Our Daily Bread

Luke 4:3-4

"The devil said to Him, 'If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.'  Jesus answered him, 'It is written, One does not live by bread alone.'"


As discussed in the previous post, the devil tested Jesus when He was "full of the Spirit".  Why?  Perhaps it was because Jesus had fasted in the wilderness for forty days.  Perhaps the devil was banking on His human side.  That is something that I forget about so much in my picture of Jesus: that He is fully God and fully human.  It is stories like this that remind us that He really does understand the trials and pains that we are going through.

Imagine a time when you were "full of the Spirit", when you were close to God.  How long did it take for temptation's sweet lure to call you like a siren?  There have been times that it seems seconds are between the two.  Falling from our mountain tops with God is almost too easy.  Think about it: Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days!!!  Nearly a month and a half!  That is an excruciatingly long time to pray and meditate and reflect.  How easily could we have been distracted after even a day?

Jesus's first temptation (that we know of) is turning stone into bread.  Why didn't He?  After forty days of fasting, why would attending to His physical needs of food have been a sin?  And it wasn't like He was going to be showing off because there was no one else around.

Perhaps the lesson is that even if something is within our powers to get, we must still rely on God for our Daily Bread.  Ow, this is definitely my spiritual Achilles' heel.  I struggle with trusting God to provide when I can do it myself.  I was given my gifts by God to use them; solving my problems with them only seems proper.  Along that logic, Jesus using His divine powers to feed Himself seems completely acceptable.  But, He chose not to, responding, "One does not live by bread alone."

Another reason that this is deemed a temptation to sin could be the deal that Jesus made: to become the human sacrifice needed to redeem our tainted souls.  He wanted to be human, and satisfying His human hunger through divine means would not be human.  No man has ever been able to provide for himself without God's help.

A third reason is that Jesus never used His divine nature for His own needs.  He always healed others, saved others, fed others.  Even when the crowds are about to throw Him off of a cliff (just a few verses away, Luke 4:28-30), the Bible mentions how He simply passes through the crowd, but it doesn't have the ending "but He passed through the crowd unscathed because of His awesome Godly power."  


Giving into this temptation, as harmless as a loaf of bread may seem, is also a dangerous stepping stone.  You could call it the gateway sin.  Think about it, we've been very good people, and every once in a while, we want to just take things easy.  "I've been going to church pretty regularly; I can miss this Sunday because I so desperately need to sleep in..." "I've been reading my Bible, so I think I can be a little more lax about church, besides, I got so much done last Sunday...."  "I am so tired tonight, I will just read double tomorrow..."  and the trend continues until we wake up one day and can't remember the last time we truly acted under God's direction.  We have slowly distanced ourselves and turned to rely upon our own power.


So, this first temptation taught us probably an obvious thing: trust God to provide everything.  We've heard it a thousand times, and I guarantee that we will all need to hear it again.  But we also learned more about Jesus.  Even though His is fully God, He is also fully human and can definitely be tempted.  His time here could have been so easy and pampered if He had used His powers as freely as the devil suggests.  He could have solved world hunger; He could have made us truly worship Him by proving His status as the Son of God through His divine side.  But that wasn't why He came.  He came to make life easier for us and teach us how to live because HE LOVES US THAT MUCH!!!