Luke 4:2

2. Being forty days tempted For the full sacred period of forty days had the devil permission to inject into the intellect of the man Jesus distrust of his divine Sonship, awful conceptions of his Messianic suffering appealing to his will for a recantation, exhibitions of the selfish uses to which he may put his miraculous powers, and high imaginations of the grandeur he might attain if he would pervert his supernatural endowments to the attainment of dominion. When the forty days were at their close, the trial terminated in the threefold effort of Satan in person, narrated specifically by the evangelists.

Did eat nothing Van Oosterzee thinks that it is shown by Matthew 11:18, that these words need mean only that he ate nothing outside the fasting diet, namely, of locusts and wild honey. Yet we need not hesitate to accept the utmost latitude of their literal meaning. The instances of a Spinoza and a Newton show how powerful thought may suspend the demands of appetite. It is spirit which organizes, shapes, and controls body; not body, spirit: and the body disorganizes and dies because spirit is too weak to maintain the completeness and firmness of its mastery. The great spirit of Jesus, sustained by the Holy Spirit, and reined up to its full natural strength by this great crisis, held the bodily organ in complete subserviency to its uses. But how terrible must have been the hungering reaction after such a fast!