^^ OF W^'nS^ 
 
 BS 2424.3 .S84 
 Stewart, a. Morris 
 (Alexander Morris) 
 The temptation of Jesus 
 
THE 
 
 TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 A STUDY OF OUR LORD'S TRIAL 
 IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 A. MORRIS STEWART, M.A. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "the CROWN OF SCIENCE" 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 NEW YORK. CHICAGO. TORONTO 
 
Published May 1903 
 Reprinted June igoj 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IN setting forth this Interpretation of our 
 Lord's Temptation in the Wilderness, the 
 writer's aim and method are very simple. 
 
 The aim is, so to read and use every indica- 
 tion in the Gospel narratives, that the plain facts 
 of them shall meet the reader's imagination, and 
 be readily related with his experience. 
 
 The Temptation is a great fact which, first 
 and chiefly, concerns the inner experience of 
 Jesus. To understand it, both generally and in 
 its details, is to gain insight regarding Him ; and 
 that is an end in itself. But there is no com- 
 munication of Scripture regarding God or His 
 Son which is not designed in relation to our 
 needs. When we are shown Jesus, it is always 
 in such an aspect as may instruct and help us ; 
 and nowhere can this be more true than in the 
 Temptation, where we see Jesus in relation to 
 Satan and sin ; meeting evil and the Evil one, 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 on His own behalf and ours, as the Saviour of 
 men. 
 
 Each point narrated or indicated in the 
 Temptation story is primarily and intimately 
 related to our Lord ; but, when it is told in the 
 Gospel, it gains, in the telling, that extra meaning 
 in which it concerns us who are admitted to the 
 understandincj of it. 
 
 The method of this Interpretation is nothing 
 else than the keeping in view of this double 
 significance : that of the facts, on the one hand, 
 which concern our Lord ; and that of their 
 narration, on the other hand, which sends them 
 on to us. 
 
 In discussing the several Temptations, the 
 order which has been followed is that of S. 
 Matthew's Gospel, in preference to S. Luke's. 
 The latter order, when it puts the rapture to the 
 Temple top after the vision of the kingdoms of 
 the world, seems designed to end on a level which 
 shall be close to the beoinnino;;s of our Lord's 
 ministry. The step from the height of the 
 Temple buildings is seen by S. Luke as a 
 proposed emergence into publicity. Jesus is 
 shown refusing this mode of entry upon His 
 ministry (Luke iv. 12); and, in the narrative 
 immediately following, we see Him choosing an 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 ordinary road towards His extraordinary work : 
 " returning in the power of the Spirit into 
 Galilee" (Luke iv. 14). This contrast of the 
 airy path suggested by Satan, and the earthly 
 walk chosen by Jesus, is effective ; but the order 
 of S. Matthew is plainly the logical order of the 
 Temptations, in which they rise from the less to 
 the greater, culminating in world-wide vision on 
 Jesus' part, and in dismissal on the part of His 
 Tempter. 
 
 Critical questions and purely theological dis- 
 cussion have been avoided in the text. A few 
 matters which fall under these heads, and which 
 could not be passed over, are treated of briefly in 
 notes which will be found in an Appendix. 
 
 A. MORRIS STEWART. 
 
 ARBROATH, 
 
 March, IQOS' 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FAGE 
 
 The Measureless Endowment . . . i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Wilderness . . . . .15 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 The Forty Days and Forty Nights . . 29 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 "If Thou be God's Son" . . • . -53 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The Snare of Hunger: i. As it concerned Jesus 73 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Snare of Hunger: 2. As it concerns Us . 89 
 
 b ix 
 
CONTExNTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Snare of the Fourth Dimension . . 109 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The Snare of the Fourth Dimension — con- 
 tinued . . . . . .127 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The Assault of the King of the World . 141 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 The Temptation of Unhallowed Means and 
 
 Unholy Ends . . . . '159 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 From Temptation to Service . . .177 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 Horror and Healing .... 193 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 "Behold the Lamb of God!" . . .211 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Note I. The Number Forty . . .219 
 
 Note II. El vlb<; et rov Oeov . . .220 
 
 Note III. to irrepiijiov rov iepou . . . 224 
 
 Note IV. The Relation of Human Nature to 
 
 Sin: especially in Jesus . .226 
 
 ^ASii« 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE MEASURELESS ENDOWMENT. - 5^- 
 
