
Matthew 4.2,
Luke 4.2.
Whenever
Matthew 4.2 KWL - Fasting 40 days and 40 nights,
- Jesus is famished afterwards.
Luke 4.2 KWL - …to be tested by the devil 40 days.
- Jesus is eating nothing in those days,
- and is famished by the end of them.
—and we know he’s not repenting, for he has nothing to repent; we’re fairly sure he’s not mourning; so most Christians figure he’s strongly petitioning his Father. He’s about to have a Satan-encounter, and even though he expects to win (’cause come on;
And it definitely wouldn’t hurt to fast. Well, hurt spiritually. With some obvious exceptions, like hypoglycemia, you’re gonna physically be fine till the second hunger pangs kick in. Then you’re gonna be weak. But this isn’t a physical battle anyway; it’s not like that scene in C.S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra, in which Ransom literally has to beat the devil-possessed Weston to death. That was messed up; that was based on the fleshly limitations of Lewis’s imagination. Jesus knows better than to think physical force stops a spiritual one. Fasting is actually a way of renouncing physical force: We make ourselves weak so that God can make us spiritually strong. We use
That’s why Jesus fasted: He wanted to be overprepared to overmatch the devil. So he deprived himself, and as the scripture says, he was famished afterwards. But in his spirit, he was mightier than ever.
Forty days.
Both Matthew and Luke state Jesus’s fast lasted 40 days: He ate nothing. Matthew adds “and 40 nights,” to make it clear Jesus wasn’t merely doing a daytime fast, like Muslims do for Ramadan: He ate nothing for 40 days straight.
There are those Christians who assume Jesus ate nothing and drank nothing during his fast—again, like Muslims do for Ramadan. Thing is, humans can’t go without water for that long. Blood pressure drops, organs get damaged, kidneys fail, we faint, we die. Takes about five days. So unless the Father supernaturally intervened, like the L
Christians figure
I’ve read a lot about long-term fasting. Some of the advice is mighty contradictory. Some of ’em recommend you keep yourself busy, so you can get your mind off how hungry you are. Others recommend you don’t keep yourself busy; your body needs to conserve energy, ’cause after 12 hours without food, you’re burning body fat, and you only have so much! (Well, unless you’re American. We have plenty.) But everybody recommends lots of water, and lots of sleep.
Christians have all sorts of theories about what Jesus did during those 40 days. Most assume he just spent it in a cave somewhere, praying non-stop. Yeah, okay… but what did he do while praying? ’Cause you can do other things while praying. Monks prefer manual labor, ’cause you seldom have to think while you’re working, so you can pray instead. Jesus didn’t have to just sit and stare at the wall the whole time he spoke with his Father; he coulda whittled. Or brought a Hebrew copy of Deuteronomy to memorize word-for-word, ’cause you notice in the gospels he did know it word-for-word.
But you also notice Luke 4.2 says Jesus was
And every day, he refused. And if you thought it’d be harder to resist the temptation the hungrier you got, man alive do you not know how fasting works. It actually gets easier.
I’ve heard preachers claim humans can fast no more than 40 days. I’ve also heard doctors point out that’s not so: Everybody’s different. Some of us can only fast a week and no more; some of us can fast for months. Really it all comes down to how much body fat we have on us. Once we have no more body fat to burn, our bodies start consuming its own muscle tissue, and now we’re in physical trouble.
I don’t know whether Jesus had only 40 days of body fat on him—he’s not American, remember—or whether he picked 40 days as a long-enough length of time to make his point that he was easily able to resist Satan. Either way, after 40 days it was time to tell it, “Get thee behind me,”
