Daily Bible Reading 24th 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 turn now to a consideration of the first temptation, the incitement to 'command this stone that it be made bread'. There are a number of pointed lessons to be drawn from this. For one thing, we must see it as a temptation to unbelief. Jesus was tempted to doubt God's Word, to doubt His care and goodness. Significantly, this is how the trouble began in the Garden of Eden: 'Yea, hath God said...?'; 'If Thou be the Son of God...'. The emphasis is all on the 'If'. We should remember what has just happened at the beginning of these forty days. At the Baptism, God had said, 'Thou art My beloved Son'. It had been, for Jesus, a moment of high spiritual exaltation and dedication. Now came the sowing of the doubt: 'If Thou be the Son of God...'. Is it all an illusion, a hallucination? In the cold, grey light of the wilderness, when He was hungry, when there was no atmosphere of the open heaven and the sense of God's nearness - then came the temptation to doubt. This is all so real, so true to human experience. In such a situation, one doubts one's calling and everything seems to be put in the melting pot - and there is no clear, divine voice to reassure, only the assertion of faith in the dark. And it needs to be this.
The fact is, if changed circumstances - the removal of the aura of spiritual atmosphere, the loss of creature comforts, the sense of desolation - are going to make us doubt God and His calling of us to His work, then we had better realise how weak our faith really is. For these things will surely come. God sees to it that they will, so as to make sure that our faith and hope rest in Him, and in nothing else.