Bread.

Matthew 4:3 is a verse in the Bible that describes the first temptation of Jesus by Satan. In the previous verse, Matthew revealed that Jesus had been fasting for 40 days and nights and was hungry. Satan's first temptation was designed to exploit this physical weakness. He asked Jesus to command that stones be made bread to relieve his hunger.

The verse is interpreted as a test of Jesus' faith and his ability to resist temptation.

Matthew 3 ended with the Holy Spirit coming to rest on Jesus following His baptism. Now the Spirit leads Him into the wilderness to endure tempting by the devil after 40 days of fasting. Jesus demonstrates His sinlessness by resisting all temptations.

He begins His ministry in the region of Galilee, settling in Capernaum and calling some disciples to follow Him.

Jesus' work in Galilee includes traveling from place to place, proclaiming the good news that the kingdom of heaven is near and healing every kind of affliction.

He soon becomes famous, drawing huge crowds from great distances.

Matthew 4:1–11 describes Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. After 40 days and nights of fasting, Jesus faces three temptations from Satan. Each one attempts to lure Christ into abusing His power; to take immediately what God the Father has promised to provide later.

Jesus resists each temptation with a quote from Deuteronomy, refusing to rebel against the plans of God the Father. Finally, Jesus refuses to worship the devil in exchange for the kingdoms of the earth. He tells the devil to leave, and angels come minister to Him.

Matthew 4:3 - "And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread."

Matthew 4:3-4 3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. 4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

In Matthew 4:3, the tempter approaches Jesus and says, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” This moment occurs during Jesus’ forty days of fasting in the wilderness, where he is tempted by the devil . The passage highlights Jesus’ response to the temptation, emphasizing his reliance on God’s Word rather than yielding to the devil’s suggestion.

In the previous verse, Matthew revealed that Jesus had been fasting for 40 days and nights (Matthew 4:1–2). He was hungry. Jesus' body desperately wanted food. Satan's first temptation was designed to exploit this physical weakness. Matthew calls Satan "the tempter."

One of Satan's primary weapons against humanity is temptation, dating all the way back to his first encounter with human beings in the garden of Eden (Genesis 3).

At first glance, the temptation doesn't sound like an invitation to sin. Bread is good, and it's meant to ease our hunger. On the face of it, there seems to be nothing wrong with this idea. That, of course, is part of the Devil's evil brilliance.

Satan tells Jesus to turn stones into loaves of bread—if He is, in fact, the Son of God. Matthew has just reported to us that God the Father declared in a voice from heaven that Jesus was His Son. There's no question about that fact for the reader, or for Jesus in this moment.

Satan is not really challenging whether Jesus is the Son of God. Instead, he seems to dare Jesus to go outside of the Father's will in order to meet His own desire for food. Satan is tempting Jesus to make Himself independent of the Father.

After all, Satan is saying, you are the Son of God. You should be able to do as you please, when you please, especially when it's something good and healthy like food.

Jesus, though, understood it was the will of God the Father for Him to endure temptations. It was also God's will for this to happen when Jesus was gripped by the results of fasting for 40 days. Jesus knew His mission on earth was to do only what the Father directed Him to do.

The Gospel of Matthew clearly shows the influence of its writer's background, and his effort to reach a specific audience. Matthew was one of Jesus' twelve disciples, a Jewish man, and a former tax collector. This profession would have required literacy, and Matthew may have transcribed some of Jesus' words as they were spoken.

This book is filled with references to the Old Testament, demonstrating to Israel that Jesus is the Promised One. Matthew also includes many references to coins, likely due to his former profession. Matthew records extensive accounts of Jesus' teaching, more than the other three Gospels.

By "the tempter", is meant the devil, see ( 1 Thessalonians 3:5 ) so called, because it is his principal work and business, in which he employs himself, to solicit men to sin; and tempt them either to deny, or call in question the being of God, arraign his perfections, murmur at his providences, and disbelieve his promises.

When he is here said to come to Christ at the end of forty days and nights, we are not to suppose, that he now first began to tempt him; for the other Evangelists expressly say, that he was tempted of him forty days, ( Mark 1:13 ) ( Luke 4:2 ) but he now appeared openly, and in a visible shape: all the forty days and nights before, he had been tempting him secretly and inwardly; suggesting things suitable to, and taking the advantage of the solitary and desolate condition he was in .

But finding these suggestions and temptations unsuccessful, and observing him to be an hungered, he puts on a visible form, and with an articulate, audible voice, he said,

if thou be the Son of God;

"If thou be the Son of God" is a phrase from the Bible, specifically Matthew 4:6 . The phrase is spoken by the devil to Jesus, and is part of a temptation story. The devil is tempting Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and is using the phrase to challenge Jesus' identity as the Son of God.

Satan's second temptation of Jesus involved a dramatic change in location. The devil brought Jesus—presumably in rapid fashion—from the wilderness to the highest point of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. This may have put the pair about 30 stories, more than 90 meters, above the surrounding terrain. Even looking down "only" to the plaza below would have been perhaps 15 stories, or around 45 meters.

This time, Satan quotes Scripture to make his case to Jesus. He challenges Christ to throw Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple if He is the Son of God. Both Satan and Jesus know that Jesus is the Son of God. Satan is tempting Jesus to use His power and authority to act independently of God the Father, to do things His own way.

