He spoke out loud:
"Go away from me, Satan! For the Scriptures say, 'Thou shall worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve!'"
The voice said no more. A great quietness came over Jesus. There was no great thing that he needed to do right away. He was the Messiah, but he did not need to make the country wealthy. He did not need to jump from the Temple, and he did not need to command an army or rule an empire.
There was one thing that he would have to do, but he could not tell anybody about it yet. It was going to be his secret for a while. But someday everybody would see what he was doing. Someday it would be understood.
And now it was time to be on his way. He had been in the wilderness forty days, and that was long enough. He found the trail back to the outside world, and soon he was on the road to Galilee.
When Jesus got home to Galilee, he began to preach to people in the streets. What he said at first was very much like what John the Baptist said:
"Give up your sins, and begin to live a new life, for God has come to rule over you!"
But the crowds that heard Jesus were not so large as those that went to the Jordan to hear John.