 ^■^ 
 
Jesus Cometh from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be 
 baptized of him. But John forbade Him, saying, I have 
 need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me ? And 
 Jesus answering said unto hint. Suffer it to be so now : for 
 thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he 
 stiffered Him,. And Jesus, when He was baptized, went up 
 straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were 
 opened unto Him, and he saw the Spirit of God descend- 
 ing like a dove, and lighting upon Him : and, lo, a voice 
 from, heaveti, saying. This is My beloved Son, in whom I 
 am. well pleased. — Matt. iii. 13-17. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE MEASURELESS ENDOWMENT 
 
 THAT which has no mere beginning has many- 
 beginnings ; and such is the life of Christ. 
 "In the beginning was the Word," says S, John 
 on the first page of his Gospel, feeling it hard to 
 profess to begin the life of Jesus. We love to 
 linger at the beginnings at Bethlehem. We are 
 alive to the " beginning of miracles " at Cana of 
 Galilee ; and the preface to the Acts makes of all 
 the ministry of Jesus one beginning of a work 
 which heralded a splendid continuance. 
 
 Among the beginnings of the perfect life a 
 chief one is the Baptism of Jesus, which separates 
 His private youth from the short public ministry 
 of His manhood. In approaching the study of 
 the Temptation in the Wilderness, our way lies 
 by the Baptism at Jordan. These two cannot 
 be separated ; they are parts of one whole. The 
 Temptation is not only related to the Baptism as 
 being its immediate sequel in point of time, but 
 
4 THE TEMPTATIOxN OF JESUS 
 
 also as its necessary consequence. The Baptism 
 at Jordan was the occasion of the Temptation in 
 the Wilderness. The Temptation was, in a sense, 
 the completion of the Baptism, in which the Spirit 
 of God descended upon Jesus and was given to 
 Him in a measureless communication. It was 
 because of the unique mission which was sealed 
 in His Baptism that Jesus was led into His 
 singular trial in the Wilderness. It was because 
 of His measureless equipment for the unexampled 
 task of men's salvation that the Tempter sought 
 Him in the desert and waged war upon His 
 sinlessness. 
 
 At this central point in our Lord's life we 
 naturally look backward in it, with an endeavour 
 to understand what had been His past relation 
 to sin. 
 
 Jesus had lived through childhood and youth 
 a pure, perfect life in His village home. He 
 knew what sin was from God's word of record, 
 law, and prophecy ; and He saw its baneful effects 
 all around Him. Jesus knew what sin was, far 
 better than any other man did ; for He viewed 
 it with sinless eyes, undimmed by the unholy 
 darkness that obscures the sight of every other 
 man. He felt it, too, with the keen sensitiveness 
 
THE MEASURELESS ENDOWMENT 5 
 
 of response and recoil which could belong only 
 to perfect purity. " Blessed are the pure in 
 heart," for they see God. Blessed also are they 
 because they see sin, undeceived by inclination or 
 any glamour, and hate and turn away from it. 
 Only those who fully see God with pure gaze 
 can truly know evil, and, detecting its nature 
 beneath disguise, can escape the snare of its 
 guile. 
 
 But we are not told the story of that early 
 life. Only once is the veil lifted, when the child, 
 now grown into a lad of twelve years, was taken 
 to Jerusalem. And this short glimpse shows 
 us already a clear consciousness of moral and 
 spiritual relations. The boy who went straight 
 to the Rabbis in the Temple and questioned their 
 astonished pedantry, must early have faced the 
 facts and problems of evil; and His life must 
 have been full of everyday opportunities for 
 sinning, very much as ours is ; only, they were 
 so differently met. 
 
 The coming of Jesus to the Baptism of John 
 is full of meaning. He was a man apart ; and 
 He knew it. Hitherto He had lived apart ; not 
 in the desert, as John had done, but in a far 
 more real separation from the world. But now 
 
6 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 He makes a move towards His fellow-men, and 
 seeks a new relation with them. This motion 
 of Jesus towards men was fraught with conse- 
 quences ; the Temptation in the Wilderness was 
 among the first of these ; but His whole ministry 
 arose from that walk in which He came from 
 Galilee to Jordan, unto John, to be baptized of 
 kim. In this, indeed. He began His ministr)'. 
 The coming of Jesus to Jordan marks the attitude 
 of desirousness on His part to join Himself to 
 the affairs and life of men. John's Baptism of 
 repentance is a movement for righteousness which 
 makes the point of contact that He seeks. Are 
 men seeking righteousness } Then so, too, does 
 He in every moment of His life, with every 
 impulse of His heart ; and He will join them in 
 their quest. Will men draw near to God ? This 
 is the constant motive of His life; He will go 
 with them to aid their progress with His presence 
 and the impulse of His pure desire. 
 
