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 THE TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. 
 
THE 
 
 TEMPTATION OF CHRIST 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE S. ''BARRETT, B.A., 
 
 PASTOR OF PRINCE’S STREET CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, NORWICH. 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 MACNIYEN & WALLACE 
 
 1883. 
 
TO THE CHURCH AND CONGREGATION 
 
 TO WHOM FOR MANY YEARS 
 
 IT HAS BEEN HIS HAPPINESS TO MINISTER, 
 
 THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 
 
 WITH THEIR PASTOR’S AFFECTION AND RESPECT. 
 

 
 
 ' -i 't 
 
 ■ 
 
 '' '73 
 
 
i! Of ^ 
 
 J^PBtKCBTOS 
 
 BEG. OCT ' eo ' 5 . 
 
 TH»OLOG iG11 ;,, 
 
 PREFACE.' 
 
 The substance of.this volume was delivered 
 in the ordinary course of my ministry to the 
 
 church and congregation to whom I have 
 
 / 
 
 ventured to dedicate it. That it retains traces 
 of its original character, I am fully aware ; but 
 as this series is entitled “The Household 
 Library of Exposition,” and is intended rather 
 for family reading than for the discussion of any 
 of the great critical or theological questions 
 connected with Scripture, I have not cared to 
 
 remove altogether from the book that practical 
 
 ✓ 
 
 colouring which is appropriate to most sermons. 
 At the same time I trust that this attempt 
 to expound the Temptation of Christ, in its 
 relation both to Himself, and to our own temp¬ 
 tations, will not altogether fail of the character 
 of an “ exposition ” properly so called. It is 
 
Vlll 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 impossible to study, for any length of time, any 
 part of the life or words of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, without being painfully conscious how 
 far short of their infinite meaning all our 
 thoughts and words ever fall; and no one can 
 feel this, in regard to the present volume, more 
 keenly than myself. If, however, this little 
 book brings any of its readers nearer to Him 
 of Whom it chiefly speaks; if it enables them 
 to feel more deeply the reality of His humanity, 
 and the greatness of the sacrifice and of the 
 struggle He undertook in the redemption of 
 the world; if it helps any soul “ sore beset of 
 sin ” to fight more courageously “ the good 
 fight of the faith, ” and to rely more trustfully 
 on the sympathy and help of Him, Who “in that 
 He Himself suffered being tempted, is able to 
 succour them that are tempted,” I shall be 
 thankful that, with whatsoever imperfections, I 
 have been permitted to publish it. 
 
 It only remains to say that the quotations 
 from the New Testament are all taken from the 
 ‘ Revised Version ; ” a version which, in spite of 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IX 
 
 some defects in rhythm, and occasionally a too 
 minute scrupulosity of scholarship, I regard as 
 the most precious, because the most faithful, 
 translation of the Book of Life yet given to the 
 English speaking nations of the world. 
 
 GEORGE S. BARRETT. 
 
 N orwich, May 1883. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. The Possibility and Necessity of the 
 
 Temptation ..... 3 
 
 II. The Reality of the Temptation . . 23 
 
 III. The Instrument and the Divine 
 
 Ordering of the Temptation . 45 
 
 IV. The Time and Place of the Temptation 65 
 
 V. The First Temptation. . . . 91 
 
 VI. The Second Temptation . . . 115 
 
 VII. The Third Temptation . . .141 
 
 1 
 
 VIII. The Life of Temptation . 165 
 
 IX. The Ministry of Angels . . 197 
 
 X. Christ’s Victory, the Pledge and 
 Power of our Victory over 
 
 Temptation and Sin 
 
 217 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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I. 
 
 THE POSSIBILITY AND THE 
 NECESSITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 A 
 
“For it became Him, for whom are all things, and through 
 whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make 
 
 the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”_ 
 
 Hebrews ii. 10. 
 
THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY OF THE 
 
 TEMPTATION. 
 
 Before entering on any exposition of the 
 Temptation of Christ as recorded for us in the 
 Gospels, there are some preliminary questions 
 of grave importance which demand our serious 
 consideration. 
 
 Assuming for the time the account of the 
 temptation given by the evangelists, it may be 
 asked how was temptation possible to Christ, or 
 if its abstract possibility be conceded, how could 
 it in any way have been necessary for Him to 
 have passed through any personal conflict with 
 the Tempter, seeing that from the first hour of 
 His human life to its last, He was “holy, guile¬ 
 less, undefiled, and separated from sinners.” We ^ 
 can readily understand the necessity for so sharp 
 a discipline as temptation in our own case, 
 because we are conscious of impurity and im* 
 
4 THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY 
 
 perfection, and these are often so intimately 
 mixed up with our character and life that 
 nothing but the most searching fire—and 
 v/ temptation is such a fire—can separate the dross 
 from the gold; but why should Christ have 
 ^ needed the fire, seeing there was no dross to be 
 separated from the gold in Him ? Was not the 
 v Lord Jesus, for this is what the question really 
 comes to, to p go od to be tempted ? 
 
 It is to the consideration and discussion of this 
 question we now invite attention. 
 
 There can be no doubt that if the Lord Jesus 
 Christ had not become incarnate He would never 
 have been tempted, and for the simple reason 
 that temptation is not possible to God. St 
 James (chap. i. 13) tells us that “ God cannot 
 be tempted with evil,” and although the literal 
 accuracy of the translation which both the 
 “Authorised,” and the “Revised ” Versions have 
 given of the original* may be open to question, 
 still there is no doubt that the Greek fairly bears 
 the meaning given to it in our version, even 
 though it should mean something more as well. 
 Probably the nearest English equivalent would 
 be “inexperienced in evil,” and a Being who has 
 
 * <X7 reipacTTOs. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 5 
 
 no personal experience of evil must necessarily 
 be an untempted and untemptable Being. In 
 fact we cannot conceive of God being tempted. 
 Temptation involves, as we shall see, the possi- 
 b ility of yield ing to it, and therefore of sin, but 
 we can no more think of the possibility of God 
 sinning than we can think of the possibility of 
 God ceasing to exist. Necessary Being and 
 necessary Goodness are equally inseparable from 
 our idea of God, and although it may be difficult 
 for us to understand how a Being Whose nature 
 is necessarily good can possess, as we believe 
 God possesses, a will which is everlastingly free, 
 and which freely chooses that which is good, 
 yet the solution of the difficulty is not to be 
 found in the denial of either of these apparently 
 contradictory truths, but in a higher truth, pos¬ 
 sibly inconceivable by us, which harmonizes and 
 reconciles them both. 
 
 God is above the possibility of temptation. ^ 
 
 But if God is above temptation the beasts are ^ 
 below it.* It is impossible to think of a beast 
 being tempted, but for the opposite reason to 
 that which made it impossible to think of God 
 
 * I owe this thought to Principal Fairbairn’s suggestive 1 
 studies of the Temptation published in the Expositor. \ j 
 
6 
 
 THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY 
 
 being tempted. God is too high, but the beasts 
 are too low, to be tempted. 
 
 They are removed from the possibility of 
 falling below their own nature by being placed 
 on so low a level that a fall from it is impossible. 
 God, on the other hand, is equally removed from 
 the possibility of falling, but through the pos¬ 
 session of a Nature which by its eternal and 
 necessary goodness places Him too high for even 
 the approach of evil. The “ beasts that perish ” 
 are at one end of the scale of being, whilst the 
 Infinite and Eternal God is at the other, and 
 of neither is temptation thinkable. But with 
 man the case is altogether different. Standing 
 midway between God and the lower animals, 
 allied in one part of his nature with God above, 
 and in another part with the beasts below him, 
 with a lower and a higher nature ever contend¬ 
 ing for the mastery within him, by the very con¬ 
 stitution of his nature man is necessarily a 
 temptable being. He may rise to the Divine 
 Image, or he may sink into the mere animal, 
 but which of these two opposing alternatives 
 shall be his final destiny can be revealed only 
 by trial. And hence temptation is not an 
 accidental incident of man’s existence on earth, 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 7 
 
 it is an essential part of that state simply be¬ 
 cause it is a state of probation. The gracious 
 purposes which temptation is made to fulfil in 
 the spiritual training and perfecting of his nature 
 we shall consider later on ; it is sufficient now to 
 emphasize the fact that by the very conditions 
 and laws of our nature we are subject, and 
 necessarily subject to temptation. We are not 
 
 above it, as God is : nor are we below it, as the 
 
 * 
 
 beasts are : we are in it, as men. 
 
 Nor is this all. The possession of an animal 
 nature is not the only possible source of temp¬ 
 tation, or the “ angels who kept not their own 
 principality” would never, and could never, 
 have fallen. It would seem that the conditions 
 of any moral goodness possible to a creature^ 
 necessarily involve the possibility of its opposite. 
 For what is goodness ? It is not doing the 
 will of God, or the sun and stars would have 
 a right to claim this glory for themselves: 
 it is the doing the will of God by a will free 
 to obey, and free therefore to disobey, that 
 will. The only conception we can form of 
 spiritual goodness in man is of his voluntary 
 and glad submission to the will of God ; if the 
 will be coerced into obedience, goodness .is at an 
 
8 
 
 THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY 
 
 end. Goodness, both towards God and towards 
 man, ceases the moment its opposite becomes 
 impossible; and hence the highest and the 
 spiritual part of man’s nature, his will, must 
 necessarily be as temptable as his lowest and 
 animal nature. In fact, the most perilous temp¬ 
 tations which assault us are not exhausted in 
 the sins of the flesh. Pride, avarice, vain glory, 
 malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness, are 
 distinctly spiritual sins, and for their motives 
 appeal to a region of man’s nature far removed 
 v from his bodily appetites. In whatever way 
 we regard man, so far as his existence here is 
 concerned, temptation is inseparable from our 
 idea of goodness. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that if the Lord 
 v Jesus was “ in all points made like unto His 
 brethren, yet without sin,” one part of His 
 voluntary assumption of our human nature 
 must have been his submission to temptation. 
 Lifted above temptation as the eternal Son 
 of God, Christ deliberately put Himself within 
 its reach by becoming the Son of Man. To say 
 that Christ was temptable is really only another 
 way of saying that Christ was man. The 
 possibility of His being tempted, and the 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 9 
 
 reality of his humanity, are inseparably con¬ 
 joined. 
 
 But even this does not fully meet the difficulty 
 which surrounds the temptation of our Lord— 
 it may explain its possibility; it does not justify^ 
 its necessity. We need temptation because of 
 the imperfection and sinfulness of our natures; 
 but for this very reason it would seem to have 
 been needless for Christ. Was He not, as 
 
 has already been asked, too good to be t/ 
 tempted ? 
 
 Now to this difficulty two sufficient replies 
 may be given. 
 
 In the first place, all human goodness needs 
 the strain of temptation to reveal its reality and ^ 
 depth. Even when that goodness, as in the 
 case of the Man Christ Jesus, and in His case 
 alone, is absolutely without fault or imperfec¬ 
 tion, temptation is still required to prove its 
 strength, and by the proof to reveal the depth 
 and solidity of its foundations in the soul. The 
 ship that lies at anchor in the harbour when 
 hardly a breath of wind ripples the surface of 
 the water, may hold to her moorings, but this is 
 no proof of the strength and soundness of her 
 cable, for no strain has been put upon it; but 
 
IO 
 
 THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY 
 
 if she is out at sea, and caught in a furious storm, 
 and drifting fast on to a lee shore, and then 
 lets go her anchor, and it holds, there is proof 
 enough of the quality of her cable. The soldier 
 who marches proudly along on a review day 
 may be a brave man at heart, and a good soldier, 
 but no one can be sure of it. See him under 
 fire in actual battle, and you will know in a 
 moment of what stuff he is made. Just so 
 v temptation is at once a test and a revelation of 
 all true goodness. 
 
 No doubt it may reveal, and often does reveal 
 to us, unsuspected weaknesses and flaws in the 
 character, just as the storm at sea may show the 
 rottenness of the cable by snapping it, or the 
 battlefield may prove the soldier to be a coward, 
 but we cannot avoid this. All proof involves 
 risk, the risk of discovering weakness as well 
 as strength, but there, is no other way of 
 being assured there is no weakness to be 
 discovered. 
 
 Here, then, is the first great reason for the 
 ^ necessity of temptation. Man needs it, not 
 because he is fallen and sinful, but because he 
 is man. Had Adam never fallen, every child 
 of Adam would have required the same discip- 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 I I 
 
 line which their first parents passed through 
 to test the reality of his loyalty to God. The 
 tree of forbidden fruit would have been found 
 in every Paradise. 
 
 We may now see how it was that the Lord 
 Jesus Christ in becoming man voluntarily sub¬ 
 jected Himself to the discipline of temptation. 
 
 It tested and revealed, as it alone could, the 
 inner allegiance of His human soul to God. 
 The struggle with the tempter, prolonged for ^ 
 forty days, and culminating at the hour of 
 greatest weakness in the great temptations 
 recorded in the Gospels, was at once the proof 
 that He who came forth victorious from such a 
 conflict was no holiday soldier, no make-believe 
 hero, but in very deed and truth “the Cap¬ 
 tain of our salvation,” Himself foremost in the 
 thickest and fiercest fight; and also the proof 
 that if in such a fight no weak places in His 
 armour were discovered, it could only have been 
 because there were none to be found. The 
 majesty and glory of the human goodness of 
 Jesus were never seen more brightly than 
 when He came forth from the wilderness 
 victorious over every assault which the craft 
 and malignity of Satan could devise, “ tempted 
 
12 
 
 THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY 
 
 in all points like as we are, yet without 
 sin.” 
 
 But temptation accomplishes more than the 
 revelation of the reality of goodness, it positively 
 strengthens goodness by assaulting it. To say 
 that a man who has been met by some subtle 
 inducement to evil, and who has refused to yield 
 to it, although at the cost of personal loss and 
 suffering, has shown the reality of his goodness, 
 is only to say half the truth. He has not only 
 maintained his former goodness unimpaired, but 
 v he has received new moral strength from the very 
 act of resisting evil. He is a stronger and a 
 better man than he was before he was assaulted 
 by the tempter. We cannot pass through any 
 temptation and come out of it morally unaltered. 
 We may yield to it, in which case we have done 
 more than sin against God, we have made the 
 v n ^xt act of sin easier by weakening the strength 
 of the will, and by deadening the keenness and 
 sensitiveness of the conscience; or we may 
 resist it and overcome it, but then the victory 
 is more than a victory, it has actually multiplied 
 the forces of righteousness within us, and has 
 made the next victory easier, and the next sin 
 harder, by the moral strength which it has im- 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 13 
 
 parted to the whole character. There are some 
 shells which cling to the rocks in spite of the 
 continual buffetting of the tides, but these 
 shells are thickest and strongest where the tide 
 has smitten them with its fullest might, and 
 just so the defences of the soul against evil 
 grow firmer, and its armour of righteousness 
 becomes more formidable, in proportion to the 
 evil which has been resisted and victoriously 
 overcome. 
 
 And this is why no human character becomes 
 stable or strong in goodness until it has been 
 exposed to temptation. Shield it from all the 
 fierce blasts of temptation, preserve it in a 
 forced isolation from the world, and it will 
 remain as unstable as water beneath a summer 
 sky : but let the rough frosts of winter fall on 
 it, and the biting winds lash it, and it will 
 slowly knit itself into compact and solid 
 strength, and like the ice, will defy the storm 
 -which has only given it strength by attacking it. 
 Christian parents sometimes fondly wish that it 
 were possible for them to preserve their children 
 through life from all experience of the evil which 
 they know too well awaits them in the great world 
 without, and that they could throw around the 
 
14 the possibility and necessity 
 
 conscience of childhood a shield, through which 
 no assaults of temptation could pierce, but they 
 could hardly wish for their children a more 
 unwise or fatal boon. To preserve goodness 
 from being assaulted by evil, is to endanger the 
 stability and growth of goodness itself; for just 
 as plants which have been reared in a hot-house, 
 and shielded from every wintry blast, are never 
 strong, but are in danger of being cut off by the 
 first frost they have to endure, so children who 
 have been brought up in an unnatural and 
 artificial atmosphere of piety, who have been 
 guarded by mistaken parental love from those 
 recurring conflicts with evil which, however 
 slight in themselves, are enough to test a child’s 
 strength,—and are intended by a merciful Provi¬ 
 dence to develop that strength by testing it,— 
 are often the first to make “ shipwreck of 
 faith,” and sometimes of moral character itself, 
 when they have to endure the sharp discipline 
 of personal contact with the world, and with the 
 evil that is in the world. 
 
 “ Blessed,” says St James,*—and as we read 
 the words we cannot forget he was our Lord’s 
 brother after the flesh, and may have been 
 
 * James i. 12. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION, 
 
 15 
 
 thinking of this conflict in the wilderness as he 
 wrote them,—“ is the man that endureth tempta¬ 
 tion,” and we may still repeat the same words. 
 
 He is “ blessed ” if he “ endures temptation,” 
 
 not if he yields to it—because each assault of 
 the tempter has strengthened the faith it was 
 intended to destroy. He is “ blessed ” because 
 he comes forth from the conflict a nobler and 
 a stronger man. The storm which threatened 
 to tear the tree from the mountain side has 
 only made it drive its roots the deeper down, 
 and has strengthened its anchorage there. 
 
 All this is true of the temptation of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. There are deep words in the Epistle *-* 
 to the Hebrews, the full meaning of which we can¬ 
 not grasp, which speak of Jesus having been 
 “ made perfect through sufferings,” of His having 
 “ learned obedience by the things which He 
 suffered,” and we may understand something 
 of the meaning of these words when we read 
 them in the light of the temptation in the wil¬ 
 derness. 
 
 Temptation did for Jesus what it does for all ^ 
 who overcome it by the grace of God. He 
 emerged from the deadly conflict with Satan, 
 lifted, so far as His human goodness was con- 
 
16 THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY 
 
 cerned, to a loftier moral greatness, a surer and 
 more commanding strength, than would have 
 been possible without the struggle. Not with¬ 
 out the deepest meaning does St Luke conclude 
 his account of the temptation with these signi 
 ficant words, “And Jesus returned IN THE 
 power OF the spirit into Galilee.” * 
 
 But we have not yet exhausted the meaning 
 and purpose of our Lord’s temptations. We 
 have seen their value to Himself as a personal 
 discipline through which His human character 
 needed to pass, at once to test and to confirm 
 the reality of its goodness, but this is not the 
 only value they had. They had a representative 
 as well as a personal significance, as being the 
 temptations and the victory of One who was 
 not only “the man Christ Jesus,” but the Elder 
 Brother and Head of the whole human race. 
 Christ was “ the Son of Man.” This name was 
 His own name for Himself; a title never used 
 until He created it, and, with one significant ex¬ 
 ception,never used in the New Testament 
 except by Christ Himself. It was a title which 
 
 * Luke iv. 14. 
 
 + The exception is in the dying speech of Stephen, Acts vii. 
 56. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION, 
 
 I? 
 
 in one pregnant word expressed not only the ^ 
 true humanity of the Lord Jesus, but His eter-' 
 nal and universal relation to humanity as a 
 whole; the unique character of His own humanity 
 as summing up and therefore representing all 
 that belonged to humanity as such, and as re¬ 
 vealing for the first time to the world the beauty 
 and nobleness of that ideal goodness of which 
 human nature was capable, and which was 
 hinted in the great words which accompanied 
 the creation of Adam, “ Let us make man in 
 our image, after our likeness.” The life of Jesus, 
 in this aspect, was as truly a representative life, u " 
 as His death was a representative death : it was 
 the life, in a word, of One who as really repre¬ 
 sented man to God as He represented God to 
 man. 
 
 It is in this light that the temptation and the 
 victory of Christ reach their last and fullest sig¬ 
 nificance. Christ came to restore a fallen race 
 to its loyalty to God ; He came to redeem a 
 world of sinners from their sin ; to “ destroy the 
 works of the devil,” and in the place of the 
 usurping kingdom of Satan to set up once more, 
 and on foundations which should never again 
 be shaken, the everlasting kingdom of heaven. 
 
 B 
 
I 8 THE POSSIBILITY AND NECESSITY 
 
 And the first public and official act of Him who 
 was the Redeemer and Saviour of the world is 
 to encounter the head and representative of the 
 kingdom of evil, to be assaulted by his most 
 furious malice, but to come forth from the con¬ 
 flict not vanquished but victor. The first victory 
 of the new Head of Humanity over the devil is 
 at once the prophecy and the pledge of His 
 final triumph over sin, and of His redemption 
 of the race with which He had now for ever 
 identified Himself,from “the bondage of corrup¬ 
 tion” into “the liberty of the glory of the children 
 of God.” 
 
 But the victory of Christ over the devil be¬ 
 comes even more significant when it is con- 
 * trasted with the fall of Adam. Adam was the 
 first head and representative of humanity, and 
 as such had to endure, as Christ endured, the 
 temptation of the devil. But in everything else 
 how immeasurably unlike were “ the first ” and 
 “ the second Adam.” Adam fell; Christ con¬ 
 quered, and conquered although He was beset 
 1 by a fierceness of assault Adam never knew: 
 / conquered, although fighting at a disadvantage 
 Adam never experienced. 
 
 Adam was tempted in a garden. Christ was 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 19 
 
 tempted in a wilderness. Adam was tempted 
 in the fulness of bodily strength, and when 
 feebleness and infirmity of the flesh gave no 
 edge to the sword of the tempter. Christ was 
 tempted when worn and weakened by a fast 
 that had lasted without interruption for forty 
 days. Adam was tempted once. Christ was 
 “ forty days tempted of the devil,” the long, 
 persistent assaults of the devil culminating in 
 the three final and typical temptations the 
 details of which are preserved to us in the 
 Gospels. And finally, Adam fell ; but Christ 
 overcame. 
 
 It is the first great act of the redemption of ^ 
 the race from sin. It is the first clarion note 
 that announces the advent of the new Head of 
 humanity, the Redeemer of the world. It is 
 the first conclusive defeat of the kingdom of 
 darkness in that holy war which shall never end 
 until “the end shall come” and the “kingdom of 
 the world become the kingdom of our God and 
 His Christ,” who “shall reign for ever and ever.” 
 
 The shame and reproach of our first parents’ 
 fall are already rolled away, and as the Son of 
 Man returns from this mighty conflict in the 
 wilderness with the prince of darkness,^victorious 
 
20 THE POSSIBILITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 in every assault, we may hear even from these 
 desert sands a voice sounding in every dungeon 
 bidding the prisoners, long held captive by 
 Satan, “ Lift up your heads because your re¬ 
 demption draweth nigh.” 
 

 II. 
 
 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
* ‘ Who in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and 
 supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was 
 able to save him from death, and having been heard for his 
 godly fear, though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the 
 things which he suffered.” —Hebrews v. 7. 8. 
 
II. 
 
 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 Admitting the possibility and even the neces¬ 
 sity of temptation as a moral discipline for 
 the Man Christ Jesus, the still graver question 
 at once arises of its reality. Did our Lord 
 undergo as real a struggle with the tempter 
 during His temptation in the wilderness as that 
 which we have to wage during our earthly life; 
 or, on the other hand, was the temptation 
 merely a dramatic exhibition * to the mind of 
 Christ of the seductions and allurements to evil 
 which beset us, so as to give Him a vivid sense 
 of the conflicts through which we have to pass 
 
 * This is apparently the view taken of the temptation of our 
 Lord by the late Professor Henry Rogers in his remarkable 
 work on “The Superhuman Origin of the Bible.” Mr Rogers 
 says (p. 178)—“ Nor is it difficult to show that, however im¬ 
 peccable, He might at least receive from the presentation of 
 temptation—under the pressure of those sufferings and privations 
 which so generally give it power over us—that vivid sense of 
 our temptations, and of the conflicts they necessitate, which 
 only experience can impart.” 
 
24 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 in any personal conflict with, or peril from, the 
 powers of darkness and of evil ? On the 
 answer that is given to this momentous question 
 depends the entire moral significance of the 
 temptation, both in its relation to our Lord and 
 in its relation to man, and it demands, therefore, 
 the most careful and reverent consideration. 
 
 One thing seems, at the outset, to be toler¬ 
 ably certain. If we take the accounts of the 
 temptation as they are given to us in the three 
 Gospels which relate it, there can be no doubt 
 that the Evangelists were thoroughly con¬ 
 vinced of its reality. The whole tone of their 
 narrative, quite as much as the statements which 
 they make about the temptation, is unmistakable 
 evidence of their conviction that the temptation 
 was as real to Christ as our temptations are to 
 us. So, too, the other references which are found 
 in the New Testament to the temptation all 
 point in the same direction. The author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, for instance, declares 
 that Christ “ was in all points tempted like as 
 we are, yet without sin,” * an assertion which 
 would be untrue in its most important particular, 
 if Christ had not personally felt the terrible 
 on our pilgrimage, but not so as to involve Him 
 
 * Hebrews iv. 15. 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 2 5 
 
 strain of the struggle with evil which confers on 
 our temptations their deepest reality and bitter¬ 
 ness. In another place in the same Epistle we 
 are also told that Christ “ suffered, being 
 tempted,” * and it seems difficult, if not impos¬ 
 sible, to imagine that the only meaning the 
 writer intended by such an expression was, that 
 Christ suffered when He realized what our 
 temptations were, and not that He suffered in 
 the fierceness of His own conflict with evil. 
 “ The Captain of our salvation ” must surely 
 have Himself been foremost in “the good fight 
 of faith.” With statements like these before us 
 it is not wonderful that the Church of Christ 
 has always refused to accept any explanation 
 of the temptation which reduced it to an un¬ 
 reality, and myriads of weak and tempted souls 
 in their hour of peril have drawn strength and 
 courage to resist “ all the fiery darts of the evil 
 one,” from the remembrance of One who “in 
 that He Himself suffered, being tempted, is able 
 to succour them that are tempted.” 
 
 There is, moreover, another point of view 
 from which the temptation of our Lord may 
 be regarded, and which serves to confirm our 
 belief in its reality. 
 
 * Hebrews ii, iS. 
 
26 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 Assuming, for the time, the personal exist¬ 
 ence of that being whom Scripture calls “the 
 devil,” “ the prince of the power of the air,” 
 “the old serpent,” “Satan,”—and it is difficult, if 
 not impossible, to understand how any one who 
 acknowledges the authority of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ and of His apostles can have any doubt 
 on this point—is it conceivable for a single 
 moment that such a being would have engaged 
 in conflict with Christ unless he had known the 
 conflict was to be a real and awful one on both 
 sides ? Can we imagine the tempter playing 
 at fighting with Christ as if they were the 
 opposing sides of a friendly army on a great 
 review day ? The supposition is impossible ; 
 and we shall have occasion hereafter to point 
 out how immeasurably the significance of the 
 temptation of our Lord is increased when we 
 consider it in its relation, too often overlooked 
 or forgotten, to the devil himself, whose 
 supreme aim it was to defeat, at the very outset 
 of our Lord’s mission, Him who had expressly 
 come “to destroy the works of the devil.” The 
 reality of the tempter demands the reality of 
 the temptation. 
 
 But the moment we admit the reality of the 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 2 j 
 
 temptation to Christ another and a still graver 
 question arises. The reality of our temptations 
 lies in the terrible fact that they are temptations 
 to SIN, and necessarily therefore involve the 
 possibility of our falling before them into sin ; so 
 that if we admit Christ’s temptations were real, 
 does not this involve the awful possibility of 
 His yielding to them ; or in other words, if we 
 may use for a moment the theological term 
 which expresses this possibility, must not a 
 tempted Christ be a peccable Christ ? 
 
 There can be little doubt that our first im¬ 
 pulse is to answer this question instantly in the 
 negative. Our reverence for the glory and 
 dignity of the person of the Lord Jesus, the 
 worship and adoration we pay to Him as 
 the personal manifestation of the unseen and 
 eternal God, the perfect holiness and beauty of 
 His human character, all combine to make the 
 bare suggestion of the possibility of Christ 
 yielding to temptation, and therefore of Christ 
 sinning, so unspeakably repulsive and painful, 
 that we dismiss it at once as bordering on blas¬ 
 phemy. 
 
 And yet deeply as every Christian heart must 
 sympathize with the sensitive jealousy for the 
 
28 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 honour of its Lord shown in such a reply, it is 
 not difficult to show that not only is the majestic 
 moral grandeur of Christ’s victory over tempta¬ 
 tion, with all the great lessons it involves, taken 
 away if we deny the possibility of His yielding 
 to the tempter,—so that instead of honouring, we 
 really dishonour Him by the denial,—but that 
 both those who affirm it was possible for Christ 
 to sin, and those who say it was impossible, will 
 be found when we carefully examine their mean¬ 
 ing really to mean the same thing. 
 
 Let us take this latter point first of all. 
 What, then, is meant when it is said it was 
 impossible for Christ to have sinned ? 
 
 Certainly not that it was a physical impossi¬ 
 bility, as when we say it is impossible for a man 
 surrounded with every comfort and luxury to 
 feel the temptation a starving man feels to steal 
 a loaf of bread, for in addition to the physical 
 impossibility of temptation being utterly mean¬ 
 ingless in the case of our Lord, and contra¬ 
 dicted by the circumstances under which the 
 very first temptation took place, it would have 
 at once destroyed the temptation itself. A 
 temptation the yielding to which is a physical 
 impossibility, is a contradiction in terms. 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 29 
 
 It follows, therefore, that those who say it 
 was impossible for Christ, as man, to sin, must 
 mean by this that it was a moral impossibility. 
 But granting this, what is a moral impossibility 
 of sinning ? What do we mean, for example, 
 when we say of some one whom we may know, 
 and whose whole life has borne witness to his 
 transparent integrity and honour, that it is 
 impossible for him to tell a lie ? Do we not 
 mean that we are so certain of our friend’s 
 loyalty to truth, of the attitude of his moral 
 nature to everything false or deceitful, that we 
 are sure that no pressure of temptation would 
 ever induce him to depart from the path 
 of rectitude and truth ? In like manner, but 
 with an assurance as infinitely greater as the 
 moral character of Christ is infinitely holier 
 than that of the most saintly of His servants, 
 when we say it was impossible for Christ to 
 yield to temptation, we mean we are so sure 
 of His perfect holiness, of His utter abhorrence 
 of all evil, of the absolute harmony of His will 
 with His Father’s, as to make it “ impossible ” 
 for Him to yield, even in thought for one 
 single moment, to the faintest suggestion of 
 evil. 
 
30 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 He could have yielded if He had chosen,- but 
 we know He never would have chosen. 
 
 On the other hand, when it is said on the 
 opposite side that it was possible for ChrisCto 
 have sinned, the word “ possible ” carries with it 
 an ambiguity of meaning that has an evil sound. 
 It seems to suggest what might, or might not, 
 occur, as for example when we say it is possible 
 for even the best Christian to make mistakes, 
 meaning that we can never be sure a Christian 
 will not sometimes err. 
 
 But this secondary and evil implication of the 
 word “ possible ” has no conceivable application 
 to the Lord Jesus Christ. When we say it was 
 “possible for Him to sin” we never mean that 
 we are not sure whether He will, or will not sin. 
 We do not imply, as in the case of a fellow 
 creature, any uncertainty as to the result. We 
 are certain of the result, whatever temptation 
 comes to Christ, because we are certain of the 
 inflexible adherence of His will to the will of 
 God and of His immovable loyalty to the 
 eternal law of righteousness and truth. For 
 Him an eternal temptation would only have 
 meant an eternal victory. He could have 
 yielded, if He had chosen, but He never would 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 3 I 
 
 have chosen to yield. It was possible for Him 
 to sin, and yet impossible; possible if He had 
 chosen, impossible for Him to have chosen. 
 
