Matthew Chapter 4

This chapter is titled "The Temptation of Jesus".  This happens after Jesus is baptized.  The wording indicates it was the "next" thing, but it does not specifically say that.  (2021 - Interesting that Rummage preached on Luke's version of the temptation yesterday.  A very good message. The order of the temptations is different in Matthew and Luke.)

Jesus fasts for 40/40.  Then he was hungry, and "the tempter", all lower case, shows up and says:

3 And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." [Mat 4:3 ESV]

Why would this have been a sin?   Because Jesus was flesh, and to use power that other men don't have would have been somehow "cheating"? 

MSB says that Jesus was tempted as to "the lust of the flesh", (vss 2,3), "the lust of the eyes", (vss 8. 9), and "the pride of life", (vss 5, 6).  These phrases are from later in the NT.  MSB explains the temptation by saying that Satan was trying to get Jesus to use the very power he had laid aside at the incarnation.  To "violate the terms" of the required redemption.

Next, "throw yourself down" and angels will be sent to help you.  Satan quotes scripture from two different places.  He has read the word, and knows it better than we do.  This would have been wrong because it "dares" God by doing something you shouldn't do anyway - because it belittles the life God gave us to do as He wills, not as we do, as Esau did with his birthright. 

Satan then offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world.  Jesus was going to get those anyway.  So after resisting these three temptations, Jesus tells the devil to be gone, and he leaves.  Angels come, on their own, not summoned, and minister to him.  Do we ever get to a point where temptation goes away and doesn't come back?

2022 - Isn't it interesting that the tempter waits until day 40 to test Jesus with food?  I think Satan does this same thing to us today.  We might be trying very hard to avoid some particular sin, and while focused on that, we are suddenly overcome and "lose" on another front  I have noticed this over and over and over.  For me, there are about four things that I constantly struggle with.  I seem to be able to "hold the line" on whichever one I'm focused on at the  time, but then I slip up somewhere else.  I suspect that everyone is like this.  While you're focused on behaving yourself in traffic, you get lazy and don't get the yard mowed.  In other words, while focusing on not getting angry, you succumb to sloth.  Satan does this on purpose.  I think we all ought to know which sins need the most work.  Anger, and sloth are two big ones, but I think pride instead of humility is also a big one.  And then there are specific sins, like alcohol that we decide to stop.  If we decide that, then Satan will keep tempting us with alcohol high on his list.  He knows that failure is often cascading, and he knows that domino is an "easy" one to tip.  So while you're focused on not drinking, he has every car on the  highway cut  us off in traffic, so that we get totally angry.  And as soon as we shift our focus to that, someone offers us a drink...while we're down. 

2020-Who told Matthew and the other writers about these temptations?  I don't think anyone was with Jesus for these 40 days, and Matthew had not been called to be an apostle yet in any case.  Luke, who never met Jesus, also writes about it.  Only Jesus knew about it to start with.  You have to wonder why neither of them put it in "discourse" format, as Jesus related to them the details of this time in his life, just before he started his public ministry.  2021 - All scripture is inspired.  God may have revealed the details of the temptation to the gospel writers directly.  We usually don't think of these things in the NT that way, but scripture as a whole certainly cannot be explained without direct revelation.  How would Moses record the six days of creation?   How would Daniel record the next 1000 years of history?  I think it is ok to ask the question about where the information came from, but writing scripture is not detective work.  It is inspired, and we should therefore not require a "man made" explanation for what it says.

Next title is "Jesus Begins His Ministry".  Again, there is no time frame given but the sense is immediate.  This verse:

12 Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. [Mat 4:12 ESV]  Jesus chooses to stay away from Jerusalem at this time.  The political climate was "hot" and Jesus knew when the time would be right.  So Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee, far away from the hotbed of politics. 

Jesus moves from Nazareth to Capernaum, fulfilling another prophecy that Matthew quotes from the OT.  It's the one about the people living in shadow seeing a great light.  A messianic scripture from Is 9:1, 2.  This verse:

17 From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." [Mat 4:17 ESV]

John's message was "repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins".  The theme of both was repentance.  It was about a change of heart.  It was about "choosing" to follow God, not about "following the rules".

2022 - Note that Jesus moves from Nazareth to Capernaum.  Mary, his mother, was still alive, because we see her all the way up to the cross.  He would have been living with her in Nazareth to this time, but now he leaves home, with all the heartbreak that would have entailed.  He would have need to support himself in Capernaum, either as a carpenter, or from donations.  Even back then, you couldn't just move into an empty house.  Real life details had to be attended to.

