Our Lord’s answer, again drawn from Deuteronomy, strips off the disguise from the action which seemed so trustful.  He changes the plural verb of the original passage into the singular, thus at once taking as His own personal obligation the general command, and pointing a sharp arrow at His foe, who was now knowingly or unknowingly so flagrantly breaking that law.  If God had bidden Jesus cast Himself down, to do it would have been right.  As He had not, to do it was not faith, but self-will.  To cast Himself into dangers needlessly, and then to trust God (whom He had not consulted about going into them) to get Him out, was to ‘tempt God.’  True faith is ever accompanied with true docility.  He had come to do His Father’s will.  A divine ‘must’ ruled His life.  Was He to begin His career by throwing off His allegiance on pretext of trust?  If the Captain of our Salvation commences the campaign by rebellion, how can He lead the rank and file to that surrender of their own wills which is victory?

The lessons for us from the second temptation are weighty.  Faith may be perverted.  It may even lead to abandoning filial submission.  God’s promised protection is available, not in paths of our own choosing, but only where He has sent us.  If we take the leap without His command, we shall fall mangled on the very temple pavement.  It is when we are ’in the way’ which He has prescribed that ‘the angels of God’ whom He has promised ‘meet’ us.  How many scandals in the falls of good men would have been avoided, and how many mad enterprises would have been unattempted, and how much more clearly would the relations of filial faith and filial obedience have been understood, if the teaching of this second temptation had been laid to heart!

III.  The final assault and repulse, on the mountain.

Again the scene changes, because the stress of the temptation is different.  The ‘exceeding high mountain’ is not to be looked for in our atlases.  The manner in which all the glories of the world’s kingdoms were flashed in one dazzling panorama, like an instantaneous photograph, before Christ’s eyes, is beyond our knowledge.  We note that Satan has no more to say about ‘the Son of God.’  He has been foiled in both his assaults on Christ in that character.  If He stood firm in filial trust and in filial submission, there was no more to be done.  So the tempter tries new weapons, and seeks to pervert the desire for that dominion over the world which was to be a consequence of the sonship.  He has not been able to touch Him as Son; can he not spoil Him as King?  They are rivals:  can they not strike up a treaty?  Jesus thinks that He is going to reign as God’s viceroy; can He not be induced, as a much quicker way of getting to His end, to become Satan’s?  Such a scheme sounds very stupid; but Satan is very stupid, for all his wisdom, and the hopeless folly of his proposal is typical of the absurdities which lie in all sins.  There is an old play, the title of which would be coarse if it were not so true, ‘The Devil is an Ass.’