 Now if this be a true account of the two sides 
 which have been taken in this controversy as to 
 the peccability of Christ, considered as man, it 
 will be seen that both sides are really on^Those 
 who most strenuously deny the possibility of 
 Christ yielding to temptation are found, on 
 enquiry, to mean that it was the sublime moral 
 impossibility of a will in perfect accord with the 
 will of God even to choose evil; whilst those 
 who maintain that He could have yielded, had 
 He chosen, are found to be equally resolute in 
 declaring He never would have chosen, because 
 of His immovable fidelity to His Father’s will) 
 
 The question we have been considering is one 
 
 which has long been discussed by theologians 
 
 under the form of the antithetical alternative 
 
 whether Christ was “not able to sin,” or was 
 
 \ 
 
 “able not to sin.” If the course of reasoning we 
 have been pursuing be correct, the opposing 
 members of this alternative turn out to be only 
 different ways of stating the same thing. He 
 was “not able to sin” simply because He was 
 “ able not to sin.” 
 
32 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 But if the reality of the temptation of Christ 
 be conceded to involve at least the abstract 
 possibility of His having yielded, had He chosen, 
 to the tempter, then some further difficulties 
 arise which deserve thoughtful and serious 
 attention. 
 
 It may be asked, in the first place, how the 
 temptability of Christ can be reconciled with 
 His essential Divinity ; or in other words, if 
 Christ were none other than the God-Man, 
 how is it possible ever to conceive of Him as 
 approached and assaulted by temptation ? Now 
 there is but one reply to this difficulty, that we 
 have here two truths, either of which seems 
 utterly irreconcilable with the other, and both of 
 which nevertheless are true. We cannot conceive 
 of the true Deity of Christ without shutting out 
 all possibility of temptation : we cannot con¬ 
 ceive of His true humanity without admitting 
 that possibility : but these apparently incom¬ 
 patible truths are only part of the greater 
 mystery of the Incarnation itself. We can¬ 
 not conceive how the omnipresence of God 
 localised and limited itself in the person of the 
 man Christ Jesus : nor how the omniscience of 
 God could dwell in One whose human soul 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 “ grew in wisdom ;” nor how the eternal blessed¬ 
 ness of God was possible in One who was “ a 
 man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;” 
 nor how God could become man and die on the 
 cross. We are, in fact, face to face here with 
 the final mystery of the Infinite becoming 
 the Finite, and all we can do is to confess the 
 utter inability of the human reason to compre¬ 
 hend so transcendent and awful a descent. But 
 just as we believe in the humanity of our Lord, 
 although it may be impossible to reconcile it 
 with His Divinity; and just as we believe in His 
 Divinity without being able to reconcile it with 
 His humanity, so we hold at once the untempta- 
 bility of the God, but the temptability of the 
 man Christ Jesus. All the difficulties involved 
 in His liability to temptation finally run up into, 
 and are lost in the vaster mystery of the union 
 of the Divine and the Human in the single and 
 unique personality of the God - Man, Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 But again, it may be asked whether the 
 consciousness of temptation is not in itself an 
 admission of moral imperfection, and if so, 
 whether it is not inconsistent with the perfect 
 holiness of the human character of the Lord 
 
 C 
 
34 THE reality of the temptation. 
 
 Jesus Christ to imagine temptation being a 
 reality to Him. 
 
 To this we may reply that everything depends 
 on the origin and source of the temptation. It 
 may arise—it does often arise—in our own case, 
 from our own hearts ; a man may be “ drawn 
 away,” as St James says, “ by his own lust, and 
 enticed,”* and in such a case, no doubt, the fact 
 of temptation arising, and of its assault being 
 felt, is itself an evidence of moral imperfection 
 within. If we were absolutely sinless and pure, 
 if no fatal bias or tendency to evil lurked in the 
 secret places of our will, no temptation could 
 arise from within ; there would be no foes “ of 
 our own household ” to contend against, and any 
 attack on our fidelity and loyalty to God would 
 have to be made from without. The fact that 
 many of our most deadly temptations are gener¬ 
 ated in the unholy desires and passions of our 
 own evil hearts, and even when not actually 
 arising there, but coming from seeds of evil sown 
 by “an enemy” external to us, spring up when 
 once the seed is sown, like poisonous weeds in 
 a congenial soil, is doubtless one of the saddest 
 proofs of the sinfulness of our human nature, 
 
 * James i. 14. 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 35 
 
 and of the immeasurable distance it has fallen 
 from “the image of God” in which it was 
 originally created. 
 
 But temptation may arise, and often does 
 arise, not from within but from without. Evil 
 men may tempt us, or Satan himself may directly 
 tempt us, and in either case the consciousness 
 of temptation is not sin. It is, as we saw in the 
 last chapter, one of the essential conditions of a 
 state of probation that it should be a state of 
 temptation, and temptation therefore no more 
 necessarily involves the idea of sin than pro¬ 
 bation does. If man had never fallen but had 
 remained stedfast in his obedience to God, so 
 long as probation lasted he would still have 
 required temptation to test and to consolidate the 
 moral value of that obedience, even though all 
 the inducements to sin came to him only from 
 without. 
 
 It will be seen, therefore, that the access of 
 temptation to the soul is not necessarily any 
 proof of moral imperfection unless the temptation 
 originally arises from within the soul itself. But 
 all Christ’s temptations came to Him not from 
 within, but from without. Each of the Gospels 
 which record the temptation is careful to tell 
 
36 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 us that when Jesus was tempted He was tempted 
 by the devil. “Then was Jesus led up of the 
 Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the 
 devil; ” “ He was in the wilderness forty days 
 tempted of Satan He was “led by the Spirit 
 in the wilderness during forty days, being 
 tempted of the devil,” are the significant words 
 which are found at the commencement of the 
 account of the temptation in the Gospels of St 
 Matthew, St Mark, and St Luke respectively* 
 None of Christ’s temptations arose from within, 
 there were no traitors in the garrison secretly 
 aiding the foe without; and for Him, therefore, 
 to be assaulted by seduction to evil as little 
 implied any moral imperfection in His own 
 character, or any inward disloyalty to God, as 
 the siege of a beleaguered fort by an invading 
 army implies that the garrison defending it 
 are disloyal to their king. That Christ was 
 tempted proves the reality of His humanity, but 
 it proves nothing more. 
 
 But if this be so, if our Lord’s temptations all 
 came upon Him from without, if there was no 
 inward bias to evil in Him, as there is in us, to 
 which the external solicitation to sin might 
 
 * Matthew iv. i ; Mark i. 13 ; Luke iv. 1. 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 37 
 
 appeal, then it may be said—and this is the last 
 difficulty we shall consider in this chapter— 
 that Christ’s temptations were, after all, unlike 
 ours, and that the graver half of their reality 
 and terror is at once taken away. But is it so ? 
 Is the existence of a prior inclination to evil, or 
 in other words, is a corrupt heart necessary to 
 the gravity and reality of temptation ? If so, 
 how was the first Adam tempted ? There was 
 no bias to sin in him to which the tempter 
 might appeal, and yet he fell; fell where Christ 
 conquered. The difference, great and serious 
 as it is, between Christ’s temptations and our 
 temptations, only makes His temptation the 
 more like the temptation of .Adam. The first 
 and the second Adam were each typically 
 attacked by the tempter, but where Adam 
 yielded Christ overcame ; and His victory—the 
 victory of the new Head and Representative of 
 Humanity—rolled back the shame and dishon¬ 
 our of our first parents’ fall. Nay, more ! An 
 inward bias to evil is not even essential in our 
 own case to the reality of temptation. Tempta¬ 
 tion may appeal to what is noblest and best, as 
 well as to what is lowest and basest in us, and 
 some of our sharpest and deadliest temptations 
 
3 8 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 arise, not from the inducement to commit open 
 and flagrant transgression, but from the subtle 
 suggestions which come to us so often in our 
 highest and best moments to do wrong for the 
 sake of right, to satisfy lawful appetites by 
 unlawful means, to serve the truth by a lie. 
 The reality of Christ’s temptations remains 
 unbroken, although there was no sin in Him 
 to which temptation might appeal. 
 
 Assuming, then, their reality, it will be well 
 for us to consider some of the practical results 
 which flow from this admission. 
 
 First of all, it is manifest, as has already been 
 observed, that the entire moral significance of 
 the temptation to Christ is vitally affected by 
 this admission. If the temptation of Christ 
 were only an act, however stately and solemn, 
 in a great drama, the issues of which had been 
 determined beforehand, and were wholly inde¬ 
 pendent of its chief actors; if from the outset 
 there was no real possibility of Christ yielding, 
 had He chosen, to the tempter, then the majes¬ 
 tic glory of Christ’s victory over Satan is gone 
 for ever. It is only as we feel His temptation 
 was not “ acting ” at all, but an awful and tre¬ 
 mendous struggle between the Captain of our 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION, 39 
 
 salvation and the prince of darkness,—a struggle 
 which Christ waged at the cost of terrible suffer¬ 
 ing and exhaustion,—that we feel the full moral 
 sublimity of His character, Who, though spent 
 and weary with the forty days’ fast which had 
 preceded this final assault of the devil, and not¬ 
 withstanding His physical weakness and need, 
 foiled one after another all the assaults of 
 the tempter’s power. Instead of the admis¬ 
 sion of the reality of the temptation detracting 
 from the moral glory and greatness of Christ, 
 it adds immeasurable grandeur to His human 
 character, and fills us with a new sense of 
 His unapproachable goodness and unswerving 
 fidelity to His Father, Whose kingdom He thus 
 founded among men in tears and conflict and 
 pain. 
 
 But the admission of the reality of the 
 temptation of our Lord affects us as well as 
 Him. It must have been comparatively easy 
 for the first disciples, who saw our Lord’s 
 human life, who lived with Him from day to 
 day, and learnt from this companionship His 
 humanity as well as His divinity, who heard, 
 possibly from Christ’s own lips, the story of 
 His struggle with the tempter in the wil- 
 
40 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 derness, to realize the intensity and depth of 
 Christ’s sympathy with them in their tempta¬ 
 tions. What was easy for the twelve may be 
 difficult for us. We have never seen Christ 
 hungering and thirsting, or weary and tempted; 
 we no longer think of Him as “ the man of sor¬ 
 rows and acquainted with grief,” for He is now 
 seated at “ the right hand of God,” and crowned 
 with the glory and praise of Heaven ; and the 
 present majesty and exaltation of the glori¬ 
 fied Christ actually make it hard for us to 
 realize that though He is “highly exalted,” yet 
 on the throne of His glory He bears for us 
 a Brother’s heart, is still “ touched with the 
 feeling of our infirmities,” and still remembers 
 the days of His flesh, when He was “ in all 
 points tempted like as we are, yet without 
 
 sm. 
 
 We must go back to the story of this temp¬ 
 tation, and feel its reality, if we would re¬ 
 vive within us the sense of the warmth and 
 vividness of Christ’s sympathy with His dis¬ 
 ciples in all their struggles with evil. Here is 
 our Lord entering into the lowest conditions of 
 our lot, suffering as we suffer from the assaults 
 of evil, fighting as we have to fight against 
 
THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 4 1 
 
 temptation to sin, proving for Himself how 
 “ narrow is the gate and straitened the way that 
 leadeth unto life;” and surely if sympathy is 
 born out of a common experience of suffering, 
 we may be assured, not only that Christ will 
 stand by us and help us in every struggle we 
 have to wage against sin, but that He enters 
 into the bitterness of the struggle, and under 
 stands, better than even we ourselves do— 
 
 “ How hard it is to be a Christian.” 
 
 The reality of Christ’s temptation is the one 
 abiding pledge we possess at once of His deep 
 and tender sympathy with us in every effort to 
 resist evil, in every struggle to do right, and of 
 His power and willingness to help “ in time of 
 need.” 
 
 But it is more than this. It affects our feel¬ 
 ings to Ch'rist as well as our realization of His 
 sympathy with us. No doubt it is possible to 
 dwell too much on mere subjective emotion, and 
 to lose the brightness and liberty of the Divine 
 life in a too careful and constant scrutiny of our 
 own affection to the Lord Jesus Christ. But if 
 this be possible, it must not be forgotten that it 
 is also possible to dwell too little on our feelings 
 
4 2 THE REALITY OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 to Him, and to forget that He cares very much 
 for the love and sympathy of His disciples 
 for Himself. It is to be feared that the deep 
 and reverent affection which the early disciples 
 cherished for their Lord, the tender and constant 
 sympathy with which they followed every move¬ 
 ment of His earthly life, entering into its needs 
 and sorrows and pains almost as if they were 
 their own, are becoming rarer in the Church 
 to-day, and that of other Churches than the 
 Church at Ephesus He has to complain that 
 “ they have left their first love.” It may be 
 that as we study His temptation, as we watch 
 with Him through the long forty days of fasting 
 and trial, as we gaze with reverence and love 
 on the great conflict which closed the fast, and 
 on the issues of which the salvation of the world 
 was hanging, we may be led once more to cast 
 around our Lord the arms of our poor sympathy 
 and love, hardly knowing whether more to weep 
 for the suffering He thus endured for us, or to 
 rejoice in the matchless goodness which triumphed 
 over the deadliest assaults of the tempter, and 
 became the pledge of our final triumph as well. 
 
III. 
 
 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
“ Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to 
 be tempted of the devil.”— Matt. iv. i. 
 
 ‘ ‘ Straightway the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilder¬ 
 ness : and he was in the wilderness forty days tempted of 
 Satan.” —Mark i. 12, 13. 
 
 “Jesus, full of the Holy Ghost, returned from the Jordan, 
 and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days 
 being tempted of the devil.”— Luke iv. i. 
 
III. 
 
 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE ORDERING 
 OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 All the Evangelists who record the temptation 
 of our Lord tell us expressly it was a temptation 
 by “ the devil.” We have already remarked 
 on the impossibility of accounting for tempta¬ 
 tion assaulting Christ unless some external 
 and objective source of temptation be pre¬ 
 supposed, and as in the special circumstances 
 under which He was now placed He was 
 removed from the possibility of temptation by 
 man, the evangelic records are alike true to 
 the facts of our Lord’s position, and to the 
 inherent necessity of the case, when they tell 
 us that the temptation through which He was 
 now to pass, arose from the malignity and 
 subtlety of the devil. 
 
 To those who believe in the supernatural 
 there will be no difficulty in the account which 
 the Scriptures give,—and nowhere more fully, or 
 more explicitly, than in the teaching of the Lord 
 
 
46 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 
 Jesus Christ Himself,—of the agency and power 
 of the devil. That there are evil spirits as well 
 as good spirits constantly surrounding man— 
 the infranatural, if the word may be used, as 
 well as the supernatural,—that these spirits, in 
 accordance with their nature, are banded together 
 in rebellion against God, and in a ceaseless effort 
 to overturn His kingdom ; that they are under 
 the leadership and control of a prince, or arch¬ 
 devil, of vast, although strictly limited power, 
 and of infernal malignity and cunning, who is 
 called “the Devil,” “Satan,” “Beelzebub,” “the 
 Prince of the Power of the Air,” “ the Prince of 
 this world,”—the two last expressions possibly 
 summarizing the extent of the territory over 
 which the power of the devil extends,—that this 
 evil spirit has usurped, and has been permitted 
 by God provisionally to usurp, the government 
 of this world, and to occupy the throne which 
 belongs to God alone; that his sole object 
 during the limited time of his dominion over 
 men is to seduce them to join him in his 
 revolt against the authority of God, and that 
 for this purpose he approaches and assaults 
 every human soul with an endless variety of 
 seductions to evil, whence he derives the darkest 
 
ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 47 
 
 and most terrible name given to him in Scrip¬ 
 ture of “the Tempter,” is only the briefest 
 summary of the teaching of the Bible on the 
 agency and personality of the devil 
 
 It is true that of late years doubts have 
 arisen, not only amongst those who deny any 
 authority to the Christian revelation, but also 
 amongst some who accept its authority, as to 
 whether there is any valid ground for assum¬ 
 ing the existence of a personal devil. It has 
 recently, for example, been gravely asked 
 whether it would not be as well in future 
 to spell the devils name without the initial 
 letter; and the recent outcry at the altera¬ 
 tion by the Revisers of the New Testament 
 of one petition in the Lord’s Prayer from 
 “ Deliver us from evil ” to “ Deliver us from the 
 evil one,” was perhaps as much due to the 
 theological implication of the alteration, as to 
 a critical objection to the new translation 
 itself; but in addition to the fact that any 
 denial of the existence of a personal devil 
 must necessarily be a denial of that of which, 
 apart from Scripture, we can know nothing either 
 way, it is difficult to see how such a denial can 
 be reconciled with submission to the supreme 
 
48 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 
 authority of the Lord Jesus Christ There has 
 been an almost unanimous consent amongst all 
 the profoundest theologians of the Christian 
 Church on this point, and without therefore 
 encumbering these pages with a discussion, 
 which to be exhaustive would have to be too 
 technical and theological for general readers, 
 we shall assume what is generally understood 
 by the personality of the devil, and we have 
 now to consider the relation the temptation of 
 our Lord bears to the devil as its instrument 
 and cause. 
 
 In the previous chapters we have dwelt on the 
 reality and the significance of the temptation 
 to Christ Himself, and these have been the 
 aspect in which both theology and the pulpit 
 have commonly regarded it, but it has been too 
 much forgotten that real as the temptation 
 was to Christ, it was just as real to the devil 
 himself. In point of fact the relation and 
 significance of the temptation to the devil have 
 hardly been so much as raised, and yet on the 
 right apprehension of the meaning and motive 
 of the devil in the temptation of Christ, depends 
 very much of the reality of the temptation to 
 Christ Himself. 
 
ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 49 
 
 ' Christ had become Incarnate to redeem the 
 world from sin, and to restore the authority of 
 God over a revolted race. His whole mission 
 was summed up in the words of St John, a To 
 this end was the Son of God manifested, that He 
 might destroy the works of the devil.” * That He 
 might overturn the kingdom of Satan, and 
 reinstate the kingdom of God among men, might 
 reveal at once the greatness of the sin of man, 
 and the greatness of the glory which had been 
 lost to him through his sin, might make it pos¬ 
 sible to man to recover this glory once more, 
 Christ did not hesitate to abandon the infinite 
 bliss and glory of Heaven, and to enter on a 
 life filled with sorrow, and ending in the shame 
 and darkness of the Cross. Is it to be won¬ 
 dered at, then, if he who had seduced man from 
 his allegiance to God, whose infernal kingdom 
 had been set up in the world on the ruins of 
 the kingdom of God, who for long ages had 
 been “ the prince of this world,” knowing the 
 full significance of the advent of Christ, should 
 rouse himself at the very outset of Christs 
 mission for a desperate struggle with the Prince 
 
 * 1 John iii. 8. 
 
JO THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 
 of glory, Whose victory meant the destruction 
 both of Satan and of his kingdom ? 
 
 It is not a little remarkable that we find 
 similar, if more limited, outbursts of the 
 hostility and power of Satan at each of the 
 great historical crises of the kingdom of God 
 among men. Any special manifestation of the 
 love and power of God in the gradual unfolding 
 of the mystery of Redemption has always pro¬ 
 voked a correspondent manifestation of the 
 hatred of the devil both to God and to man. 
 When Adam appears in Paradise—the first 
 subject of the new kingdom of God on earth— 
 the devil appears too, and at once begins to 
 tempt him to his ruin.* When Israel is de¬ 
 livered from Egypt, and the first great step is 
 taken of the founding of the Theocracy on 
 earth, then again, according to Jewish tradition, 
 Satan appears in the wilderness and seduces 
 Israel by the worship of the golden calf.f When 
 the worship of God is once more restored to the 
 people of God after the exile, Satan appears 
 hindering its re-institution, apparently suggest¬ 
 ing that as Israel had been rejected by God 
 the priesthood could never again be renewed. J 
 
 * Genesis iii. + Cf. Exodus 32. X Zechariah iii. I, 2. 
 
ORDERING OF 
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 5 I 
 
 When Christ is bom “who is to rule all the 
 nations,” again we read, “there was war in 
 heaven: Michael and his angels going forth 
 to war with the dragon ; and the dragon warred 
 and his angels : ” * the birth of our Lord being 
 the signal for a furious outbreak of Satanic 
 malignity and power. During the whole of 
 Christ’s earthly life that mysterious revelation 
 of the same power, which the New Testament 
 calls * possession by devils,’ occurs again and 
 again. When Christ’s kingdom is finally set 
 up among men in the Church of the living 
 God, Satan again appears, “ and working with 
 all power and signs and lying wonders,” 
 and “ with all deceit of unrighteousness,” f 
 he enters the Church, falsifying the Gospel, 
 falsifying the worship of God, falsifying the 
 kingdom of God, with lying prophecy, a lying 
 priesthood, and a lying kingship, all of which 
 unite against the office and the kingdom of 
 Christ. According to the Apocalypse Satan’s 
 fury increases with his losses, and it finally 
 culminates in that last and desperate assault 
 on the kingdom of God—as if he hoped, even 
 at the moment of the triumph of the kingdom, 
 
 * Rev. xii. 7. +2 Thess, ii. 9, 10. 
 
52 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 
 to wreck it for ever—described in the mysteri¬ 
 ous words, “ When the thousand years are 
 finished, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, 
 and shall come forth to deceive the nations 
 . . . and they went up over the breadth 
 
 of the earth, and compassed the camp of the 
 saints about, and the beloved city.” * 
 
 Is it wonderful, we ask again, now the supreme 
 moment in the history of the race has come, and 
 the Deliverer of man from the power of the 
 devil is about to begin His mighty work, that 
 Satan should gird himself for a tremendous 
 and deadly struggle with the Redeemer of the 
 world ? As Christ begins His Divine mission 
 Satan arises to overturn it. The temptation is 
 an attempt, almost majestic in its infernal daring, 
 to assault the Son of God ere His work had 
 fully begun ; to destroy the kingdom by conquer¬ 
 ing its King. 
 
 And here, it may be said in passing, we have 
 another evidence of the reality of the temptation 
 to our Lord. S atan was not playing at fig hting. 
 He would never have entered on the awful and 
 perilous work of tempting Christ, if he had 
 known from the outset his attack was doomed 
 
 * Rev. 20, 7, 9. 
 
ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 53 
 
 • 
 
 to failure.* As the reality of our Lord’s man¬ 
 hood guaranteed on His side the reality of the 
 temptation, so the r ealit y of the struggle 
 to Satan also guarantees from his side its 
 reality to Christ. Instead of the temptation 
 being an unreal encounter between the devil 
 and Christ, it may be said without exaggeration 
 that never has there been any encounter be¬ 
 tween the devil and a human soul so real, or on 
 the results of which such vast and tremendous 
 issues were depending. The redemption of the 
 world, the final victory of good over evil, the 
 glory of God Himself, were involved in the 
 victory of Christ over the devil. 
 
 It is not necessary, as has sometimes been 
 asserted, to the reality of the temptation, to 
 suppose there must have been a bodily and ^ 
 visible appearance of Satan to Christ. For not 
 only have we no authority in the New Testa¬ 
 ment to warrant us in believing that Satan has 
 the power to make himself visible at will, but if 
 the visibility of the tempter is essential to the 
 temptation, then it is certain none of us can be 
 
 * We may assume that so much as this Satan must have 
 known, although, doubtless, the popular conception of the 
 practical “ omniscience ” of Satan has no foundation in Scrip¬ 
 ture, 
 
54 THE instrument and the divine 
 
 tempted by the devil. The truth is, as we shall 
 see in a moment, that so far from a personal 
 and bodily manifestation of the tempter being 
 a necessary part of temptation, it is rather a 
 hindrance to its reality and intensity than other¬ 
 wise. There is, moreover, not a word in any 
 one of the three narratives of the temptation of 
 Christ which would warrant the belief that the 
 devil became personally visible to Christ. In¬ 
 deed, one of the temptations, and perhaps the 
 keenest and deadliest of the three, must neces¬ 
 sarily have been visionary and subjective, for 
 no one can imagine that there was any high 
 mountain from the summit of which Christ could 
 be shown “ all the kingdoms of the world ; ” or 
 that if there was an elevation sufficiently high 
 for such an impossible view, Christ could have 
 seen, with His bodily eyes, such a prospect “ in 
 a moment of time,” and if this temptation was 
 mental and subjective without losing its reality, 
 the rest of the temptations may have equally 
 well been so too. Further, it may be urged, 
 and with very considerable force, that the dis¬ 
 tinct assertion of Scripture that Christ “ was in 
 all points tempted like as we are,” precludes 
 the supposition of any visible appearance of 
 Satan to Christ 
 
ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 55 
 
 The safest way of discussing the specific mode 
 in which the devil approached Christ is to leave 
 it in the vague and indefinite terms in which 
 Scripture leaves it. “ The tempter came . . . 
 unto Him ” * is all we are told, and yet vague 
 and indefinite as the expression may be, it is 
 full of suggestion because of its vagueness. Is 
 it not so with all our own temptations ? Can we 
 say, on looking back on them, more than this, 
 that in some way, we knew not how, “ the 
 tempter came” to us ? How the tempter gains 
 access to our own hearts, how he draws back 
 one by one the bolts which bar his entrance 
 there, how he creeps along the secret avenues of 
 the soul, how the dark shadow falls on the 
 chambers of imagery within, how he reaches 
 the spring and fountain of life, the heart itself, 
 
 ✓ 
 
 and poisons it with evil; how he intermingles 
 his foul and dark suggestions with our own 
 thoughts, filling the soul with all disgusting and 
 loathsome shapes and forms of sin; how, at last, 
 he lays his hand on the citadel of the soul, the 
 will itself, and slowly and surely leads it towards 
 the evil from which it had struggled to be free, 
 until his infernal work is done, and—O hideous 
 
 * Matt. iv. 3 . 
 
56 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 
 mystery !—these unclean desires seem to be ris¬ 
 ing from our own hearts, these dark imaginations 
 to be our own foul thoughts within, and these 
 secret inclinations to yield to temptation seem to 
 be our own will bending and swaying towards sin, 
 and at length the voice of conscience is silenced, 
 and “ lust hath conceived and brought forth 
 sin ; ”—how all this can be we cannot tell; we 
 only know it is so. The process and the mode 
 of temptation may be a mystery, but its pain 
 and peril are none the less real. We, too, can 
 only say, “ the tempter came unto us.” 
 
 But it is not enough to speak of the tempta¬ 
 tion of our Lord as if the devil were solely 
 responsible for it, and there was no Divine 
 ordering to be seen in the conflict between 
 the prince of darkness and the Saviour of the 
 world. It is a remarkable fact that each of 
 the three evangelists who record the tempta¬ 
 tion uses a different, and yet most significant 
 expression to denote the Divine appointment 
 of the temptation of Christ. St Matthew says, 
 
 “ Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the 
 wilderness to be tempted of the devil,”* the 
 gracious but effectual conduct of the Saviour 
 
 * Chap. iv. I. 
 
ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 57 
 
 by the Spirit to the temptation being implied in 
 the word used :* St Luke says,J- “And Jesus, full 
 of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, 
 and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness 
 during forty days, being tempted of the devil; ” 
 the Spirit—for this seems the meaning of the 
 word here used J—-inspiring the journey to the 
 desert and to the temptation that awaited Christ 
 there; whilst St Mark with characteristic energy 
 of expression compresses into its most vigorous 
 form § the Divine ordering and purpose of the 
 temptation; “ Straightway,” he says, “ the 
 
 Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness. 
 And He was in the wilderness forty days tempted 
 of Satan.” || 
 
 The devil was the instrument of the tempta-1 ^ 
 
 tion, but God ordained it. 
 
 And this distinction between the agent 
 and the ordainer of temptation is not one of 
 words. For not only does the withdrawal of 
 anything, save positive sin, from the sphere of 
 God’s will, affect the integrity of His moral 
 government of the race, and relax the hold 
 which God has on the progress of human affairs, 
 
 * d.v'ftx^V- f Chap. iv. I. + 'fjyero. 
 
 § ixfiaWei. || Chap. i. 12. 
 
58 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 
 but the teaching of Scripture is only to be recon¬ 
 ciled with itself by bearing in mind that God 
 may ordain a moral discipline for the soul, of 
 which it is impossible He should be the instru¬ 
 ment and immediate cause. We are told, for 
 example, by St James,* “ Let no man say when 
 he is tempted, I am tempted of God : for God 
 cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself 
 tempteth no man,” and yet we are equally told, 
 
 “ It came to pass after these things that God did 
 tempt Abraham; ”•)* and if it be said that this 
 only means that God did try Abraham, the 
 difficulty is removed but a step farther back, for 
 trial is always temptation, just as temptation is 
 always trial. The true solution of the apparent 
 contradiction seems to be suggested by the 
 typical temptation of Christ, that whilst God . 
 Himself never does offer, and never can offer 
 personal seduction or inducement to sin to the 
 soul—the supposition itself is utterly blasphem¬ 
 ous—yet God may permit, and may will, that the 
 soul should pass through temptation as the only 
 means of that purifying and strengthening dis¬ 
 cipline to which we referred in the first chapter, 
 as the chief obj ect and result of all moral trial 
 
 * Chap. i. 13. t Genesis xxii. 1. 
 
ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 59 
 
 Of every kind. And hence it is that the same 
 temptation may be said, from one point of view, 
 to come from God, and from another, to come 
 from the devil. Thus, to take perhaps the most 
 striking illustration of this truth to be found in 
 Scripture, the numbering of the people by David 
 is said in the Book of Samuel to have been the 
 result of God “moving” David “against” Israel;* 
 whilst in the parallel history of the Book of 
 Chronicles we read, “ And Satan stood up 
 against Israel and provoked David to number 
 Israel.”*!* Of course there is an absolute opposi- ^ 
 tion between the ends which God has in view 
 and those the devil compasses in the temptation 
 of men. God ordains our temptation in order ^ 
 to purify us as gold is purified in the fire. The 
 devil tempts us to destroy us as rotten wood is 
 consumed in the furnace. God leads us into 
 temptation in order to bless and to crown us 
 with the reward of the victory. The devil tempts 
 us to curse us with the shame and the guilt 
 of defeat. God tempts to save ; Satan tempts 
 
 to destroy. 
 
 And this double aspect of temptation may 
 suggest to us, in conclusion, some of the prac- 
 * 2 Sam. xxiv. I. t I Chron. xxi. i. 
 
60 THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DIVINE 
 
 tical lessons which even thus early we 
 may learn for ourselves from the temptation 
 of Christ. 
 
 i. We may learn that it is never the will 
 of God we should voluntarily enter into temp¬ 
 tation. 
 
 Christ did not. He was, as we have seen, 
 “ led ” of the Spirit, “ driven ” by the Spirit into 
 the wilderness, and because He was, and did 
 v/not go there of His own accord, He found power 
 to overcome. And so is it with us. It is possi¬ 
 ble, alas ! for us to encounter temptations which 
 God never meant us to face; to enter into 
 temptation of our own self-will; to enter it 
 therefore without God; to put ourselves in the 
 way of evil; to go as near to sin as we think we 
 dare without touching it; but if we do thus 
 “ tempt God ” we have no right to wonder if He 
 seems to desert us in our hour of sorest need. It 
 is we who have really deserted Him by “ enter¬ 
 ing ” into temptation ; and our peril is the direct 
 punishment and result of our own perversity 
 and sin. Whatever blessings may result to the 
 soul from “ enduring temptation ” they come 
 only to them who do not “ go,” but are “ led ” 
 by the Spirit into the peril and the fight. 
 
ORDERING OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 6l 
 
 2. But we may go farther than this. Not 
 only ought we never to enter temptation of our¬ 
 selves, but we may pray, and we ought to pray, 
 that God would not “ bring us ” into it. 
 
 When we think of our own weakness, of how 
 little we can trust ourselves, of how much may 
 be involved in a single struggle, or a single 
 defeat, there is, perhaps, no petition in the 
 “ Lord’s Prayer ” which comes more nearly 
 home to us than this —“ Bring us not into 
 temptation,”* and to pray it is the sign, not of 
 cowardice, but of courage; not of weakness, 
 but of strength; for it is the courage and 
 strength of those who have learnt the lesson, 
 “ Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed 
 lest he fall.” f 
 
 3. But, should God lead us, as He led Christ, 
 into temptation, then we may confidently appeal 
 to God for grace to overcome. 
 
