Daily Bible Reading 1st May 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.
If our interpretation of the temptations of Jesus in general has been right, then we must see that the central message of the third temptation as recorded by Luke lies along the line, once again, of messianic power. It was a temptation to do something spectacular - we shall take this up later - but why this particular kind of spectacular action? What lies behind it? We suggest that only one thing would be conjured up in the minds of pious Jews by the sight of someone being borne by angels down from the pinnacle of the temple - the Son of Man coming in the glory with His angels (see Daniel 7:13; Matthew 26:64; Jude 14). This was a deliberate attempt on Satan's part to get Jesus to identify Himself with the Messianic idea of the coming glorious King, without reference to that of the Suffering Figure mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament prophecies: 'Be the glorious King, Jesus, not a Sufferer. If Thou be the Son of God, show Thyself as a King, not as a criminal on a cross.' Once again, it is the whisper: 'Bypass the cross, take an easier way'. But a Messiah-ship on these terms and in this way was something Jesus was not prepared to countenance, precisely because it was a denial of the Scriptural pattern laid down for Him in the messianic prophecies and assumed by Him in His baptism. This is the force of His counter-quotation of Scripture in verse 12 (Matthew puts it even more graphically than Luke, 'It is written again') as if to say 'This is the correct interpretation of Scripture, not that'. We shall look at this corrective use of Scripture in tomorrow's Note.