Duel in the Desert

This excerpt is talking about when Jesus was driving into the desert by the Holy Spirit and was tempted by the Satan

We should follow the duel closely — three thrusts by Satan, three times parried by Christ. What lay behind the three thrusts? I think what principally lay behind them was Christ's sinlessness. From your past sins and mine, the devil knows where the weaknesses are, the cracks and fissures in our natures half-healed or still gaping wide open. With us, he has plenty to go on: with Christ he had nothing at all. He could only improvise. We cannot read his mind ... but we can look at what he did.

He made three propositions. All of them were sketched in advance — rather sketchily sketched perhaps — by the behavior of the children of Israel in the desert. Christ answered with three wholly appropriate texts, all from Deuteronomy, all dealing with the time when Israel was beginning its new life... Or he may simply have taken three current views of the Messiah and tried them out in turn — that he would bring the earth wholly into the service of men's needs; that the very heavens would serve his splendor; that all the kingdoms of the world would be subject to him and to the Jewish nation whose glory he would be.

The first two temptations open with the words: "If you are the son of God." I think it was of the first urgency for Satan to find out what "son of God" meant. It had been used in the Old Testament as a name for the Messiah (Ps 2:7). But did he know what it meant?

"Son of God" had variously been used in the Old Testament — of the chosen people, for instance (Ex 4:22), and, in the plural, of the Jewish judges (Ps 81[82]:6). Satan knew his Old Testament, but the Book of Job he must have scrutinized with special closeness, for so much of it was about a certain Satan and the high carnival he had at Job's expense. In that book (1:6, 2:1, 38:7) "sons of God" meant the unfallen angels...

To Know Christ Jesus by Frank Sheed