By Clement Harrold

February 18, 2026

The Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent gives us the dramatic scene of Christ entering the desert to do spiritual battle with the devil.

This testing in the desert is also the theme for the first episode of Bible Across America Lent 2026, which you can sign up for here.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the deeper meaning of Christ’s wilderness showdown with Satan, as well as the encouragement we can draw from His example.

Divinity Veiled

Perhaps the first point to note about the temptations of Christ is one put forward by many of the early Church Fathers, namely, that the devil’s objective in these temptations is to ascertain whether or not Jesus is divine.

This perspective is helpful, especially since it seems unlikely that the devil would try to persuade Jesus to worship him—the most blatant of the three temptations—if he already knew for certain that Jesus was God in the flesh.

It makes more sense, then, to say that the devil was still trying to figure Jesus out: On the one hand, he had just witnessed a heavenly voice at the Jordan describing Jesus as His beloved Son; on the other hand, he kept observing Jesus doing distinctly un-Godlike things, such as fasting and getting baptized, not to mention His becoming human in the first place.

Explaining the devil’s perplexity, St. John Chrysostom notes that Satan “neither could believe that [Jesus] was a mere man, because of the things spoken concerning Him; nor on the other hand receive it that He was Son of God, seeing Him as he did in hunger.”

Since the devil remains unsure as to whether Jesus is truly divine or merely some exceptionally holy messianic figure, the strategy he employs in the desert is one of baiting Jesus into revealing His true identity.

Adam, Israel, and Jesus

Next we should pay attention to the location and length of this Gospel episode. The evangelists tell us that Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert. This is significant because it’s in the desert that the Israelites get stuck as a punishment for their disobedience following their liberation from Egypt.

But if the desert is supposed to make us think of ancient Israel, it should also point us even further back to Adam, our first parent. Adam was placed together with Eve in a garden paradise, but because of their disobedience, this primordial couple was cast out of the garden, and the whole world was turned into a spiritual desert as a result.

The connection between Adam and Jesus during the latter’s time in the desert is especially prominent in St. Mark’s brief account of the temptations. Mark uses just two sentences to describe the episode, but in those two sentences he includes a detail that doesn’t appear in either Matthew or Luke: Jesus was “with the wild beasts” during His time in the wilderness.

The reason Mark includes this seemingly random detail is to remind us of Adam, who prior to the Fall was able to live peacefully with the beasts of the earth. After the Fall, that original harmony was lost; now wild animals pose a danger to human beings. And yet, in Mark’s desert scene, Christ is presented as the new Adam who is once again able to dwell safely with the wild beasts. In other words, the Son of God is beginning to restore and heal everything which was broken and wounded by our first father’s sin.

Interestingly, the connection Mark draws between Jesus and Adam is even stronger in Luke’s telling of the temptations in the desert. We see this when we compare Luke’s and Matthew’s genealogies of Christ—those long lists of hard-to-pronounce names describing Jesus’ family tree. When we make this comparison, the most striking thing to note about the two genealogies is that they run in reverse order.

In the case of Matthew, his genealogy begins with Abraham and ends with Jesus. But with Luke, the genealogy goes the other way: it begins with Jesus, and it goes all the way back—not just to Abraham, but to Adam! What makes this so significant is that the mention of Adam at the end of the genealogy is the final verse in Luke’s Gospel before he begins his temptation narrative:

the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil. (Luke 3:38-4:1-2)

When we remember that the chapter and verse divisions in the Bible aren’t original (they were added much later), the implication becomes clear: Luke, like Mark, is highlighting for us the fact that when Jesus goes into the desert, He does so as the new Adam.

So much for the location of Jesus’ temptations, but what about the length?

Forty is an important number in the Bible, symbolizing a period of purification and growth. For example, Moses spends forty days praying and fasting on Mount Sinai while communicating with God (see Exod 34:28), and the prophet Elijah fasts for forty days during his pilgrimage to Mount Horeb (see 1 Kgs 19:8).

Even more importantly, the number forty symbolizes the forty years that Israel spent wandering in the desert. We all know the story: Israel was liberated from Egypt when God led them across the Red Sea, but because the Israelites kept returning to idolatry, it took forty long years of spiritual purification in the wilderness before God finally allowed them to cross the river Jordan and enter into the promised land.

This means that when the evangelists tell us that Jesus is being led by the Spirit not just into the desert, but into the desert for forty days, they’re pointing out to us that Jesus is in some sense reenacting and undoing not only the disobedience of Adam in the garden, but also the unfaithfulness of the Israelites in the wilderness.

The Way of the Cross

There’s so much more we could say about the deeper meaning of Christ’s testing in the desert, but for brevity’s sake we’ll end with this simple but crucial point: through His wilderness temptations, Jesus chooses the Cross.

To see why, consider this line from St. Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel: “For it was fitting that [Christ] should go out into the desert, as though to a one-on-one combat with the devil.” Here we need to ask ourselves: what did this combat involve exactly?

Now we know it didn’t involve Jesus punching Satan in the face, or striking him with a thunderbolt, or summoning twelve legions of angels to drag him off to hell. Rather, the way Jesus conquers evil in the desert is the same way He conquers evil from the Cross: not through power and strength, but through humility and self-sacrifice.

Faced with the temptation to bring all the nations of the earth under His dominion without ever having to face the looming Passion that awaits Him, Jesus chooses instead the path of loving obedience to the Father.

And so, what this whole episode so powerfully conveys is that when the harmony of creation was shattered by man’s sin, our God did not remain distant or removed.

Instead, He became one of us. Our God took on our frailty and weakness; He entered our suffering, and He chose to redeem us from the inside out. Hence, in the desert as on the Cross, Jesus reveals Himself as the perfect Son of God who fights in the place of sinners and who is victorious on our behalf.