 In this emergence to consciousness and purpose 
 of the impulse to go with men and for them in 
 the quest of righteousness we may find the call 
 of Jesus to His mission of salvation for the 
 world. It was not enough that He should live 
 among men, " holy, harmless, and undefiled ; " 
 the pulse of the world must beat in His heart ; 
 
THE MEASURELESS ENDOWMENT 7 
 
 the affairs of men and their Godward aspirations 
 and endeavours must be His own if He would 
 help them. Till this was accomplished, the 
 relation of Jesus with His kinsmen of Israel 
 was not complete. His Baptism at Jordan was 
 the beginning of the road which led to Calvary. 
 And the beginning was already a shadow of that 
 end; in it Jesus did for Israel some part of that 
 fulfilment of all righteousness which on the Cross 
 He finished for Israel and all the world. 
 
 The lesson of this for us is, that isolation is 
 not the way to work and usefulness ; to the 
 attainment of influence upon men. Isolation has 
 its use as a preparative, in our experience as 
 in that of Jesus. But if it be like the separation 
 of His long youth, it will, like His, be fruitful 
 of the impulse towards a relation with others in 
 which we may help them. When we see the 
 Son of God go to seek the Baptism of John, 
 we learn that it is not the will of God that 
 His children should stand apart from the 
 movements of the world ; but rather that after 
 His example they should take part, even in 
 imperfect endeavours like that Baptism ; and, 
 taking part, should raise them to a new 
 significance and efficacy. Only one Man 
 received the Baptism of John with a perfect 
 
8 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 zeal and resolve for righteousness ; and that 
 was the man Jesus. The shallowness of the 
 penitence around Him did not deter Him from 
 that step which proved to be the first step of 
 His manhood in the way of men's salvation. 
 It was when He went to Jordan that Jesus first 
 took up His Cross, and we learn how heavily 
 it bore upon Him from the very first, when we 
 see Him tempted in the Wilderness. 
 
 We know that crowds came to John to be 
 baptized ; but crowds have tides that flow and 
 ebb. We are sure that the Reformer had quiet 
 hours in which he was left alone in the familiar 
 solitude of many years ; and we doubt not that 
 it was in such a quiet hour that Jesus came 
 to him. There is a disengaged accent about the 
 dialogue between them which tells us thus much,^ 
 and the witness to the descent of the Spirit ^ is 
 evidently given by one who saw it alone in 
 the wide privacy appropriate to a great sign 
 specially addressed to himself. We may there- 
 fore picture the meeting of the Forerunner and 
 his Master in the early morning before others 
 had awakened to a new day. Perhaps it was 
 a Sabbath on which the vigilant ascetic was 
 
 1 Matt. iii. 14, 15. ■•^ John i. 32-34. 
 
THE MEASURELESS ENDOWMENT 9 
 
 waiting by the river, and Jesus came. The 
 purity of His presence brought an added hush 
 to the stillness of the scene ; for there is awe 
 in the voice of John when he bids Jesus back 
 from His Baptism, saying, / have need to be 
 baptized of Thee, and contest Thou to me f 
 
 Jesus came, and John looked on Him and 
 saw Him as He was, unstained by sin and 
 unmarked by conflict. His aspect was such as 
 suited the things that were at this time behind 
 Him in His life : the simple but thoughtful 
 childhood, the active though secluded time of 
 youth, in which He "increased in wisdom and 
 stature, and in favour with God and man."^ 
 Above all there was that subtle somewhat that 
 marked Him as "holy, harmless, undefiled, 
 separate from sinners."^ When John looked on 
 Jesus as He came, he did not see this character 
 and aspect for the first time. When he says, 
 Contest Thou to nie ? we judge that they had 
 met before, and that it was a well-known and 
 well-loved countenance that the Baptist looked 
 upon. When we remember the intimacy that 
 was between Mary, the mother of Jesus and 
 Elizabeth, John's mother, who were cousins- 
 german,^ we are sure that John and Jesus 
 
 ^ Luke ii. 52. ^ Y{€o. vii. 26. " Luke i. 36, 39. 
 