 Hard and desperate as the fight may be, if 
 only we are true to God, we shall overcome at 
 last. And yet not we, for' God will fight for us 
 and with us. “ The battle is the Lord’s,” not 
 ours, and He who led us into peril will Himself 
 furnish us with all the strength for the battle 
 
 * 
 
 t 1 Cor. x. 12. 
 
 Matt, vi. 13. 
 
62 THE INSTRUMENT OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 which we may need, and finally bring us scathe¬ 
 less from the fight singing, “ Now unto Him that 
 is able to guard us from stumbling, and to set 
 us before the presence of His glory, without 
 blemish, in exceeding joy, to the only God our 
 Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, 
 majesty, dominion and power, before all time, 
 and now, and for evermore.” Amen.* 
 
 * Jude 24, 25. 
 
 1 
 
IV. 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE OF THE 
 TEMPTATION. 
 
“ Then cometh 
 Jesus from Galilee 
 to the Jordan unto 
 John, to be baptized 
 of him. But John 
 would have hindered 
 him, saying, I have 
 need to be baptized 
 of thee, and comest 
 thou to me? But 
 Jesus answering said 
 unto him, Suffer it 
 now : for thus it be- 
 cometh us to fulfil all 
 righteousness. Then 
 he suffereth him. 
 And Jesus, when he 
 was baptized, went 
 up straightway from 
 the water : and lo, 
 the heavens were 
 opened unto him, 
 and he saw the Spirit 
 of God descending 
 as a dove, and com¬ 
 ing upon him; and 
 lo, a voice out of 
 the heavens, saying, 
 This is my beloved 
 Son, in whom I am 
 well pleased. 
 
 “Then was Jesus 
 led up of the Spirit 
 into the wilderness 
 to be tempted of the 
 devil. And when 
 he had fasted forty 
 days and forty nights, 
 he afterward hun¬ 
 gered.”— Matt. iii. 
 13-17 j iv. 1, 2. 
 
 “And it came to 
 pass in those days, 
 that Jesus came from 
 Nazareth of Galilee, 
 and was baptized of 
 John in the Jor¬ 
 dan. And straight¬ 
 way coming up out 
 of the water, he saw 
 the heavens rent 
 asunder, and the 
 Spirit as a dove de¬ 
 scending upon him; 
 and a voice came 
 out of the heavens, 
 Thou art my beloved 
 Son, in Thee I am 
 well pleased. And 
 straightway the 
 Spirit driveth him 
 forth into the wilder¬ 
 ness.” — 
 
 9-12. 
 
 “ Now it came to 
 pass, when all the 
 people were bap¬ 
 tized, that, Jesus 
 also having been 
 baptized, and pray¬ 
 ing, the heaven was 
 opened, and the 
 Holy Ghost descend¬ 
 ed in a bodily form, 
 as a dove, upon him, 
 and a voice came 
 out of heaven, Thou 
 art my beloved Son ; 
 in Thee I am well 
 pleased. 
 
 “And Jesus, full 
 of the Holy Spirit, 
 returned from the 
 Jordan, and was led 
 by the Spirit in the 
 i. wilderness during 
 forty days, being 
 tempted of the devil. 
 And he did eat noth¬ 
 ing in those days : 
 and when they were 
 completed, he hun¬ 
 gered.”— Luke iii. 
 21, 22 ; iv. I, 2. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 Each of the three evangelists who record the 
 
 temptation of our Lord begins the record with 
 
 a word which indicates the close and profound 
 
 connection there was between the temptation 
 
 and the events which immediately preceded it 
 
 in the life of Christ. St Matthew commences 
 
 his account with the word “ Then and St 
 
 Mark and St Luke do not even interrupt their 
 
 narrative, but as if the temptation were only a 
 
 part of what had just gone before, they couple 
 
 its record with that of the preceding history by 
 
 the conjunction “ And .” Now to say that 
 
 Christ’s temptation was not an isolated event 
 
 in His experience, wholly disconnected with 
 
 His previous history, is only to say of our Lord 
 
 what is true of every temptation that assaults 
 
 the human soul. The temptations of to-day 
 
 are always more or less the result of the life of 
 
 yesterday, the character and actions of the past 
 
 reappearing, not only in the good, but in the 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 evil of the present. For even where there has 
 been no yielding to sin, as in the case of our 
 Lord, it by no means follows, as we shall see, 
 that the triumphs of goodness itself may not be 
 used by the tempter as fresh occasions of temp¬ 
 tation to the soul. It is from the loftiest heights 
 of holiness that the deepest fall into sin is 
 always possible. 
 
 To understand fully the temptation of Christ, 
 we must therefore understand the period in His 
 human life at which it took place, and the his¬ 
 tory which immediately preceded it. 
 
 One great event—the Baptism of Christ— 
 stands out in the sacred narrative in each 
 of the three evangelists as having been the 
 V immediate precursor of the temptation; and we 
 have now to enquire into the significance of our 
 Lord’s baptism, and into its relation to the 
 temptation that succeeded it. 
 
 The baptism of Christ was, first of all, the 
 ^ public announcement and inauguration of Christ 
 to His work. John the Baptist had come “to 
 bear witness of the Light that all might be¬ 
 lieve through him,’ 5 * and now his work was 
 nearly done. He had “ prepared the way of the 
 
 * John i 7. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 67 
 
 Lord ” by preaching “ repentance unto Israel,” 
 and by warning men everywhere that One 
 greater than himself was at hand. One last act — 
 and it was J ohn’s greatest act—remained to be 
 done, the solemn setting apart of the Christ to 
 His redeeming work. At length the time for 
 this had come. Jesus was baptized of John in 
 the Jordan. The baptism closed our Lord’s 
 private life, and began His public ministry. 
 He who had gone down into the water known 
 to men as “ the Son of Mary,” came up thence 
 declared to be “ the Son of God.” The baptism, 
 with the opened heavens, and the Spirit “ de¬ 
 scending like a dove,” and “ abiding ” on Jesus, 
 and the witness borne by the voice of God 
 Himself, “ This is My beloved Son in whom 
 I am well pleased,” was the sublime inaugura¬ 
 tion of the Saviour of the world to His great 
 mission. From that hour John’s prophetic work 
 was done. It expired, to use Davison’s beauti¬ 
 ful image, as Old Testament prophecy had ex¬ 
 pired, with “ the Gospel upon its tongue.” * 
 As soon as the Christ was manifested unto 
 Israel, John begins to vanish from the his¬ 
 tory ; as “ the star which opes the gates of 
 
 * “ Discourses on Prophecy,” p. 253. 
 
68 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 day, and shuts in the night ” is never found 
 very far from the sun, and as the sun appears 
 is lost in its light, so John passes out of sight 
 as Christ draws near. He had but one more 
 word to speak—and with that his witness to 
 Christ was ended— “ Behold the Lamb of God 
 which taketh away the sin of the world.”* 
 
 “ Then,” we read, as immediately following 
 the baptism, “ was Jesus led up of the Spirit 
 into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.” 
 We may see, in part, at anyrate, the reason of 
 the temptation thus coming after the bap¬ 
 tism. As the baptism had announced the 
 Christ for His work, so the temptation now 
 announces the work to the Christ. Christ’s first 
 public act, His first step in His ministry of 
 redemption, is to be tempted by the devil. 
 He had come to “ destroy the works of the 
 devil,” and here, in the wilderness, He enters 
 on the first great act of the struggle. Christ 
 and Satan meet face to face. The beginning 
 of the work is at once the key to the whole, and 
 the prophecy of its end. 
 
 How far our Lord Himself may have learnt 
 from His temptation the nature of the great 
 
 * John i. 29. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 69 
 
 work to accomplish which He had become 
 incarnate, we do not know. The whole 
 subject of the growth of Christ’s human soul, 
 the steps by which it grew into the full con¬ 
 sciousness of His Divine mission, is so ob¬ 
 scure and mysterious, that it is better not to 
 speculate in a region which the wisdom of 
 Scripture has left in darkness.; but we can 
 scarcely be wrong in supposing that if the 
 baptism of Jesus first fully revealed to Him 
 the full glory of His Person, and of His relation 
 to the Eternal Father—a glory which had been 
 slowly dawning on Him from His youth up¬ 
 wards—so the temptation first fully set before 
 Him the greatness of the struggle He had 
 undertaken to endure, and the full bitter¬ 
 ness of the cup which His Father had given 
 Him to drink. The two together, the baptism 
 and the temptation, complete the solemn 
 announcement of the Saviour for His work. 
 The inauguration is followed by the initiation. 
 The commissioning, if we may use the term 
 with deepest reverence, of the Captain of our 
 salvation, is succeeded by His first great con¬ 
 flict with the prince of this world. Christ’s 
 work has begun. 
 
7 o 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 But the baptism of our Lord did more than 
 precede His temptation ; it prepared the way 
 >/ for it, and this in two ways : it prepared Christ 
 for the temptation, and it prepared the tempta¬ 
 tion for Christ. 
 
 v/ It prepared Christ, first, for His temptation. 
 We have already noticed, in another connection, 
 that the Evangelists who record the temptation 
 emphasize with marked significance the fact 
 that Jesus was “ led ” or “ driven ” of the Spirit 
 to His temptation. But St Luke adds to this a 
 still more pregnant expression, for he tells us 
 that Jesus, “full of the Holy Ghost , returned 
 from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit in 
 the wilderness during forty days, being tempted 
 of the devil.” * That this fulness of the Holy 
 Ghost had come upon our Lord’s human nature 
 at His baptism, the Scripture record seems 
 plainly to declare, and if so, we can see at once 
 how closely it was connected with the tempta- 
 y tion that followed it. The Divine equipment 
 of the man Christ Jesus preceded the long 
 struggle in which He was now to engage. In 
 all things our example, He puts on “ the whole 
 armour of God ” before entering on “ the good 
 fight of faith.” 
 
 Luke iv. i. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 71 
 
 There is another and an analogous prepara¬ 
 tion for coming conflict bestowed on Christ 
 at a later period of His ministry, and which 
 serves to illustrate the special meaning of the 
 baptism in the light in which we are now con¬ 
 sidering it. Once, and only once, again in the 
 earthly life of our Lord do we read of the voice 
 from heaven uttering the same glorious and 
 solemn witness to the Divine Sonship and mis¬ 
 sion of Jesus which was given at His baptism. 
 
 At the transfiguration of Christ, a second time ^ 
 was heaven opened, and a second time God 
 Himself bore witness to His Son in the words, 
 
 “ This is My beloved Son in whom I am well 
 pleased, hear ye Him.” * But what followed 
 the transfiguration and the heavenly witness ? 
 The passion came after the transfiguration, just 
 as the temptation came after the baptism ; the 
 glory of the “ holy mount ” being the pre¬ 
 paration of Christ for His cross, just as the ful¬ 
 ness of the Holy Ghost received at His baptism 
 was the Divine preparation for the conflict with 
 the devil in the wilderness. 
 
 But the baptism had a further and final re¬ 
 lation to the temptation. If it prepared Christ 
 
 * Matt. xvii. 5, and the parallel passages, 
 
72 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 for the temptation, it also prepared the tempta¬ 
 tion for Christ. The baptism of the Holy 
 >/ Ghost was not accidentally followed by the first 
 assault’of the tempter on Jesus. 
 
 It is true that we are apt to think that the 
 possession of unusual spiritual power, or the 
 consciousness of peculiar spiritual elevation, is 
 enough to secure the soul from any further 
 assaults of evil; and that the loftiest elevations of 
 the spiritual life must necessarily be the freest 
 from spiritual peril. But it is not so really. 
 >/ In this life, and we speak of this life alone when 
 we speak of temptation, moments of spiritual ex¬ 
 altation and rapture are sure to be succeeded by 
 some terrible and searching temptation. It is not 
 merely that seasons of peculiar ^blessedness, 
 whether in spiritual or in temporal things, need 
 to be proved and chastened by the keen and 
 v' terrible fires of trial; but the trial itself often¬ 
 times arises from the very blessedness we enjoy. 
 It was when Abraham’s heart was filled with 
 joy at the fulfilment of the long-delayed pro¬ 
 mise God had made to him, and Isaac was 
 growing from boyhood into manhood, every 
 year bringing nearer and nearer the rich heri¬ 
 tage of blessing which rested on the heir of the 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 73 
 
 promise, that we come across the ominous 
 words, “It came to pass after these things, God*' 
 did tempt Abraham.”* It was when David 
 had reached the zenith of his prosperity and 
 power, and the glory of his house seemed estab¬ 
 lished for ever, that his great temptation came 
 upon him, and he fell.*f* It was when Simon l/ 
 Peter had been so filled with the overwhelming 
 sense of his Master’s grace and love that he had 
 declared, “ Even if I must die with Thee, yet 
 I will not deny Thee,” J that the hour of his v 
 proving, and his bitter failure in the denial of 
 Christ, drew near. It was when St Paul had ^ 
 been “ caught up into the third heaven,” and 
 had heard “ unspeakable words, which it is not 
 lawful for a man to utter,” that there was given 
 to him “ a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of 
 Satan to buffet him, that he should not be 
 exalted overmuch.” § And it was when Jesus 
 was “ full of the Holy Ghost,” the Spirit having 
 descended and remaining on Him, that “ imme¬ 
 diately the Spirit driveth Him forth into the 
 wilderness, and He was in the wilderness forty 
 days, tempted of Satan.” 
 
 * Gen. xxii. i. 
 
 % Matt. xxvi. 34. 
 
 + 2 Sam. xi. 
 
 § 2 Cor. xii. 7. 
 
74 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 And so it always is. When we are walking 
 softly with God, and there is not much light 
 about the path, and we rejoice, if we rejoice at 
 all, “ with trembling,” we are comparatively safe 
 from the tempter : but when we walk on the 
 heights above, and stand in the sunlight of 
 heaven, and the heart beats high with exalting 
 raptures, danger is near. Close to those sunlit 
 heights there yawn downwards at our feet black 
 and awful precipices, and one false step may be 
 fatal. Hours of solitude and of depression and 
 of self-distrust are not our most perilous hours ; 
 it is when all heaven seems opened above us, 
 v and God to be very near to us, and His Spirit 
 to be filling us with peace and joy, that we 
 most need to watch and pray. The wilderness 
 with its fierce temptation always comes near 
 to the baptism with its heavenly vision ; and 
 from the conflict of the perfect man with the 
 tempter the voice sounds afresh in our ears, 
 “ Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed 
 lest he fall.” * 
 
 And now let us turn to the consideration 
 of the place in which the temptation occur¬ 
 red. 
 
 * I Cor. x. 12. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 75 
 
 The only account given to us of the locality 
 of the temptation is that it took place in “ the 
 wilderness,” but where this wilderness was situ¬ 
 ated we do not know. It is true that there is 
 a spot near to Jericho which has long been 
 pointed out as the traditional locality of the 
 temptation, and which has taken its name (The 
 Quarantania) from the forty days’ fast in the 
 wilderness, but'there is no evidence whatsoever 
 for the tradition, and the utmost that can be 
 said in its favour is that the place is not 
 unsuited to the solitary and awful conflict of 
 our Lord with the tempter. A high and coni¬ 
 cal mountain, rising out of a lifeless and joy¬ 
 less desert plain, and looking over the waters of 
 the Dead Sea, the sides of the mountain 
 pierced with innumerable caves (which were 
 once tenanted by hermits), and terminating in 
 precipices on every side, is the traditional loca¬ 
 lity which has been identified with “ the wil¬ 
 derness ” of the Gospel history. But whether 
 this were the true locality of the tempta¬ 
 tion, or whether, as for some reasons seem 
 more probable, the Desert of Sinai was the 
 scene of the conflict, there are lessons to 
 be learnt from the nature of the locality 
 
76 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 itself, which are independent of its exact 
 position. 
 
 It was, first of all, manifestly a place of abso- 
 v lute solitude. 
 
 We referred on a previous page to the ful¬ 
 ness of the Holy Ghost which was bestowed 
 on our Lord at His baptism, and to the re¬ 
 velation which in all probability this fulness 
 of the Spirit gave to His human soul of the 
 nature and glory of His Divine mission in the 
 world. 
 
 But if this were so, and if, as we believe, Jesus 
 was “ made in all points like as we are, yet 
 without sin,’* solitude even apart from tempta¬ 
 tion would become a necessity to Christ after 
 such a revelation. He would be led by the 
 instincts and necessities of His own spiritual 
 life to yearn for solitude that he might ponder 
 the ^vast and glorious work on which He had 
 entered at His baptism by John. It seems, 
 indeed, as if all the noblest and most distin¬ 
 guished servants of God had been forbidden to 
 begin their great work until they had passed 
 through the discipline and strengthening of 
 some such period of solitude and fellowship 
 J with God. Moses spent forty years in the 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 77 
 
 silence of the desert before he was called by 
 God to be the leader and lawgiver of Israel.* 
 
 Elijah was alone with God for forty days and 
 forty nights - on Mount Horeb before coming 
 forth to his final conflict with the priests of Baal, OA* c ^' i 
 and with an idolatrous king, and an idolatrous 
 
 f/.;\ wo 
 
 people.! St Paul tells us that after it had 
 pleased God to “reveal His Son in me,” “ im¬ 
 mediately I conferred not with flesh and blood,” 
 
 “ but I went away into Arabia,”J and there is 
 little, if any, doubt that the “ Arabia ” into 
 which he retired was the same desert of Sinai 
 where Moses had received the law and Elijah 
 had heard “ the still, small voice ” of God. 
 
 “ Standing,” to quote the words of the Bishop 
 of Durham, § “on the threshold of the new 
 Covenant, he was anxious to look upon the 
 birthplace of the old: that dwelling for a 
 while in seclusion in the presence of ‘ the 
 mount that burned with fire/ he might ponder 
 over the transient glories of the ministration of 
 death and apprehend its real purpose in relation 
 to the more glorious covenant which was now 
 to supplant it. Here, surrounded by the chil- 
 
 * Acts vii. 30. *f* 1 Kings xix. 8. J Galat. i. 16, 17. 
 
 § Commentary on Galatians, p. 89. 
 
78 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 dren of the desert, the descendants of Hagar 
 the bondswoman, he read the true meaning and 
 power of the law. In the rugged and barren 
 region whence it issued he saw a fit type of 
 that bleak desolation which it created and was 
 intended to create in the soul of man.” It may 
 well have been to this same desert, already 
 consecrated by the most sacred memories, 
 
 “ Where all around, on mountain, sand, and sky, 
 
 God’s chariot wheels have left distinctest trace,” 
 
 that One infinitely greater than either Moses 
 or Elias—and to whom their homage on the 
 Mount of Transfiguration testified that both 
 law and prophets bowed before the supreme 
 authority and glory of the Christ—was led, 
 that amidst its awful solitudes and sur¬ 
 rounded by its sacred memories, He might 
 meditate on the nature and the issues of that 
 redeeming work which He had just begun, and 
 to accomplish which He had come into the 
 world. 
 
 But if this solitude of the desert afforded to 
 Christ a lengthened season for meditation on 
 His great work, and for fellowship with His 
 Father, we must not forget that it also deepened 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 79 
 
 and aggravated the severity of the conflict 
 which our Lord endured from the assault of the 
 tempter. We know from our own experience 
 the helpfulness of a human voice and a human " 
 heart by our side in times of the deepest spirit¬ 
 ual darkness and trial: we know how even 
 the simple entreaty by those we love, not to give 
 way to temptation, often girds us with new 
 strength, and decides the wavering will; and 
 because Christ was in very deed our brother, 
 
 “ the Son of Man,” He too must have felt the 
 inspiration and the courage which human 
 sympathy and human goodness afford to those 
 who are sore beset of the devil. In another 
 great crisis of our Lord’s life, the temptation 
 which fell on Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, 
 and of which He Himself spoke as “the prince 
 of this world coming ”* to Him, He besought v 
 the three of His disciples whom He most trusted 
 to “watch with him/’t as if He longed to feel 
 the comfort and help of their companionship in 
 His awful agony ; but He asked, it may be 
 added, in vain. The second temptation, like ^ 
 the first, was to be endured alone. Gethsemane 
 was as truly a solitude to Christ as the wilder- 
 
 * John xiv. 30. + Matt. xxvi. 38. 
 
8o 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 ness. And in this, the first temptation of 
 Christ, as in the second, He is withdrawn from 
 all human companionship, and from the sound 
 of human voices, and the touch of human love, 
 that alone He may face the tempter, and in 
 the dread conflict be cast on His God alone. 
 How immeasurably this solitude added to the 
 anguish and bitterness of the conflict we can 
 only faintly imagine; that it left a dread 
 of the same solitude occurring again we may 
 see, not only from the pathetic appeal of which 
 we have just spoken, which Jesus made to His 
 disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, to 
 “watch with Him,” but from the sad remon¬ 
 strance He addressed to His disciples concern¬ 
 ing their desertion of Him in His hour of need, 
 “ The hour cometh, yea is come, that ye shall 
 leave Me alone, and yet I am not alone, because 
 the Father is with Me.”* 
 
 But another purpose than that of solitude 
 was secured by the wilderness being selected as 
 the scene of Christ s temptation; it necessitated 
 the long period of fasting which preceded the 
 final temptation. “In those days”—and St Luke 
 is referring do the forty days of the sojourn in 
 
 * John xvi. 32. 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 8 I 
 
 \ 
 
 the desert—“He did eat nothing; and in 
 St Matthew we read, “ When He had fasted 
 forty days and forty nights He afterwards 
 hungered.”! Now this fast had a double sig¬ 
 nificance, first in regard to the relation Christ 
 bore to the Jewish law, and then in relation to 
 our Lord Himself. 
 
 Twice, and only twice before, is a fast similar 
 to Christ’s recorded in the history of the Bible, 
 and it is not a little significant that in both 
 cases the fast took place in the wilderness, and 
 in both cases it was a fast of the two great 
 typical precursors of our Lord in the Jewish 
 Church. Moses, the giver of the law, and who 
 declared to the people, “The Lord thy God 
 will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the 
 midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; 
 unto Him shall ye hearken,had fasted in the 
 wilderness forty days and forty nights ;§ and 
 Elijah, the typical prophet of the Old Cove- v 
 nant, had also fasted for the same time in 
 the same desert. || The first public act of 
 the ministry of our Lord declares he has not 
 
 * Luke iv. 2. + Matt. iv. 2. 
 
 I Dent, xviii. 15 - § Ex. xxiv. 18, 
 
 || 1 Kings xix, 8. 
 
 F 
 
82 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 come to “destroy, but to fulfil the law.” By 
 one significant act He binds Himself to the 
 old at the very moment of inaugurating the 
 new. 
 
 But the fast had its special relation to 
 Christ’s spiritual equipment for the conflict 
 through which He was now to pass. In every 
 age of the Church’s history, and in almost every 
 religion on the face of the earth, the practice of 
 fasting has been the witness to the supremacy 
 of the higher over the lower nature in man, and 
 to the victory which may be gained by the 
 spirit over the affections and passions of the 
 flesh. Christ Himself bore witness to the value 
 of this discipline of the body by His fast in the 
 wilderness. About to enter on His great work, 
 and to encounter the fiery darts of the devil, 
 He equips Himself alike for the work and for 
 the conflict, by a long and deliberate subordin¬ 
 ation of His bodily to His spiritual nature, by 
 the assertion of the utter insignificance of the 
 demands of the flesh as compared with the 
 deeper necessities of the spirit. He Himself is 
 the great illustration of the meaning of His own 
 words, “ If any man would come after Me, let 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 83 
 
 him deny himself and take up his cross daily 
 and follow Me.” * 
 
 No doubt it is easy to say that even fasting 
 has been abused, and has been made a foe rather 
 than a friend to the spiritual life. When the 
 subordination of the lower to the higher nature, 
 which alone gives all its moral value to fasting, 
 has been lost sight of; when fasting has been 
 practised for its own sake, rather than as a 
 means to an end higher than itself; when in¬ 
 stead of taking its place as one of the conditions 
 of spiritual endowment for any special spiritual 
 work, it has been made a counsel of perfection, 
 and exalted into a good in itself, then fasting 
 has lost its moral worth, and a protest against 
 the fast may be really a higher moral act than 
 the fast itself. 
 
 But in the present day, and amid the growing 
 luxuriousness of the age in which we live, it is 
 possible that we may be in danger of forgetting 
 that fasting has still its legitimate place in the 
 culture of the spiritual life, and that there is a true 
 as well a^ja. false asceticism in the kingdom of 
 God. The form which the denial of the lower 
 nature may take is comparatively unimportant; 
 
 * Luke ix. 23. 
 
8 4 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 whether we abstain literally for a time from our 
 wonted food and drink, or whether we refuse to 
 gratify any of the sinless desires of which every 
 human life is full, matters but little so long 
 as the moral significance of the self-denial is 
 reached in the resolute subordination of the 
 lower and fleshly nature to the higher, even at the 
 cost of pain, and suffering, and the mortification 
 of the flesh. If an apostle could say, “ I buffet 
 my body and bring it into bondage, lest by any 
 means, after that I have preached to others, I 
 myself should be rejected,” * how little can any 
 of us afford to neglect that bodily discipline, 
 that gymnastic of the lower nature, which St 
 Paul tells is “ profitable for a little,” -|* and the 
 disregard of which has so often brought decay 
 and death on the nobler life of the soul. High 
 achievements in duty, continual victories over 
 temptation and sin, the mastery of “ the flesh ” 
 which besets us all, and without whose repression 
 the spiritual life itself becomes enervated and 
 luxurious, are not to be gained without much 
 personal self-denial and pain, and without a 
 daily self-discipline of which fasting ought to 
 form at least a subordinate part. 
 
 * I Cor. ix. 27. 
 
 t I Tim. iv. 8 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 S5 
 
 J One further point, moreover, in the locality 
 chosen for the temptation remains to be noticed. 
 St Mark alone preserves for us the graphic 
 touch in the picture, “He was with the wild 
 beasts.” * It is difficult, perhaps, to put into 
 words all the subtle suggestions of this preg¬ 
 nant phrase—the imagination is often a better 
 interpreter of Scripture than the logical reason 
 —but some glimpses at anyrate of its meaning 
 may be caught. Adam lost his regal control 
 and dominion over the lower animals by his fall: 
 Christ regained it by His victory. The crown 
 of man’s lordship over the brute creation which 
 had been lost by the first Adam is restored by 
 the second. Adam turned Paradise into a 
 desert by his sin : Jesus turns the desert into 
 Paradise by His victory over sin and the wild 
 beasts; and it adds inexpressible pathos to our 
 Lord’s temptation if we think of Him not only as 
 confronted by the great enemy—that adversary 
 whom Scripture itself compares to a “ roaring 
 lion walking about seeking whom he may 
 devour ” +—but as surrounded .by a fierce and 
 bloodthirsty crew of wild beasts of prey, each 
 one intent on His destruction, as eager for 
 
 * Mark i. 13. f I Peter v. 8. 
 
86 
 
 THE TIME AND PLACE 
 
 ft 
 
 His blood as the devil was for His soul, but 
 kept in terror, and subdued by the majesty and 
 might of Him who had come to regain that 
 lordship of man over the creation, which at the 
 beginning was “put into subjection under his 
 feet,” but which had been forfeited by the fall. 
 
 What deeper meanings there may be in this 
 mysterious phrase, “He was with the wild 
 beasts,” we may never on earth fully know. We 
 only know that for ourselves temptation is often 
 nothing but the assault of what has been called 
 ‘‘the wild beast in every man” on that which 
 is best and holiest in the soul, and although in 
 the pure and perfect soul of Jesus there never 
 was aught but what was divine and gentle and 
 good, yet even He “ made in all points like unto 
 His brethren,” may have been permitted to feel 
 the assault of those seductions to evil which in 
 us arise from our lower and evil nature, but 
 which came to Him from the temptations of the 
 devil from without. When He was tempted to 
 make the stones into bread that He might satisfy 
 the cravings of the hunger of the body, He 
 passed through a temptation which is the preg¬ 
 nant type of all those temptations which come 
 to us from “ the flesh,” and which gives a new 
 
OF THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 87 
 
 meaning to the graphic words of St Mark, “ He 
 was with the wild beasts.” 
 
 And these were in the wilderness. Christ 
 had left the haunts of men far behind, but he 
 had not left temptation and danger behind. 
 Driven by the Spirit into the desert, He finds 
 the devil waiting for Him even there : and so 
 we learn the last, and perhaps the most vital 
 lesson the scene of the temptation was meant 
 to teach us. In every age of the Church’s history 
 men and women have imagined that by fleeing 
 from the world they could flee from temptation: 
 and the “ religious houses ” of the Roman 
 Catholic Church, its monasteries and convents, 
 the cell of the anchorite or the recluse, and 
 the pillow of the miserable devotee, all have been 
 hailed as retreats from the world, because they 
 were believed to be refuges from temptation. 
 How deadly the disaster that has come to the 
 spiritual life of those who thus imagined they 
 could serve God best by breaking God’s own laws, 
 it is needless to say; but against this foolish 
 dream of escaping temptation by fleeing from the 
 world, the temptation of Jesu<5 in the wilderness 
 is the divine and solemn warning. He found 
 
gg THE TIME OF THE TEMPTATION, 
 
 the devil in the deepest solitudes of the desert: 
 and we shall find that he waits for us there too. 
 To escape from temptation we must escape from 
 life, for whether in the city or in the desert 
 the tempter is near. 
 
V. 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
“And the tempter came and “And the devil said unto 
 said unto him, If thou art the him, If thou art the Son of 
 Son of God, command that God, command this stone that 
 these stones become bread, it become bread. And Jesus 
 But he answered and said, It answered unto him, It is 
 is written, Man shall not live written, Man shall not live 
 by bread alone, but by every by bread alone.”— Luke iv. 
 word that proceedeth out of 3, 4. 
 the mouth of God.”— Matt. 
 iv. 3, 4. 
 
V. 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 It is only in a very limited sense that we can 
 speak of this temptation as being the first temp¬ 
 tation of our Lord. It is true that it is the first of 
 which we have any detailed record in the Gospels, 
 but both St Mark and St Luke expressly state 
 that the temptation of Christ had been going 
 on incessantly throughout the forty days which 
 preceded j the final assault of the tempter. 
 “ He was in the wilderness forty days tempted 
 of Satan,* are the words of St Mark, whilst St 
 Luke says, “Jesus . . . was led by the Spirit 
 in the wilderness during forty days, being 
 tempted of the devil.” f The forty days of 
 fasting were also forty days of temptation, cul¬ 
 minating, as we shall now see, in thiee supierne 
 and typical temptations, embodying in the ideal 
 form in which they were presented to Christ all 
 the temptations to which man is subject, the 
 * Mark i. 13* f Luke iv. 2. 
 
92 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 temptation, first of all, of the bodily or lower 
 nature; then the temptation of the soul, or higher 
 nature; and lastly, the temptation of the spirit 
 ual or highest part of man’s nature. Or to put 
 the same truth in another form, as there are 
 three possible relations in which God stands to 
 man, the relation of creation, or of providence, 
 or of redemption, so these three final temptations 
 of our Lord successively touch each one of these 
 spheres of man’s life; the first belonging to the 
 lowest sphere, that of creation ; the second to 
 another and a higher sphere, that of providence ; 
 whilst the third and last reaches to the loftiest 
 of all the divine relations of human life, the 
 sphere of the redemptive kingdom of God. 
 
 We have to consider now the meaning of the 
 first temptation as it was presented to Christ. 
 
