The temptations of Christ have always been puzzling to me. The things Jesus is being tempted to do don’t seem very. . . sinful? At least that seems to be the case for the first two sins (in the Matthean order). To turn stones into bread or to jump from the temple--what’s the problem? Why is it sinful to do these things? God would protect Jesus if he jumped, and surely it’s within the power of Jesus to turn stones into bread--he turned water into wine, after all!
I also see in this passage a prima facie difficulty with the relationship between evidence and faith. Is Jesus’s faith more noble because he trusted the Father without requiring the Father to save him miraculously? A similar question is near for the stones case. If this is the correct interpretation of the first two temptations, then it would seem to support the idea of faith that’s more worthy apart from evidence, and this is the sort of conception of faith that’s seemed troubling to me. I’ve seen some possible hints in which a lack of immediacy in faith can give rise to a greater focus and reliance on God, a sort of stimulus to our relationship and a call to reform our priorities. Maybe that’s right. But I’m still not sure about it.
Anyway, I took it upon myself to read some of the significant commentaries on the passage and to summarize each interpreter's main take on why the temptations were sinful. I’ve copied the relevant sections below. Towards the end, I’ll try to summarize what I take to be the most likely interpretation and what this has to say for my concerns about the nature of faith.
Leon Morris
What sort of Messiah would Jesus be? Those are the points of the temptations. Using his powers for his own needs, spectacular but pointless miracles, or a mighty empire?
Second miracle is to compel God and reverse the Lord-servant order.
D.A. Carson
The father gave him a mission to demonstrate Jesus’s prioritizing of God over food, making bread would violate that mission.
To jump would be to forcefully manipulate the Father. It’d be holding our pledge to God contingent on his fulfilling our demands--it’d be bribery. It'd be threatening God with a bad state-of-affairs unless he acts.
Craig Keener
In this passage, the devil seeks to redefine Jesus’s call; by appealing to various culturally prevalent models of power to suggest how Jesus should use his God-given power. The devil tests Jesus with three roles into which other Palestininan charismatic leaders had fallen -- from the generally despised crassly demonic sorcerer’s role to those that some Jews justified as pious.
Second temptation presumes upon the Father
Robert Mounce
To eat the loaves at that moment would be to reorder physical needs above spiritual needs.
Perhaps the temple-jump was a reference to an immediate way to establish Jesus’s messianic claim. But being the Messiah wasn’t a miracle-monger, as this would be repeating Moses’s sin?
R. T. France
He has deliberately put them through a time of privation as an educative process.
As the first part of Deut 8:3 explains, Israel’s hunger had been a part of the educative process designed by God; it was only after they had experienced hunger that they were fed, in God’s good time, not at their own convenience.
The vivid imagery of the psalm envisages some of the hazards which may be expected to confront God’s people, and promises God’s protection for them, but it does not suggest that they should take the initiative in courting such dangers. The devil’s suggestion, however, is to test the literal truth of God’s promise of protection by deliberately creating a situation in which he will be obliged to act to save his Son’s life. In this way “man may become lord of God, and compel him to act through the power of his faith” (Schweizer, 63). It would be “to act as if God is there to serve his Son, rather than the reverse”
Donald Hagner
The testing takes place in conjunction with fasting, which is to be understood as commanded by God.
The testing is accomplished here by the suggestion of something that, looked at from another perspective or in a different context, is within the power and prerogative of the Messiah.
To jump is to jump to safety, to end the trial.
Robert Gundry
Using his powers for self-serving interest would be contrary to his divine mission as Messiah
Let’s summarize the points. Here’s wherein the wrongness of the temptations consisted:
I. Jesus was being tempted to specific models of Messiah: The miracle-monger (temple jump), the war leader (taking the worldly Kingdoms), and the self-serving (stones to bread) kinds of Messiahs.
Op: I don’t find this plausible as an interpretation.
II. Alternative:, the temptations constituted a special set-apart test, so while it wouldn’t be wrong for Jesus to turn stones into bread on other occasions, it would be under the conditions of this test. The test was meant to present worldly goods in their best possible light, and to see whether Jesus could still choose God over them.
Op. I find this very plausible.
III. Turning stones to bread would be self-serving.
Op. I don’t find this plausible.
IV. Under the conditions of the test, turning bread to stones would wrongly prioritize bread over God’s mission.
Op. I find this plausible.
V. The temple jump may have been a temptation to immediately establish his Messianic claims in front of cheering crowds. So it was a test to be a crowd-pleaser, taking the easy route.
Op. I don’t find this plausible.
VI. The temple jump was a temptation to end the trial early. If Jesus had jumped, it would have been a jump to safety and prematurely ended his trials, as Jesus would be saved and ministered by angels before the trial was meant to end. It’d be picking worldly goods over God, so is the same sort of temptation as the stones to bread temptation.
Op. I find this plausible.
VII. The temple jump would oblige the Father to act on Jesus’s behalf, which is a wrongful and presumptive reversal of the Lord-Servant order.
Op. I find this plausible.
Given these interpretations, the temptations don’t seem clearly relevant to the nature of faith given that they occurred in a special sort of test. But maybe this sort of test can be used as an analogy for the use of faith even in believers?
Just as Jesus’s trials were given to him by God, perhaps God sends us trials and testing as well. In Jesus’s trial, worldly goods were withdrawn. And in their withdrawal, Jesus still prioritized God’s mission and God’s value over the world. This seems to echo Abraham’s trial. The life of Isaac had been withdrawn from an easy view once God had given the command to sacrifice Isaac. But Abraham, even in light of this command, held onto the promise given by God. The promise of God was ranked higher than the easy-to-view life of his Isaac.
This isn’t to say that we’re *always* under trials. We often aren’t. We get promises, and signs, and confirmation, and arguments at times. But not always. Life flickers.
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