10 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 early knew each other by report, and had each 
 some knowledge of the other's destiny. John 
 " was in the deserts till the time of his shewing 
 unto Israel ; " ^ we cannot doubt that Jesus sought 
 him there and communed with him. Together 
 they had learned of God's truth from His word 
 and by His Spirit's teaching. 
 
 The Baptist knew what manner of man He 
 was whom he greeted with that forbidding 
 question : Contest Thou ? Yet he afterwards 
 definitely disclaimed foreknowledge of Jesus as 
 the Christ. " I knew Him not," he says ; and 
 again: "I knew Him not."^ He cherished the 
 promise of a sign of the Messiah which as yet 
 had not been given ; yet he testified beforehand 
 in that greeting: Contest Thou? that Jesus was 
 different from the rest of those who sought 
 his Baptism, so that it seemed a profanation 
 that his unworthy hands should minister the 
 rite to Him. We are sure that John suspected 
 the truth regarding Jesus ; but one meaning 
 of his disclaimer of all knowledge beforehand 
 is, that he did not trust his own intuition or 
 judgment, or base his testimony on his own 
 opinion. When he " bare record," it was on 
 the authority of God's own witness to His Son. 
 
 ' Luke i. So. " John i. 31, H- 
 
THE MEASURELESS ENDOWMENT 1 1 
 
 So Jesus came to be baptized, and gently 
 turned back the instinctive reluctance of the 
 Baptist, that He might " fulfil all righteousness."^ 
 And Jesus, when He zvas baptized, went tip 
 straightway out of the waterr The significance 
 of this has been variously conjectured, but 
 without satisfaction. We take it to mean that, 
 as the rite was completed, Jesus left the Baptist 
 with a marked haste. This Man waited for no 
 word of absolution or exhortation such as others 
 sought from him. He looked upwards as one 
 who saw someone greeting Him. He went 
 towards the river-shore with the steady gaze 
 and purposeful step of one who answered a 
 beckoning. John, awestruck, felt that Jesus was 
 summoned from his side by a Presence which, 
 though unseen by him, was recognised by Jesus. 
 The Baptist noted the rapt expression of His 
 countenance, which S. Luke interprets as com- 
 munion with God, "prayer;"^ and as he 
 watched the footsteps that seemed to go with 
 a glad haste, and as he lifted his eyes in the 
 direction of Jesus' gaze : Lo, the heavens were 
 opened unto Him, and he saw the Spirit of God 
 descendiftg, in a bodily shape, '^ like a dove, and 
 
 ^ Matt. iii. 15. - Matt. iii. 16. 
 
 ^ Luke iii. 21, * Luke iii. 22. 
 
12 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 lighting upon Him : and lo, a voice from heaven, 
 saying, " This is My beloved Son, in whom I am 
 well pleased^ ^ 
 
 It was the eye of Jesus that first and fully saw 
 the Presence and greeting that came to meet 
 Him ; so that He left the Baptist in the waters 
 of Jordan, as it were, with eager hurry to meet a 
 visitant. We may judge that the vision of Jesus 
 was not shared by John. His eye and ear ap- 
 prehended the approach of God's Spirit directly : 
 His heart understood without mediating symbols. 
 What John saw was an interpretative sign, and 
 what he heard was an explanatory voice ; and 
 by means of these he was enabled to share the 
 significance of the salutation which came to Jesus 
 alone.^ The voice which spoke to Jesus a full 
 announcement and assurance of His sonship^ 
 gave to John the message of his witnessing,* in 
 which he " bare record that this is the Son of 
 God."^ 
 
 The " bodily shape like a dove " is familiarly 
 and rightly apprehended as a symbolical sign. 
 
 ^ Matt. iii. i6, 17. 
 
 2 Cf. John xii. 30, "This voice came not because of Me, but for 
 your sakes." 
 
 •'' Luke iii. 22, "Thou art My beloved Son." 
 ^ Matt. iii. 17, "This is My beloved Son." 
 ^ John i. 34. 
 
