We all know what it feels like to be hungry. It’s not a good feeling, but we all know how to remedy it: eat some food. I get hungry if I go without food for more than four hours. If I go without food for a whole day, I’m famished. It’s unthinkable to go without food for forty days. Some people have actually done that. That’s exactly what Jesus did at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He had just experienced the exhilaration of the baptism in the Jordan, where the Father expressed his pleasure in the Son. On that spiritually high note, the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert to be tempted by the devil for forty days. It seems like quite a contrast from a spiritual high to a spiritual low. But the truth is that the forty-day fast was a time of spiritual strength. By entering a place of physical weakness through the fast, he enters a place of spiritual strength and dependence on the Father. The purpose was for Jesus to focus on the Father and the mission the Father sent him to accomplish when the devil brought all his big guns of temptation against him. At the end of this time of fasting, the first temptation the devil brings against Jesus is to turn stones into bread to prove he really is the Son of God. If you’ve ever been to the Holy Land, you know that it is a very rocky place. After forty days of fasting, the many stones in the wilderness probably looked like small loaves of bread. What a temptation it would be to satisfy one’s hunger and bolster one’s ego at the same time. Jesus did not fall for the bait. He resisted the temptation by firing scripture at the devil.
Jesus uses Scripture to defeat the temptation of the devil. He cited Deuteronomy 8:3 to deflect the temptation and make a profound statement about who he is and what he has come to accomplish. Jesus answered the Devil’s temptation by saying, “It is written: ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4). People need bread, physical food, but they need something more, something greater.
Someone Greater than Moses
Using this statement from Deuteronomy, Jesus declares that he is the new Exodus, in a new desert, eating a new food with a new hunger. The passage Jesus uses on the devil calls the reader to look back to the time of the exodus from Egypt, a time of great need, a time of great bondage and suffering, but also a time of great deliverance and salvation. A time that prefigures a future time, a greater time when the Lord himself will come to save. Jesus is proclaiming he is the long-awaited one who comes to fulfill God’s redemptive purposes. Jesus is the new Moses, bringing the soul-filling food of God to the people of God. Though Jesus is very hungry, he does not primarily hunger for physical food but for the spiritual food of doing the will of the Father who sent him. He was hungry, really hungry for the Word of God.
Hungry Too?
Just like everyone experiences physical hunger, everyone experiences spiritual hunger. Most fill it with the junk food of the world. When we’re hungry, we’re going to eat something. But the problem is that we have no intrinsic hunger for the gospel. To gain an appetite for the gospel, we must feast on the healthy food of every word that comes from the mouth of God. That’s not easy to do in a spiritual junk food world. Like Jesus, we must resist the temptation for ineffective substitutes. We can’t do that by ourselves. But we can do it because he first did it. When we fail to feast on the gospel, we know he did. When we are too full of junk food to pull up to the table of the Word of God, we know he did. His grace enlivens our hunger for him. He calls us to come to the supper table. It’s on the house. Jesus promised that all those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed because they would be satisfied. Those who have a genuine hunger for God through the word of God will be fed by God. Do you find yourself longing for something more than you now experience? Do you feel like there’s just something missing? Are you tired of trying to fill your hunger with so many things that still leave you empty? That longing is your hunger for God. Only he can fill it and satisfy the aching hunger deep inside. He fills it with his truth and love. He will satisfy every longing when we surrender to feast on his word to our soul’s delight. We must be famished for every word that comes from the mouth of God. Our hunger is really for God, for Jesus. He, and he alone, satisfies the deepest part of our souls with his steadfast love. Jesus once told a group of people who were part of the five thousand he had previously fed with five loaves and two fish, “I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). The food is on the table, come and enjoy.