Deuteronomy 6:16

"Ye shall not tempt Jehovah your God, as ye tempted him at Massah. Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of Jehovah your God, and his testimonies, and his statutes, which he hath commanded thee. And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of Jehovah; that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which Jehovah sware unto thy fathers to thrust out all thine enemies from before thee, as Jehovah hath spoken."

"Ye shall not tempt Jehovah your God ..." This, of course, is one of the passages from Deuteronomy that Jesus used in vanquishing the Devil on the occasion of the Temptation (Matthew 4:7; Luke 4:12). Eerdman's explanation of this passage is as follows:

"To tempt God is to put him to a test, or to try to make him act in a certain way to prove his goodness and power. Thus in Massah, when the people needed water, they cried out in unbelief, saying, `Is the Lord among us or not?' (Exodus 17:7)."[27]

Jesus' use of this text in his contest with Satan further reveals that what is forbidden is any presumptive reliance upon the providence of God. Satan suggested that if Jesus jumped off the pinnacle of the temple that God would not allow him to be injured, but Christ's answer shows that any presumption on the part of any person who might deliberately enter into danger would be sinful. In case Christ had accidentally fallen from the pinnacle of the temple, of course, God would have rescued him, but for the Son of God to have deliberately jumped from that eminence would have been sinfully presumptuous. Dummelow thought it was remarkable that our Lord not only took all of his answers from the Scriptures during the temptation, "But they all came from the same portion of Deuteronomy 8:2; Deuteronomy 6:13, and Deuteronomy 10:20."[28]

The balance of this chapter reverts to the problem of teaching the children of the oncoming generation.