First, the tempter had utterly failed of his object, else it had not been renewed and the terms in which he opens his second attack imply as much.
What the precise nature and object of the forty days' temptation were is not recorded. And this is what we have called the First Stage. But it is clear, from Mark's statement, that "He was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan" (Mr 1:13), and Luke's, "being forty days tempted of the devil" (Lu 4:2), that there was a forty days' temptation before the three specific temptations afterwards recorded. Had we only this Gospel, we should suppose the temptation did not begin till after this. A supernatural power of endurance was of course imparted to the body, but this probably operated through a natural law-the absorption of the Redeemer's Spirit in the dread conflict with the tempter. So it was apparently with Moses (Ex 34:28) and Elijah (1Ki 19:8) for the same period. He was afterward an hungered-evidently implying that the sensation of hunger was unfelt during all the forty days coming on only at their close. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights-Luke says "When they were quite ended" (Lu 4:2). Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary2. Of that attack there may well have been preludes during the previous time of trial. The cravings of the body at last made themselves felt, and in them, together with the memory of the divine witness that had been borne forty days before, the Tempter found the starting-point of his first attack. He was afterward an hungred.-The words imply a partial return to the common life of sensation. suggests that their presence, their yells of hunger, their ravening fierceness, their wild glaring eyes, had left, as it were, an ineffable and ineffaceable impression of horror, in addition to the terrors and loneliness of the wilderness as such. Mark (who omits the specific history of the temptations), that our Lord “was with the wild beasts” ( Mark 1:13). Luke describes the Temptation as continuing through the whole period, so that what is recorded was but the crowning conflict, gathering into one the struggles by which it had been preluded.
The effect of such a fast on any human organism, and therefore on our Lord’s real humanity, would be to interrupt the ordinary continuity of life, and quicken all perceptions of the spiritual world into a new intensity. Prolonged fasts of nearly the same extent have been recorded in later times. Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(2) Forty days and forty nights.-Here we have an obvious parallelism with the fasts of Moses ( Exodus 34:28) and Elijah ( 1Kings 19:8), and we may well think of it as deliberately planned.
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