Luke 4:3 And the devil said to him, If you be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. The temptation was shrewdly contrived to meet the peculiar circumstances. Remember that the desert and the Dead Sea, lying in the basin of the barren hills, were a figure of the desolation brought on the world by sin, and that probably our Lord, from the wilderness, looked over this picture of death, and saw in it a figure of the scene of His moral operation. Now Satan steals up to Him, holding out a dead stone, and asks Him to begin His work by transforming that stone. As He is about to make the desert fruitful, and the wilderness blossom as a rose, and the Sea of Death become a lake of living water, let Him begin His work symbolically, with a stone of this district. Very probably the temptation was not to turn the piece of black stone into white wheaten bread, but into the homely, hard rye, black bread, which nourishes, but is no dainty. On the way to Jericho, and, indeed, all around the Dead Sea, are to be found in chalk beds, masses of flint, of rounded shape, which the Arabs suppose to be the olives, apples, melons, and other fruit of the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, which, at the overthrow of the cities, were turned into stone. Some of these stones have the size and shape of loaves, and it is possible that Satan took one of these rounded masses of flint, and, with his undercurrent of bitterness and scorn, offered it to Christ, supposing Him to share the popular superstition about them. If we may expand his words, they ran thus: "See this loaf-like flint stone! No doubt it was once bread in one of the houses of Sodom, but God overthrew the wicked city, and the bread was turned into stone. Now, O Son of God — that is, if you are the Son of God — as you have come to undo the work of destruction wrought by sin, and to bring life into a world subject to death, show your power on this stone, and turn it back into the loaf of bread which it once was." (S. Baring-Gould, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.WEB: The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." |
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