The Temptation of Jesus Christ
Jesus, being the embodiment of the Love of God wanted to approach human beings with this Love which could conquer everything. At the same time while He was still maturing in the wilderness and while He had not received His full Powers, He was vulnerable to the possibility of misusing this Power in His Love for mankind and also in His enthusiasm for His Mission.
The Adversary (Lucifer) knew this and wanted to use this period of vulnerability which was actually the only opportunity and window left to him. It is inconceivable that Lucifer would have wanted to help the work of the Light with these schemes. In fact this is why they were called temptations. Schemes which were intended to do maximum harm to Jesus if yielded to.
To take just one example, Lucifer told Jesus to jump down from a height saying that the Angels would bear Him in their arms and save Him. If He had jumped and indeed had been rescued by Angels, then the people more than ever would have flocked to Him and His Mission would have been easier to accomplish. This, however, was not the intended aim of this. If Jesus had jumped He would have harmed Himself and probably would have been killed thereby thwarting the Mission of the Christ even before the start.
The same applies to the other temptations. They were meant to do incalculable harm. He meant to induce Jesus into doing something that must prove impossible for Him thereby either harm Him physically or diminish His influence among the people or even make Him begin to doubt the potency of His Powers if these things failed as He tried to do them. In whatever case, incalculable harm would have been done and a very terrible blow would have been dealt to the work of Redemption right at the very start.
Jesus’ pure noble intuition would not allow this, however, and this simplicity of intuition allowed Him to prevail over what would otherwise have been catastrophic, allowing Him to easily overcome them and then begin His Mission in earnest. Let it be said that it is impossible to jump from heights without suffering some physical injury of some sort. Jesus, by incarnating on earth subjected Himself voluntarily to the physical laws of His Father and would have been harmed if He had yielded to that temptation. The same goes for turning stones to bread. This is simply impossible and it was a ploy to make Jesus lose confidence in the potency of His Powers and to make Him confused about when and how to use them.
Lucifer wanted to destroy the Mission of Jesus right at the beginning, thwarting the Work of Redemption and thus preserve his own power and authority over mankind. He knew that with the successful Mission of Jesus his power over human beings would diminish and we would come to recognise him for who he really was. This he could not bear and attempted to attack Jesus when He thought that He was most vulnerable. After having failed in this because he could not get hold of Jesus Himself he now set out in search of human beings whom he could then use as tools for the attacks, hence the slanders, calumny and so on that was brought on Jesus when He began His Mission.