Simon and Andrew, James and John called to be disciples while they were fishing.  Zebedee was there also, but not called, only his sons.  Matthew says Jesus preached throughout Galilee in the synagogues and that he was "proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom".  Matthews theme - the kingdom. 

It also says he was healing every disease and every affliction.  There were miracles, countless miracles, countless witnesses to his power, undeniable evidence of who he was.  The miracles bore witness to his deity.  People brought the infirm of all kinds to him and he healed them.  There were no exceptions.  His fame spread all over.

2024 - So he was baptized, and then went into the desert and was tempted.  Then he returned to Nazareth.  He left there and "settled" in Capernaum.  I would say he lived in a house there, perhaps supporting himself as a carpenter.  He began to call his apostles, to preach repentance and the kingdom, and to heal every kind of sickness and every kind of disease.  Syrians began to bring their sick to him, including demoni.

2025 - At least so far as Matthew is concerned, this account in 4:23 is the first we see of Jesus healing the sick - his first miracles even.  In this first verse it is every kind of disease and every kind of sickness (or affliction in the ESV, which always translates this word as affliction, perhaps to distinguish it from the acute like colds and flu.  Longer term non-specific physical maladies).  "Every kind of" is included twice.  Disease is "noson" and sickness is "malakian".  Noson is sometimes translated disease, sometimes sickness.  It is not hugely specific.  Malakian in non-Biblical use is primarily translated as "softness".  It is used only three times in the Bible and is translated disease each time, in this sense: infirmity, debility, bodily weakness, sickness.  While I am just giving my opinion here, we might think of noson as something like known, recognized acute illness and malakian as maladies of unknown cause - those who were just never feeling well, who were always at less than what we would think of as "normal" for a healthy person.  These were the things that people kept trying this or that remedy for - the chronic maladies - the physicians and healers of that time couldn't really fix.  But Jesus could.  I don't thing Matthew is using a rhetorical device here in giving two different words for "sick people".  I think he is try to show that Jesus didn't heal just one kind of problem, but all problems physically. 

2025 - And then in the very next verse, in 24, NASB says the Syrians brought him the ill, those suffering with diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics (they could tell the difference between demonic activity and seizures), paralytics; and he healed them.  This is a broader list. The more they saw that Jesus COULD do, the more they asked him to do for them. 

24 So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures, and paralytics, and he healed them. [Mat 4:24 ESV]

Just a couple of things:  People were ill (kakos) with disease (noson as we saw above, giving still more corroboration to the idea of acute illness).  So we get "all the sick" and then we get a list:

Diseases - noson, as we saw above

Pains - basanos, which is used to describe physical torture, as being broken on the rack and such.  These were not rheumatiz or every day aches and pains.  These were debility, serious hurt.

Demoniacs - Used 13 times in KJV, ALWAYS of possession, one possessed by a demon, vexed with a devil, having a devil.  This is about an external agent exercising an extreme measure of control of a person to that person's hurt.  The objective of the demon seems to be to bring harm and affliction to the person possessed.

Seizures (or epileptics) - The literal meaning is to be "moonstruck".  Lunatic is another word that would work here.  BLB says epileptic is a huge stretch of translation and is likely incorrect.  And it seems someone, seeing the word translated epilepsy, translated the translation and got seizures.  That's not what this was.  This, to me, looks more like mentally deficient.  Imagine if it means that Jesus cured those "touched", "slow", "retarded", and so on.

paralytics - 10 times in KJV this is translated as some variation of "palsy".  I don't think of palsy as paralytic, but as uncontrollable shaking.  This is apparently not what the word here means.  More accurately this means "disabled, weak of limb". The important part is "he healed them".

In that time, Syro-Phonecia reached all the way down to and included Tyre and Sidon.  There was no country of Lebanon, though we know from the OT that the area was called Lebanon even back then.  Today, Syria runs up the border of Lebanon.  Found this in the CIA Factbook:

"Following World War I, France acquired a mandate over the northern portion of the former Ottoman Empire province of Syria. From it the French demarcated the region of Lebanon in 1920, and it gained independence in 1943."

As his notoriety for all these healings he did spread far and wide, people began to seek him out from all over the region - as far south as Jerusalem and Judea, Galilee, Syria, and the Decapolis AND beyond the Jordan.

2021 - This verse:

24 So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures, and paralytics, and he healed them. [Mat 4:24 ESV]

Does any modern day "faith healer" come close to making this claim?  The "pains" maybe.  Sometimes people say their pain is gone.  But the rest?  Diseases cured?  Paralytics healed?  That never happens.  Organic diseases and problems are never healed.  It is the unquantifiable, unprovable that the faith healers deal with and this is why their fame is limited.  Jesus healed everyone brought to him, no exceptions.  That is the difference.