“Then Jesus answered them: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4)
The more I write about Orthodox Christianity, the more I find myself returning to the fundamentals. For instance, among the first words from the lips of Jesus Christ is the phrase, “One does not live by bread alone.” He tells us so much in this phrase:
- Most of us have never known true hunger, yet He was near starvation at the time, having fasted for forty days and nights. For Him it was the one thing that He most needed;
- He addressed this phrase to the devil. Many feel that faith is something rational…a way of dealing with the world…a philosophy of life that gives meaning to existence. It has these attributes; however, we are part of a cosmic war waged by Satan against God. These are not abstract concepts, good versus evil, not our animal urges, but God Who is Person, and a true Father Who has faith in us offering His Son for our salvation. He trusts us to be capable of dealing with the devil’s wiles. He permits us to be exposed to evil and triumph;
- Our Lord is quoting from the Bible. He demonstrates for us:
- That we must know the Bible and the way to use it;
- We ought not to rely on ourselves to respond to Satan, and our own ability to argue with the master of lies and deception, but to seek the Word of God.
We do indeed require bread, or nourishment, but it is not all that we need. This is the root of many decisions in life. Because we must care for our welfare, life is an ongoing process of decisions. What do we do with the blessings provided by the Lord? How are we best able to respond to all His gifts? How do we share our possessions with society? Bread is a euphemism—a slang expression for money. Here too is an American challenge. How much money do we need to have a comfortable life, much less pleasing to God? I think of families who move from single bedroom apartments to split-levels and on to mansions and never leave the county. Suggest it’s self-indulgence and you offend them. Is that the best use of bread from heaven? We all recognize the dangers of excessive income. An eighteen-year-old basketball phenomenon is given a $90m. contract for endorsing sneakers. How will that affect his soul’s well being?
”...but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”
A phrase once used by servants of the 19th century: “I hear and I obey” applies to us in reading the Bible. What profit is it to read the holy words and not apply them to ourselves? One can take courses in college on the Bible as literature. It’s taught like any other classic: Homer, Shakespeare, or Dante. It’s read and analyzed, but not as written by the Holy Spirit. It’s as though one is reading the lyrics of an opera and never hearing the music. Worse, because a talented musician might construct alternative sounds based on the text and approximate or even improve on the original; but nobody knows the mind of God nor the means by which the Holy Spirit inspired the writers and composers of the Holy Bible, assembling it in the very form handed down to us millennia later.