The devil isn't suggesting Jesus commit suicide. Rather, by jumping from such a great height, He would be using His authority over angels to dramatically save Himself. That would have happened in full view of everyone gathered at the temple. Satan quotes from Psalm 91:11–12, applying it to Jesus.

Though he leaves out a line of the verse, Satan is not necessarily twisting the text of Scripture. Instead, he is misusing it. The Devil is tempting Jesus to prematurely reveal Himself as the Son of God by forcing God to send angels to save Him.

This would result in revealing Jesus' true identity to Israel immediately. The Father's plan, though, was for His Son to suffer and die for the sins of humanity. More work needs to be done before Jesus' role can be fully revealed (John 12:23; Acts 1:7).

Jesus knew that. He will quote another passage from Deuteronomy in rejecting the devil's temptation.

40 Days for 40 Years .

How Does Jesus’ Temptation Link Him to Israel?

The Scriptures identify the Lord Jesus as the true Israel of God by means of the smallest and seemingly most insignificant details in the records of His temptation in the wilderness.

No sooner had God brought His son (Ex. 4:22), Israel, out of Egypt and through the waters that He brought him into the wilderness for forty years—to be tested by Him and tempted by the evil one. In similar fashion, after bringing Jesus up out of Egypt (Matt. 2:15) and through the waters of baptism, the Spirit drove God’s beloved Son into the wilderness for forty days to be tested by God and tempted by the evil one.

The overarching parallel is striking. But the small details recorded in the temptation accounts prove to be even more striking.

The first significant small detail about Jesus as the true Israel of God is found in Mark’s account. There we read that while He was in the wilderness, Jesus was “with the wild beasts” (Mark 1:13). Before considering how this plays into Jesus’ recapitulation of Israel’s history, we have to consider what it teaches us about Jesus as the second Adam.

When God created Adam, the Scriptures tell us that he was in the garden with the animals. The Lord gave Adam the task of “tending and keeping” the garden-temple paradise and of naming the animals. When Adam sinned by eating of the tree of which God told him not to eat, Adam turned the garden-temple into a barren wilderness.

The world was now a place of sin, rebellion, misery, and danger. The second Adam entered the world to undo all that Adam did. In order to do so, He had to begin His ministry as the last Adam—not in a garden but in the place that symbolized the barrenness and cursed nature of the fallen world.

Jesus was not in the garden-temple paradise like the first Adam, but He was in the desert with the wild beasts.

Back to Jesus as the true Israel of God, note that when God brought Israel into the wilderness, He promised them covenant blessings and curses (Deut. 28–31). In the wilderness, He tested them. Israel failed to obey the God of redemption and, therefore, failed to obtain the covenant blessings.

It was for this reason that the Son of God began His incarnate ministry in the wilderness. He came to do what Israel had failed to do. He came to the wilderness in order to regain the garden-temple paradise. When we start to see the wilderness/garden themes, we soon realize that it was not a coincidence that our Lord Jesus began His ministry by being tempted in the place of His people in the wilderness and ended it by leaving the sin of His people behind in the garden tomb.

The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness carries with it the same structure as the temptation of Adam and Israel. Satan tempted our first parents with “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2:16). Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil when she allowed herself to believe that it was “good for food, pleasant to the eyes and desirable to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6).

Likewise, Israel in the wilderness gave into the lust of the flesh (Num. 11:1–9, 31–35), the lust of the eyes (1 Cor. 10:7–8), and the pride of life (vv. 9–10). We find that when the devil came to tempt Jesus, the last Adam and true Israel, he did so with temptations that corresponded to the temptations he utilized in the garden with our first parents and in the wilderness with old covenant Israel.

Jesus was tempted with the lust of the flesh (Matt. 4:3), the lust of the eyes (vv. 8–9), and the pride of life (vv. 5–6). There was one difference between the experience of Jesus and that of Adam and Israel under temptation. The protological son, Adam (Luke 3:38), and typological son, Israel (Ex. 4:22), disobeyed; the eschatological Son, Jesus (Rom. 1:4), obeyed.

The most significant detail of all is the source of the Scriptures to which Jesus appealed in battling the temptations of the evil one. Three times, Satan tempted Jesus. Three times, Jesus fought back with God’s Word. This has often encouraged believers to take up God’s Word when tempted by the evil one.

However, there is something deeper and more profound in the text. Matthew and Luke tell us that Jesus appealed to Scripture from the book of Deuteronomy—a book that summarizes the lessons that God taught the Israelites during the time of their sojourning in the wilderness.

Jesus took what Israel should have taken—the truths God taught them in the wilderness and inscripturated in the Word of God—and did what Israel should have done in overcoming the temptations of the evil one in the wilderness.

Jesus’ obedience stands in the place of our disobedience. The true Israel merited the covenant blessings of God by His overcoming the evil one in the wilderness and by disarming the principalities and powers on the cross (Col. 2:15).

In union with Christ by faith alone, we now become partakers of the covenant blessings (Eph. 1:3–14). In Him, we are given the weapons and the power to stand against the wiles of the devil (6:10–13).

In Christ, we are raised up to be part of the true Israel of God (Eph. 2:1–15; Gal. 6:16; Rom. 11:17–20)—spiritually resurrected members of His body redeemed by Christ out of every tongue, tribe, people, and nation.