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Saturday 20 June 2020

Matthew 4:11,12 - Then the devil left Him

4:11
“Then the devil left Him, and angels came and attended Him”. The devil will not work forever. This is true cosmically in that there is a day of judgement, a day when Jesus returns as Lord of All. It is also true on a temporal level. When under pressure or attack of whatever sort it can seem as if it will never end. It will always end. The angels came to attend Jesus after the temptation. One might have thought there help would have been most useful during the attack, but man living under God’s authority can defeat the devil, and this was part of Jesus winning the victory for us. But then angels did come to help Him, and at times God may send angels to help us.

4:12,13

Jesus heard that John had been put in prison and so He began to preach. He began by withdrawing from Nazareth to Galilee. Galilee was known as Galilee of the Gentiles (Isaiah 9:1,2). This was because it was surrounded by Gentile peoples, and was therefore influenced by them more than other parts of Israel. Because of this the Jerusalem Jews tended to look down on Galilee. Jesus went to Capernaum, which was in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali. While often referred to as the “Sea of Galilee”, Galilee was actually a lake, some 200m below sea level. The lake lay between two hills and so was subject to sudden and fierce storms, as we see in other parts of the gospels. 

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