THE MEASURELESS ENDOWMENT 13 
 
 Its meaning regarded the character and mission 
 of Jesus, which were purity and peace ; and its 
 meaning was addressed to John in order that he 
 might witness to Messiah, and that with a new 
 understanding of His Spirit. He had used the 
 language of strong denunciation to Israel ; he 
 had spoken of Messiah as coming with a "fan 
 in His hand" to make a sifting wind, and as 
 ready to judge, and "burn up the chaff with un- 
 quenchable fire."^ John had been a prophetic 
 flail, beating Israel upon the threshing-floor of 
 repentance ; and now there was shown to him 
 the Sonship of the lowly Jesus ; and the quality 
 that was sealed on Him from Heaven was gentle 
 holiness. When we hear the Baptist tell, " I 
 knew Him not," perhaps we hear his accusation 
 of himself, in which he confesses that he ought to 
 have known beforehand the whole truth about 
 Jesus; but his own hard spirit had been slow to 
 believe all that his heart had told him of Him 
 who was "harmless and undefiled." 
 
 The Spirit of purity and peace descended thus 
 upon Jesus; but His coming was not only upon 
 Jesus, but also into the world and for all men. 
 We must bear in mind both of these aspects of 
 the descent, as we go on to the study of the 
 
 ^ Matt. iii. 12. 
 
14 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Temptation which followed it. His Baptism was 
 a part of the fulfilling of all righteousness by 
 Jesus ; it was also an act of repentance on behalf 
 of Israel and the world beyond. So, also, the 
 descent of the Spirit was for the cleansing of the 
 world by God ; in it there was loosed upon earth 
 the flood of those waters of Heaven which are 
 spirit and fire. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 THE WILDERNESS. 
 
Then was Jesus led tip of the Spirit into the imldermess 
 to he tempted of the Devil. — Matt. iv. i. 
 
 And He "was with the wild beasts. — Mark i. 13. 
 
 16 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE WILDERNESS. 
 
 IT is a fact which has been proved in the 
 experience of many men, that the way to 
 which God's Spirit beckons Hes often past the 
 mouth of Hell, which gapes in solitary places. 
 Thus it was with Jesus. He "was led up of the 
 Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the 
 Devil." 
 
 If we rightly interpret the silence of the 
 Gospels regarding His youth, and if we read 
 aright His aspect as John saw Him come to 
 Jordan, the life of our Lord now passed was a time 
 of growth and waiting, in which He had been 
 aloof from afiairs and "separate from sinners" in 
 an external sense as well as inwardly. But now 
 there had risen up within Him a new impulse, 
 which He expressed to John as a resolve to 
 "fulfil all righteousness." This purpose of Jesus 
 was met by the Father in the descent of the 
 Spirit, which brought Him a measureless en- 
 
1 8 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 dowment.^ Now He was rapt from John's side, 
 wearing the intense, abstracted look of one who 
 answered a a^reetinor and went to meet an unseen 
 Presence ; and without pause His steps were 
 directed away from the haunts of men and 
 towards the Wilderness. In the vivid language 
 of S. Mark : Straightway the Spirit drive th Hh>i 
 forth} This gives the more true psychology of 
 the movement towards the Wilderness ; for we 
 are told that the Spirit descended upon Him, and 
 remained on Him.^ It was not an outward 
 constraint that led Him away: the impulse of 
 the Spirit was now within Him, and possessed 
 and ruled Him with an inward grasp to which 
 He yielded gladly. 
 
 The obvious note of this experience of Jesus 
 is the note of isolation. He was led, even driven 
 apart. His inward separateness, which He 
 always had, was not enough : that was a moral 
 separation from the elements of imperfection and 
 evil which were around Him ; this was a separa- 
 tion in order to a definite exercise of spirit and 
 ordeal of character. His accustomed apartness 
 was consistent with many links of human kinship 
 and sympathy, with much intercourse of common 
 interest and kindness. He who brought the 
 
 ' John iii. 34. ^ Mark i. 12. ' John i. n. 
 
THE WILDERNESS 19 
 
 message of the Father's love could never be 
 alone as a Man among men. 
 
 John had sought the Wilderness from his youth 
 in order to the imperfect attainment of what Jesus 
 had in perfection, even while He mingled freely 
 with His fellows. It was a different necessity 
 which drove Jesus into solitude, from that which 
 denied the social life to His Forerunner. It was 
 not that He had need to keep His hands clean 
 from the sordid soiling of gain, or His lips from 
 words that might be hasty and unkind or false or 
 any way injurious ; nor that His heart needed to 
 be retired from the reach of stains that might 
 sully it, nor that His feet must be removed from 
 paths where waywardness might stray into the 
 snares of common life. Nor was it that the 
 severities of nature's wildness might ennoble His 
 spirit and strengthen His will for lofty purposes. 
 These were the ends that were sought by John, 
 as they had been sought by many who were 
 lesser than he among the prophets. But it was 
 different with Jesus. He was driven to the 
 Wilderness for the enacting of a drama which no 
 eye might see save Heaven's. The theatre of 
 this Temptation must be solitude. This is the 
 explanation of the rigid solitude into which Jesus 
 was driven by the Spirit of God. 
 