 For forty days and forty nights Jesus had 
 eaten nothing. He had passed through a 
 fast that recalled the great typical fasts of 
 the Old Testament economy,—passed through 
 it that at least He might bear witness that in 
 the new kingdom of God He was founding on 
 earth, the lower nature of man was not less 
 under the control of the higher than it was in 
 the ancient kingdom of Judaism,—but at the 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 9 3 
 
 end of the forty days, when the cycle of the 
 fast was complete, nature reasserted her claims. 
 “When they were completed He hungered.”* 
 Now, hunger is of all physical torments the 
 most intolerable, with the single exception of 
 the pangs of thirst, and even this latter misery 
 we can hardly doubt was added to the Saviour’s 
 suffering at the end of His fast; for although 
 we are not told that He was enduring the 
 pains of thirst as well as those of hunger, 
 yet we may be sure that water was as little 
 likely to have been found in the wilderness 
 as bread. And it is this exhaustion and faint¬ 
 ness of body which the devil uses as the instru¬ 
 ment and occasion of the first temptation. (We 
 have already seen that there is no necessity to 
 imagine any visible appearance of Satan to 
 Christ, for the obj ective reality of temptation 
 in no way depends on the personal manifestation 
 of the tempter, and we may therefore, without 
 irreverence, imagine the temptation as rising 
 up within the soul of Christ, as our temptations 
 arise within ourselves, as if it had sprung from 
 the natural and lawful desires and necessities 
 of His own bodily nature. 1 1 am weak, and 
 
 Luke iv. 2. 
 
94 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 faint, and hungry from my long fast and watch¬ 
 ing and conflict; why should I not at once 
 satisfy the hunger of my body—hunger it is no 
 sin for Me to feel, for it is only a consequence 
 of that humanity I have taken upon Myself—by 
 working a miracle and changing these stone* 
 which lie at My feet into bread ? ’ 
 
 But the suggestion by the tempter to the 
 mind of our Lord that He would do well to 
 exert His miraculous power in order to satisfy 
 the pangs of hunger does not, as it seems to us, 
 reveal the deepest and most infernal subtlety 
 of this first temptation. Both St Matthew and 
 St Luke tell us that the temptation began with 
 an appeal to Christ’s divinity. “If Thou be the 
 Son of God, command that these stones be made 
 bread,” and these words are profoundly signifi¬ 
 cant. Immediately before Christ had gone up 
 into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, 
 He had been baptized by John in the Jordan, 
 and heaven had been opened, and the voice of 
 God Himself had been heard declaring, “ Thou 
 art My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” 
 We have already endeavoured to understand 
 the meaning of the baptism in its relation to 
 our Lord’s own consciousness, and although the 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 95 
 
 growth of the consciousness of the Divine nature 
 in our Lord must be to us a dark, and possibly 
 an insoluble mystery, yet as we have seen it 
 seems not improbable that this heavenly voice 
 gave to Jesus the first full assurance of His 
 Divine mission, and that then there arose in Him 
 in all its wonder and glory the consciousness, 
 which from the first had been latent and slum¬ 
 bering in His soul, of His Divine relationship 
 to God and of the work He had to fulfil in 
 the world as the “ beloved Son ” in whom the 
 Father was “ well pleased.” 
 
 This deep and blessed sense of Christ’s filial 
 relation to God Satan now uses as the lever of 
 this first temptation. ‘ Thou art the Son of 
 God; Thou hast heard the voice from heaven 
 witnessing to Thy sonship ; Thou hast all power 
 given to Thee on earth; Thou hast a Divine 
 mission to fulfil; why not test Thy power, and 
 begin Thy mission now and here ? Thou art 
 hungry from fasting in Thy Father’s work, 
 command that these stones be made bread. If 
 not, Thou mayest perish from hunger ere Thy 
 work has well begun, and Thy refusal may 
 frustrate the end for which Thou hast come into 
 the world.’ 
 
96 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 But even this account does not exhaust the 
 full force of the temptation. It is impossible 
 to overlook the dark suggestion implied in the 
 first word of the tempter, “ If Thou be the Son 
 of God,” of doubt as to Christ’s Divine Sonship, 
 doubt which only a miraculous exertion of His 
 power could answer and remove. ‘ If Thou be 
 the Son of God, command that these stones be 
 made bread; otherwise how shalt Thou know 
 Thou art not self-deceived as to Thy Sonship 
 and Thy mission ? There is an “ if,” a terrible 
 “ if,” before even Thine assurance of Thy 
 Divine nature: destroy the doubt for ever by 
 one wonder-working word. ^5ivine Sonship 
 must mean Divine power ; prove the Sonship 
 by exerting the power. Thou hast done nothing 
 with Thy Divine power for thirty long years; 
 use it now. Use it for a holy and lawful end, 
 and with the command that these stones be 
 made bread,—a command they shall hear and 
 obey,—at once satisfy Thy hunger, and for ever 
 verify Thy Divine mission among men.’ 
 
 Such, in its deepest meaning, seems to have 
 been the true character of this first temptation 
 of Christ. And let us remember that it came 
 to our Lord when He was least able to bear it. 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 97 
 
 It is hard enough at all times to resist temp¬ 
 tation, but to fight such a temptation as this, 
 when the weakened bodily strength, and the 
 pangs of hunger, gave the keenest edge to 
 the assault of the tempter, is a task heavy 
 enough to tax the strength of even the most 
 resolute loyalty to God. We pitifully blame a 
 starving man if his conscience is not over 
 scrupulous as to the means he uses for obtaining 
 food, and we do not realise the tremendous 
 force with which this temptation assaulted our 
 Lord, nor the sublime grandeur of His victory 
 over it, if we forget that He who suffered it had 
 been exhausted and weakened by prolonged 
 fasting, and that it was only when the claims of 
 the physical nature began once more to assert 
 themselves, that the whisper of the tempter 
 came, “ Command that these stones be made 
 bread.” 
 
 But it may be asked, What would there have 
 been sinful in Christ yielding to the suggestion 
 of Satan, and turning the stones, by the exercise 
 of His miraculous power, into bread ? He 
 wrought a miracle more than once to feed 
 others, why should He not have wrought a 
 miracle to feed Himself? 
 
 G 
 
98 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 The reply to this question leads us into the 
 very heart of the temptation, and reveals its 
 special significance to the tempted followers of 
 Christ in every age. 
 
 Christ was being tempted, it must be borne in 
 mind, as man. He stands before Satan not as 
 the Son of God—as such he was inaccessible to 
 temptation—but as the Son of Man. He has 
 to meet the seductions of the tempter not in 
 His Divine power, but in the greatness of His 
 human trust and obedience to God. He is to 
 be “ in all points tempted like as we are, yet 
 without sin.” But if our Lord had used His 
 Divine power to satisfy His own hunger, and 
 had wrought a miracle to supply His own press¬ 
 ing need, He would not have been “ tempted 
 in all points like as we are.” He would have 
 separated himself from His brethren at the very 
 point when they would have been unable to 
 follow Him, and in the moment of the severest 
 pressure of the fight would have defeated the 
 enemy with weapons which they could never 
 use. When the poor and needy are tortured 
 with hunger, and the terrible temptation arises 
 to do wrong in order to get bread, they gannot 
 vanquish the tempter by a miracle./"They must 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 99 
 
 conquer, if they conquer at all, by trust; and it 
 would be no example and no inspiration to them 
 to be told that once their Lord and Master had 
 been tempted as they were, but had overcome 
 by turning the stones into bread. Christ will 
 not overcome Satan thus. Even in the thick of 
 the battle He will not separate Himself for a 
 moment from the poorest and weakest of His 
 brethren : He will vanquish His temptation, as 
 we have to vanquish ours, not by a miracle, but 
 by trust in the living word of God. 
 
 And hence the deep significance of the reply 
 which Christ makes from Scripture in answer to 
 the temptation of the devil, and with which He 
 overcomes his assault. “ It is written,” our 
 Lord says, “ MAN shall not live by bread alone, 
 but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 mouth of God; ” and if we remember the 
 original application of these words, and the cir¬ 
 cumstances under which they were spoken to 
 Israel by Moses, we shall see their profound 
 meaning as used by our Lord. Moses is re¬ 
 minding the children of Israel of the perils 
 which had befallen them in the wilderness*— 
 possibly this very wilderness in which Christ 
 
 * Deut, via., xix, 
 
IOO 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 was now being tempted—of the way in which 
 God had led them for forty years, “ to humble 
 them, and to prove them, to know what was in 
 their heart, whether they would keep His com¬ 
 mandments, or no; ” and then he goes on to 
 say, “And He humbled thee, and suffered thee 
 to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou 
 knewest not, neither did thy fathers know, that 
 He might make thee know that man doth not 
 live by bread only, but by every word that pro¬ 
 ceeded out of the mouth of the Lord doth man 
 live.” Israel had been tempted in the wilder¬ 
 ness just as Christ was now tempted; they had 
 been “ suffered to hunger,” and appeared to be 
 starving, and yet they had not perished. And 
 why ? Because God could provide and did pro¬ 
 vide “ a table in the wilderness,” because the last 
 extremity of human need is only the beginning 
 of the Divine opportunity, for when all the bread 
 and the water had failed, the infinite resources 
 of God were unexhausted and untouched. That 
 was the lesson of the manna, and Christ quotes 
 the sublime words of Moses in reference to the 
 manna as His own reply to the temptation of 
 the devil. He, too, is man. He, too, is in the 
 wilderness. He, too, is tempted by hunger: 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 IOI 
 
 tempted to distrust, and in His distrust to for¬ 
 sake the living God and rely on His own re¬ 
 sources. But He refuses to yield to the temp¬ 
 tation. God has led Him to the wilderness: 
 God has suffered this sore need and temptation 
 to befall Him, and God will provide a way of 
 escape. Jesus will not work a miracle to save 
 Himself from hunger : no! not even to assure 
 Himself of His own Divine sonship and glory. 
 He is here as the Son of Man, not as the *Son 
 of God ; and as man, our Brother in the deepest 
 and truest meaning of the word, He will con¬ 
 quer by trust in His Father’s care. He lives, 
 as well as we, not on “bread alone, but on 
 every word which proceedeth out of the mouth 
 of God.” 
 
 And so Christ vanquishes the tempter, and 
 we know not whether more to admire in His 
 victory the moral grandeur of His refusal to use 
 His supernatural power to save Himself from 
 hunger, it may be from perishing—a refusal borne 
 out by all His subsequent life, for never once 
 did our Lord work any miracle for His own 
 benefit or succour—or the gracious condescen¬ 
 sion with which He identified Himself with His 
 brethren, by His refusal to allow Himself any 
 
102 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION 
 
 support or relief in the hour of His sorest need 
 and peril, other than that which the humblest of 
 His disciples possess in the immeasurable re¬ 
 sources of an unwavering trust in God. 
 
 """Only once again, although in a different form, 
 this first temptation seems to have been re¬ 
 peated in the life of our Lord, and repeated 
 with a deadlier and darker fury, assaulting Him 
 when even more exhausted with pain and 
 weakness than He was in the desert When 
 Jesus hung on the cross, the crowd who passed 
 by, mocked Him, and quoting His own words 
 bade Him come down from the cross and 
 save Himself. “ Thou that destroyest the 
 temple, and buildest it in three days, save Thy¬ 
 self ; ” * and the very words of the tempter in this 
 first temptation were heard again in the jeers 
 beneath the cross : “ If Thou art the Son of God , 
 come down from the cross.” J- Again, and in 
 the hour of His deepest agony and need, He is 
 challenged to work a miracle to save Himself 
 from death : and again, in patient and sublime 
 trust in God, He overcomes the temptation. 
 The bitter taunt of the tempter, hurled at Him 
 in 'the sneer, “ He saved others, Himself He 
 
 * Matt, xxvii. 40. + Matt, xxvii. 40. 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 103 
 
 cannot save,” while it repeats this first tempta¬ 
 tion of the wilderness, like it falls powerless 
 before the immoveable fidelity of our Lord’s 
 trust in God. ' 
 
 And now let us endeavour to gather from 
 this temptation some of the lessons it may 
 teach us. 
 
 The temptation to turn the stones into bread 
 so as to satisfy the hunger of the body is mani¬ 
 festly a type of the whole circle of temptations 
 which arise from the needs and demands of our 
 lower and fleshly nature. If Christ had been 
 only apparently flesh and blood, if as many of 
 the early heretics believed, His body was not a 
 real body like our own, but a phantom body, 
 which fell away from Him at His resurrection, 
 then this temptation could never have arisen in 
 His earthly life. It was the reality of Christ’s 
 human body which made this first tempta¬ 
 tion possible, and which gives to it all the 
 significance it bears on similar temptations in 
 our lives. 
 
 We, too, have bodies, and a very large part 
 of the temptations to evil which assault us 
 arise from the physical organization we now 
 possess. Sometimes, indeed, temptation comes 
 
104 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 to the servants of Christ in almost literal 
 resemblance to the form it took with their 
 Lord, and they are hungry as He was hungry ; 
 and they are in a wilderness as He was, where 
 there is no bread, and are tempted, as He was 
 tempted, to break their trust in God, and in 
 impatient unbelief to be their own Provi¬ 
 dence, and to anticipate the slow movements 
 of the Infinite Care and Love on which man 
 alone truly lives. Sometimes the temptation 
 arises from still lower parts of the physical 
 nature, and the lusts of the flesh clamour for 
 gratification, and there is a deadly strife 
 between the animal and the spiritual, the flesh 
 “ lusting against the spirit,” and “ the spirit 
 lusting against the flesh,” and victory, if it be 
 won at all, is won at such a cost that it is only 
 less terrible than a defeat. Sometimes it is 
 physical suffering which is the instrument the 
 tempter uses for assailing the soul through the 
 body. Long months, or years, of bodily agony 
 have to be endured, making it hard to sub¬ 
 mit to the will of God, still harder to acquiesce 
 in that will; and as the pain grows keener, and 
 all human means of mitigation are one after 
 another tried, and one after another fail, the 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 105 
 
 terrible temptation to take life into one’s own 
 hand, and to cut it short, and by one stroke to 
 end for ever the weary days of pain, arises 
 before the soul; or if that be thrust from us 
 with horror, the not less deadly whisper of the 
 tempter is heard, “ Curse God and die.” 
 
 In ways like these Christ’s temptation re¬ 
 peats itself in our lives, but the chiefest peril 
 to us of all such temptations, as it was to 
 Christ in His first temptation, is when they 
 take the form—and it is one of the subtlest 
 forms temptation can take—of an inducement 
 to satisfy lawful needs and desires by unlaw¬ 
 ful means. There was no sin in the hunger 
 Christ suffered, and there was no sin in 
 the desire He felt to satisfy the pangs of 
 hunger. It was as natural and sinless a desire 
 as the appetite with which a hungry man sits 
 thankfully down to his food. The sin was in 
 the temptation to satisfy an innocent bodily 
 craving by unlawful means. For Christ to 
 have worked a miracle to have delivered Him¬ 
 self from hunger would have been to have 
 abandoned His trust in God, and would have 
 destroyed at a blow all the blessed example 
 His temptation and His victory in the wilder- 
 
IOO 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION, 
 
 ness have been to His tempted brethren in 
 every age. 
 
 The sin was not in the desire for food, not in 
 the longing to gratify the desire, but in the 
 means suggested to be used for its gratification. 
 It is so with us. Our subtlest temptations are 
 not those which openly and bluntly seduce us 
 to do that which is evil. Satan is far too 
 cunning to arouse the conscience against him¬ 
 self at the commencement of his infernal work, 
 for he knows full well that to exhibit tempta¬ 
 tion in all its naked and undisguised wickedness 
 before the heart, to attempt to induce the soul 
 to yield to sin, would be to rally to its defence 
 whatever remained of goodness, and to make 
 the ruin of the soul not less, but more difficult. 
 He tempts in a subtler and deadlier way. He 
 lays before the soul an end confessedly innocent 
 in itself, but which can only be reached by 
 sinful means. Then peril arises. The inno¬ 
 cence of the end too often conceals from the 
 conscience the guilt of the means by which 
 it has to be attained, and the soul has fallen 
 before temptation almost before it knew danger 
 was near. 
 
 Thus, for example, there is no sin in the 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 107 
 
 poor desiring bread ; no sin in their longing 
 to satisfy their own wants and those of their 
 children ; no sin in their desire to lessen the 
 load of the miserable poverty under which 
 many of them live from day to day. It is in 
 the steps which they may take to satisfy these 
 wants, and to lift themselves above want, that 
 sin may lie. They may be tempted to compass 
 a natural and rightful end by unlawful means, 
 to imagine that since some have bread enough 
 and to spare, whilst they have not enough, it 
 cannot be wrong for those who haye too little 
 to take of the superfluity of those who have too 
 much, so that even robbery may be justified if 
 committed under the plea of hunger and of 
 poverty. 
 
 So again there is no sin in a man of business 
 desiring to make money, no sin in his ambition 
 to attain a position which shall secure both 
 himself and his family from pecuniary care, 
 but there may be sin of the gravest kind in the 
 means he takes to reach the end he seeks. He 
 may become unscrupulous in trade ; he may 
 disguise dishonesty under the plausible name of 
 sharpness in business; he may sacrifice the 
 peace and integrity of his conscience to getting 
 
 / 
 
io8 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 rich, until at length an end which in itself was 
 at least an innocent, if not a very lofty ambi¬ 
 tion, has become the means of leading him 
 deeper and deeper into sin. Or, to take one 
 farther illustration, and yet one to which, for 
 obvious reasons, it is only possible remotely 
 to allude, those dark and terrible temptations 
 whose fires burn most fiercely in the days when 
 youth is passing into manhood, and which, 
 unless quenched, leave behind them the 
 charred and blackened ruin of body and 
 soul alike, derive their deadliest and most 
 insidious peril from being, in another form, 
 only a repetition of this first temptation of 
 our Lord, the temptation to satisfy innocent 
 and natural desires by unlawful and guilty 
 means. 
 
 v X 
 
 And now what is the one safeguard against 
 this peril ? How may we defeat this attempt 
 of Satan to destroy the soul through the body ? 
 If we ponder the significance of our Lord’s 
 victory we shall gain the answer we seek. 
 How, then, did Christ overcome ? 
 
 Not, be it observed, by denying the legiti¬ 
 macy of the desires of the bodily organization. 
 One word in our Lord’s first answer to the 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. IO 9 
 
 tempter may easily escape our notice, and yet 
 it is a word full of meaning: “ Man,” said 
 Christ, “ shall not live by bread ALONE, but by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of 
 God.” In that reply the Saviour expressly 
 declares that man has a lower as well as a 
 higher life, and He implies that this lower life 
 demands its appropriate nourishment and satis¬ 
 faction. Christ does not say, as an ascetic 
 would have said, “ Man shall not live by 
 bread,” but He says, “ Man shall not live by 
 bread alone ;” that is, He admits and recognises 
 the lower needs and desires of the body, and 
 implicitly sanctions their lawful gratification. 
 
 How then does Christ vanquish the tempter ? 
 He vanquishes him by quoting, as we have seen, 
 a passage from the history of the children of 
 Israel, in which Moses declared to them that 
 their life was a nobler and diviner thing than 
 the life of the beasts, for it was the life of 
 “ man,” and man lived not on “ bread alone,” 
 but on God ; his truest life was not the grati¬ 
 fication of a bodily need, but the satisfaction of 
 the hunger of the spirit in God Himself. In 
 other words, Christ overcame the flesh by the 
 spirit. He conquered, not [by denying either 
 
I IO 
 
 THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 the existence of the hunger to which the tempta¬ 
 tion appealed, or His own desire for bread to 
 satisfy it, but by asserting the supremacy for 
 man of the higher life of faith in God. It were 
 better for man that his body should perish from 
 want, than that his soul should die by distrusting 
 God. 
 
 And as Christ overcame, we must overcome 
 too. Unhappily for the Christian life it has not 
 not always followed the Divine wisdom of the 
 example of Christ. It has attempted to over¬ 
 come in its own way rather than in Christ’s. 
 Asceticism in every age has tried to conquer 
 the temptations which proceed from the desires 
 of the physical nature of man by seeking to 
 destroy that nature altogether, instead of sub¬ 
 ordinating it to the higher laws of the spiritual 
 life, and the result has too often been disastrous 
 both to body and spirit. The fleshly side of 
 man’s nature is too strong for any forced and 
 unnatural repression, and the bitterest satire on 
 the ascetic life is the fact that it perished from 
 sensual corruption, dragging in its fall the 
 nobler and diviner life down to destruction as 
 well. Only as Christ overcame shall we over¬ 
 come the temptations of the flesh. We must 
 
THE FIRST TEMPTATION. 
 
 I I I 
 
 recall ourselves to our truest and highest life; 
 we must refuse to gratify even the most innocent 
 desire if it necessitate our touching any means 
 which are unholy and unlawful ; we must con¬ 
 quer the flesh not by vainly striving to destroy 
 the flesh, but by living above it; we must 
 remember that the mortification of the body 
 does not necessarily involve the mortifica¬ 
 tion of the flesh ; we must be willing to perish 
 from hunger rather than abandon our trust in 
 God. On this first temptation and this first 
 victory of our Lord, we may read the words 
 written which have been the secret of the 
 spiritual life in every age, “ The Just shall Jive 
 by Faith.” 
 

 
 
 
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VI. 
 
 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 H 
 
( ‘ Then the devil taketh him 
 into the holy city; and he set 
 him on the pinnacle of the tem¬ 
 ple, and saith unto him, If thou 
 art the Son of God, cast thy¬ 
 self down : for it is written, 
 
 He shall give his angels 
 charge concerning thee : 
 And on their hands they 
 shall bear thee up, 
 
 Lest haply thou dash thy foot 
 against a stone, 
 
 Jesus said unto him, Again it is 
 written, Thou shalt not tempt 
 the Lord thy God,” —Matt. 
 iv. 5-7* 
 
 “ And he led him to Jerusa¬ 
 lem, and set him on the pin¬ 
 nacle of the temple, and said 
 unto him, If thou art the Son 
 of God, cast thyself down from 
 hence : for it is written, 
 
 He shall give his angels 
 charge concerning thee, to 
 guard thee : 
 
 and. 
 
 On their hands they shall 
 bear thee up, 
 
 Lest haply thou dash thy foot 
 against a stone. 
 
 And Jesus answering said unto 
 him, It is said, Thou shalt not 
 tempt the Lord thy God.”— 
 Luke iv. 9-12. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 In considering the instrument of the temptation 
 of Christ we saw there was no necessity to 
 suppose there was any literal and visible ap¬ 
 pearance of Satan to our Lord. The reality of 
 our temptations does not depend on our seeing 
 the tempter-— nay! the force of the seductions 
 to evil to which we are exposed often depends 
 on the source whence they proceed, being 
 hidden from us—and in the same w r ay the 
 reality of Christ’s temptations in no way de¬ 
 mands the external and bodily appearance of 
 the tempter to Him. It is quite possible that 
 each of these three successive temptations was, 
 as one of them, and that the last and most 
 terrible must have been, purely subjective to 
 the mind of Christ; subjective, however, with 
 this important limitation, that their origin was 
 not subjective but objective, in other words, 
 they did not, in the first instance, arise from 
 
I I 6 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 within the mind of Christ, but were inducements 
 to sin suggested by the tempter from without. 
 
 Nor is it any serious objection to this view 
 that in the account of the second temptation we 
 are told, “ Then the devil taketh Him into the 
 Holy City, and he set Him on the pinnacle of 
 the temple, and saith unto Him, If thou art 
 the Son of God, cast thyself down” In the 
 vision recorded by the prophet Ezekiel (chap, 
 xxxvii. l) of the valley of dry bones, we read, 
 “ The hand of the Lord was upon me, and 
 carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and 
 set me down in the midst of the valley which 
 was full of bones, and caused me to pass by 
 them round about; ” words which, but for the 
 insertion of the single clause “ in the Spirit,” 
 would have appeared to imply a bodily and literal 
 translation of the prophet from the banks of the 
 river Chebar to the desolate Mesopotamian plain 
 where the scene of the vision is laid. There is, 
 moreover, in the same book, a still more strik¬ 
 ing illustration of the subjective nature of the 
 prophetic vision, and a still more striking proof 
 that the reality of the spiritual in no way de¬ 
 pends on its visibility to sense. A few chapters 
 later in the same prophet (chap. xl. i), we read, 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. I I 7 
 
 “ In the five and twentieth year of our capti¬ 
 vity, in the beginning of the year, in the tenth 
 day of the month, in the fourteenth year after 
 the city was smitten, in the self-same day the 
 hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me 
 thither. In the vision of God brought He me 
 into the land of Israel, and set me upon a very 
 high mountain, by which was as the frame of a 
 city on the south ”—the concluding words bear¬ 
 ing a singularly close resemblance to the terms 
 in which our Lord’s third and last temptation is 
 described. So, too, to take one further illustra¬ 
 tion, and this time from the New Testament, 
 we read in the Book of the Revelation (chap, 
 xvii. 1 - 3 ), “ There came one of the seven angels 
 that had the seven bowls, and spake with me, 
 saying, Come hither, I will show thee the judg¬ 
 ment of the great harlot that sitteth upon many 
 waters . . . and he carried me away in the 
 Spirit into a wilderness ; ” in which case again 
 the translation of the seer was entirely subjec¬ 
 tive, but nevertheless real. If it be said that in 
 the cases which have been quoted we are ex¬ 
 pressly told the translation of the prophet in 
 the one casd; and of the apostle in the other, 
 was “ in the Spirit,” it may fairly be replied that 
 
I 1 8 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 this also is exactly what we are told of the 
 temptation of Christ. “ He was led up of the 
 Spirit into the wilderness,” or, as St Luke has 
 it, “was led in the* Spirit in the wilderness,” the 
 very words which, as we have just seen, are 
 used of the translation of Ezekiel and of John.f 
 There are moments of exalted experience like 
 the rapture of which St Paul speaks (2 Cor. xii. 
 2), in which he was “ caught up even to the 
 third heaven,” when the share the body has in 
 the experience is so infinitely insignificant, and 
 so completely unnecessary to the reality of the 
 experience itself, that it is impossible to say 
 whether it was “ in the body,” or “ apart from 
 the body;” and so in the case of our Lord’s 
 temptation, the temptation was as real to Christ 
 as the vision was real to Ezekiel or to John, 
 although like the vision it was a purely subj ec- 
 tive representation to the mind. In a dream 
 everything seems, and for the time is, as real as 
 our waking life, and in like manner the trans¬ 
 lation from the wilderness to Jerusalem, and the 
 standing on “ the pinnacle of the temple,” with 
 
 * iv TW UveVfAOLTU 
 
 + In Ezek. xxxvii. I, iv Trveti —LXX., In Rev. xvii. 3, tv 
 Hvttiju.ct.Ti, 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. I 19 
 
 the temptation that immediately followed, were 
 as real to Christ even if purely visionary and 
 subjective, as if His feet had literally been 
 placed on the summit of the pinnacle, and He 
 had heard the voice of the tempter bidding 
 Him cast Himself down from thence. 
 
 If this view be correct it becomes a matter of 
 complete'unimportance for us to spend any time 
 in the attempt to determine which part of the 
 temple is meant by “ the pinnacle ” to which 
 Christ was taken by the devil. The answer 
 to the question may have a feeble archaeo¬ 
 logical interest: it has no bearing on the 
 significance and reality of the temptation itself. 
 
 Following the plan we have pursued in con¬ 
 sidering the first temptation, it will be well for 
 us to study the second temptation first in its 
 relation to our Lord; we shall then be prepared 
 for the lessons it was intended to teach our¬ 
 selves. 
 
 The diabolic subtlety of the second tempta¬ 
 tion will be seen if we consider what the first 
 temptation and the first victory had been. 
 That temptation, it will be remembered, was a 
 temptation to Christ to use His Divine power 
 on His own behalf: to satisfy His hunger and 
 
the second temptation. 
 
 I 20 
 
 want by a miracle, and so to separate Himself 
 from His brethren, who in their hours of need 
 had no miraculous power on which they could fall 
 back, and had no resource but their faith in God. 
 Christ refused to work the miracle: refused to 
 work it even though such a signal display of 
 supernatural power would have quenched the 
 awful doubt suggested by the tempter’s question, 
 “ If Thou art the Son of God.” He will live by 
 faith in God. He will be u in all points tempted 
 like as we are, yet without sin” One with us 
 in all that belongs to our true humanity, He 
 declares for Himself, not less than for us, “Man 
 shall not live by bread alone, but by every word 
 that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” 
 Christ s first victory is the victory of a triumph- 
 ar,f trust. 
 
 And now out of this sublime trust arises the 
 second temptation. With equal cunning and 
 daring, the tempter seizes the weapon with 
 which Christ had just defeated him, and turns 
 it against the Lord Himself. 
 
 * Thou wilt not work a miracle to supply 
 Thyself with bread, and to save Thyself from 
 perishing from hunger! Thou sayest Thou 
 wilt live by trust in the care and love of God. 
 Be it so. But dost Thou really trust, as Thou 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 12 I 
 
 sayest ? To refuse to command the stones to 
 be made into bread because of Thy trust in God 
 is but a small thing, for Thou art not yet ready 
 to perish : but lo! I offer Thee a worthy test 
 of the greatness of Thy trust. Seest Thou this 
 dizzy height ? Thou standest on the pinnacle of 
 the temple far above the valley below : now, 
 at length, Thou canst prove the reality and the 
 greatness of Thy trust: Cast Thyself down : 
 and if Thou art the Son of God, no evil shall 
 befall Thee. Yes ! If Thou art the Son of God, 
 cast Thyself down, and Thou shalt do more 
 than prove the greatness of Thy trust in God : 
 Thou shalt prove the greatness of Thine own 
 Divine Sonship as well. Thou art not yet 
 assured of it: Thou hast given to Thyself no 
 proof that the voice at Thy baptism, and Thine 
 own consciousness of a Divine birth and a 
 Divine mission, are more than a dream and a 
 vision: Thou canst banish doubt by one supreme 
 and triumphant act of trust in God. If Thou 
 art the Son of God Thou wilt not, canst not 
 perish. Nay! the very word of God which 
 Thou hast quoted will warrant this great act 
 of trust. Listen to it, for it is written— 
 
 ‘ “ He shall give his angels charge concerning Thee, 
 And on their hands shall they bear Thee up, 
 
 Lest haply Thou dash Thy foot against a stone.’” 
 
122 
 
 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 Such was the second temptation : and poorly 
 as it has been set forth by the dark suggestions 
 which we have thus imagined to have passed 
 through the Saviour’s mind, enough has been 
 said to show its infernal subtlety and cunning. 
 
 It appeals to the trust which had been tri¬ 
 umphant over temptation a moment before. It 
 does not ask Christ to separate Himself from 
 His brethren by any miraculous exertion of His 
 Divine power: it only bids Him commit Him¬ 
 self yet more fully to that care in which they 
 and He alike have to trust. It challenges trust 
 to nobler victories over sense and fear. Nay! 
 it demands this new venture of faith in the 
 interests of His Divine Sonship itself. How 
 shall the Son of God perish with such words 
 spoken of Him, words which declare that an 
 angel guard shall ever surround Him, and deliver 
 Him from so much as dashing His foot against 
 a stone ? 
 
 ^ And now let us consider the victory of our 
 Lord over this second temptation. We lose sight 
 altogether of the profound significance of Christ’s 
 reply to Satan if we imagine that it was merely 
 a quotation from Scripture forbidding Satan to 
 tempt Him, because He was God. A far deeper 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 123 
 
 meaning lies beneath Christ’s words, a mean¬ 
 ing which will become clear if we attempt to 
 discover the original reference of the words 
 which our Lord here solemnly uses in his 
 answer to Satan’s temptation : “ Again it is 
 written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord Thy 
 God.” 
 
