If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then he can do anything and no thing is harder than another.

If God can do anything then he can prove himself when tested.

If Jesus is the Son of God then he has God’s power.

Therefore, Jesus can prove himself when he is tested and it is no harder for him to do so than it is for him to open or close his eyes.

This is the line of argument that Satan uses toward Jesus when he tempts him in the wilderness.

Here is the argument that we would be tempted to add:

True temptation implies a struggle

Jesus could prove himself to be God, as Satan asked, or resist the temptation with equal ease and without a struggle.

Therefore Jesus was not truly tempted.

This argument is equally flawed. Jesus treats it the same way as he does the argument of Satan, ignore it and continue to bear witness to the truth of who he is and why he came.

Preceding the temptation of Jesus in Luke’s narrative, he is baptized by John the Baptist and God testifies to who Jesus is. He says that Jesus is his very Son. Now both Satan and our curiosity would like to find out exactly what that means. Satan thought he could use the testimony as a weakness in Jesus, causing him to inadvertently obey Satan in the very act of proving that he was God’s Son. And we would like to make Jesus’ experience as a human to be fundamentally different from our own. In some ways we want an excuse for the fact that Jesus resisted temptation where often we fail to do so.

Jesus’ life condemns both arguments. Jesus did not allow the divine will to be bent by Satan’s schemes, but rather he remained hidden to the eyes of Satan, causing him to think he had defeated him even unto causing Jesus to die. But in fact Jesus was entrusting himself to the divine will, and through it, defeating Satan and all of his tricks for eternity!

Luke unabashedly states that Jesus ‘grew’ in wisdom. Now we would have no means of understanding a ‘growth’ in God. But only as a real human does this statement make sense. Jesus went through a progression of wisdom going from one level to another level of wisdom