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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comRobertson Word Pictures - Matthew 4:9 - 4:9
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All these things will I give thee (tauta soi panta dōsō). The devil claims the rule of the world, not merely of Palestine or of the Roman Empire. “The kingdoms of the cosmos” (Mat 4:8) were under his sway. This word for world brings out the orderly arrangement of the universe while hē oikoumenē presents the inhabited earth. Jesus does not deny the grip of the devil on the world of men, but the condition (ean and aorist subjunctive, second class undetermined with likelihood of determination), was spurned by Jesus. As Matthew has it Jesus is plainly to “fall down and worship me” (pesōn prokunēsēis moi), while Luke (Luk 4:7) puts it, “worship before me” (enōpion emou), a less offensive demand, but one that really involved worship of the devil. The ambition of Jesus is thus appealed to at the price of recognition of the devil’s primacy in the world. It was compromise that involved surrender of the Son of God to the world ruler of this darkness. “The temptation was threefold: to gain a temporal, not a spiritual, dominion; to gain it at once; and to gain it by an act of homage to the ruler of this world, which would make the self-constituted Messiah the vice-regent of the devil and not of God” (McNeile).