 These words are taken from the Book of 
 Deuteronomy (chap. vi. 16), but they are fol¬ 
 lowed there by a significant addition which is 
 left out by our Lord in His answer to the devil, 
 “ Thou shalt not tempt the Lord Thy God, as 
 ye tempted Him in Massah .” In what way did 
 Israel tempt God at Massah ? The answer is clear 
 enough. It appears from the history in the Book 
 of Exodus (chap, xvii.) that when the children 
 of Israel in their journeyings in the wilderness 
 came to Rephidim, “ there was no water for the 
 people to drink.” They come, in bitter indigna¬ 
 tion, to Moses, and demand that he should 
 give them water. Moses answers, “ Why chide 
 ye with me ? wherefore do ye tempt the Lord ? ” 
 One sentence, a few verses later on, lets a flood 
 of light on the meaning of these words of Moses. 
 After the rock has been smitten in obedience 
 to the command of God, and a miraculous supply 
 
124 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 of water has been secured for the people, 
 we read that Moses “called the name of the 
 place Massah (‘Temptation’), and Meribah 
 0 Chiding ’), because of the chiding of the chil¬ 
 dren of Israel, and because they tempted the Lord ’ 
 saying, Is the Lord among us, or not ?” Here 
 was the sin of Israel. ; They refused to trust 
 God, refused even to believe in His presence 
 among them, unless He wrought a miracle to 
 prove it. They came to Moses with, a demand 
 which seemed to rest on a great faith,—for they 
 asked him to supply them with water by a 
 miracle,—but which was not really faith at all, 
 but the daring presumption of unbelief; of 
 unbelief which refused to “ wait patiently for 
 the Lord,” and openly challenged Him to prove 
 His own presence among His people, and to 
 justify their trust in Him, by an immediate 
 exertion of supernatural power on their behalf. 
 
 And this was tempting God. To dictate 
 terms of trust in God, to deny God’s care and 
 love unless He miraculously demonstrated 
 them, to presume on the supernatural as the 
 condition of our faith, is not faith, but unbelief; 
 it is to dishonour God under the pretext of 
 honouring Him. Now what was this second 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 125 
 
 temptation of Christ but a repe 
 
 sin of Israel under a different 
 
 devil urges our Lord to cast Himself down 
 from the pinnacle of the temple, in order to 
 demonstrate to Himself the sovereign care and 
 love of God : accepting Christ’s trust which 
 had vanquished him in the first temptation, he 
 puts it to a new and, as it seemed, a severer 
 and a nobler test; He is to trust God even to 
 work a miracle to hold Him harmless in faith’s 
 most daring venture ; He is to prove God to 
 be God, and faith to be faith, by one sublime 
 and glorious act of abandonment to the mighty 
 power of God. But Christ refuses the tempta¬ 
 tion. He will not tempt God. Such an act as 
 that to which Satan tempted Him would not be 
 faith, but presumption. It might resemble faith, 
 but only as the counterfeit coin resembles the 
 true; and the Lord takes from the ancient 
 history of the people of God the one illustra¬ 
 tion of unbelief daring to assume the appear¬ 
 ance of faith, which stood in closest likeness to 
 His own temptation, and utters for Himself, but 
 with new and deeper emphasis, the warning 
 Moses uttered to Israel of old, a It is written 
 
126 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 But leaving the special occurrence in the 
 history of the children of Israel to which our 
 Lord refers, and returning to the temptation 
 itself, let us endeavour to see more clearly why 
 such an act as that of Christ casting Himself 
 down from the temple summit, would have 
 been the presumption of unbelief, and there¬ 
 fore a guilty tempting of God, rather than the 
 honouring Him by a great act of trust. Is 
 there any law which can be laid down which 
 will serve in all cases to distinguish faith from 
 presumption ; which will warn us that we are 
 no longer honouring God by our trust, but dis¬ 
 honouring Him by our unbelief. There is, and it 
 is as follows :— The moment trust in God pre¬ 
 sumes to break any one , even the least of the laws 
 of God, and then expects God to save it from the 
 consequences of its disobedience , it is not trust , 
 but unbelief ; it is not faiths but presumption ; it 
 is not honouring , it is tempting God. The laws 
 of nature, one of which the devil was now 
 tempting Christ to disregard and to violate, are 
 as much God s laws as the ten commandments 
 given from Mount Sinai; they are as truly the 
 reflexion and the revelation of the eternal will 
 of God as the moral law itself, and God will never 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 127 
 
 require us in the interests of our trust in Him, 
 to dishonour, by breaking, the laws which He 
 has ordained. It was God’s law that men who 
 fling themselves down from the summit of the 
 temple should be dashed to pieces on the 
 ground ; death was to be the wages of that sin ; 
 and for Christ first to break this law of God 
 by casting Himself down from the pinnacle of 
 the temple, and then to expect God to save 
 Him from the consequences of His disobedience, 
 was not a faith that honoured God; it was a 
 presumption which dishonoured Him. And so 
 it is with us. It is a sure and certain sign that 
 our trust has passed from the sweetness and 
 strength of childlike confidence in God into 
 the impertinence of unbelief, if we find ourselves 
 breaking the laws of God, and doing so in the 
 expectation that God will interfere to save us 
 from the penalties of our own transgression. 
 
 The practical applications and illustrations of 
 this truth may be seen in almost every province 
 of human life. When Christian parents, for 
 instance, whose own lives are undevout and 
 worldly, and whose homes are prayerless and 
 unspiritual, who perhaps take a keen interest 
 in politics, or literature, or art, or science, 
 
128 
 
 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 but manifest none whatever in the great work 
 for which Christ died, and for which He still 
 lives, the redemption of the world from sin, when 
 such parents expect their children to grow up 
 godly and devout, and to take their parents’ 
 place in the Christian Church, they are not 
 trusting God by this expectation, they are dis¬ 
 honouring Him by the presumption of unbe¬ 
 lief. They have no right, their own lives being 
 what they are, to expect anything of the kind. 
 They are living in daily and open violation 
 of some of the most sacred and solemn laws of 
 God, and there is not one word in the whole 
 compass of Scripture to warrant them in hop¬ 
 ing that God will interfere to save them, or 
 their children, from the penalties of their dis¬ 
 obedience. If they dishonour God by trans¬ 
 gression of His laws, they must not complain 
 if the rewards of their transgression come down 
 on themselves, and on their children after them. 
 To sow tares, and then expect by some Divine 
 miracle a harvest of wheat to spring up, is to 
 “ tempt the Lord our God.’ 5 
 
 Or again : There are multitudes of Christian 
 people who are living self-indulgent and slothful 
 lives, but who nevertheless hope, often vaguely 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 I 29 
 
 enough that after death, and in the day of 
 judgment, the rewards of heaven will not be 
 altogether denied them. They read in the New 
 Testament of the welcome of “ well done ” given 
 by the King to the good and faithful servant, 
 and they hope such a greeting may await 
 them; or they read of “ the crown of glory 
 which fadeth not away,” and they trust that it 
 one day may be theirs ; or they catch some 
 glimpse of the gladness and splendour of the 
 City of God above, they hear that no tears 
 and no darkness are there, and they trust that 
 its splendour and bliss will be theirs when once 
 they have entered within its golden gates. But 
 what right have such professing Christians to ex¬ 
 pect anything of the kind ? If the New Testament 
 promises, with lavish hand, crowns and rewards 
 in heaven, it does so under the sternest moral 
 conditions. They are to be given to the “ good 
 and faithful servant:” to “them that overcome;” 
 not to all that enter heaven. The Bible never 
 conceals from us the fact that the moral in¬ 
 equalities we see in the Church on earth will 
 reappear on a vaster scale in the Heaven 
 above ; that there are “first” there, and “last” 
 there ; that some servants shall have “ ten cities ” 
 
 I 
 
I3O THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 to rule over, but others only “five;” and that 
 the final reward will in each case be deter¬ 
 mined by the strictest, and yet most merciful 
 moral laws. The rewards may be, and are, of 
 grace; but grace will never put the servant 
 whose pound had gained ten pounds over five 
 cities, nor put the servant whose pound had 
 only gained five pounds over ten cities. That 
 would be unjust grace, and paradox as the ex¬ 
 pression may sound, unjust grace—if such a 
 thing were possible—would be a deeper offence 
 to the moral nature than ingracious justice. 
 What right then, we ask, have any Christians 
 who are slothful and prayerless and self-indul¬ 
 gent in their lives to look for reward hereafter ? 
 Is such an expectation an act of faith, or is it 
 not rather a great presumption ? Does it not 
 repeat, in another and widely different form, the 
 essential sin of this temptation of Christ, inas¬ 
 much as they have first broken the known laws 
 of the kingdom of God, and then they look to 
 God to save them from the consequences of their 
 disobedience. To live a Christian life which is a 
 life of self-pleasing, to shrink from the daily self- 
 denial which is the condition of all true disciple- 
 ship of Christ, to put this world and its pleasures 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 I 3 I 
 
 and rewards before the kingdom of God and 
 its righteousness, to make the service of self the 
 real end of life, and then to expect to be re¬ 
 warded as a servant of God, is not to trust, but 
 “ to tempt the Lord our God.” 
 
 Or to take one final illustration of the same 
 sin. There are thousands of men and of women 
 who are living altogether without God and with¬ 
 out Christ in this world j who have never heartily 
 and truly repented or abandoned any one 
 sin which they really liked; who have never 
 given to God the love He demands, nor sought 
 from Him the mercy He is willing to bestow on 
 all who seek it through Christ, and yet who live 
 and who die in a vague hope that “ the Al¬ 
 mighty,” as they say, will have mercy on them 
 at the last day. Once more we ask, what right 
 have they to any such expectation ? There are 
 laws of the kingdom of heaven as fixed and as 
 inexorable as any of the laws of the physical 
 universe—fixed and inexorable, because to 
 change them in the least jot or title would be 
 to imply that they were not originally the per¬ 
 fect revelation of infinite wisdom and infinite 
 righteousness and infinite love—laws which re¬ 
 ward obedience, and punish disobedience, as 
 
132 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 infallibly as any physical law does, and these 
 laws are neglected, broken, trampled under foot 
 from the beginning to the end of life, and yet it 
 is said that at the last God will suspend their 
 action, and mercifully and miraculously inter¬ 
 pose to save such disobedience from its “just 
 recompense of reward.” Why ? Because they 
 trust in the mercy of God ? But trust, as we 
 have seen, which first disobeys any known law 
 of God and then looks to Him to avert the result, 
 is not trust; it is presumption; and to live and to 
 die disregarding the solemn laws of the kingdom 
 of heaven, careless of fulfilling the one supreme 
 condition of entrance into the kingdom, and 
 yet hoping to enter it at last, is not to trust, it 
 is to “ tempt the Lord their God.” 
 
 These illustrations will suffice to shew us the 
 innumerable applications which the great lesson 
 of this second temptation has to our daily life; 
 there are, however, other and incidental, but 
 not less valuable lessons which we may learn 
 from the narrative, and which it will be well for 
 us now to consider. 
 
 And amongst these subordinate lessons 
 stands first this truth, that the teaching, or 
 the apparent teaching, of any isolated text 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. I 33 
 
 in Holy Scripture, always needs to be 
 interpreted, and, if necessary, limited by the 
 teaching of the whole of Scripture. There 
 is no book in the world so precious as the 
 Bible, and yet there is no book so easily 
 perverted, or so perilous to those who pervert 
 it, as this Book. It warns us itself of some 
 who “ wrest ” the Scriptures “ to their own 
 destruction/’ * and Satan’s quotation of Scrip¬ 
 ture in this second temptation is an illustration 
 of the meaning of St Peter’s words. It was a 
 quotation, and a true quotation, from Scripture, 
 and yet it was so quoted as to make Scripture 
 to teach a lie instead of the truth, and to 
 warrant Christ in an act of sin, if He had 
 yielded to the temptation. The same perilous 
 and illegitimate use of the Bible may be made 
 to-day. It is possible to prove anything, it has 
 been said, out of the Bible; and the statement 
 is true, provided by “ the Bible ” be meant, 
 not the whole teaching of Scripture, but the 
 apparent teaching of isolated passages in the 
 sacred record. It is only necessary to take a 
 verse, to tear it out of all connection with the 
 context, to refuse to modify its interpretation 
 
 * 2 Peter iii. 16. 
 
134 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 by other verses in Scripture, to quote it as if 
 any one promise of God contained absolute 
 and unqualified truth, irrespective of the con¬ 
 ditions under which the promise was given by 
 God, and you may prove that it was right for 
 Christ to cast Himself down from the pinnacle 
 of the temple, as you may prove that darkness 
 is light, or light darkness. 
 
 And even where such grievous perversions of 
 the truth of Scripture do not take place, the 
 same error of the misquotation rather than the 
 quotation of Scripture may be detected in 
 other and hardly less serious ways. There is 
 not one heresy, there is not one form, however 
 debased, of ecclesiastical government, there is 
 not one eccentricity or extravagance in the 
 Church of Christ, which has not appealed to 
 Scripture for its justification and support. 
 Sabellianism, Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, 
 Mormonism, Christadelphianism, all alike quote 
 Scripture in their defence; whilst the Papal 
 Church and Plymouth brethrenism both pro¬ 
 fess to derive their distinctive ecclesiastical 
 principles from the teaching of the Bible. The 
 worst systems of Church government, and the 
 greatest errors in Christian doctrine have fled 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. I 35 
 
 to Scripture for defence and support, and have 
 declared they were derived from its teaching 
 alone. 
 
 Now against this illegitimate use of Scrip¬ 
 ture Christ warns us by the use He makes of 
 it in His answer to Satan’s temptation. That 
 solemn word “ again,” “ It is written again,” is 
 the foundation stone on which the true use of 
 the Bible ought to be built. Truth is un¬ 
 limited, but truths are not. Each verse con¬ 
 tains not truth, but a truth ; each verse only 
 reflecting some partial rays of the central sun 
 of all truth. Each verse, therefore, is true, but 
 true within limits. Take away those limits, 
 and you destroy the truth. Just as it is the 
 banks of a river which make it navigable, 
 which make it indeed a river at all, so it is 
 the bounds and limits of truths which make 
 them true ; and those who would grow up into 
 all “ the truth as it is in Jesus,” who would 
 avoid all one-sided views of truth, who neither 
 in theory, nor in practical life, would be t angular 
 or narrow, who would shun any of theHntel- 
 lectual or moral monstrosities professed to be 
 founded on the teaching of the Bible, must 
 learn first of all the many-sidedness of Holy 
 
136 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 Scripture ; must read it with the light shining, 
 not on one chapter nor on one Book, but on 
 the whole Book ; must learn how to modify 
 and correct and supplement one Scripture by 
 another ; and must be capable of that large and 
 wise spirit of induction which in the interpre¬ 
 tation of Scripture, as in the interpretation of 
 nature, always yields the richest results, build¬ 
 ing the sacred Temple of Truth, not like a mean 
 hut of one solitary room, but like a glorious 
 Palace, with many mansions, each with its own 
 noble occupant, and all built according to what 
 Scripture itself calls “ the proportion of faith.” 
 
 A second and not less valuable lesson taught 
 us by the second temptation is the warning that 
 vice is often nothing but the exaggeration and 
 distortion of virtue. Trust in God becomes 
 presumption, but how hard it is to say where 
 trust ends and presumption begins. And so it 
 is with nearly all the excellences of the 
 Christian life. They pass by steps which are 
 so small as to be almost imperceptible from the 
 region of light into that of darkness. Righteous 
 indignation against wrong degenerates into un¬ 
 righteous hatred; just self-respect becomes 
 unholy pride ; healthy emulation ends in sinful 
 
THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 137 
 
 envy. How easily the purest unselfishness 
 may become conscious of itself, and feed the 
 most subtle forms of selfishness within ; what 
 a narrow line divides the legitimate territory of 
 the reason from those provinces where only 
 faith has eyes to see, or feet to tread ; how 
 soon intelligent enquiry becomes presumptuous 
 unbelief, or the submission of faith is degraded 
 into the ignoble slavery of superstition. Our 
 virtues might almost seem to be like the strings 
 of a harp : stretch any one of them too far, and 
 discord and not music is the result. Earnest¬ 
 ness becomes severity; gentleness falls into 
 moral weakness ; activity degenerates into 
 meddling; moderation becomes indifference ; 
 decision of character settles into dogmatic self- 
 assertion ; consideration for the feelings of 
 others passes into moral cowardice ; trust, as 
 we have seen, goes to seed in presumption, and 
 self-reliance in pride. 
 
 Strike any one note of human goodness and 
 you will be sure to hear its accompanying 
 discord. You reap the harvest, but the tares 
 are gathered with the wheat. Goodness is not 
 merely tainted with evil, but evil itself is too 
 often nothing but the bastard child of goodness. 
 
 There has only been one human life in whic 
 
138 THE SECOND TEMPTATION. 
 
 goodness has been exhibited in its “ perfect 
 and consummate flower,” every virtue making 
 sweetest music without one discordant note, 
 the pure light of its heavenly holiness un¬ 
 tarnished even by the impurities which float 
 in the sunbeams of earth—the life of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. We shall speak later on of the 
 miracle of the sinlessness of Jesus—a miracle 
 far surpassing in wonder and glory the mighty 
 works which He wrought when on earth—but 
 how impressive a testimony is borne by this 
 mixed character of all human goodness, its 
 proneness to fall away into sin, or to become 
 exaggerated into imperfection, to the sinfulness 
 of man. The springs of his moral life are 
 poisoned at their fountains within. He not 
 only does wrong, but he is wrong ; and the 
 evil with which he is born into the world taints 
 his very efforts after goodness, so that even the 
 tempter himself can turn the noblest achieve¬ 
 ments of holiness into occasions of stumbling, 
 and make each successive victory over tempta¬ 
 tion a new peril to the soul. 
 
 From our achievements in the Divine life as 
 much as from our failings comes the warning 
 to us all, “ Watch and pray lest ye enter into 
 temptation.’’ 
 
VII. 
 
 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 0 
 
‘ ‘ Again, the devil taketh 
 him unto an exceeding high 
 mountain, and sheweth him 
 all the kingdoms of the world, 
 and the glory of them : and he 
 said unto him, All these things 
 will I give thee, if thou wilt 
 fall down and worship me. 
 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get 
 thee hence, Satan : for it is 
 written, Thou shalt worship 
 the Lord thy God, and him 
 only shalt thou serve. ”— Matt. 
 iv. 8-io. 
 
 “And he led him up, and 
 shewed him all the kingdoms 
 of the world in a moment of 
 time. And the devil said unto 
 him, To thee will I give all 
 this authority, and the glory of 
 them, for it hath been delivered 
 unto me ; and to whomsoever 
 I will I give it. If thou there¬ 
 fore wilt worship before me, it 
 shall all be thine. And Jesus 
 answered and said unto him, It 
 is written, thou shalt worship 
 the Lord thy God, and him 
 only shalt thou serve.” —Luke 
 iv. 5-8. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 We have already seen with what subtlety Satan 
 turned the victory our Lord had gained on him 
 in the first temptation into the instrument of his 
 attack in the second. Christ had conquered by 
 trust in God, and forthwith Satan bids him reveal 
 and test the greatness of His trust by a new and 
 more heroic venture of faith : “ If thou art the 
 Son of God, cast Thyself down : for it is written, 
 He shall give His angels charge concerning 
 Thee; 
 
 And on their hands they shall bear Thee up, 
 Lest haply Thou dash Thy feet against a 
 stone.” 
 
 ^ The same infernal cunning is repeated in 
 turning the victory of the second temptation 
 into the assault of the third. Christ had defeated 
 Satan’s challenge to His trust by refusing to 
 admit that it was trust. To cast Himself down 
 from the summit of the temple and to expect 
 
142 
 
 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 God to deliver Him from death was not trust, 
 but presumption, for it was to break one of the 
 laws of God, and then to appeal to God to 
 save Him from the penalty of His disobedience. 
 Such disobedience was “ tempting ” God. ^ 
 But no sooner had our Lord vanquished this 
 second assault of Satan than His new victory is 
 turned into a new temptation, the last and 
 fiercest of the three which are recorded in Scrip¬ 
 ture. ' Let us, with deepest reverence, endeavour 
 to imagine the third temptation as it may have 
 been presented to the mind of Christ, and the 
 objective counterpart of which is found in the 
 narrative before us. ‘Not tempt the Lord thy 
 God ? Is it thus Thou speakest ? But what art 
 Thou doing now ? Thou art about to begin 
 Thy great work; to build the kingdom of 
 God among men ; to redeem a lost world from 
 its sin and guilt, to proclaim Thyself the Prince 
 and Saviour of men. And lo ! Thine own people 
 are ready to welcome Thee as the promised 
 Messiah, heir to the throne and the glory of 
 David, if Thou wilt only declare Thyself their 
 king, coming to deliver them with “a strong 
 hand and an outstretched arm ” from the hate¬ 
 ful dominion of the Gentiles. Thou hast but to 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 H3 
 
 declare Thyself the Hope of Israel, and Thy 
 work is done. The kingdom, not of Israel 
 alone, but of the world, is at Thy feet. But 
 Thou wilt not! Thou rejectest the crown that 
 Thine own nation are ready to lay at Thy feet, 
 because Thou sayest, “Thy kingdom is not of this 
 world,” and Thou art not come to be a Christ 
 after the flesh. Can it be so ? Thou needest not 
 to abandon Thy high mission ; Thou mayest use 
 the carnal to lead to the spiritual; Thou mayest 
 accept the earthly crown, if but for a moment, 
 to replace it with the heavenly; Thou mayest 
 deliver Thy people from the accursed rule 
 of the Gentiles only to deliver them afterwards 
 from the more accursed slavery of sin. Do 
 this, and Thy kingdom is secure. But no ! Thou 
 wilt not. Thou choosest Thine own way; 
 Thou wilt set at naught the longings of Thy 
 nation ; Thou wilt refuse all earthly pomp and 
 glory and power even though Thou knowest it 
 will make Thee the “despised and rejected of 
 men; ” Thou wilt insure Thine own defeat 
 when victory was within Thy grasp. And is 
 not this tempting God ? To cast away the 
 only hope of success; to disappoint the multi¬ 
 tudes who are eager and waiting for their King ; 
 
144 
 
 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 to refuse the crown which they are ready to lay 
 at Thy feet; to come to be a King and yet to 
 disown the kingdom when it comes near to 
 Thee; to reject the Hallelujahs the people are 
 longing to offer Thee; to choose the lot of an out¬ 
 cast when the throne of a king might have been 
 Thine ; to bring down on Thyself the scorn and 
 hatred and rejection of men, when they had 
 offered Thee their loyalty and love; to be 
 crucified when Thou mightest have been 
 crowned-—what is all this but tempting the 
 Lord Thy God ? Better, far better, take the 
 crown Thine own nation are waiting to bestow 
 on Thee, even though it be the crown of worldly 
 pomp and power, if by taking it “ the kingdoms of 
 the world, and the glory of them ” may be Thine! ’ 
 In some such way we may imagine with all 
 reverence the temptation to have presented 
 itself to the mind of Christ. There have, 
 indeed, been those who have thought that 
 Satan literally took Christ into “ an exceeding 
 high mountain,” and there literally “ showed 
 Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the 
 glory of them,” and then literally offered to 
 give Christ “ all these things ” if he would “ fall 
 down and worship ” him. But to say nothing 
 
the third temptation. 145 
 
 of the physical difficulties and impossibilities of 
 such an interpretation of the narrative, the 
 spiritual difficulties which it involves are fatal 
 to it. For Satan to have appeared as Satan to 
 our Lord, and with bold and naked affirontery to 
 have said to Him, “ If Thou wilt worship me I 
 will give Thee the world,” would not have been 
 tempting, but insulting Christ. Such an offer 
 on such a condition would have been no 
 temptation to our Lord. It would hardly be a 
 temptation to the humblest Christian, much 
 less to Him, to be offered a reward on condition 
 of openly and avowedly apostatizing from God, 
 and worshipping the devil; and we may be 
 sure that attack with such a weapon would 
 have made absolutely no impression on the 
 armour of righteousness with which Christ was 
 encompassed. 
 
 But how different all this becomes, how 
 real, how fearfully real, the temptation is, if 
 instead of such a mechanical and literal inter¬ 
 pretation of the narrative, we suppose, as we 
 are sure must more than once have been the 
 case during the earthly life of our Lord before 
 His crucifixion, that he was tempted by doubts 
 as to His own Divine plan, which seemed to 
 
 K 
 
146 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 promise so little and to entail so much ; tempted 
 to relinquish that plan in favour of another 
 that seemed to promise so much and entail 
 so little. And especially would such a tempta¬ 
 tion be likely to occur at the time in Christ’s 
 life which He had now reached. He was 
 standing, as we have seen, at the opening of His 
 great work ; nothing had yet been done, but 
 everything had to be done; all the great and 
 Divine purposes for which he had become in¬ 
 carnate had yet to be accomplished, and the 
 kingdom of heaven, of which He was to be 
 the King, had yet to be founded among men. 
 It seemed to be a question, not of the end, but 
 of the means to the end. The devil himself 
 suggests no manner of doubt as to the end. He 
 admits it; he offers to hasten it; he says, “ All 
 these things,” that is, “the kingdoms of the 
 world and the glory of them,” “will I give 
 Thee,” provided only “ Thou wilt fall down and 
 worship me.” The temptation is not to abandon 
 the end, but to modify or to change the means 
 which are to lead to it. And these means, 
 as we have seen, divided themselves in the last 
 resort into two opposite and contrasted paths: 
 the one was Christ’s, the other was the devil’s. 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 H7 
 
 To refuse the acclamations of the people, 
 even though they were ready to hail Him as 
 their King ; to disappoint every hope they had 
 formed that when Messiah came He would 
 deliver the people of God from the hated 
 Roman rule, and crown their race again with 
 more than its ancient glory and honour; to 
 change the homage of the crowd into hatred— 
 hatred all the more bitter because of the dis¬ 
 appointment that had led to it; deliberately to 
 reject the earthly glory, even though it should 
 lead to another and a nobler glory than its own; 
 to refuse to use aught but spiritual means in 
 founding the kingdom of God among men; 
 to care nothing for popular applause, but very 
 much for personal faithfulness and purity and 
 love ; to know no distinction between rich and 
 poor, learned and unlearned, save the supreme 
 distinction of character; to go about rebuking 
 and denouncing wickedness even when it was 
 found in the high places of the land; to set 
 Pharisee and Sadducee, chief priest and ruler, in 
 implacable hostility against Himself; to have 
 no friend, or hardly any, save among the 
 poorest of the poor ; to associate with, and be a 
 friend of “ publicans and sinners;” to be every- 
 
148 
 
 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 where “a sign that was spoken against;” to 
 seem, in a word, to lose the very kingdom which 
 He had come to establish—this was Christ’s way. 
 
 And, on the other hand, to accept the glory 
 of this world; to take the tide of national hopes 
 and national enthusiasm at its flood; to set 
 Himself at the head of the nation; to accept the 
 worldly power that was ready for His use ; to 
 receive in one hour “the kingdoms of this world, 
 and the glory of them ”—this was Satan’s way. 
 "" It was Satan’s third temptation. It was 
 of all temptations which could have been 
 presented to the pure and sinless soul of Christ 
 the most awful and searching, for it touched 
 not Himself alone, but the great work He had 
 come to accomplish for man. It was compara¬ 
 tively easy to refuse to turn the stones into 
 bread, for His hunger concerned Himself alone ; 
 and he had learnt how to endure suffering in 
 His “ Father’s business ;” it was not so hard, 
 even though it involved a dread struggle, to 
 refuse to prove His own trust in God and His 
 own Divine Sonship by casting Himself down 
 from the pinnacle of the temple ; but to con¬ 
 quer this temptation, which affected not Himself, 
 nor His own ease and comfort, but the success 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 r 49 
 
 and glory of the work for which He had become 
 Incarnate, was terrible indeed. And Christ 
 knew the cost of rejecting Satan’s offer. He 
 knew that it meant disappointment, suffering, 
 tears and blood, heart-breaking and death : He 
 knew that it meant apparent failure of His work, 
 the apparent loss of all He had come to save: He 
 knew, above all, that it meant deep and deadly 
 dishonour done to Himself as “the Son of God,” 
 and a new and tremendous guilt added to the 
 already heavy sum of human transgression and 
 sin. For, it will be observed, this temptation is the 
 only one of the three temptations in which Satan 
 suggests no doubt of the Divine Sonship and 
 Divine glory of Christ. The doubt, “ If Thou 
 be the Son of God,” is not so much as whispered 
 here. The Divine Sonship is admitted, the full 
 glory and dignity of Christ’s person and work, 
 of His royal honour and office, is shining on 
 Him, and in its light the black shadow of the 
 temptation is cast. Could a Divine Son rightly 
 refuse the honour and glory of a Son ? Could 
 it be anything but a sin to turn His back on the 
 only way that seemed to lead straight up to 
 His throne ? Was not this a “ tempting ” of 
 God ? 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION, 
 
 150 
 
 Such was the temptation. If we put it into 
 its simplest and shortest form, it was the old 
 but ever new temptation to do evil that good 
 may come; to justify the illegitimacy of the 
 means by the greatness of the end. 
 
 And, as such, how solemn and heart-searching 
 are the lessons it may teach all those who pro¬ 
 fess to be servants of God among men, lessons 
 which, perhaps, were never more needed than in 
 the present day. We live in an age of extra¬ 
 ordinary evangelistic zeal and effort. The type 
 of religious life which was found in the Christian 
 Church a hundred, or a hundred and fifty years 
 ago, has completely changed. The edification 
 and culture of the individual spiritual life, the 
 “ building up ” of strong churches of intelligent 
 and godly men and women, is no longer the 
 supreme aim of Christian zeal and Christian 
 preaching. The conversion to Christ of the un¬ 
 converted, and the evangelisation of the masses, 
 absorb the energies and efforts of the Church. 
 But the intensity of this passion for saving men 
 may itself become a peril to the Church. In 
 its zeal to save souls it may become indifferent 
 to the means by which they are saved. It is 
 altogether untrue to say, as some enthusiastic 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. I 5 I 
 
 and zealous Christians are saying, that so long 
 
 as men are saved it matters little or nothing how 
 
 % 
 
 they are saved. The end, however great, never 
 justifies unworthiness in the means by which it 
 is attained, for in the sight of the Lord of the 
 Church the means by which we seek to promote 
 the coming of His kingdom are hardly less 
 important than the kingdom itself. Nay ! they 
 are part of the kingdom, and to fight for victory, 
 even for Christ, with worldly weapons, is not 
 merely to degrade the battle of the Lord, it is to 
 imperil the character of the victory itself. Un¬ 
 worthiness in the means used to extend the king¬ 
 dom of God is sure to react on the kingdom it¬ 
 self ; and converts who are won to Christ by 
 means that are “ of the earth, earthy,” are too 
 apt to retain the taint, in their spiritual life, of the 
 soil whence they sprang. Christ might have 
 secured apparent success ; He might have en¬ 
 listed the sympathies and suffrages of His own 
 nation ; He might have avoided the shame and 
 sorrow of the cross, if He had consented to 
 adopt worldly means to secure spiritual ends : 
 but He would not; He rejected the temptation, 
 and in doing so warned His disciples in every 
 age that not even for the sake of His kingdom 
 
T 5 2 THE third temptation. 
 
 are they to bow down to “the prince of this 
 world ” and worship him. 
 
 But the peril of using illegitimate means for 
 the spread of Christ s kingdom is not the only 
 lesson taught us by this temptation; it utters 
 another and even more serious warning to all 
 who are followers of Christ. Satan offers Christ 
 “ a11 the kingdoms of the world, and the glory 
 of them, provided only He will “ fall down and 
 worship ” him. We have already seen that the 
 inner meaning of the temptation was the at¬ 
 tempt of Satan to induce Christ to adopt the 
 Jewish and carnal idea of the kingdom of God 
 prevalent in His nation, and so to seek to secure 
 the coming of His kingdom by worldly means, 
 but is there no profound significance in the very 
 words used by the tempter in laying this 
 temptation before Christ. “All these things 
 will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and 
 worship me ” ! To resort, then, to worldly and 
 carnal methods for the extension of Christs 
 kingdom ; to lose faith in the power of the 
 Gospel of Christ to do its own work, and to win / ' 
 its own way in the world ; to seek to add to the 
 Gospel the adventitious and meretricious “glory” 
 of this world ; to attempt, in one word, to do 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 153 
 
 Christ’s work with hands stained with the im¬ 
 purities of this world, is not to imperil merely 
 the purity and preciousness of the work itself, 
 it is treason to Christ and to God ; it is the 
 worship of the devil 
 
 Would that the Church of Christ ever remem¬ 
 bered the solemnity of this warning! The 
 establishment of the Church by Constantine, 
 and the secularization and demoralization of the 
 spiritual life and energies of the Church which 
 followed, would never have taken place if the 
 meaning of this third temptation had been 
 understood by the Church. The control of the 
 Church, and the support of the Church, by the 
 State; the association of the splendour of 
 worldly power with the simplicity and spirit¬ 
 uality of Christ’s kingdom, may have been 
 assented to, at first, with the simple desire to do 
 what seemed best for the honour and glory of 
 Christ, and for the success of His work among 
 men; but none the less have its results in every 
 age proved the fatal mistake that had been made, 
 and warned the followers of Christ that even in 
 His Church they may ignorantly mistake the 
 worship of Satan for the worship of their Divine 
 Lord and Master. 
 
