Is there anyone here who can testify that they have fulfilled the forty days and forty nights of fasting in the same manner that the Lord Jesus fulfilled it in carrying out His role as the Son of the Living God?
Let us not forget the Lord Jesus’ instruction to Simon Peter. As our model, we should follow in His footsteps.
1 PETER 2:21
21 For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps:
Fasting was commanded by the Lord God to His chosen people so that they could fulfill it. The Lord Jesus, in His role as the Son of the Living God, fulfilled it through His forty days and forty nights of fasting. Why, then, has it been preached and required by some ministers in a purely literal and physical sense? They have relied on their own understanding to interpret the command (similar to the devil's understanding), even though it is extremely impossible to fulfill it literally.
Why was the devil's literal and physical interpretation followed?
Did they not read that the Lord God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit?
He told them that on the day they ate it, they would surely die.
Yet they did not die physically on that very day. This shows that God's words were not meant to be understood only in a literal, physical sense.
GENESIS 2:16-17
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die.
GENESIS 3:4
4 And the serpent said unto the woman,
Ye shall not surely die:
Therefore, the Lord God's command regarding fasting is not meant to be understood in a literal, physical sense, but in a spiritual sense.
ROMANS 7:14
14 For we know that
the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.