Daily Bible Reading 21st April 2026 // Luke 4:1-13
1 And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness 2 for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were over, he was hungry. 3 The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” 4 And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” 5 And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, 6 and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. 7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” 8 And Jesus answered him, “It is written,
“‘You shall worship the Lord your God,
and him only shall you serve.’”
9 And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10 for it is written,
“‘He will command his angels concerning you,
to guard you’,
11 and
“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”
12 And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” 13 And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
We should also remember Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 10:13 about temptation being common to man. This observation should serve to remind us that studying the temptations of our Lord is no mere academic exercise, of no practical relevance to our day-to-day living; for Jesus was man. He was God, yes, but He was also man, and fully human. And it was as man that He sustained the assault of the enemy: 'man shall not live by bread alone...'
It is clear that Luke presents the temptation as a confrontation with the enemy. There is something elemental here; it is no mere subterfuge. We are taken right to the heart of the situation. Sin is spoken of in Genesis 3 in terms of an attack by Satan; and now salvation - and it is the history of salvation we are concerned with in the gospel record - is spoken of as a battle with and victory over Satan. In this connection, we should bear in mind the 'symbolic' character of gospel writing. We have already referred to the concept of a second Exodus (which lies behind the thinking of more than one of the Evangelists), with Christ as the second Moses delivering His people out of bondage. Thus, the Red Sea 'baptism' of Israel, which corresponds to our Lord's baptism in Jordan; and now, here also, the forty days and nights to correspond with Israel's forty years in the wilderness. This is not as fanciful an exegesis as might first appear: for the three quotations from Scripture that Jesus uses in the Temptation are all from Deuteronomy, and refer to the testing of Israel in the wilderness after the crossing of the Red Sea. Israel was tested (Deuteronomy 8:2) to know what was in their heart; and Jesus is also put to the test. But where Israel failed, Jesus was victorious.