 Nor is it alone in the establishment and en- 
 
I 54 THE THIRD' TEMPTATION. 
 
 dowment of the Christian Church by the State, 
 and the consequent secularization of the autho¬ 
 rity of the Church, that an illustration and ex¬ 
 emplification of this grave error may be formed. 
 A Church may be able to boast that it has never 
 been “in bondage to any man,” that it was 
 “ born free,” but nevertheless may be guilty of 
 the sin of using worldly means for spiritual 
 ends, and so of worshipping the god of this 
 world. When a Church is found trusting for its 
 success or its permanence to the wealth or social 
 position of its members rather than to what an 
 old mystic called “ the naked arm of God J ” 
 when men are entrusted with office or power in 
 the Church, not because of their godliness and 
 wisdom, but because of their wealth ; when the 
 ministry so far forgets its Divine vocation, and 
 the Divine resources open to its use, as to con¬ 
 descend to the lowest tricks of advertizing out 
 of the pulpit, and of sensationalism and manner¬ 
 ism within it, in order to attract popular notice; 
 when the spiritual life of the members of the 
 Church is sustained, or is attemped to be sus¬ 
 tained, by sermons which may be full of intel¬ 
 lectual glitter and brilliance, but are utterly 
 destitute of the deeper and more serious elements 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 155 
 
 of spiritual power, then that Church has fallen 
 before the temptation here offered to our Lord, 
 and is bowing down before the prince of this 
 world and worshipping him. 
 
 And now, before considering the victory 
 which our Lord gained over this temptation of 
 Satan, it may be worth while to consider for a 
 few minutes what the result would have been 
 if Christ yielded to this temptation of the devil 
 and had fallen down and worshipped him. 
 There can be little doubt, we imagine, that in 
 one sense Satan would have fulfilled his promise 
 and have given Christ “the kingdoms of this 
 world, and the glory of them.” No cross would 
 have stood at the end of His earthly life. There 
 would have been louder Hosannas than Jeru¬ 
 salem ever offered Him as its King ; there would 
 hav been vaster throngs of people proclam- 
 ing Him their Messiah and Lord ; a more 
 splendid homage from the rich and great, from 
 rulers and Pharisees, would have been laid at 
 His feet; in a word, Christ would have received 
 the crown of worldly dominion and glory. But 
 at what a cost! The great burden of human sin 
 and guilt would have been left still resting on the 
 world ; the heart of man would have been still 
 
156 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 weary and heavy laden ; the hope of immortal 
 life would have been left a yearning and a long¬ 
 ing, unsatisfied and unfulfilled; and the kingdom 
 of God among men, the true and only kingdom 
 of God in the heart, and conscience, and will of 
 man, would have been unfounded and unknown. 
 Christ would have lost the kingdom by appear¬ 
 ing to gain it. The promise of the devil, like 
 all his promises, would have turned out a black 
 and terrible lie. He would have given the king¬ 
 doms of this world and the glory of them to our 
 Lord, but only after Christ had given Himself 
 to the devil. Satan would have lost nothing of 
 his kingdom, for he would have been king of the 
 world s king. Appearing to resign his sovereignty 
 for a moment he would have secured it for ever. 
 
 Nor is this a mere dream of unrealities and 
 visionary absurdities. It was, at any rate, no 
 dream to the devil. He knew the vast 
 issues involved in the incarnation and work 
 of Christ j knew that the Son of God had been 
 manifested for no other purpose than to “ de¬ 
 stroy the works of the devil,” and that the 
 victory of Christ meant his own eternal shame 
 and defeat. Twice over Satan had attempted 
 to conquer Christ and had failed. Twice over 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 157 
 
 his attack had ended in his own defeat, and 
 now he gathers all his strength and subtlety 
 together for one final effort; hoping that if 
 hostility has failed to seduce Christ from His 
 immovable loyalty to God, the offer of alliance 
 and of friendship may succeed. “ All these 
 things will I give Thee,” were his last and dead¬ 
 liest words to Christ, “ if Thou wilt fall down 
 and worship me.” 
 
 And now let us consider the victory our 
 Lord gained over this temptation. It is not 
 without the deepest meaning that Christ here 
 first addresses the tempter by his own name 
 “ Satan.” “ Then saith Jesus unto him, Get 
 thee hence, Satan.” It is at least possible that, 
 up to this point, our Lord had not recognised 
 the objective personality of the source whence 
 the first two temptations had proceeded : they 
 may have appeared to Him, as so many of our 
 temptations appear to us, as mysterious sugges¬ 
 tions rising from within the depths of His own 
 personality; inducements to sin coming to 
 Him, He knew not how nor whence ; shadows 
 crossing His pure mind like dark clouds float¬ 
 ing in a clear sky. But this last temptation 
 left no possible doubt as to the source whence 
 
158 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 these temptations had come. It revealed in 
 lurid light the dark personality of the tempter. 
 To do evil that good might come, or that good 
 might apparently come ; to use worldly power 
 to secure spiritual ends ; to gain the world for 
 Himself, but to lose it for God—this was enough. 
 Such an infernal subversion of the eternal king¬ 
 dom of righteousness and truth which He had 
 come to found, could only have proceeded from 
 that evil spirit whose original revolt against God 
 had cast him down “ as lightning from heaven,” 
 and whose kingdom of unrighteousness and evil 
 and suffering Christ had expressly come to 
 overturn. Instantly our Lord answers, in words 
 which burn with fiery indignation and scorn, 
 “ Get thee hence, Satan : for it is written, Thou 
 shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only 
 shalt thou serve.” 
 
 Once again, and now for the last time, the 
 tempter is foiled by an answer taken from the 
 Book of Deuteronomy. “ The words of all the 
 three answers to the tempter,” as Dr Plumptre* 
 well remarks, “ come from two chapters of 
 Deuteronomy, one of which (Deut. vi.) supplied 
 one of the passages (vi. 4-9), for the phylac- 
 
 * “ New Testament Commentary for English Readers,” in Iqc, 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. T 59 
 
 teries or frontlets worn by devout Jews. The 
 fact is in every way suggestive. A prominence 
 was thus given to that portion of the book, 
 which made it an essential part of the education 
 of every Israelite. The words which our Lord 
 now uses had, we must believe, been familiar 
 to Him from His childhood, and He had read 
 their meaning rightly. With them He may 
 have sustained the faith of others in the 
 struggles of the Nazareth home with poverty 
 and want. And now He finds in them a truth 
 which belongs to His high calling as well as to 
 His life of lowliness.” 
 
 But, as in the two former cases in which Christ 
 repelled the temptation of Satan by a quota¬ 
 tion from the Old Testament Scriptures, there 
 seems a special appropriateness in the answer 
 here given to the tempter. The passage in 
 Deuteronomy (chap. vi. 13) which our Lord 
 quotes, is followed by the significant words, 
 “ Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of 
 the people round about you T If we have rightly 
 interpreted the meaning of this third tempta¬ 
 tion of our Lord as having been, in its inmost 
 heart, a temptation to seize a present and a 
 worldly dominion at the expense of an eternal 
 
i6o 
 
 THE THIRD TEMPTATION. 
 
 and a spiritual kingdom, the choice of this quo¬ 
 tation from the Book of Deuteronomy becomes 
 profoundly significant. The one recurring 
 peril of religion in every age is the temptation 
 to lower its high standard of truth and of action 
 in order to win the suffrages of the world ; to 
 seek to advance Christ’s spiritual kingdom by 
 worldly means, and what is this but a forsaking 
 of the worship and service of the true God for 
 the carnal idolatry of worldly success. It is 
 the repetition of the ancient sin of Israel of old, 
 who forsook the living God and turned to the 
 gods of the people round about them. Christ, 
 tempted to commit this sin, repels the tempta¬ 
 tion by quoting the very Scripture which bore 
 the deepest analogy to the special peril in which 
 He was now placed. 
 
 We shall see, when we come to consider the 
 significant words with which St Luke closes his 
 account of the temptation, how frequently this 
 last and subtlest temptation recurred in the life 
 of our Lord ; but before we close our study of 
 this third temptation, let us again remind our¬ 
 selves of its deepest and most solemn lesson. 
 We may build, or attempt to build, on the one 
 foundation, “wood, hay, stubble,” but our build- 
 
THE THIRD TEMPTATION. I 6 I 
 
 ing will never last It will be “ tried by fire,” 
 and the unworthy material which we have 
 wrought into the eternal kingdom of truth and 
 of righteousness will be utterly consumed in 
 the flames. Nothing is really permanent in the 
 spiritual kingdom but that which is spiritual. 
 Worldly success is not true success: it is defeat 
 calling itself a victory. Faithfulness to God 
 may seem to delay for long ages the advent of 
 His glorious kingdom ; but it is better to wait 
 a millennium for the coming of that kingdom 
 than to stain its triumph, when it comes, by 
 having fought for its King with the weapons of 
 the god of this world. They, and only they, 
 will be crowned at last by the King who have 
 “ contended lawfully,” and even for the sake of 
 the kingdom have refused to “ bow down and 
 worship ” Satan. 
 
 L 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 / 
 
“And when the devil had completed every temptation, he 
 departed from him for a season.”—L uke iv. 13. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 In the preceding studies of the temptations of 
 our Lord we have endeavoured to realize the 
 fact that they were not acts in a great drama, 
 the issue of which had been arranged and 
 determined beforehand, but a most real and 
 deadly attack by the prince of this world on 
 Him who had come “ to destroy the works of 
 the devil,” and to redeem mankind from his 
 authority and rule; an attack made on the 
 Saviour at the commencement of His redeem¬ 
 ing work, and before that work had fully begun, 
 in hope of overcoming the Redeemer Himself, 
 and so of overthrowing His kingdom before its 
 foundations had been laid among men. We 
 have further seen that the three temptations 
 with which the forty days of fasting and of 
 temptation in the wilderness close, and of which 
 alone the details are preserved in the Gospels, 
 were essentially typical of all possible tempta- 
 
i66 
 
 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 tions of man by the evil one. They embrace 
 in their essence the whole compass of human 
 peril and human temptation. 
 
 The first temptation began on the lowest 
 ground, taking for its province the sphere of the 
 physical nature of man. The words of the 
 tempter, “ Command that these stones become 
 bread,” point to the seductions of sense, and 
 Christ’s victory over the temptation was the 
 victory of the higher spiritual life over the 
 fleshly appetites of the body. Whenever “ the 
 flesh ” and “ the spirit ” meet in deadly 
 antagonism, and these are always “ contrary 
 one to the other,” we have, with whatever 
 variation of form, a repetition in our own lives 
 of the first temptation of our Lord. 
 
 The second temptation passed from the re¬ 
 gion of sense into the lower realm of the spiritual 
 life, and challenged Christ’s trust in God’s pro¬ 
 vidential care by demanding that it should 
 prove its own reality by a transcendent venture 
 of faith. We have seen how Christ vanquished 
 this assault of the tempter by declaring that a 
 trust which presumes to break even the least of 
 the Divine laws, and then to appeal to God for 
 salvation from the penalties of its disobedience, 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. I 67 
 
 is not trust, but its spurious counterfeit, the 
 presumption of unbelief. 
 
 The third and final temptation completed the 
 cycle of possible assault. It led us into the 
 highest region of the spiritual life, into the 
 kingdom of Christ itself, and it warned us 
 against the peril of using worldly means for the 
 establishment and advancement of that king¬ 
 dom, even though they promise, as they pro¬ 
 mised to Christ, a shorter road to the consum¬ 
 mation of the kingdom, and deliverance from 
 that cross which is the Divine way to the crown. 
 
 We see now the meaning of the words which 
 stand at the head of this chapter, and with 
 which St Luke concludes his account of our 
 Lord’s temptation—‘‘'When the devil had com¬ 
 pleted every temptation, he departed from Him.” 
 The circle of attack had been exhausted. All 
 possible temptation had been summed up, and 
 had failed, in these three successive assaults 
 made on Christ. ^Creation, providence, redemp¬ 
 tion had each furnished the ground of attack ; 
 the body, the soul, and the spirit had each been 
 assailed, but in vain; the triumphant Lord had 
 “ been tempted in all points like as we are, yet 
 without sin,” 
 
168 
 
 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 But the words which immediately follow in 
 the narrative of St Luke are of dark and omin¬ 
 ous significance. “When the devil had com¬ 
 pleted every temptation, he departed from Him 
 for a season!' “ For a season —what do these 
 words mean ? ^To what further and future 
 conflicts do they point ? ‘WVhere in the life of 
 our Lord, as recorded in the four Gospels, is the 
 account of any renewed temptation of Christ by 
 the devil ? It is the answer to these questions 
 that we shall attempt in the present chapter. 
 
 There is a suggestive and pregnant contrast 
 in the words with which St Luke closes his 
 account of the temptations and the last words 
 of their record in the Gospel of St Matthew. 
 St Matthew closes his account thus—“ Then the 
 devil leaveth Him ; and behold, angels came 
 and ministered unto Him.” * St Luke, on the 
 other hand, as we have just seen, says, “ And 
 when the devil had completed every tempta¬ 
 tion, he departed from Him for a season.” 
 
 The difference in the close of the record is in 
 profound harmony with the difference in the 
 scope and aim of the two Gospels.f The 
 
 * Matt. iv. ii. 
 
 t I owe this thought to Canon Westcott’s “ Introduction to 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 169 
 
 Gospel of St Matthew is pre-eminently the 
 Gospel of the King, the record of the founding 
 of the kingdom of God among men, and it 
 closes its record of the temptation of the Christ 
 with “ the ministry of angels to a Heavenly 
 Prince,” whilst the Gospel of St Luke, as the 
 Gospel of the Son of Man, and of the suffering 
 Saviour of the world, ends its record with “ a 
 mim foreboding of the coming sufferings of the*-"' 
 Saviour.” And this difference in the scope of 
 the two Gospels will also account for the varia¬ 
 tion in the order of the second and third 
 temptations in each Gospel. We have followed 
 the order preserved in St Matthew in the course 
 of this exposition, but in St Luke the second 
 and third temptations, as recorded in the first 
 evangelist, change places. “ The preservation 
 of the just relation of the Saviour to God 
 occupies in St Luke the final place which St 
 Matthew assigns to the vindication of Messiah’s 
 independence of the world. In St Luke the 
 idea of a temporal empire of Christ passes 
 
 the Study of the Gospels,” not the least precious and suggest¬ 
 ive of the works of one to whose writings, for the rare union 
 they afford of the most exact scholarship with the profoundest 
 spiritual intuition, I gladly take this opportunity of confessing 
 my deep obligation and gratitude. 
 
17 ° THE life of temptation. 
 
 more clearly into that of mere earthly dominion, 
 which is distinctly regarded as in the power 
 and gift of Satan. The crowning struggle of 
 Ch rist is not to repress the solicitation toante- 
 date the outward victory of His power, but to 
 maintain His human dependence upon His 
 Father’s will. Before Messiah, the King, the 
 temptations arise in the order of His relations 
 to sense, to God, to man ; before the man Christ 
 Jesus, in his relation to sense, to man, to 
 God.”* 
 
 And now can we discover in the after narrative 
 of the Gospels any light on the mysterious words 
 with which St Luke’s account of the temptation 
 ends: “ When the devil had completed every 
 temptation, he departed from Him for a season?” 
 iTour or five times, at least, in our Lord’s life 
 did specific temptation recur, and it is remark- 
 able that on at least three of these occasions 
 the temptation was the repetition of the last and 
 greatest of these three temptations,—the sug¬ 
 gestion, to use Satan’s own words, “to fall down 
 and worship ” him, in order to secure “ the kin°-- 
 doms of this world and the glory of them.” 
 
 The first of these renewed assaults of the 
 
 * “ Introduction to the Study of the Gospels,” p. 295. 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. I 7 I 
 
 tempter of which any distinct record is pre¬ 
 served to us in the Gospels occurs in the Gospel 
 of St John, chapter vi. 15. The miracle of the 
 feeding of the five thousand had just taken 
 place, and had made a profound impression on 
 the multitude. For the first time Jesus had 
 seemed to them to vindicate His claim to be 
 ‘‘the prophet,” greater than Moses, “whom the 
 Lord God should send into the world. The 
 miracle had recalled one of the most signal 
 events in the history of the children of Israel in 
 the wilderness. It was a new and more wonder¬ 
 ful feeding of the people with food from heaven, 
 and it was followed, we are told, by an instant 
 revulsion of feeling in favour of the super¬ 
 natural mission of Christ. “ When, therefore, 
 the people saw the sign which He did, they 
 said, This is of a truth the prophet that cometh 
 into the world.” * 
 
 They resolve at once to proclaim Jesus as 
 their Messianic King, ^fcfttle did they dream of 
 the new and terrible temptation their ignorant 
 enthusiasm was offering to our Lord. Little 
 did they imagine they were fulfilling the words 
 of St Luke, “the devil departed from Him for 
 
 * John vi. 14. 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 I 72 
 
 a season,” in the earthly crown they were ready 
 to lay at the feet of Christ. But so it was. 
 Once more the former temptation was repeated : 
 once more “ the kingdoms of this world, and the 
 glory of them,” were offered to Christ: once 
 more escape seemed possible from the dark and 
 sorrowful way of the cross, and once more the 
 possibility of the speedy advent of the kingdom 
 dawned upon the Saviour. But how did Christ 
 meet this new temptation ? The words of St 
 John alone are sufficient, even in their dim and 
 mysterious suggestiveness, to hint to us both 
 the keenness of the pain with which our Lord 
 felt this new assault of the tempter, and the in¬ 
 stant decisiveness with which He repelled it. 
 A^Jesus, therefore,” St John says, “ perceiving 
 that they were about to come and take Him by 
 force to make Him a king, withdrew again into 
 the mountain Himself alone.” * But how im¬ 
 measurably does the significance of the tempta¬ 
 tion, and of the solitary departure a into the 
 mountain Himself alone,” become heightened 
 when we read the parallel passages in the Gos¬ 
 pels of St Matthew and of St Mark. “And 
 straightway He constrained the disciples to enter 
 
 * John vi. 15. 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 173 
 
 into the boat, and to go before Him unto the 
 other side, till He should send the multitudes 
 away. And after He had sent the multitudes 
 away, He went up into the mountain apart to pray y 
 and when even was come He was there alone.” * 
 St Mark repeats, + in other words, the same 
 reason for Christ’s departure to the mountain. 
 The offer of the kingship to Jesus by the people 
 was a new temptation and a new crisis in the 
 life of Jesus, and He vanquished the peril by 
 instant retirement and prayer. 
 
 A little later on in the life of our Lord a still 
 more remarkable repetition of the same tempta¬ 
 tion, in which the tempter was none other than 
 one of Christ’s own disciples, is recorded in the 
 Gospel of St Matthew. I Christ had been un¬ 
 folding to His disciples, for the first time with 
 fulness and explicitness of detail, the mystery 
 of His cross and passion, and had been showing 
 them “how that He must go unto Jerusalem, 
 and suffer many things of the elders and chief 
 priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third 
 day be raised up.” To Simon Peter, not yet 
 weaned from Jewish prejudices and Jewish 
 
 * Matt. xiv. 22, 23. t Mark vi. 45, 46. 
 
 X Matt. xvi. 21, 22, seq. 
 
1 74 the life of temptation. 
 
 hopes, the thought of a suffering and crucified 
 King was intolerable, and with characteristic 
 impulsiveness and vehemence he “took” Jesus 
 and fr began to rebuke Him, saying, Be it far 
 from Thee, Lord: this shall never be unto 
 Thee.” ^Here was Satan’s temptation over 
 again. In the words of the disciple another 
 than Peter had spoken to Christ. Satan had 
 come again : and once more the awful tempta¬ 
 tion, twice vanquished already, rose up before 
 the Lord; the temptation to accept the crown 
 which the multitude and the disciples alike were 
 ready to lay at Christ’s feet, to be a new Captain 
 of the armies of Israel, to rally to Himself all 
 the loyalty and patriotism of the nation ; to do 
 all this for the sake of the kingdom of God 
 among men, and to avoid in doing it the shame 
 and humiliation of the cross, and the execration 
 and hatred of the very people He had come to 
 save. All this in that single sentence of Simon 
 Peter once more stated itself before the Lord, 
 and the vehemence and holy indignation with 
 which Christ instantly repelled the dark sug¬ 
 gestion bore tragic witness to the pain and the 
 peril which this renewal of temptation caused 
 the Lord. “He turned,” we read, “and said 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 175 
 
 unto Peter/’—almost repeating the very words 
 He had spoken to Satan at His third tempta¬ 
 tion,—“ Get thee behind Me, Satan : thou art a 
 stumblingblock unto Me: for thou mindest not 
 the things of God, but the things of men.” 
 And then follow the words, so solemn and 
 piercing, which told the disciples, as they tell 
 Christ’s disciples in every age, that the only way 
 to the kingdom of God on earth is the way of 
 the cross : “ Whosoever would save his life shall 
 lose it: whosoever would lose his life shall find it.” 
 
 The third recurrence of this temptation took 
 place nearly at the close of Christ’s earthly life, 
 and just before the anguish in Gethsemane. 
 
 Every detail in the narrative is full of 
 meaning. 
 
 The first dim signs of the coming conflict be¬ 
 gin on the day of the triumphal entrance into 
 Jerusalem, when the air was rent with the 
 Hosannas of the multitude crying, “ Blessed is 
 He that cometh in the name of the Lord : 
 Blessed is the kingdom that cometh, the king¬ 
 dom of our father David : Hosanna in the 
 highest.” * Once more the earthly crown 
 seemed within our Lord’s grasp, and “ the 
 
 * Mark xi. 9, 10. 
 
I / 6 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 kingdoms of this world, and the glory of them,” 
 spread themselves before His view, so that even 
 the Pharisees “said among themselves, Behold, 
 how ye prevail nothing : lo, the world is gone 
 after Him * Again, temptation was near. 
 The conflict, however, did not fully begin until 
 the day but one after this triumphal entry. 
 “ Certain Greeks ” had desired, we are told, to 
 “ see Jesus.” In them Christ sees the first fruits 
 of His redeeming work among the Gentiles. 
 “ The hour is come,” Jesus says, “ that the Son 
 of Man should be glorified.” But the mention 
 of His own glorification at once suggests the 
 dark and sorrowful way through which alone 
 His glory could be reached, and He adds, with 
 that peculiar and marked solemnity and im¬ 
 pressiveness which were always indicated by 
 the prefixed “ Verily, verily,” “ Verily, verily, 
 I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall 
 into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; 
 but if it die, it beareth much fruit.” And then 
 significantly follow the same deep and solemn 
 words which, as noted, closed the account of 
 Simon Peter’s temptation of Christ, “ He that 
 loveth His life loseth it; and he that hateth his 
 
 * John xii, 19, seq. 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION, I 77 
 
 life in this world, shall keep it unto life eternal.’’ 
 Immediately after these words the conflict once 
 more begins. “ Now,” exclaims the Lord, “ is 
 My soul troubled ; and what shall I say.” For 
 one moment, and only for one moment, as the 
 dreadful shadow of the cross cast itself over His 
 path, and as the awful anguish of Gethsemane 
 and of Calvary began almost to be tasted by 
 Him who came “ to bear the sins of the world,” 
 there was a human shrinking from the cup 
 which His Father had given Him to drink. 
 Could it be that there was no other way to 
 the Crown but through the Cross ? “ Father,” 
 
 Jesus cried, “ save Me from this hour.” The 
 next words check the natural shrinking from the 
 Cross—“ But for this cause came I unto this 
 hour.” And the answer quickly came. Only 
 in the greatest moments and crises of Christ’s 
 life on earth, do we read of heaven being 
 opened, and of the voice of God speaking to His 
 Eternal Son ; but such a moment and such a 
 crisis were now pressing on the soul of Jesus, 
 and instantly “ there came a voice out of 
 heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and 
 will glorify it again.” 
 
 The victory was once more won ; and with 
 
 M 
 
178 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 new and triumphant joy Jesus cries, “ Now is 
 the judgment of this world : NOW SHALL THE 
 PRINCE OF THIS WORLD RE CAST OUT, AND 
 I—” for the division of the words of Jesus into 
 verses hide from us the close connection of the 
 Cross of Christ with the casting out of Satan— 
 “ IF I BE LIFTED UP FROM THE EARTH, WILL 
 DRAW ALL MEN UNTO ME.” 
 
 He who had told His disciples of those who 
 gained their life by seeming to lose it, would 
 Himself gain the world by seeming to lose it. 
 His Crown was His Cross, and His Cross was 
 His Crown. 
 
 One final crisis in the life of Jesus is recorded 
 in the Gospels. Hitherto each successive 
 assault of the tempter had been triumphantly 
 beaten back, and now the time of conflict was 
 drawing to a close. There remained but one 
 more opportunity to the prince of this world 
 of tempting its Prince and Saviour before His 
 death on the Cross, with which the victory 
 would be finally won. Gethsemane still inter¬ 
 vened between the struggle in the upper room 
 and the crucifixion, and it is in Gethsemane the 
 last conflict takes place. It is true, indeed, that 
 the Gospels make no express mention of any 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. I 79 
 
 temptation by the devil in the Garden of 
 Gethsemane, but the same thing may be said 
 of the three previous occasions which we have 
 just been considering, and on which, as we have 
 seen, there is no reason to doubt temptation 
 was offered to Jesus. We shall find, moreover, 
 that there are words spoken by Christ during 
 this awful struggle in Gethsemane which seem 
 to imply that to His mind there were present 
 more than the bitter shame and anguish of the 
 Cross, more even than the intolerable agony 
 of bearing away the sin of the world; there was 
 also present the dark and malignant work of 
 one who, even in that awful hour, had not aban¬ 
 doned the hope of overcoming the Captain of 
 our salvation. 
 
 The narrative begins with words which 
 plainly recognise the presence of the tempter 
 in the betrayer. “ And Satan entered into 
 Judas,’ 1 we read,* “who was called Iscariot, 
 being of the number of the twelve/’ The final 
 assault of the devil is to be made once more 
 through one of the disciples of the Lord. 
 Judas is to repeat, in another form, the sin 
 of Peter. Shortly after, the Passover feast 
 
 * Luke xxii. 3. 
 
i8o 
 
 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 begins, and hardly has it begun when for 
 the first time in His intercourse with His 
 disciples Christ makes open reference to the 
 temptations He had endured. “Ye are they 
 which have continued with Me in My tempta¬ 
 tion?^ ” and then He adds, connecting the 
 coming kingdom in some mysterious way with 
 His own endurance of, and triumph over 
 temptation—“ And I appoint unto you a 
 kingdom, even as my Father appointed unto 
 Me, that ye may eat and drink at My table in 
 My kingdom ; and ye shall sit on thrones 
 judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” t But with 
 the thought of His own temptations and con¬ 
 flicts with the devil still uppermost in His mind, 
 He turns to Peter, and warns him of the con¬ 
 flicts through which he will have to pass before 
 he enters the kingdom. “ Simon, Simon,” 
 Christ says, “ behold, Satan asked to have you, 
 that he might sift you as wheat : but I made 
 supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not: 
 and do thou, when once thou hast turned 
 again, stablish thy brethren.” J The Passover 
 meal is eaten ; the disciples’ feet are washed 
 by the Lord, thus silently rebuking their 
 
 * Luke xxii. 28. + lb. ver. 29. £ Luke xxii. 31, 32. 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. I 8 I 
 
 “ contention ” which of them was “ accounted 
 to be greatest ; ” the reference to the betrayer, 
 who was still present with the twelve, grew 
 more and more pointed, until at length, as 
 if unable longer to endure his presence, 
 and as if longing to terminate the dreadful 
 suspense, Jesus openly turns to Judas and 
 says, “ That thou doest, do quickly.” The 
 institution of the Lord’s Supper, the Passover 
 of the Christian Church, follows, when once 
 again the dark shadow of the tempter crosses 
 the path of Jesus. “The prince of the world,” 
 Jesus says, “cometh; and”—sure of victory even 
 before the last conflict begins, He adds—“ He 
 hath nothing in Me.” * 
 
 Gethsemane followed. No heart but the 
 heart of Jesus Himself can ever measure the 
 depth of its unutterable anguish and woe ; 
 none but those to whom God has revealed the 
 meaning of that single word “ sin ” can so 
 much as faintly understand the tremendous 
 burden of human guilt which then began to 
 rest on the sinless sin-bearer : but we may 
 catch some distant vision of His woe if with 
 unsandalled feet we follow our Lord over the 
 holy ground. 
 
 * John xiv. 30. 
 
182 the life of temptation. 
 
 Only once before during His life had Jesus 
 ever spoken of His personal suffering, but now 
 He cannot be silent. The pressure is too great, 
 the anguish too awful to be self-contained. He 
 begins, in the impressive language of St Mark, 
 to be “greatly amazed, and sore troubled.”* 
 And then He turns to the three disciples whom 
 He had taken with Him that they might 
 “ watch ” with Him—as if in the dread conflict 
 on which He was now entering He longed for 
 the succour of their vigilance as well as of His 
 own—and utters the pathetic words, “ My soul 
 is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.” f 
 Then He withdraws Himself a little way— 
 “ about a stone’s cast ”—from them, and there 
 alone with His Father pours out His soul in 
 that sublime but awful prayer, every word of 
 which quivers with agony, “ Abba, Father, all 
 things are possible unto Thee: remove this 
 cup from Me : howbeit not what I will, but 
 what Thou wilt.” + 
 
 He returns to His disciples and finds them 
 “ sleeping,”—St Luke adds, “ for sorrow,”—and 
 once more He warns Simon Peter of the perils 
 of those temptations of the devil of which 
 
 Mark xiv. 33. f Mark xiv. 34. | Mark xiv. 36. 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 183 
 
 Peter knew as yet so little, and Christ knew 
 so much. “ Simon, sleepest thou ? Couldest 
 thou not watch one hour ? Watch and pray 
 that ye enter not into temptation" * A second 
 time Jesus leaves the disciples and prays the 
 same prayer. A second time He returns to 
 them and finds them sleeping. A third time 
 He leaves them—this constant change of place 
 being the reflexion of the agitation and con¬ 
 flict which were going on within—and a third 
 time He prays the same prayer, but now 
 with such augmented intensity of anguish that 
 “ His sweat became as it were great drops of 
 blood falling down upon the ground.” t A 
 third and last time He returns to the disciples, 
 and once more repeats the solemn warning, 
 “ Why sleep ye ? Rise and pray that ye enter 
 not into temptation? J 
 
 It is as these words are being uttered that 
 Judas with his band draws near. The last 
 damning act of human ingratitude and sin is 
 consummated in the traitor’s kiss, but as Jesus 
 is (< betrayed into the hands of men, the last 
 words He utters in the Garden of Gethsemane 
 
 * Mark xiv. 38. + Luke xxii. 44. 
 
 J Luke xxii. 46. 
 
184 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 disclose the presence of a vaster hostility than 
 even the hatred of “the son of perdition:” 
 “ This is your hour,” the Lord says, “ and the 
 POWER OF DARKNESS.” * His own words were 
 fulfilled, “ The prince of this world cometh and 
 hath nothing in Me.” 
 
