Biblical commentary on the New Testament - The Christian ...

280 Matthew IY. 2-4.
Ver. 2,—In Christ's fasting for forty days, there is evidently a
parallel with the fasting of Moses (Deut. ix. 9, 18) and Elijah
(1 Kings xix. 8). We are, therefore, the less justified in taking
vrjOTEveiv, fasting, in a wider sense—viz., "abstaining from ordinary
nourishment," since it is said of Moses, that he ate no bread, and
drank no water, which coincides with Luke iv. 2 : "He did eat nothing."
The intention of the Evangelists is to place Jesus in comparison
with the great prophets of earlier days (according to Deut.
xviii. 15: "A prophet like unto we," says Moses, "will the Lord
thy God raise up") ; he could not, therefore, do any thing less
than they did. The number forty was certainly a sacred number
with the Jews ; but it does not follow thence that it is not to be
taken exactly ;
but rather that the idea entertained by the Jews of
the sacredness of certain numbers has itself a deeper foundation,
which, taken as a general proposition, may be thus expressed :
" According to divine arrangement, which is pure harmony, every
development proceeds by definite measure and number." The forty
days of the temptation forms an interesting parallel with Israel's
forty years' journey through the wilderness. ••' All the passages
quoted in the history of Christ's temptation are taken from the
narrative of that journey.
Ver. 3, 4.—The point of the first temptation is justly regarded
as lying in the thought of employing the higher powers bestowed
upon him for satisfying his own wants. The principle here main-
tained, of using his miraculous powers only for the good of others,
the Saviour followed out with self-denying love through his whole
ministry. Jesus repulsed the powerful solicitation of sensual appetite
by faith in God's power, with a reference to Deut. viii. 3, where the
LXX. translate ^vn"^, "'3 N^i» V^ by pTJi^a eKTropevojievov did oronaTog
Geov. In this passage the manna, viewed as an extraordinary
heavenly aliment (Psalm Ixxviii. 25), is contrasted with earthly
means of subsistence, and just so Jesus contrasts the earthly dprog,
bread, with the heavenly. According to the connexion, therefore,
other kinds of earthly food cannot be meant. The prjua Oeov, word
of God, is to be conceived of here as the effectual creative cause of
all nourishment. As every thing was made by God's word, and by
the breath of his mouth (Psalm -xxxiii. 6), so that same word also
preserves all things, since the preservation is but a continued crea-
tion. Jesus is stayed by faith in this power of God ; so long as the
Spirit did not release him from the wilderness, he was fed by the
* Such parallels are acknowledged by the advocates of the mythical character of the
Gospel-history, Straiiss and Be Wette; but In such a way, that precisely because of those
parallels they deny the historical reality, both of the typical event in the Old Testament,
and of the antitype in the New. But in this way they are degraded into mere puerilities.
For a serious person they can have no import, unless they be founded on real transactions,
by which God speaks to men in the language of fact.
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