I used to wonder why Matthew was the first gospel in the Bible when the gospel of Mark was written first. The answer is obvious to me now. Salvation was for the Jew first, then the Gentile. God never intended to leave us out. God’s original plan was for His chosen people to be His priests and for them to take salvation to the Gentiles. It was only after the Jews rejected the Messiah that God turned to the Gentiles to build His church. Getting back to my point, the gospel of Matthew is the “Jewish gospel” and therefore the first of the gospels by right. The Apostle Matthew was of course a Jew and he wrote his gospel to and for the Jews in their native Hebrew language.
Matthew establishes the genealogy of Jesus and bridges the Old and New Testaments with all the references to the Old Testament Scriptures about Jesus being fulfilled in the New Testament. The Jewish people are jealous of their God. The Jews thought God was for them only and salvation was also for them alone. The Jews thought the Gentiles were inferior and unclean and rather to be shunned. It was a hard pill to swallow when God made it clear that salvation was for all men and we were all children of God. God also made women the equal of men which was not the norm. Through the genealogy of Jesus God makes all this clear because it contains four women, one of which was a harlot and another was a Gentile. Jesus came to save everyone.
After the baptism of Jesus, and before He began His ministry, Jesus went to the Judean desert where He fasted for forty days while being tested by the devil (as we all are). Satan tried to get Jesus to turn rocks into bread, then jump off the temple which was 15 stories high and the highest building in antiquity, and finally Jesus was offered all the kingdoms of the earth which Satan had acquired due to Adam’s fall in the garden. The point is, Jesus stopped Satan by quoting Scripture. Jesus was a man and didn’t use any of His powers while on earth. Jesus used God’s Word to defeat Satan and we also have that spiritual weapon today that we can use in the same manner to defeat Satan if we speak it in faith.
Jesus was setting the example for us to follow. Satan quoted Scripture to Jesus so obviously Satan had read the Old Testament and, by extension, the New Testament when it was written. When we face off against Satan we don’t have a chance unless we know the Bible as well as he does. That’s why it’s important to get into God’s Word every day and put on the shield of faith. If Jesus had given in to Satan He would have sinned and failed the test and therefore Jesus would have been an unworthy sacrifice to redeem man from their sins. Of course there was no chance of that since Jesus was God. The story about the trials of Jesus was meant to be an example for us to follow when tempted by the devil. We are to use God’s Word to defend ourselves and pray for God’s help. Satan has no power over the children of God other than what we give him.