 We shall consider later on the significance of 
 that ministry of angels which followed the final 
 victory over Satan in the wilderness, but it may 
 be noticed here that it is not without the deepest 
 meaning that in Gethsemane, and in Gethsemane 
 alone, does this angelic ministry reappear in the 
 life of Christ. The last great temptation is accom¬ 
 panied, as the first was, by supernatural succour, 
 and the evangelist who closed his account of the 
 temptation in the wilderness with the words, 
 
 “ The devil leaveth Him for a season,” and who 
 records the return of the tempter in the con¬ 
 flict in Gethsemane, with “ the power of dark¬ 
 ness,” records also at the close of the struggle 
 the heavenly refreshment which was sent to 
 our Lord“ there appeared unto Him an angel 
 from Heaven strengthening Him.” 
 
 We have already referred to the possible 
 recurrence during the crucifixion of another 
 
 * Luke xxii. 53. 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. I 8 S 
 
 of these three wilderness temptations of our 
 Lord. It is, at least, remarkable that the very 
 words Satan here uses, challenging Christ to 
 prove His Divine Sonship by a miracle, are 
 again heard in the scornful mockery of the 
 crowd beneath the Cross, “ If Thou art the Son 
 of God, come down from the Cross : ” * and it 
 can hardly be doubtful that He who was “made 
 in all points like unto His brethren ; ” who was 
 in very deed our Brother ; who was conscious as 
 we are of the natural shrinking of the body from 
 pain; whose death, above all, as the Divine 
 Sacrifice for the sins of the world, overwhelmed 
 Him with a woe of which we can know but little, 
 must have felt the natural and sinless longing 
 to end in a moment, by His own Divine power, 
 the torment of the Cross, and to declare by one 
 last transcendent miracle that He who was 
 crucified in weakness was in very deed the Son 
 of God. But Christ’s triumph in the wilderness 
 over Satan was only augmented in the voluntary 
 obedience of the eternal Son “ to death, even 
 the death of the cross.” He had come “to save 
 others,” and Himself He would not save. 
 
 The last act of Christ’s human life—if we 
 
 * Matt, xxvii. 40. 
 
I 86 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 may dare to speak of degrees of glory in that one 
 all glorious life—was the sublimest moment in 
 His moral life. “ Tempted in all points like as 
 we are,” He is tempted even in death; but sin¬ 
 less in death, as He had been sinless in life, He 
 dies triumphant over sin, and in the hour of His 
 apparent defeat wins His last and greatest victory 
 over the empire of darkness and of Satan. 
 
 We have thus examined the principal crises 
 in the life of our Lord which the Gospels record, 
 and as we have seen the recurrence in each of 
 them of special temptation. They lose, indeed, 
 a great part of their significance if the infernal 
 hostility of Satan to Christ which prompted 
 the first temptation, and which reappeared in 
 these subsequent assaults, be overlooked or for¬ 
 gotten. The wilderness did not and could not 
 exhaust the “wiles of the devil.” His antagonism 
 to Him who had come to “ destroy the works of 
 the devil ” did not cease with his defeat at the 
 beginning of Christ’s ministry. His hope of 
 vanquishing “ the Captain of our salvation ” 
 was not destroyed by -the failure of his first 
 great attack on the kingdom of God which 
 Christ had come to establish among men. One 
 defeat does not lead the devil to abandon his 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 187 
 
 assaults on us; nor did our Lord’s first defeat of 
 the tempter end his temptation of Him. The| 
 life of Christ was a life of temptation, for it, 
 “ behoved Him in all things to be made like' 
 unto His brethren.” 
 
 But if this were so, it is impossible to believe 
 that the instances of temptation which we have 
 been considering were all the temptations which 
 Christ endured subsequently to His temptation 
 in the wilderness. His life, from first to last, 
 was a tempted life, and as no day passes in 
 our own experience in which we do not find 
 some seduction to sin beset our path, so we may 
 believe that He too found “ occasions of stumb¬ 
 ling ” at every step in His earthly life. Those 
 “ spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly 
 places ” which never cease their warfare against 
 the soul of man, did not, we may be assured, 
 leave “ the Son of Man ” alone. Nay ! they 
 would be less likely to leave Him alone than to 
 leave us alone, for victory over any one of us 
 would only mean one more private soldier in 
 the great army of the Lord fallen in the field, 
 but victory over Christ—if even in imagination 
 we may conceive for a moment the inconceivable 
 —would have been the vanquishing of the 
 
188 
 
 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 “ Leader and Commander of the people,” the 
 destruction of the kingdom of God by the con¬ 
 quest of its King. 
 
 Was there no temptation to our Lord—to 
 take only a few illustrations from the life of 
 Christ—in the poverty of His earthly life ? Do 
 not the poor, the “dim and common popula¬ 
 tions ” of our great cities, know too well that if 
 poverty shuts some of the gateways by which 
 sin finds access to the soul, it opens many which 
 are closed to the rich. And can we doubt for 
 a moment that He who “for our sakes became 
 poor,” who “had not where to lay His head,” 
 who lived all through His public life on the 
 charity of those who “ministered to Him of their 
 substance,” chose that lot, not only because it 
 was the lot of the vast majority of His brethren 
 on earth, but because it enabled Him to en¬ 
 counter the same spiritual perils which beset the 
 poor in every age ? And they who are called 
 to follow their Lord in the poverty of their 
 earthly life, and are tempted to “ curse God and 
 die ” because of the hardness of their lot, may 
 remember Him who is “not ashamed to call 
 them brethren,” who lived a poor man’s life 
 with unrepining submission to the will of His 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 189 
 
 Father, and who is the One perfect example to 
 “ them that are poor in this world ” of being 
 “ rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which 
 God hath promised to them that love Him.” * 
 Was there no temptation to our Lord in the 
 hopeless indifference and deadness of the people, 
 in the bigotry and blindness of those who were 
 “ teachers in Israel,” above all in the dulness and 
 “ slowness of heart to believe ” of His own dis¬ 
 ciples ? Do not those who with unworthy steps 
 strive to follow Christ know how hard it is to be 
 “ kind to the unthankful and to the evil,” and 
 how easy it is to lose heart in work for God, 
 worn out by the stolid indifference and ignorance 
 and ingratitude of those whom they are seeking 
 to lead to God ? And this temptation does not 
 diminish, but increases with the earnestness of oui 
 zeal for God and for the salvation of men. The 
 follies and perverseness of the multitude most 
 keenly affect those who are seeking to bless 
 them, for the selfish and self-absorbed can know 
 nothing of the temptation to lose faith in man, 
 and all hope of his redemption, which is the daily 
 experience of all who are seeking “ to save the 
 lost.” But if we whose hearts are tainted with 
 
 * James ii. 5. 
 
190 THE LIFE OF'TEMPTATION. 
 
 selfishness feel this, how much more keenly must 
 He have felt the pressure of this temptation 
 who never knew one selfish desire, who came 
 “not to be ministered unto but to minister,” 
 who “pleased not Himself”? And yet He 
 never yields to it. He is the same patient, 
 gentle Teacher to the fro ward and ignorant, 
 that He is to the simple and guileless. Not one 
 hasty word, not one petulant expression, ever 
 escapes His lips. He speaks, it is true, burning 
 words of rebuke and anger against hypocrisy 
 and self-righteousness and malignity of heart, 
 but in the midst of the most terrible indigna¬ 
 tion with those who were “ blind leaders of 
 the blind,” His love and forbearance are as 
 unruffled by the ingratitude and obstinacy and 
 sin of men as the depths of the ocean by the 
 storms which lash its surface into fury and 
 wrath. 
 
 Was there no temptation to our Lord, to take 
 only one farther illustration from the Gospels, 
 in the activities of His public life—activities so 
 incessant that we read there was not, at one time, 
 “ leisure so much as to eat”—to lose the inti¬ 
 macy and freshness of His communion with the 
 Eternal and Unseen ? We know, alas! how 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 191 
 
 often a life of active and exhausting service for 
 God in the world is unfriendly to devoutness of 
 spirit ; how quickly may we lose the spirit of 
 prayer in the excitement and strain of spiritual 
 work ; how hard it is to be in the world and yet 
 not of it, and how easily we excuse ourselves in 
 remissness of prayer, or neglect of our own 
 spiritual culture, by the plea of fatigue incurred 
 in the work of God. But it was never so with 
 Jesus Christ. Engaged, and ceaselessly engaged, 
 in labouring for others, in “ preaching the Gospel 
 of the kingdom/’ in going about “doing good,” 
 He never loses the sacredness and nearness of 
 His Father’s presence ; at the end of the heaviest 
 day of labour recorded in the Gospels, He rose 
 up, we read, “ in the morning a great while be¬ 
 fore day, and departed into a desert place, and 
 there prayed.”* His feet trod the roughest 
 ways of our earthly life, but His face was ever 
 turned up to heaven and touched with the light 
 of God. He shared with us every experience of 
 human weakness and weariness, but never once 
 did He allow the pressure of the most absorbing 
 work to interfere with His God. He was among 
 us as “ one that serveth,” and yet, to use His 
 
 * Mark i. 35. Compare the parallel passages. 
 
192 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 
 
 own sublime words of Himself, He was ever 
 “ the Son of Man who is in heaven.” 
 
 The life of temptation was also a life of unin¬ 
 terrupted victory over temptation. “ He was 
 tempted in all points like as we are, yet with¬ 
 out sin.” 
 
 And it is in this light that the sinlessness of 
 Jesus becomes so amazing. It has been as¬ 
 serted by a sceptical criticism that the miracles 
 which the Lord Jesus is declared in the Gospels 
 to have wrought are inconsistent with the “ laws 
 of nature,” and are therefore unbelievable by 
 “ the modern scientific intellect,” but that if the 
 Christian Church would be content to accept 
 the lofty ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, 
 minus the miracles, no great difficulty in the 
 way of faith would remain to the reason. No 
 mistake can be greater. The miracles wrought 
 by Christ are not the only, or the most startling 
 miracles of the Gospel. Christ Himself is His 
 own greatest miracle. His absolute sinlessness, 
 His freedom from the least taint of human 
 infirmity and folly, His pure and perfect life, 
 are a far more wonderful exception to the so- 
 called “ laws of nature ” than the healing of the 
 sick, or the stilling of the storm, or the raising 
 
THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. 193 
 
 of the dead. For not only was Jesus “ with¬ 
 out sin ” in the outward acts of His life, but 
 He was free from that consciousness of a sinful 
 nature, of an inherited bias towards evil, which 
 makes its appearance with the first dawn of 
 consciousness in every other human lile; and 
 it is only when we remember that this sense of 
 sinfulness is as truly a “ law of nature as any of 
 the great laws of the physical universe that, to 
 use the words of the late Professor Mozley, 
 perhaps the profoundest thinker of the English 
 Church since the time of Bishop Butler, the 
 sinlessness of Christ appears in its true light as a 
 supernatural fact,—an inward invisible miracle 
 surpassing in wonder any of the visible miracles 
 which He wrought.”* 
 
 It is idle to imagine that it is possible to get 
 rid of the supernatural in the Gospels by blot¬ 
 ting out the miracles wrought by Jesus. The 
 miracle of] esus remains; the miracle of a human 
 life, in all other respects like our own, save in 
 this, that it was “without sinthe miracle of a 
 will ceaselessly assaulted by every temptation 
 “ common to man,” but as ceaselessly victorious 
 over each successive assault; the miracle of a 
 
 * “Lectures and other Theological Papers,” p. H 7 - 
 
 N 
 
194 THE LIFE 0E temptation. 
 
 character, from the first hour of life to the last, 
 unconscious of evil; the miracle of a goodness 
 touching, like the sunlight, the darkest and most 
 festering pollutions of this world, and remaining 
 as untainted as the sunlight by contact with im¬ 
 purity ; and so long as this supreme manifestation 
 of the supernatural meets us on every page of 
 the Gospel history, it is worse than a waste of 
 time to be discussing the possibility of the 
 miraculous. Here it is, breathing, living, moving 
 before our eyes, an Image too fair for the heart 
 of man to have conceived if it had not seen its 
 heavenly beauty in the flesh, and an Image the 
 spell of which for eighteen centuries has en¬ 
 chained the wonder of foes as well as of friends, 
 so that even unbelief has been compelled to ex¬ 
 claim, “If the life of Socrates was the life of a 
 saint, the life of Jesus was the life of God.” 
 
IX. 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 
 
 
“Then the devil leaveth him, and behold, angels came 
 ministered unto him.”—M att. iv. n. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 “ Behold, angels came and ministered unto Him.” 
 
 SUCH is the close, according to St Matthew’s 
 Gospel, of the great temptation of our Lord. 
 We have already seen the significant contrast 
 this ending to the temptation affords to its 
 close in the Gospel of St Luke, and it now 
 remains for us to study the significance of 
 this angelic ministry as recorded in “ the 
 Gospel of the King.” 
 
 It is true that Scripture tells us less of the 
 ministry of angels in the New Testament than it 
 does in the Old. The messengers and heralds 
 of the King pass out of sight when the King 
 Himself appears, but there is one verse in 
 the first Epistle of Peter which seems for 
 a moment to lift the veil which hides the 
 heavenly intelligences from us, and shows us 
 them following with the deepest interest the 
 footsteps of their Lord and King on earth. After 
 speaking of “ the salvation ” concerning which 
 
198 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 “ the prophets sought and searched diligently, 
 who prophesied of the grace that should come 
 unto you ; searching what time or what manner 
 of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them 
 did point unto, when it testified beforehand the 
 sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should 
 follow them,” the apostle adds that there were 
 other intelligences than the prophets, who 
 longed to know the mystery of a crucified and 
 glorified Saviour, “ which things,” St Peter says, 
 “ angels desire to look into.” * And the word 
 the apostle uses t implies far more than the 
 English expression “to look into” conveys to our 
 ears. It is the “ earnest gaze of one who bends 
 over a given object and scrutinizes it thorough- 
 1 y,”J which is implied in the apostle’s word, 
 and it gives us, though for a moment only, a 
 revelation of the eager and reverent interest 
 taken by these high intelligences of heaven in 
 all the facts of the life of their King when on 
 earth. 
 
 We do not wonder, then, to find that when 
 Christ appears on earth, these spirits who had 
 never sinned, who had bowed in adoration in 
 
 * I Peter i. IO. + irapaKtyau. 
 
 £ Plumptre in loc. in the Cambridge Bible for Schools. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 199 
 
 heaven before His glory, who had long desired 
 to know the meaning of the strange predictions 
 of inspired men concerning Him, should have 
 appeared too. “ An angel ©f the Lord ” appears 
 to Zacharias to announce the birth of John the 
 Baptist, the Lord’s forerunner.* The angel 
 Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary the 
 coming birth of her Saviour and her King.! 
 The heavens are filled with “ a multitude df the 
 heavenly host” praising God at the birth of 
 Jesus.J “ An angel of the Lord” warns Joseph 
 to depart into Egypt,§ and “an angel of the 
 Lord ” bids him return again to the land of 
 Israel.H At the Passion in Gethsemane “ there 
 appeared an angel from heaven strengthening 
 Jesus.” IT At the Resurrection the stone is 
 found removed from the mouth of the sepulchre, 
 “ an angel of the Lord ” having “ descended 
 from heaven and rolled away the stone.” ** 
 Mary sees “ two angels in white sitting one at 
 the head, and one at the feet, where the body 
 of Jesus had lain ” it And as each of the great 
 events of our Lord’s earthly life has been thus 
 
 * Luke i. 11. F Luke i. 26. + Luke ii. 14* 
 
 § Matt. ii. 13. il Matt. ii. 19* IT Luke xxii. 44. 
 
 ** Matt, xxviii. 2. ft John xx. 12. 
 
200 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 attended by the ministry of angels, so at the 
 Ascension of Jesus they wait to follow their 
 King to the everlasting glory, and announce to 
 His disciples as they were “ looking stedfastly 
 into heaven ” the return of their Lord in the 
 power and majesty of the Second Advent.* 
 There was nothing, therefore, exceptional in 
 this ministry and succour of the angels being 
 offered to our Lord at the close of the tempta¬ 
 tion. It was only a part of that service which 
 they rendered the Saviour throughout His 
 earthly life,—service which was the crowning joy 
 of the angelic host. For the Lord Jesus Christ 
 had come from heaven. He had been the light 
 and glory of the city of God above. For ages 
 upon ages, long before man was created, He 
 had received the adoration and worship of 
 countless myriads of angels who stood before 
 His throne. The mighty cherubim, “ eldest 
 born of the intellectual creation of God,” had 
 gazed in fixed and unbroken wonder and awe 
 at the “ treasures of wisdom and of knowledge ” 
 which were hidden in Him who was the Eternal 
 Word, the uncreated “ Reason ” of the Most 
 High. The burning seraphim, spirits of worship 
 
 * Acts i. io. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 201 
 
 and of love, had fed their rapt devotion from 
 the fount of living fire ever glowing in the 
 infinite heart of Jesus ; and angels and arch¬ 
 angels, filled with the awful vision of His glory, 
 and standing in the light streaming from His 
 throne, had fallen prostrate before Him as they 
 heard the Divine command, “ Let all the angels 
 of God worship Him.” Their ministry on earth 
 was only a continuation of the sublimer ministry 
 of heaven. 
 
 Nor has their ministry ceased with the Ascen¬ 
 sion of our Lord. If our conflicts with tempta¬ 
 tion, and our victories over the devil are like those 
 of Christ in their severity and peril, they are like 
 them also in their end and crown. The glorified 
 Lord does not deny to His tempted followers 
 the succour and help which He found so precious 
 in His hour of earthly need. “ Are they not all 
 ministering spirits,” says the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, “ sent forth to do 
 service for the sake of them that shall inherit 
 salvation ?” * They whose harps are struck to 
 a louder strain of joy over “one sinner that 
 repenteth,” do not watch with indifference the 
 long struggles which precede and follow true 
 
 * Hebrews i. 14. 
 
202 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 repentance for sin. They wait with eager 
 interest the issue of our conflicts with evil, 
 and they come to visit us with their gracious 
 ministries when the struggle is over, as they 
 came to Jesus. 
 
 How they come, what they do for us when 
 they come, we may not be able to tell; but we 
 may owe more than we know to the willing, if 
 unknown service they render in our hour of need. 
 He who is their Lord and ours may give them 
 some special mission of help and of love for us 
 when we most need it; and many a time the 
 healing of the wounds inflicted in the strife, the 
 quieting of the storm which had been raging 
 within, the whispering of new hope and new 
 courage to the depressed, the warding off of 
 unsuspected attacks of the innumerable hosts of 
 darkness when we were too weak to meet them, 
 may be owed to the silent and blessed ministry 
 they render to us. 
 
 “ Whenever, in some bitter grief, we find 
 All unawares, a deep, mysterious sense 
 Of hidden comfort come, we know not whence; 
 When suddenly we see, where we were blind; 
 
 Where we had struggled, are content, resigned ; 
 
 Are strong where we were weak, 
 
 And no more strive nor seek ; 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 203 
 
 Then we may know that from the far glad skies 
 To note our need, the watchful God has bent, 
 
 And for our instant help has called and sent, 
 
 Of all our loving angels, the most wise 
 And tender one, tp point to us where lies 
 The path that will be best, 
 
 The path of peace and rest.” 
 
 But the ministry of angels to our Lord is 
 more than a witness to His royal majesty, it 
 also attests the reality and severity of the 
 struggle with the devil through which the man 
 
 Christ Jesus had passed. 
 
 Even if the final assault of the tempter had 
 not been preceded by the long and exhausting 
 fast of forty days, if there had been no other 
 demand on the energies, both physical and 
 spiritual, of the Lord Jesus than that involved 
 in the struggle which was now for a season 
 over, we can imagine the terrible reaction 
 and exhaustion which must have followed 
 such a contest. If the soldier is wearied 
 and faint on the evening of the day of the 
 battle, when its fierce excitement is gone, and 
 the tumult of the conflict has ceased, how much 
 more must such a spiritual conflict as that 
 through which u the Captain of our salvation 
 had been passing, have ended in utter prostra- 
 
204 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 tion and weakness. We know from our own 
 experience a little of the sense of physical 
 feebleness which ensues when any great spiritual 
 crisis in our history has been passed, or when 
 the forces of good and of evil have been ar¬ 
 rayed on the battle-ground of our own soul, and 
 we have had to fight for victory over some 
 deadly sins, but we cannot tell how much a con¬ 
 flict on which was hanging the destiny of a world 
 must have involved for the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 And when to the tremendous issues of the 
 struggle we add the fact that it took place at 
 the end of a prolonged and exhausting fast, we 
 may perhaps faintly imagine how utterly the 
 Victor must have been “ spent ” at its close, and 
 how welcome the boon this ministry of angels 
 must have been to Him who, because “the 
 children were sharers in flesh and blood, also 
 Himself in like manner partook of the same.” 
 
 But if the angelic succour granted to our 
 Lord attests the greatness of the spiritual con¬ 
 flict through which He had gone, it is an in¬ 
 cidental but most precious proof to us of the 
 completeness with which He had identified His 
 lot with that of His brethren. He will work no 
 miracle to supply His own hunger at the com- 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 20J 
 
 mencement of His temptation. He will not, 
 now all is over. He will do nothing that shall 
 in any way separate Him from His tempted 
 brethren in every age. He began the conflict 
 as man. He ends it as He began. Conscious 
 of power that in a moment could have turned 
 the stones into bread, and made weariness 
 vanish before Almighty strength, He will not 
 use His power. He submits to be ministered 
 unto, and the Creator of all worlds is succoured 
 by the creatures whom He had made. In the hour 
 of His triumph we may read a new meaning in 
 the gracious words, “ We have not a High Piiest 
 that cannot be touched with the feeling of our 
 infirmities ; but One that hath been in all points 
 tempted like as we are, yet without sin.’ * 
 
 Nor is the reality of the humanity of our 
 blessed Lord, as witnessed by His temptation 
 and by the ministry of angels which followed it, 
 a doctrine of purely theological interest and 
 without relation to our spiritual life. 
 
 The worship of the Virgin, and the place 
 assigned to her, in the devotions of the Roman 
 Church would never have been possible if that 
 Church had not first lost the vivid and tender 
 
 * Hebrews iv. 15 . 
 
206 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 realization of the true humanity of Jesus which 
 pervades the New Testament, and was the life 
 and joy of the faith of the early Church. Christ 
 was farther and farther withdrawn from all real 
 and true participation in the lot of men, and 
 whilst the theological doctrine of His humanity 
 remained untouched, the living sense of that 
 humanity became fainter and fainter, until at 
 length the way to God which He had opened 
 through the veil of His flesh was lost, and His 
 mother was invoked to occupy the place which 
 He alone can ever fill. It may be true that the 
 denial of the Deity of Christ has even graver 
 results for the spiritual life of the Church than 
 the forgetfulness of His humanity, but it is 
 equally true that without the humanity, the Deity 
 of our Lord is removed from all practical rela¬ 
 tion to the religious life of mankind. We can¬ 
 not afford to lose any part of “ the truth as it 
 is in Jesus the Deity of Christ, not less than 
 the Humanity, and Humanity not less than the 
 Deity, or rather as we prefer to say, the unique 
 personality of Him who was not merely God 
 and Man but the God-Man, is as essential to 
 the vigour and health of the spiritual life as it 
 is to the soundness and accuracy of its creed. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 2QJ 
 
 Romanism warns us of the peril that follows 
 those who deny the one ; Unitarianism warns us 
 in equally impressive tones of the peril of deny¬ 
 ing the other. 
 
 But the realization of the true humanity of 
 Jesus in His temptation, as witnessed by the 
 ministry of angels, is necessary not only to bring 
 His temptations near to our own, and to enable 
 us to realize the depth of His sympathy with 
 us, it is also necessary to the reality and vivid¬ 
 ness of our sympathy with Christ in His struggle 
 with the tempter. We have already briefly 
 referred to the danger there is of the Church 
 losing the tenderness and warmth of the love 
 which the first disciples had to Christ, and of 
 our forgetting the sympathy we ought to offer our 
 Lord in the sympathy we are so eager to expect 
 from Him. We can hardly wonder if our love 
 for Christ grows less intense and warm, and the 
 fountains of feeling in the heart of the Church 
 are dried up, if the temptation be conceived as 
 a dramatic conflict, the result of which had been 
 determined upon and arranged beforehand. 
 The moment we feel it was a real struggle, 
 involving exhaustion, pain, and peril to Christ 
 Himself; taxing His human energies to their 
 
208 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 very uttermost by the grievous strain ; prostrat¬ 
 ing Him at its close in such weakness, that “the 
 angels came and ministered unto Him/’ the 
 heart leaps up in joy and gratitude to its Saviour 
 and King, and knows not whether most to 
 wonder at the love which for our sakes willingly 
 endured so fierce a conflict, or the glorious 
 goodness which quenched in successive triumphs 
 “ all the fiery darts of the devil.” 
 
 And we are tempted too. But temptation 
 becomes a new thing to the soul if it realizes 
 that in the struggle with the tempter, in the 
 weariness and weakness of the conflict, in the 
 moments when defeat seems inevitable, nay! in 
 those victories which are only less terrible than 
 a defeat, Christ is with us all through. We are 
 sure, at least, of His sympathy, whosoever else 
 may fail us; sure of His most tender and 
 generous pity; of His making allowances, 
 which none but Himself could make; sure even 
 in the hour of defeat — for defeat as well as 
 victory comes, alas to us all—that He will not 
 judge us too h' n "shly, for He knows, as none of 
 us can ever know, “ the depths of Satan,” and 
 on the throne of the eternal glory He “ remem- 
 bereth our frame ; He knoweth we are but dust.” 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 209 
 
 But we may learn another lesson of not less 
 practical importance from the heavenly ministry 
 granted to the Lord at the close of His temp¬ 
 tation. Christ had been tempted falsely to rely 
 on the ancient promise of God to His people, 
 “ He shall give His angels charge over Thee,” 
 and to cast Himself down from the summit of 
 the temple, and He had refused to tempt God, 
 even though He lost the succour which in such an 
 hour of need the angels could render to Him. 
 He missed, as we should have said, the celestial 
 ministry ever ready to be granted to the children 
 of God, and above all, to Him who was the Son of 
 God. He refused to avail Himself of the angelic 
 “ charge ” because He refused to “ tempt God.” 
 
 But the ministry which appeared to have been 
 lost in the temptation is found at its close, in 
 the succour of the ministering angels, and found 
 not then alone, but in even richer abundance 
 earlier in the life of our Lord, for only a few days 
 after the temptation we find Christ saying to 
 Nathanael, “ Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye 
 shall see the Heaven opened, and the angels of 
 God ascending and descending upon fche Son 
 Man.” * 
 
 * John i. 51. 
 
210 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 And so we may learn for ourselves the 
 homely, but ever needed lesson that the self- 
 denials of the path of duty are never real losses 
 to the soul. No doubt this truth may be so 
 represented, or misrepresented, as to be turned 
 into a falsehood to the conscience and a dis¬ 
 honour to God. It may be said that it comes 
 simply to this, that goodness pays, and that 
 therefore the service of God and of righteous¬ 
 ness becomes in the end a question of policy 
 and of self-interest. But this is a caricature, 
 not a statement, of the truth. ^ If I resist 
 temptation to do wrong because, and only 
 because of the reward promised to them who 
 overcome, I am not morally the victor over 
 sin. I am really yielding to one temptation 
 whilst professing to resist another. I am put¬ 
 ting self and not God first, and no man is a 
 servant of God who has not learned that the 
 essence of all goodness lies in putting God 
 before self, and that to make obedience to the 
 will of God the result of a calculation of the 
 advantages of obedience, is to dethrone the will 
 he professes to obey. 
 
 But, on the other hand, it is true—and gene¬ 
 ration after generation of men and of women 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 2 l I 
 
 who have “ suffered for righteousness’ sake ” 
 have proved its truth—that wherever and when¬ 
 ever right is done, not from policy but from 
 principle; where temptation to sin is van¬ 
 quished, not because it will pay in the long run 
 to resist, but because of the inner loyalty of the 
 soul to God ; where self-denial has been freely 
 and gladly borne without a thought of the 
 reward, and only because sacrifice is the sweet 
 necessity of love, God will more than com¬ 
 pensate the soul, even in this life, for the loss; 
 and the blessings which seemed to have been 
 lost, because we loved Him better than we 
 loved ourselves, come back multiplied and 
 augmented a thousandfold to the heart. 
 
 Abraham surrenders “ his son, his only son ” 
 Isaac to death, but receives him again “ from 
 the dead,” crowned with a richer wealth of pro¬ 
 mise than ever he had heard before* Joseph 
 refuses to commit one great sin, and his refusal 
 ends apparently in the loss of all hope of earthly 
 happiness, and in the exchange of the high 
 place of honour for a prison cell, but he 
 becomes at last a prince in the land of Egypt.*)* 
 Moses “ chooses rather to be evil entreated with 
 
 * 
 
 t Gen. xxxix. 
 
 Gen. xxii. 15> seq. 
 
2 I 2 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures 
 of sin for a season ; accounting the reproach of 
 Christ greater riches than the treasures of 
 Egypt,” and he becomes the leader and law¬ 
 giver of a nation, and makes to himself an 
 immortal name in the history of the world.* 
 Daniel is true to God in the midst of the seduc¬ 
 tions of a heathen court, although his fidelity 
 seemed to close every path of worldly advance¬ 
 ment against him, but he rises to the chief 
 place in the land, and is “ ruler over the whole 
 province of Babylon, and chief of the governors 
 over all the wise men of Babylon.” f 
 
 And thus the great law of the Master, that 
 “ whosoever would save his life shall lose it, 
 and whosoever shall lose his life . . . shall save 
 it,” fulfils itself in human experience. Honesty 
 is the best policy, but it is only so on condition 
 it is pursued not as a policy, but as a principle. 
 We gain what we lose, and more than we lose, 
 in the path of duty, but only on condition that 
 we are not thinking of the gain, but of the 
 duty, when we make the sacrifice it entails. 
 The rewards of righteousness disappear the 
 moment they are made the conditions and 
 
 t Dan. ii. 48. 
 
 * Heb. xi. 24-26. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 2 I 3 
 
 motives of righteousness : they return in over¬ 
 flowing measure to those who, in their passion 
 for righteousness, have forgotten altogether 
 whether it has rewards or not. “ There is no 
 man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, 
 or mother, or father, or children, or lands, for 
 My sake, and for the Gospel’s sake, but he shall 
 receive a hundredfold NOW IN THIS TIME 
 houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, 
 and children, and lands, with persecutions; and 
 in the world to come eternal life.” * 
 
 One last office remained to the angels in their 
 ministry to their Lord. They had watched, may 
 we not say, with deep and reverent awe the long 
 conflict of forty days of Christ with Satan; they 
 had beheld Him triumphant over every form of 
 temptation; they had seen how His victory had 
 been won at the cost to Himself of sore weak¬ 
 ness and exhaustion; they had been permitted 
 to come to this earth to minister to His need ; 
 and now, “borne on joyful wings,” they celebrate 
 His triumphs on high. 
 
 Satan had assaulted “ the Prince and Saviour” 
 of the world with his deadliest force, but had 
 failed, and if we may faintly imagine the terror 
 
 * Mark x. 29, 30. 
 
2 1 4 THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS. 
 
 and dismay which his defeat must have caused 
 in the realms of his own infernal kingdom, 
 we may also imagine the exultant glad¬ 
 ness with which the tidings of the victory 
 of the great “ Captain of our salvation ” must 
 have filled the courts of heaven, as they 
 echoed with the shout of triumph, “ Sing unto 
 the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously:” 
 “ The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is His 
 name ; Thy right hand, G Lord, is glorious in 
 power ; Thy right hand hath dashed in pieces 
 the enemy: ” “ The Lord shall reign for ever 
 and ever.” 
 
 But the warfare of Christ against sin is not 
 yet completed. He has never laid down the 
 glorious work which He began when “ He was 
 led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be 
 tempted of the devil.” He will not lay it down 
 till “ the last enemy shall be abolished,” and 
 “all things are put in subjection under His 
 feet” 
 
 Blessed, thrice blessed, they who in this holy 
 war have taken sides with Christ, and have 
 sworn, as with an oath, that they too will not 
 rest until all sin, whether within themselves or 
 in the sinful world without, shall be destroyed, 
 and “ God shall be all in all.” 
 
