But that you may the better understand the meaning of Christ’s answer, we will express and repeat it over in more words.  “Thou laborest, Satan,” would Christ say, “to bring into my heart a doubt and suspicion of My Father’s promise, which was openly proclaimed in My baptism, by reason of My hunger, and that I lack all carnal provision.  Thou art bold to affirm that God takes no care for Me, but thou art a deceitful and false corrupt sophister, and thy argument, too, is vain, and full of blasphemies; for thou bindest God’s love, mercy, and providence to the having or wanting of bodily provision, which no part of God’s Scriptures teach us, but rather the express contrary.  As it is written, ’Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proeeedeth out of the mouth of God,’ that is, the very life and felicity of man consists not in the abundance of bodily things, or the possession and having of them makes no man blest or happy; neither shall the lack of them be the cause of his final misery; but the very life of man consists in God, and in His promises pronounced by His own mouth, unto which whoso cleaves unfeignedly shall live the life everlasting.  And altho all creatures in earth forsake him, yet shall not his bodily life perish till the time appointed by God approach.  For God has means to feed, preserve, and maintain, unknown to man’s reason, and contrary to the common course of nature.  He fed His people Israel in the desert forty years without the provision of man.  He preserved Jonah in the whale’s belly; and maintained and kept the bodies of the three children in the furnace of fire.  Reason and the natural man could have seen nothing in these cases but destruction and death, and could have judged nothing but that God had cast away the care of these, His creatures, and yet His providence was most vigilant toward them in the extremity of their dangers, from which He did so deliver them, and in the midst of them did so assist them, that His glory, which is His mercy and goodness, did more appear and shine after their troubles than it could have done if they had fallen in them.  And therefore I measure not the truth and favor of God by having or by lacking of bodily necessities, but by the promise which He has made to me.  As He Himself is immutable, so is His word and promise constant, which I believe, and to which I will adhere, and so cleave, whatever can come to the body outwardly.”

In this answer of Christ we may perceive what weapons are to be used against our adversary the devil, and how we may confute his arguments, which craftily, and of malice, he makes against God’s elect.  Christ might have repulsed Satan with a word, or by commanding him to silence, as He to whom all power was given in heaven and earth; but it pleased His mercy to teach us how to use the sword of the Holy Ghost, which is the word of God, in battle against our spiritual enemy.  The Scripture which Christ brings is written in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy.