Luke 4:2-4 Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungry.… What is Christ doing in this long solitude and silence of the wilderness? To say that He is fasting does not satisfy our inquiry. Who has not wished many times that he could have the record of these forty days? We know that He is not bewailing His sins; nor afflicting Himself purposely in penances of hunger and starvation; nor wrestling with the question whether He will undertake the work to which He is called. But these are negations only, and I think we shall be able to fix on several important points where we know sufficient in the positive to justify a large deduction concerning the probable nature of the struggle through which Jesus is here passing. 1. He has a nature that in part is humanly derived. But now it is opened to Him that He is here not as here belonging; that He is sent, let down into the world, incarnated into human evil. 2. It is not to be doubted that He had internal struggles of a different nature, growing out of His hereditary connection with our humanly disordered and retributively broken state. I refer, more especially, to what must have come upon Him under the law of bad suggestion. 3. It is not to be doubted that His human weakness made a fearful recoil from the lot of suffering, and the horrible death now before Him. 4. There comes upon Him also, at the point of His call or endowment, still another and vaster kind of commotion, that belongs even to His Divine nature. The love He had before to mankind was probably more like that of a simply perfect man. Having now the fallen world itself put upon His love, and the endowment of a Saviour entered consciously into His heart, His whole Divinity is heaved into such commotion as is fitly called an agony. 5. Once more, the mind of Jesus, in His forty days' retirement and fasting must have been profoundly engaged and powerfully tasked in the unfolding of the necessary plan. (H. Bushnell, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. |
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