X. 
 
 CHRIST’S VICTORY THE PLEDGE 
 AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY OVER 
 TEMPTATION AND SIN. 
 
IheiQ hath no temptation taken you but such as man can 
 bear : but God is faithifil, who will not suffer you to be tempted 
 above that ye are able j but will with the temptation make 
 
 also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it. ”•_ 
 
 I CORIN. X. 13. 
 
 (i Apart from me ye can do nothing. ” — John xv. 5. 
 
 I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”_• 
 
 Phil. iv. 13. 
 
 I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” 
 —Gal. ii. 20. 
 
 “ Be stron g in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.” 
 —Ephes. vi. 10. 
 
 “ He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me 
 in my throne, as I also overcame^ and sat down with my Father 
 in his throne.” —Rev. iii. 21. 
 
X. 
 
 CHRIST’S VICTORY THE PLEDGE AND POWER 
 OF OUR VICTORY OVER TEMPTATION 
 
 AND SIN. 
 
 We have already seen that temptation, even of 
 the fiercest kind, need not imply a fallen state. 
 The temptations of Christ are not only the 
 proof that sin in no way necessarily follows 
 previous temptation, but they are also the proof 
 that temptation in no way necessarily implies 
 previous sin. Temptation, in fact, is an inevit¬ 
 able condition and result of probation; and had 
 man never fallen he would still have required 
 the searching discipline of trial, for until good¬ 
 ness is proved it can never be assured of its 
 own reality and stability. 
 
 In this light Christ’s temptations may be 
 regarded as types of the temptations through 
 which each man would have passed if sin had 
 never “ entered into the world, and death through 
 sin,” and His victories as types of the victories 
 
218 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 man would have gained over sin. The whole of 
 the life of our Lord indeed was a representative 
 life, as truly as His death was a representative 
 death for human sin. As “ the Son of Man,” 
 His life was the realized ideal of the Divine 
 Image in which man was originally created, but 
 which had been lost through his fall. Even the 
 great facts of the Incarnation and Resurrection, 
 which stand at the commencement and the close 
 of the human life of the Lord Jesus, have their 
 relation to us as well as to Him. In the sug¬ 
 gestive words of Canon Westcott,* “ the Incar¬ 
 nation gives the absolute pledge of the fulfil¬ 
 ment of man’s destiny : the Resurrection shows 
 that fulfilment already attained, as far as our 
 present powers enable us to realize the truth. 
 So it is that Christ, as raised from the dead, is 
 spoken of as 'the second Adam/ in whom 
 men are reborn, and also as ‘the head of 
 the body, the Church.’ The Resurrection, as 
 answering to death, so far depended on the fall, 
 but the glory of the Risen Lord, answering to 
 the accomplishment of the Idea in which man 
 was created, is independent of it. We see in 
 the Risen Christ the end for which man was 
 
 * “ The Revelation of the Risen Lord,” Preface, p. xiii, 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 2ig 
 
 made, and the assurance that the end is within 
 reach. The Resurrection, if we may so speak, 
 shows us the change which would have passed 
 over the earthly life of man if sin had not 
 brought in death.” 
 
 We may take these last words and apply 
 them with equal truth to the 'victories which 
 Christ gained over the temptations of the devil. 
 If His temptations are the ideal forms under 
 which sinless humanity, if it had remained loyal 
 to God, would have had to meet temptation, 
 His victories are types and illustrations of the 
 successive conquests man would have won over 
 temptation had he never fallen. The tree of 
 forbidden fruit, as we have said, would have 
 been found in every garden, but any garden 
 would have been a paradise, and a paradise 
 never “ lost ” through transgression. 
 
 But the race, alas ! has fallen. We have sinned, 
 and in our revolt against the authority and love 
 of God, have brought disaster and death on our¬ 
 selves, and the question at once arises, whether 
 the victories of our Lord over the devil have 
 therefore lost their significance to the life of 
 fallen humanity? Is the rich and glorious 
 promise they would have afforded to us, as a 
 
220 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 sinless race, of a life of victory over temptation 
 unchecked and untarnished by a single defeat, 
 emptied of all its meaning now that we have 
 “sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”? 
 
 To this question the teaching of the New 
 Testament, and the experience of innumerable 
 generations of saints, return an unhesitating 
 response. As the life of Jesus still remains, 
 even to sinful man, at once the revelation and 
 the example of the glory still possible to him in 
 his fallen state, so the triumph of the Lord 
 Jesus over the tempter is the pledge and pro¬ 
 phecy of His final triumph over sin. “ If we 
 endure”—either suffering or temptation with 
 Him—“we shall also reign with Him.” 
 
 It remains only to enquire how this pledge is 
 fulfilled. 
 
 In the first place, and beginning on the 
 lowest ground, the fact that one man has over¬ 
 come the subtlest and deadliest temptations, 
 has passed unscathed out of the fiercest fires of 
 assault, is alone of immense significance to the 
 race. It is sometimes asserted that the life of 
 Jesus loses all its glory and meaning if its 
 supernatural character be denied. But it is not 
 so in reality. That we should lose much—how 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 
 
 221 
 
 much It would be impossible to say—if we aban¬ 
 doned our faith in the supernatural birth and 
 the supernatural resurrection of our Lord ; that 
 the supreme glory of the life of Christ as the 
 personal revelation of the Eternal God to man, 
 the power of His cross as the Divine atonement 
 for human sin, are gone for ever if His Divine 
 Sonship is denied, no Christian can for a moment 
 doubt; but notwithstanding this, no theory of 
 the person and work of Christ, however erroneous 
 or insufficient, can utterly destroy His signifi¬ 
 cance to our race. The most hostile unbelief 
 can never empty the life of Jesus of its surpass¬ 
 ing value and preciousness. He may be nothing 
 but “the sweet Galilean vision” which has faded 
 for ever away in the fuller light of the nine¬ 
 teenth century; the vanished Master 
 
 “ On whose face, with shining eyes, 
 
 The Syrian stars look down,” 
 
 but the vision has passed before the eyes of 
 man, and the world can never wholly lose the 
 spell of its sweetness and beauty. It may be 
 that we “ live,” as M. Renan said* speaking of 
 Christianity, “ on a shadow, on the perfume of 
 an empty vase,” but the shadow is more won- 
 
 * “ Speech at the admission of M. Cherbuliez to the French 
 Academy,” May 1882. 
 
222 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 derful than all realities besides, and the perfume 
 is still there although the vase be empty. 
 Christianity may be a dream, but it is still true, 
 as M. Renan himself confesses, that “ it is often 
 to its formulas ”—the formulas of a dream !—- 
 “ we owe the remains of our virtue.” 
 
 This significance of the victory of Christ over 
 temptation is not wholly lost, even if Christ were 
 only one of us. This, at least, that victory proves, 
 that once in the slow evolution of humanity it 
 has given birth to one in whom goodness was 
 triumphant over every form of evil; that once 
 in the weary progress of the race towards per¬ 
 fection it has borne “ one consummate flower,” 
 without spot or imperfection, the fragrance of 
 which has come down through all the ages ; 
 that one man, at least, has been victor, not 
 vanquished, in the life-long conflict with evil 
 that all men have to wage. As the sweetest, if 
 saddest, poet of unbelief exclaims— 
 
 “ Was Christ a man like us ? Ah! let us try 
 If we then, too, can be such men as he ! ”* 
 
 But to the Christian the victory of Christ over 
 the devil has a far more solemn and glorious 
 
 * Sonnets by Matthew Arnold, “The Better Part.” 
 
and power of our victory. 223 
 
 signficance than if it were the solitary triumph 
 of one exceptionally holy man over the forces of 
 evil within and without him. The unique value 
 of Christ’s temptations and victory as those of 
 “the Son of Man” has already been referred to 
 both as the pledge of Christ’s own complete 
 triumph over evil, and of His redemption of 
 mankind from the corruption and slavery of sin; 
 but we have yet to see how the victory of our 
 Lord at once prophesies and secures the triumph 
 of those who trust in Him. 
 
 It prophesies our victory, first, because it is 
 the victory of the new head and representative 
 of humanity. A race which owns Christ as its 
 Elder Brother can never be wholly vanquished 
 by sin. Individual members of the race may 
 fall before temptation, and be “hurt of the 
 second death,” through not “ overcoming,” just 
 as individual soldiers in a victorious army may 
 perish on the battlefield, but the race as a whole 
 is not doomed, can never be doomed to final 
 defeat in the warfare against sin. There are 
 great words in the New Testament concerning 
 the future of mankind the full significance of 
 which only the eternal world will reveal, but 
 even here it is impossible altogether to miss the 
 
224 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 brightness of the hope they shed on the destiny 
 of man. Such verses as these, “ Behold the 
 Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the 
 world ; ”* “ God sent not the Son into the world 
 to judge the world, but that the world should 
 be saved through Him ; “ I, if I be lifted up 
 
 from the earth, will draw all men unto My¬ 
 self ; “ The Son of Man came to seek and to 
 
 save that which was lost; ” § “ We have beheld 
 and bear witness that the Father hath sent the 
 Son to be the Saviour of the world ; ” || “ He is 
 the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours 
 only, but also for the whole world ; ”1T “ For God 
 hath shut up all unto disobedience, that He 
 might have mercy upon all;”** “ Through Him 
 to reconcile all things unto Himself, having 
 made peace through the blood of His cross ; 
 through Him, I say, whether things upon the 
 earth, or things in the Heavens ; “ For as in 
 
 Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made 
 alive ; “ When all things have been subjected 
 
 unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be 
 subjected to Him that did subject all things 
 
 * John i. 29. § Luke xix. 10. ** Romans xi. 32. 
 
 + John iv. 17. || 1 John iv. 14. ft Coloss. i. 20. 
 
 t John xii. 32. H 1 John ii. 2. 1 Cor/xv. 22. 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 22 5 
 
 unto Him, that God may be all in all”*— 
 and the number of such passages might be 
 largely increased—are filled with a new and 
 glorious meaning when we remember that 
 already One has overcome in whom every man 
 may claim a brother’s part. It may be true 
 that the advocates of the final salvation of all 
 men have failed in their induction from such 
 texts as these fully to weigh with them those 
 which speak, in language not less plain and dis¬ 
 tinct, of the doom of those who deliberately 
 reject the offer of mercy, and of eternal life, 
 which Christ brings to every human soul; it 
 may be true that they have failed to appreciate 
 the measureless forces of resistance to God 
 possible to the human will, and that in their 
 pleading for “ the larger hope,” they have 
 forgotten that God will never overpower the 
 freedom with which He originally endowed 
 man; but it is equally true that the severe and 
 narrow theology which doomed—let us hope 
 not without misgiving of heart—the vast major¬ 
 ity of mankind to eternal destruction had for¬ 
 gotten the immortal hopes which the Headship 
 of Christ has made the heritage of the human 
 
 * I Cor. xv. 28. 
 P 
 
226 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 race. It is for His honour, not solely for man’s 
 salvation, that these hopes are not utterly frus¬ 
 trated by human sin and unbelief. And when 
 we are tempted to despair of our work for our 
 Lord and Master—and who is not tempted a in the 
 long and weary work of bringing the world to 
 the feet of Christ sometimes to despair of ever 
 seeing “ the will of God done on earth as it is 
 in heaven ? ”—it is enough for us if we “ lift 
 up our hearts,” and remember Whom it is we 
 serve, Whose kingdom it is we seek to bring in, 
 and that the 
 
 “ One far-off, divine event, 
 
 To which the whole creation moves,” 
 
 is nothing less than this, “He shall see of 
 
 THE TRAVAIL OF HlS SOUL AND BE SATISFIED.” 
 
 But the victory of the Lord J esus over temp¬ 
 tation is more than a Hope to the Christian ; it 
 is the assurance and power of His own triumph 
 over sin, because Christ dwells in him, and he 
 in Christ. It is difficult, if not impossible, to 
 convey in any human words the reality and 
 intimacy of the union which exists between 
 Christ and His people. To them He is in¬ 
 finitely more than the Divine Head of the race 
 to which they belong; more than the “ elder 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 22 J 
 
 brother,” who is “not ashamed to call them 
 brethren He is “ the Vine,” of which they are 
 the branches, the “ Head of the Body,” of which 
 each one of them is a living member. His 
 Incarnation, as the assumption of the human by 
 the Divine, is also the pledge of the participation 
 of the human in the Divine, and the pledge is 
 fulfilled when Christ “ dwells in their hearts by 
 faith.” To the apostles there was nothing in 
 the whole sphere of their Christian experience 
 more wonderful or more glorious than the 
 relation which they knew existed between 
 themselves and Christ. They were not only 
 “ saved from wrath through Him,”* not only 
 “justified by faith ”t in Him, not only “be¬ 
 gotten again unto a living hope by His resur¬ 
 rection from the dead but they were “IN 
 CHRIST, ”§ and in Him had “ become partakers 
 of the Divine nature,”|1 so that the springs of 
 their best and truest life were not human but 
 Divine. Words which on the lower levels of 
 Christian experience would have sounded almost 
 blasphemous, St Paul uses as the simple and 
 natural expression of his daily life in Christ: 
 
 - * Romans v. 9. t Romans v. 1. t 1 Peter i. 3 
 
 § Romans xvi. 7. || 2 Peter i. 4. 
 
228 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 “ For to me to live is Christ “ I live, and yet 
 no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.’’f 
 
 But that which was true of the spiritual life of 
 the apostles is equally true of the spiritual life 
 in every age. “ The Christian man ”—to quote 
 the words of Dr Dale in his masterly “ Congrega¬ 
 tional Lecture —“ does not simply develop and 
 perfect his own life; he is constantly receiving 
 and appropriating the life and power of the Son 
 of God. Christ does not merely exhort us to 
 repent, and reveal new motives by which we 
 should be constrained to repent; He gives 
 repentance,§ inspiring us with His own sense of 
 the evil of sin, His own sorrow for it, and His 
 own desire that we should sin no more. We 
 escape from evil habits and evil passions, not by 
 the force of any moral struggles which can be 
 called our own : sometimes the habits fall away 
 from us at the touch of Christ, as the chains 
 fell away from Peter at the touch of the angel; 
 sometimes the passions are expelled by the 
 power of Christ, as evil spirits were driven out 
 of men by His word; and if we struggle for 
 freedom we are conscious that we are ‘ strong ’ 
 
 * Phil. i. 21. t Atonement,” pp. 413, 414. 
 
 t Gal. ii. 20. § Acts v. 31. 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 229 
 
 only ‘in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. 
 Even in the presence of violent temptation there 
 are some Christian people to whom it seems 
 that the victory is given them by Christ rather 
 than achieved by themselves through Christ’s 
 help, and who say they do but ‘ stand still and 
 see the salvation of the Lord.’ And though to 
 others, and perhaps to most, there is real and 
 prolonged conflict, their own part in it disap¬ 
 pears when they look back on their triumphs ; 
 and they declare, in no false humility, but in 
 their desire to express the exact truth, that if 
 they have rescued their moral nature from the 
 power of sin, ‘they got not the land in posses¬ 
 sion by their own sword, neither did their own 
 arm save them ; but (God’s) right hand and 
 (God’s) arm, and the light of (God’s) coun¬ 
 tenance, because (God) had a favour unto them.’ 
 
 “ In the development of the virtues and per¬ 
 fections of the Christian life, as distinguished 
 from conquest over sin, it is, if possible, still 
 more obvious that the life and power of Christ 
 are revealed in us. We lose our selfishness and 
 hardness through receiving, direct from Him, 
 the spirit of compassion which made Him to 
 relieve every form of human infirmity and suf- 
 
230 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 fering. . . , Hence the possibilities of the Chris¬ 
 tian life are not to be measured by our native 
 resources, but by the infinite perfection of 
 Christ Himself. We dwell in Him ; He dwells 
 in us ; and He is the living prophecy of the 
 height and glory of our holiness—a prophecy 
 never to be fulfilled on earth or in heaven, but 
 perpetually moving towards fulfilment, through 
 struggle and sorrow and frequent defeat in this 
 world, and through endless ages of joy and 
 triumph in the world to come. . . . As we never 
 find rest in the mercy of God until we discover 
 that neither our penitence, nor our amendment 
 of life, nor our faith, can create any claim to the 
 remission of sins, and are willing to receive it as 
 God’s free gift i for Christ’s sake; ’ so we can 
 never receive perfect deliverance from sin until 
 we are so anxious for holiness itself as to care 
 nothing for winning any personal credit by 
 becoming holy, —until in renouncing the hope 
 of achieving victory over sin for ourselves, re¬ 
 nouncing even the desire to achieve it for our¬ 
 selves, we are willing to accept victory and 
 freedom as part of that large inheritance which 
 God has given us in Christ.” 
 
 If this be a true account of the relation that 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 23 I 
 
 exists between the Lord Jesus Christ and the 
 believer,—and to its truth every page of the 
 New Testament bears witness,—-very grave 
 practical results follow, some of which profoundly 
 affect the moral life of the Christian Church. 
 
 To say that the Christian has to struggle 
 against temptation and sin is only to say half 
 the truth. The Christian has not only to 
 struggle, he has to overcome. Victory, not 
 defeat, is to be the normal condition of the 
 Christian life. The temptations to sin which 
 beset us are as various as human character itself; 
 they may come to the soul from the intellect 
 or the affections quite as much as from “the 
 world, the flesh, and the devil,” but the issue of 
 the conflict is to be the same in every case. 
 We have an armour wherewith we are “ able to 
 stand against the wiles of the devil,” * and a 
 shield wherewith we are “ able to quench all 
 the fiery darts of the evil one.” f This is the 
 ideal of the Christian conflict; why is it that in 
 actual experience we come so far short of the 
 ideal ? There are children of God who ought long 
 ago to have been freed from the bondage of evil 
 habit or the tyranny of besetting sin, but instead 
 
 t Eph. vi. 16. 
 
 * Eph. vi. 11. 
 
232 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 of this, the power of the habit over them seems 
 hardly broken, and the sin still fills them with 
 sorrow and shame as they remember how often 
 they have struggled against it in vain. Why 
 is this melancholy experience so common ? In 
 the great majority of cases, because they have 
 never yet learnt the secret of the Christian life. 
 They strive, and strive honestly, against temp¬ 
 tation and sin, but they strive, looking to Christ 
 rather to supplement the deficiencies of their 
 own moral strength, than to fill them with His 
 own Divine and victorious power in the conflict. 
 They do what they can, and when they fail, they 
 ask Christ to help them ; but they never dream 
 of doing nothing at all except to cast them¬ 
 selves from the first wholly on their Lord, and 
 emptied of all confidence in their own power to 
 resist sin, to appeal to Him to fight in them and 
 for them, because “ the battle is not theirs, but 
 the Lord’s.” Or to put the same truth in an¬ 
 other form. Christian people never doubt that 
 the Lord Jesus Christ, through His Holy Spirit, 
 stands in some relation to their will, but if they 
 were to ask themselves what relation it is that 
 Christ thus sustains to them, they would answer 
 that it is an indirect and instrumental relation. 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 
 
 233 
 
 They believe, that is, that Christ influences them 
 through His word, or in the acts of Christian 
 worship, or in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, 
 or by the discipline of life, but they do not 
 believe, or at least they do not realize the fact, 
 that He also stands in a more immediate and 
 direct relation to their souls than one human 
 soul can stand to another: that He is able 
 directly and personally to communicate of His 
 own exhaustless might to the broken will, so 
 that even the feeblest Christian may rejoice to 
 say, “ The strength of Christ may rest upon 
 me.” 
 
 The result is seen in those failures and de¬ 
 feats in the Christian life with which we are all, 
 alas! too familiar, and which are sometimes so 
 frequent as to reverse the true order of Christian 
 experience, and to make victory the exception 
 rather than the rule. 
 
 We have not yet fully learned “the unsearch¬ 
 able riches of Christ.” He has already done more 
 for us than in the beginnings of our Christian 
 life we could have believed it possible even for 
 Him to do, but He has not yet accomplished 
 all His “ good pleasure ” in us. We have yet to 
 learn what is the “ exceeding greatness of His 
 
234 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 power to us-ward who believe.’’ * We may 
 come nearer to Him, and He may come nearer 
 to us than we think. His own parable of “the 
 Vine,” and “ the branches ; ” His own words, 
 “ Abide in Me, and I in you, for apart from 
 Me ye can do nothing,” may be translated into 
 the daily but blessed reality of the Christian 
 life. It is impossible to expect Him to do too 
 much for us when He has Himself told us, “ He 
 that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall 
 he do also; and greater works than these shall 
 he do; because I go unto the Father.” f 
 
 But this supreme triumph of the power of 
 God in us, which is the one unfading ideal of 
 the Christian life, never reached but ever before 
 every one who has “ known the Lord,” is im¬ 
 possible unless we are prepared to fulfil the con¬ 
 ditions on which that power descends on the 
 human soul. 
 
 And of these the first and simplest, and yet 
 perhaps the most difficult, is the confession of 
 our own helplessness and impotence. It is the 
 emptied vessel which alone can be filled with the 
 grace of God, and until we are emptied of all 
 self-confidence, and realize in the depths of our 
 
 * Eph. i. 18, 19. + John xiv. 12, 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 235 
 
 own soul the meaning of the Master s words, 
 “ Apart from Me ye can do nothing,” it is vain 
 for us to expect the fulness of His power to 
 rest upon us. In a little village in Switzerland 
 there stands a Roman Catholic Church, the 
 whiteness of whose spire shines above the dark- 
 roofed chalets around, and on the wall behind 
 and above the altar within the church, there is 
 painted a rude picture of the crucified Christ, of 
 the kind so commonly seen in Catholic churches 
 on the continent. Below the figure of Christ 
 there is written the single word “ I ” in German, 
 but some of the drops of blood which have fallen 
 from the pierced hands and side have splashed 
 on that “Ich,” and have struck it through as 
 with a crimson line. That village artist had 
 learned “ the secret of Jesus, that he that 
 loseth his life ” for Christ’s sake “ shall find it; ” 
 and not until we have learned the same lesson, 
 and discover, perhaps after many humbling 
 defeats and much painful experience, that it is as 
 impossible to trust self too little, as it is to trust 
 Christ too much, shall we find the secret of a 
 life of victory over sin in the words, “ I live, yet 
 no longer I, but Christ liveth in Me. 
 
 But this appeal to the strength of Christ can 
 
236 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 only be made “ by faith,” and faith in Christ is 
 as essential a condition of the exercise of His 
 power as distrust of self. 
 
 In the prayer of St Paul for the Ephesian 
 Church which has been already quoted, * he asks 
 God that they may know “ the exceeding great¬ 
 ness of His power to us-ward who believe” as if 
 even the answer to his prayer was limited by 
 their faith. And it is so. It has been one of 
 the saddest misfortunes to Christian truth that 
 this one act of the soul which Christ and His 
 apostles have made the condition, not only of 
 personal salvation, but of the reception of those 
 large and precious gifts which Christ has as¬ 
 cended to bestow on all who trust in Him, has 
 been so often degraded, largely through the 
 indiscretions and exaggerations of ignorant but 
 well-meaning evangelists, into a mechanical and 
 meaningless fetish. When faith in the Lord 
 Jesus Christ has been made to mean little more 
 than the utterance of the words, “ I believe,’’ “ I 
 dd believe,” as if there was magic even in the 
 sound of the words, it is little wonder if the 
 sceptical and critical have scornfully asked how 
 a talisman like that can open the treasures of 
 the kingdom of heaven to the soul. 
 
 * Page 233. 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 237 
 
 Faith is no such fetish as this. It is the 
 supreme act of the soul; the synthesis of all its 
 powers ; the union of thought, of feeling, of will, 
 in one critical and glowing response to the offer 
 of Christ; the submission of the whole man 
 to His authority and love; the uplifted and 
 emptied human hand which receives “ the gift of 
 God. 5 ’ “ By faith,” to use only a few of the 
 great Scriptural words concerning it, we are 
 “grafted in ” to Christ;* “ through faith ” Christ 
 “ dwells in our hearts; ” t “ by faith ” we have 
 “ access into this grace wherein we stand ; ” % “by 
 faith” we are “begotten of God;”§ nay! so limit¬ 
 less is its power that our Lord Himself declares 
 “All things are possible to him that believeth.” || 
 
 This is faith, and such faith we must have if 
 we are ever to conquer temptation, and to be 
 saved from our sins. It is not because Christ’s 
 power is exhausted that we so often fail in the 
 conflicts of the Christian life ; it is because we 
 have not yet learned to trust Him as He de¬ 
 serves to be trusted. If “ all things are possible 
 to faith,” it almost seems as if all things were 
 possible to unbelief, for it can limit omnipotence 
 
 * Rom. xi. 20, 23. t Eph. iii. 17. X Rom. v. 2. 
 
 § 1 John v. 1, 18. || Mark ix. 23 . 
 
238 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 itself, so that even of Christ it can be said, “He 
 could do there no mighty work, and He mar¬ 
 velled because of their unbelief.”* To us His 
 own question comes as it came to the blind 
 men of old, ere He can do for us any miracle of 
 grace, “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” 
 and to us, as to them, He still declares the 
 great law of His power, “According to your 
 faith be it done unto you.”*!* 
 
 But even this is not all. This undivided 
 trust in the power of Christ does not supersede 
 that moral discipline of ourselves which is an 
 essential condition of all true holiness of 
 character and of life. Not only is faith in 
 Christ not inconsistent with such a discipline, 
 but the discipline itself is one of the conditions 
 of a strong and triumphant faith. For, as has 
 already been observed, faith is not a mechanical 
 act, it is the highest moral attitude of the soul 
 to God; and if so, this attitude must be deter¬ 
 mined in the last resort by the moral condition 
 of the soul itself. To imagine that because 
 nothing but faith in Christ is required to enable 
 us to overcome sin, we may be careless of our¬ 
 selves, may venture perilously near danger, may 
 * Mark vi. 5, 6. + Matt. ix. 28, 29. 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 239 
 
 '‘enter into temptation,” may abandon watching 
 and self-denial and prayer, may forego all that 
 inward disciplining of self which St Paul says is 
 part of the “gift of God,”* is to imagine we 
 may sow the seeds of the flesh and reap the 
 fruits of the spirit. The one perfect example 
 which the world has ever seen of faith, the 
 Lord Jesus Himself, has not only revealed to 
 us the triumphs possible to faith, but He has 
 also shown us the secret places where alone 
 these triumphs are won. He lived a life of 
 constant watching and self-discipline and 
 prayer; He “pleased not Himself;”f His 
 cross was so constantly with Him that He 
 said, “ If any man would come after Me, let 
 him deny himself daily and follow Me and 
 He found in prolonged communion with God, 
 the nourishment and strengthening of His 
 own spiritual life. He entered on His public 
 ministry with prayer ;§ He repaired the ex¬ 
 haustion of spiritual work by “ rising up a great 
 while before day” to pray ;|| He “continued all 
 
 * 2 Tim. 1, 7, hojcppouurfxds. t Rom. xv. 3. 
 
 t Luke ix. 23. § Luke iii. 21. 
 
 || Mark i. 35. Cf. also Luke v. 16 with the next verse. 
 
240 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 night in prayer to God/’ before choosing the 
 twelve apostles and founding His Church among 
 men; * He met temptation twice over with 
 watching and prayer; f He enters both the 
 way of the Cross and the glory of the Trans¬ 
 figuration through prayer ; % He begins His 
 passion with prayer; § He dies with the words of 
 prayer on His lips.]| This is the life of “the 
 Leader and Perfecter of the Faith,”H a life from 
 which we learn that the most watchful self- 
 discipline, the most constant self-denial, the 
 most fervent prayer, are only the human con¬ 
 ditions of that fulness of Faith, which in its turn 
 becomes the condition of the fulness of the 
 Power of God. 
 
 But with these conditions fulfilled on our part, 
 
 * Luke vi. 12, 13. 
 
 + Matt. xiv. 23 compared with John vi. 15 ; and for the 
 second time, Matt. xxvi. 36, 40. 
 
 4 Luke ix. 18, and Luke ix. 28. 
 
 § Luke xxii. 40, 41. li Luke xxiii. 46. t 
 
 f Heb. xii. 2. It is with great diffidence that I venture to 
 differ from the Revised Version, but surely the revisers, by the 
 insertion of the word “our ” in italics in this verse, have mis¬ 
 conceived its true meaning. The writer is not speaking of Jesus 
 as the “author of our faith,” but as the one perfect Example of 
 faith to whom we are to “look ” while we “run with patience 
 the race set before us.” The words which follow are enough 
 to show that he is thinking of Christ’s life as the life of the 
 “ Leader and Perfecter of Faith.” 
 
A.ND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 24 1 
 
 it is hard to say how much God may not do for 
 us. The doctrine of “ perfectionism,” whether 
 in the more ancient form set up by Pelagianism, 
 or in the more modern form it took in the 
 teaching of Wesley, and which has been repro¬ 
 duced without the qualifications Wesley gave to 
 it, and the balance his ethical teaching afforded, 
 in a crude and perilous form by the “ Salvation 
 Army,” has always been discredited in the 
 Church, not less by its general common sense, 
 than by the teaching of Scripture, and by a pro¬ 
 founder philosophy of sin. But erroneous, and 
 oftentimes dangerous, as this doctrine is, it is not 
 wholly error. It would never have lived in the 
 Church of Christ, it would never have exerted 
 so potent a spell as it has over the coarse and 
 uneducated natures who have been taught by 
 the Salvation Army that they may pass at one 
 bound, from a life of bestiality and wickedness 
 into the possession of a “ clean heart,” had it not 
 contained, however mixed with error, a great 
 t m th—-the truth that when the moral conditions 
 of the reception of the grace of God are perfectly 
 fulfilled, there is no triumph over temptation 
 and sin impossible to man, because there is 
 none impossible to God. 
 
 Q 
 
242 Christ’s victory the pledge 
 
 The Church of Christ has too much been 
 allowed to regard defeats in the warfare against 
 sin as part of the normal condition of the Chris¬ 
 tian life, instead of as a shame, and a disaster, 
 and a sin. When victory over temptation has 
 come, it has too often come as a surprise to 
 the soul; and gloomy acquiescence in life¬ 
 long weakness or sin has taken the place of the 
 shout of triumph, “Thanks be to God who giveth 
 us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
 
 It is unnecessary to say we shall never wholly 
 conquer sin, or be “ made perfect ” in this present 
 life. The conditions necessary for the soul to 
 be so filled with God as to make sin impossible 
 will never be perfectly realized on earth. It is 
 not a little thing, nevertheless, to know what 
 God can do for us, if we will only wholly trust 
 Him ; it is not a little thing to have ever shining 
 before us the promise which Christ has made 
 our own, which is being fulfilled in this life in 
 spite of its sorrows, and failures, and defeats, and 
 which will crown us with immortal blessed¬ 
 ness in the triumphs of the eternal world—the 
 promise that He will “ bruise Satan under our 
 feet,”* and “will guard us from stumbling, and 
 
 * Rom. xvi. 20. 
 
AND POWER OF OUR VICTORY. 243 
 
 set us before the presence of His glory without 
 blemish in exceeding joy.”* 
 
 The glory of that final triumph over sin will 
 be His, not ours ; but even here on earth we 
 may in part anticipate its glory, and join in the 
 song of those whom He has made “ more than 
 conquerors,” “ Unto Him that is able 
 
 TO DO EXCEEDING ABUNDANTLY ABOVE ALL 
 THAT WE ASK OR THINK, ACCORDING TO THE 
 POWER THAT WORKETH IN US, UNTO HlM BE 
 THE GLORY IN THE CHURCH AND IN CHRIST 
 
 Jesus unto all generations for ever 
 and ever. Amen.” f 
 
 * Jude 24. t Ephes. iii. 20, 21. 
 
 TURNBULI. AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH- 
 
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