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Verse 2

Luke 4:2. Being forty days tempted According to Luke here, and Mark 1:12, he was tempted of Satan during the whole of these forty days; but we are favoured with no account of the various subtle arts which that evil spirit used in the course of so long a temptation. Only the three assaults which he made at the expiration of the forty days are recorded; perhaps because they were more violent than the rest, or more for the instruction of mankind. In those days he did eat nothing And therefore was supported all the time by a miracle; for he found no inconvenience from so long and preternatural a fast. He did not, it seems, even feel the sensation of hunger till the forty days were expired. Moses, who was a type of Jesus, was remarkable for fasts of this kind; for at two different times he was forty days and forty nights with the Lord, Deuteronomy 9:9-25; Deuteronomy 10:10. In like manner Elijah, who was a type of Christ’s forerunner, went in the strength of the meat he had eaten, for forty days and forty nights, unto Horeb, the mount of God. Moreover, as Moses, during his forty days’ fast, received from God the laws which he afterward delivered to the Israelites, and, by continuing so long without food, proved the reality of his intercourse with God; so Jesus, during the whole of his fast, enjoyed continual converse with his heavenly Father, and received the new law, or evangelical doctrine, which he communicated to his first disciples, to be by them transmitted to future ages, John 8:26; and John 15:15; and by the miracle of a total abstinence from food for so long a time, demonstrated the truth of his mission. And it is probable, that this solemn fast of Christ, like those of Moses and Elias, was intended partly, at least, to prove the divinity of his mission, and to inculcate the necessity of subduing the animal passions and fleshly lusts, and vanquishing the pleasures of sense, before a man takes on himself the high character of an instructer of others in the knowledge of divine things.

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