He has come to bear all man’s burdens, and shall He begin by separating Himself from them?  Therefore He answers in words which declare the law for ‘man,’ and thereby merges all that was distinctive in His position in a loving participation in our lot.  If the Captain of our Salvation had begun by refusing to share the privations of the rank and file, and had provided dainties for Himself, what would have become of His making common cause with them?  The temptation addressed to Christ’s physical nature was, to put it roughly, ‘Look out for yourself.’  His answer was, ’As Son of God, I hold by My filial dependence.  As man, I share My brethren’s lot, and am content to live as they live.’

II.  The second assault and repulse, on the temple.

We need not touch on the questions as to whether our Lord’s body was really transported to the temple, and, if so, to what part of it.  But we may point out that there is nothing in the narrative to warrant the usual interpretation of this temptation, as being addressed to the desire of recognition, and as equivalent to the suggestion that our Lord should show Himself, by a stupendous miracle before the multitude, as the Messiah.  There is nothing about spectators, and no sign that the dread solitude wrapping these two was broken by others.  We must seek for the point of the second temptation in another direction.

The very locality chosen for it helps us to the right understanding of it.  There were plenty of cliffs in the desert, down which a fall would have been fatal.  Why not choose one of them?  The temple was God’s house, the fitting scene for an attempt to work disaster by the abuse of religious ideas.  The former temptation underlies this.  That had sought to move Jesus to cast off His filial confidence; this seeks to pervert that confidence, and through it to lead Him to cast off filial obedience.  Therefore ‘the Devil quotes Scripture for his purpose.’  What could be more religious than an act of daring based upon faith, which again was based on a word which proceeded ‘out of the mouth of God’?  It is not in the suppression of certain words in the quotation that Satan’s error lies.  The omitted words are not material.  What did he hope to accomplish by this suggestion?  If Jesus was, in bodily reality, standing on the summit of the temple, the tempter, profoundly disbelieving the promise, may have thought that the leap would end his anxieties by the death of his rival.  But, at any rate, he sought to lead His faith into wrong paths, and to incite to what was really sinful self-will under the guise of absolute trust.