Daily Bible Reading 4th 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.
Let us look one more time at this third temptation before going on. The appeal to the spectacular is a very subtle one and needs to be examined with some care to see what lies at its root. The idea that was suggested to Jesus was that 'miraculous works, dazzling, overwhelming, dumbfoundering, are the basis on which the kingdom of God can be built. Overpower the senses of men, and you will win their souls for God. This was for Jesus radically false, and it contained a temptation which He steadily resisted. He never worked a miracle of ostentation or display....' (Denney). But it is true that some of His miracles were taken like this. And here is the point: true faith was never produced by them (cf John 2:23 - the kind of faith produced by the miracles was one that Jesus questioned and repudiated). One thinks in this connection of the rich man's appeal (in the parable in Luke 16:27ff) to Father Abraham for a spectacular manifestation that would convince his brethren. But Father Abraham said, 'No; they have the Word; if that does not convince them, nothing will'. Denney adds: 'The trust of the Church in 'other things' is really a distrust of the truth, an unwillingness to believe that its power lies in itself, a desire to have something more irresistible than truth to plead truth's cause; and all these are modes of atheism....What the evangelist calls “the word” - the spiritual truth, the message of the Father and of His kingdom - spoken in the Spirit and enforced by the Spirit, told by faith and heard by faith - is our only real resource, and we must not be ashamed of its simplicity.' Ah, the temptation to take lower ground than this is a very real one. God give us all grace to believe, quite simply and fervently, that there is nothing more irresistible than truth in pleading the cause of truth!