After fasting for forty days and forty nights, the Lord must have been very weak, and he felt hungry like any man in his circumstances. This is when the tempter approached him with the proposition that he turn the stones there into the bread he so badly needed and desired.
And Jesus "not only rejects the food his body craved, but also turns away from a greater temptation: that of using divine power to remedy, if we may say so, a personal problem (...).
“Generosity of the Lord who has humbled himself, who has fully accepted the human condition, who does not use his power as God to flee from difficulties or effort. He teaches us to be strong, to love work, to appreciate the human and divine nobility of savoring the consequences of surrender.”
This passage from the Gospel also teaches us to be particularly attentive, to ourselves and to those whom we have a greater obligation to help, in those moments of weakness, of fatigue, when we are going through a bad time, because the devil may then intensify the temptation for our lives to take other paths that are foreign to God's will.
In the second temptation, the devil took him to the Holy City and placed him on the pinnacle of the Temple. And he said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you, to bear you up in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”
And Jesus answered him: "It is also written: 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'" It was, in appearance, a deceptive temptation: if you refuse, you demonstrate a lack of full trust in God; if you accept, you force Him to send His angels for your personal benefit to save you. The devil does not know that Jesus would have no need for any angel.
A similar proposition, with almost identical wording, the Lord would hear at the end of His earthly life: "If he is the King of Israel, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him."
Christ refuses to perform useless miracles for the sake of vanity or vainglory. We must be attentive to reject similar temptations in our own lives: the desire to "look good," which can arise even in the holiest of matters. We must also be alert to false arguments that claim to be based on Holy Scripture, and avoid asking for (much less demanding) extraordinary proofs or signs to believe. The Lord gives us sufficient grace and testimony to show us the path of faith in the midst of our ordinary lives.
In the last of the temptations, the devil offers Jesus all the glory and earthly power a man could ever covet. He showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said to Him: "All these things I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." The Lord definitively rejected the tempter.
The devil always promises more than he can deliver. Happiness is far beyond his reach; every temptation is always a wretched deception. To test us, the devil relies on our ambitions. The worst of these is the desire for one's own excellence at any cost—systematically seeking ourselves in everything we do or plan. Our own "self" can, on many occasions, be the worst of idols.
Neither can we bow down before material things, turning them into false gods that would enslave us. Material goods cease to be "good" if they separate us from God and from our fellow human beings.
We must remain vigilant in constant struggle, because the tendency to desire human glory remains within us, despite having told the Lord many times that we want no glory but His. Jesus addresses us as well: "You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve." And that is what we desire and ask for: to serve God in the vocation to which He has called us.
HCD (Gemini translation)