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tested in the wilderness in connection with "bread", and had succumbed. They had
murmured about the provision made for them; they had expressed their doubt as to
whether God could provide "flesh to eat" (Numb. 11: 4); they "tempted" God; they
failed.
The quotation with which our Lord had withstood the tempter was a passage from
Deut. 8::
"And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these
forty years (the Saviour had fasted `forty days') in the wilderness (LXX eremos, as in
Matt. 4: 1), to humble thee, and to prove (LXX peirazo, `tempt', `try') thee, to know
what was in thine heart . . . . . He suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna . . . . .
that He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live" (Deut. 8: 2, 3).
As on a later occasion, so here, the Saviour could say: "The prince of this world
cometh, and hath nothing in Me" (John 14: 30). The trials of Israel in the wilderness
were to reveal what was in their heart; the temptation of the Son of God showed that
there was no desire in His heart that ran counter to the will of Him that sent Him. He was
indeed the beloved Son, in Whom the Father was well pleased.
As indicated in the preceding article, the rejoinder to the second temptation
emphasizes the word ekpeirazo, "to try out" (Matt. 4: 7), pages 164-168. The Son of
God could neither be tempted by the devil, nor would He tempt the One that sent Him.
This brief comment on so weighty a theme is obviously too meager to be regarded as
an attempt to explain the full significance of this initial trial of our Lord, but we cannot
attempt more here. At the moment all that we are doing is reviewing the occurrences of
the words "tempt" and "temptation", and endeavouring to discover their significance.
The next reference is found in the Sermon on the Mount, in the prayer which the Lord
taught His disciples: "And lead us not into temptation" (Matt. 6: 13). What does this
petition mean? The words are uttered over and over again by those who use "the Lord's
prayer" in public and private, yet it is not uncharitable to affirm that very few could give
an intelligent reason for the prayer.
In this same prayer is another petition, which, on the surface, seems simple enough.
"Give us this day our daily bread" (Matt. 6: 11). Yet scholars have written reams of
explanations of the prayer, for it is a strange fact that the word translated "daily"--"the
torment of theologians and grammarians"--is a word unknown elsewhere in the
Scriptures. It is epiousios. For some reason yet to be sought the Saviour was under the
necessity of coining a word to express His meaning, consequently, such a simply,
every-day, idea as "daily" cannot be the translation of this strange word. The word is
most evidently composed of the preposition epi, "upon", and eimi. Now eimi is usually
to be understood as representing the verb "to be", but it has a secondary meaning, "to go
or to come". It means here, in epiousios, "to come upon", and is a most obvious allusion
to the Manna which came upon Israel in the wilderness.