness of the possession of miraculous power by which He might have relieved them. And in what did the evil of the suggestion consist? There were, it has been observed, other times in our Lord's life and ministry when He did not hesitate to have recourse to His miraculous powers, even for His own preservation, as when He passed through the hostile crowd at Nazareth; and there seems obviously nothing essentially wrong in the exercise of such powers. But our Lord's answer, "It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," points to the fact that the use of His miraculous power on this occasion would have been inconsistent with the express will and words of His Father. His endurance, for reasons beyond our full comprehension, had been imposed upon Him by the Spirit of God, and He would, therefore, have been acting in disobedience to an express direction of His Father if He had used the power with which He was endued to escape from the trial.
II. Now it would seem obvious that this is an example of the earliest and simplest and yet, in some respects, the most persistent temptation by which ordinary human beings are beset. The commonest temptations of life are aroused by physical cravings, together with the opportunity of gratifying those cravings in some manner which is contrary to the declared will and ordinance of God. Man's only safety lies in grasping the principle which our Lord here asserted in answer to the tempter, that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." So far as it is necessary for him to live here, all natural provision that is essential for him will be made by his Father in Heaven. Let us seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto us.
H. Wace, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxi., p. 145.
Reference: Matthew 4:1-4. C. Morris, Preacher's Lantern,vol. iii., pp. 109, 177.