in the desert, pressed by hunger, does not yield, and thereby turns the desert into a garden again.  At the beginning of His course He is tempted by the innocent desire to secure physical support; at its close He is tempted by the innocent desire to avoid physical pain.  He overcomes both, and by His victories in the wilderness so unlike the garden, and in Gethsemane, another garden, so unlike the first, He brings ’a statelier Eden back to man.’

The act suggested seems not only innocent, but in accordance with His dignity.  It was a strange anomaly for ‘the Son of God,’ on whose head the dove had descended, and in whose ears the voice had sounded, to be at the point of starving.  What more unbecoming than that one possessed of His mysterious closeness to God should be suffering from such ignoble necessities?  What more foolish than to continue to hunger, when a word could spread a table in the wilderness?  John had said that God could make children of Abraham out of these stones.  Could He not make bread out of them?  The suggestion sounds benevolent, sensible, almost religious.  The need is real, the remedy possible and easy; the result desirable as preserving valuable life, and putting an end to an anomaly, and the objections apparently nil.  The bait is skilfully wound over the barbed hook.

Christ’s answer tears it away, and discloses the sharp points.  He will not discuss with Satan whether He is Son of God or no.  To the Jews He was wont to answer, ‘I say unto you’; to Satan He answers, ’It is written.’  He puts honour on ’the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,’ and sets us an example of how to wield it.  The words quoted are found in the account of Israel’s miraculous sustenance in the desert by the manna, and are applied by Christ to Himself, not as Son of God, but as simple man.  They contain the great truth that God can feed men, in their physical life, by bread or without bread.  When He does it by bread or other ordinary means, it is even then not the material substance in itself, but His will operating through it, which feeds.  He can abolish all the outward means, and still keep a man alive.  There is no reference to the truth which is sometimes forcibly inserted into this saying, that man has a higher than bodily life, and needs more than material bread to feed the hunger of the soul.  The whole scope of the words is to state the law of physical nourishment as dependent at last on the divine will, and therefore equally capable of being accomplished with or without bread, by ordinary means or apart from these.

The bearing of the words on Christ’s hunger is twofold:  First, He will not use His miraculous powers to provide food, for that would be to distrust God, and so to cast off His filial dependence; second, He will not separate Himself from His brethren, and provide for Himself by a way not open to them, for that would really be to reverse the very purpose of His incarnation and to defeat His whole work.