Why Jesus? First impressions…

Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is led by the Spirit to re-enact Israel’s journey through the wilderness. He is not “tempted” by the “tempter” but “tested” (peirasthēnai) by the “tester” (ho peirazōn), just as God led Israel in the wilderness “so that he might distress you and test (ekpeirasēi) you and discern the things in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not” (Deut. 8:2 LXX). So when the devil suggests that Jesus should turn stones into bread to prove the validity of his new vocation, Jesus quotes from the continuation of this passage in Deuteronomy:

And he distressed you and let you hunger and fed you with manna with which your fathers were not acquainted in order to announce to you that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes out through the mouth of God man shall live. (Deut. 8:3; cf. Matt. 4:4)

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