30 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 While remoteness is the keynote of each of 
 the Gospel notices of the Temptation, the locality 
 to which Jesus "was led up" is not precisely 
 indicated. Tradition points to the desert in the 
 neighbourhood of Jericho, and calls it Quarantania, 
 the place of the forty days. A symmetrical, and 
 perhaps also a sentimental, suggestion is that the 
 scene of our Lord's trial is to be found in the 
 wilderness of Sinai, where Israel received the Law. 
 But we must be content without determining the 
 exact place. " The desert " is meant to designate 
 a solitary, wild place; a "howling wilderness." 
 And S. Mark, in his short notice, finds room to 
 say : He was with the wild beasts. 
 
 When Jesus went into the Wilderness, He left 
 John behind Him ; but He did not merely turn 
 His back on the Baptist and Jordan. It is more 
 remarkable, that when He was led away by the 
 impulse of the Spirit's fresh-descended power, it 
 was not to the midst of the crowds who had 
 thronged to John ; not to the streets or Temple 
 of the Holy City, not yet to the populous districts 
 of Galilee. The solitary wildness of the desert 
 place stands in contrast with all these. The Fore- 
 runner had already published far and wide the 
 news of the approaching kingdom of God ; his 
 voice had stirred the whole land with its message 
 
THE WILDERNESS 21 
 
 of condemnation of the past and of hope for the 
 near future. But the time for our Lord's open 
 commencement of His public work was not yet 
 quite come. His preparation was not completely 
 finished. 
 
 It is to be noted that Jesus did not go forward 
 to His ministry straight from the Baptism of John 
 and amid the enthusiasm of the Baptist's follow- 
 ing. He was borne into His work on no wave 
 of popular excitement, but came straight from 
 solitary conflict with evil and a lonely communing 
 to which He was led by the Spirit of God. This 
 marks that His work was directly heaven-born, 
 and not the mere outcome of what preceded it. 
 It drew its inspiration from the source that moved 
 the Baptist, but did not borrow from the Fore- 
 runner. The source was with Jesus. 
 
 The Temptation with the preceding Baptism 
 creates a gulf in our Lord's life and experience, 
 by which His ministry is cut off from what went 
 before it, and the depth of that gulf is as deep 
 as the heart of God, out of which came salvation 
 for men. 
 
 We readily see that the isolation and tempt- 
 ation of Jesus on the eve of His ministry was a 
 leading of God, which is full of a significance 
 
22 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 peculiar to His own personality and special 
 mission. But also it is typical of human experi- 
 ence. 
 
 In the life of each man who fully comes to 
 manhood there is a line which marks off his youth 
 from his maturity. Others may not see it drawn, 
 for this commonly happens in the wilderness. 
 This is the emergence into clear light, of in- 
 dividual responsibility and settled purpose ; and 
 often the demarcation, though unnoticed on the 
 surface, is a deep score on the living heart be- 
 neath. Perhaps, also, it is the case that all those 
 whom God leads to special work and usefulness 
 have their wilderness into which they are led, and 
 in which they are taken apart from other men in 
 order to be alone with God and the Devil. There 
 they are called upon to choose between right and 
 wrong ; also to settle what is right for them, and 
 what is not allowable in their case whatever it 
 may be for others. 
 
 In every life there is a season, the season of 
 youth, in which temptation is a specially important 
 element. Temptation may not be lightly sought ; 
 for we are taught to pray that our path may be 
 averted from it. But its experience comes to all 
 men ; and when we come into it, we may not 
 merely wish it gone or hurry past the season of 
 
THE WILDERNESS 23 
 
 its trial. The hardness and soreness of temptation 
 are not its chief features ; the great thing about it 
 is its use. The momentous character of tempt- 
 ation lies less in its being an opportunity for 
 evil, than in that aspect in which it is an oppor- 
 tunity for good. It is an occasion for victory, an 
 opportunity for being strong in God and growing 
 stronger. 
 
