In Matthew 4:6-7, does Jesus call himself God when he tells the devil not to test the Lord?
Robert Sungenis answers that Jesus does so only indirectly: His main point is that no one should test God by presuming on His protection, as the devil urged using Psalm 91. He holds that Jesus, as Philippians says, did not use His divine power to solve human situations, because the desert temptations were for testing and refining His human nature before the cross.
A viewer asks whether, in Matthew 4:6-7, Jesus calls himself God when he tells the devil not to test him.
Answer
Indirectly you could say that, yes. The devil asked him to throw himself off the cliff and quoted Psalm 91, that the angels would not let him dash his foot against a stone, and Jesus came back and said it is also written, you shall not test the Lord your God. What Jesus meant was, yes, I know Psalm 91 says God will protect me, but I am not to take advantage of that by doing extraordinary things to see whether God will commit to protecting me; if you find yourself testing God, you are in deep sin. So he is giving a lesson on how God would treat the situation, not so much asserting that he is God at this point. Look, Jesus put his divinity on the shelf, as Philippians says; he divested himself of his divinity, not in the sense that he was not still divine, but that he would not use the power of his divinity to solve human situations. The whole point of going into the desert to be tempted was to conform his human nature to what God wanted it to be, so that Jesus could become the savior he was meant to be. We already know his divine nature would not fall into sin; it is his human nature that had to be tested and refined before the three-and-a-half-year trek to the cross.