I. The root of the third temptation lay in the thought that the kingdoms of the world were the devil's kingdoms, and that it was he who could dispose of them. If our Lord had believed this, if He had acknowledged this claim, He would have been falling down and worshipping the evil spirit, He would have been confessing him to be the Lord. But for all that He beheld the horrible vision of human misery and human crime; for all that He found men actually doing homage to the spirit of evil, actually serving him with their thoughts, and words, and deeds; in spite of all this, He believed and knew that these kingdoms were not the devil's kingdoms, but God's kingdoms. He knew that men's sins began in this, consisted in this, that they thought and believed the devil to be their king, when God was their King.
II. It is a hard thing to believe this, when there are so many things that seem to contradict it, but believe it we must, if we would be honest men. Holy men have been betrayed into sins which make one weep and blush when one reads the history of Christ's Church, because they have thought that falsehood and evil were the lords of the world, and that if they were to overcome the world they must do it by entering into some bargain or compromise with these masters of it. The devil was saying to them, "These are mine, and I give them to whomsoever I will." They believed him. He asked this token of homage from them, and they paid it. The mischiefs that have followed from every such faithless act have been more than I can tell you, and though they are no warrant to us in condemning others, they are most terrible warnings to ourselves. Such temptations can only be resisted, as the enemies of saints and martyrs were resisted, by the might of Him who said, "Get thee behind Me, Satan."
F. D. Maurice, Christmas Day and Other Sermons,p. 185.
True and False Ascensions.
It would have been an ascension if our Lord, on that exceeding high mountain, had taken, at Satan's hand, all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. For to take the same kingdom and the same glory Christ did actually ascend from the Mount of Olives. The difference was not very great in the fact of the refused and the accepted ascension. Consider in what consists the difference between the two.
I. Wherein would have lain the sinfulness of the act, if Christ had complied with Satan's desire? (1) In the first place, He would have made that His own act which was not to be His own act, but the Father's through the Son. (2) He would have accepted good at the hands of the enemy of good. (3) He would have done for His own sake, without further reference, what He was to do for the Church's sake. (4) It would have been premature, a beginning which ought to be an ending. (5) He would have assumed an end without going through the means. (6) He would have been elevated by a guilty compact; there would have been the sacrifice of a principle, a present evil committed to arrive at an ultimate good. (7) The honour would have gone in the wrong direction; it would have been to His own glory and Satan's glory, but not to the glory of the Father.
II. To ascend, that is, to get higher and higher, to possess more, to be capable of more, to have more honour and greater power, is an impulse of our nature; Every Christian, like his Master, is born to an ascension. Therefore, because it is right, it is certain that it may be a matter of great temptation to do it in a wrong way, or at a wrong time, or with a wrong motive, or by wrong means. Look well to it how you go up any height, what road, at what time, by whose bidding, for whose glory. It will be a sad thing if the bad, early fiction rob you of the grand reality of the close. There is a grand ascension coming, but now our path lies with our Master, through the plains of Galilee, the valleys of Hinnom, to the garden of Gethsemane. We have to work, and we have to bear. We must go through the last penalty of sin, and glorify God in our dying. For that road down to those "lowest parts of the earth" is the path, the only path, that leads up to the everlasting hills.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,6th series, p. 227.
References: Matthew 4:8; Matthew 4:9. Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 153; Parker, Inner Life of Christ,vol. iii., p. 294.