 The fear of everyone regarding temptation 
 ought to be, lest, having come to us, it should 
 go from us without having been turned to use in 
 this way. In the process of our life we may 
 outgrow certain outward circumstances or inward 
 conditions which have been instrumental in our 
 temptation. To outgrow a temptation before 
 we have overcome its power is an opportunity 
 lost; and the loss is an irreparable one. In the 
 progress of our life we may pass from moral straits 
 and stress to ease ; but there is no spiritual hope 
 in this, unless the quiet we have gained is the peace 
 of our victory over temptation. If we are over- 
 come, or if we make a compromise with evil, then 
 our quietude is a moral lethargy that presages the 
 sleep of spiritual death. 
 
 The sojourn in the Wilderness was the pre- 
 lude to the work of Jesus in the great enterprise 
 of man's salvation. Every enterprise has its 
 
24 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 wilderness. The long pilgrimage of Israel in 
 the desert pictures what is a general feature of 
 all the large movements which make for human 
 progress. They may have their birth amid 
 crowds ; but whether they begin in the heart of 
 one man or in the hearts of many men, they grow 
 in isolation and ripen quietly and unseen before 
 they bear fruit in the busy places of men's active 
 lives. 
 
 As (Treat movements in human affairs have 
 each their wilderness, so every individual life 
 that is truly great has its times which are filled 
 with what seem mere delays and hindrances, and 
 which are really preparations. We mark this in 
 the wanderings of Abraham, the long tuition of 
 Jacob before he became Israel ; in the captivity 
 of Joseph in Egypt, and the exile of Moses, as 
 in the persecuted youth of David. These are 
 ancient examples ; but the experience which 
 they represent is never old. The lesson of 
 the Wilderness is written broadly over sacred 
 history, and it is deeply marked in modern life 
 as well. ■ 
 
 The'^'Tsolation and strain and conflict of the 
 preliminary trial may vary with the magnitude of 
 the man and of the mission which is before him. 
 The unmatched nature of Jesus approached His 
 
THE WILDERNESS 25 
 
 unexampled mission through the unique ex- 
 perience of the forty days and nights. The 
 commission to our humble tasks may not send us 
 far apart from our neighbours ; yet when it comes 
 we are separated and driven aside to conflict and 
 delay. If it be some experience of truth and 
 righteousness which is given a man, to go and 
 use and share with other men, often he is driven 
 into the wilderness of doubt and distrust, till the 
 truth that came to him unsought and without 
 effort has seemed lost to him. Then he has 
 searched and groped and striven for it, so that 
 it has become his own as it never could have 
 been, save for his temptation in the wilder- 
 ness. 
 
 If it be some special work which is laid upon 
 a man to do, the task may seem easy while he 
 merely knows that it ought to be done by some- 
 one ; but when the call and commission come to 
 himself, when he knows that it not only ought 
 to be done, but must be done and that by him, 
 — then, not uncommonly, he is driven into the 
 wilderness of seeming impossibility and left alone 
 with his own incompetence, there to be mocked 
 on the one hand by what might be, and on the 
 other by what he himself is. 
 
 When a man has seen a vision of a pattern 
 
26 THE TEMFl^ATION OF JESUS 
 
 "shewed in the mount," ^ and when the command 
 has come, " See that thou make all things like 
 unto the pattern," then he is very near to the 
 wilderness of discrepancies. The discrepancy 
 between the revelation of Heaven and the 
 materials of earth is well-nigh maddening ; and 
 a man may be distracted to the verge of despair 
 by the discrepancy between the design of vision 
 and his own poor workmanship. It is in the 
 wilderness that these discrepancies are felt ; only 
 in painful solitude can they be harmonised. In 
 the retirement of a deep experience every man 
 must for himself resolve the recurring discord 
 between faith and fact, between the perfection of 
 his vision and the poverty of the attainment which 
 is meanwhile possible. In the wilderness a man 
 finds the word of God in his mouth, and the 
 skill of God in his hand ; and the worship of God 
 is seen to be one in heaven and earth. In the 
 wilderness the groping fingers of the mind catch 
 the threads of method. Or, it may be, but one 
 thread of a fabric of God's will is let down from 
 heaven ; and from the desert of his difficulty the 
 man takes the solitary clue of his first duty and 
 comes back to do the first act of a long course of 
 service, in which, thread after thread, and deed 
 
 ' Ex. XXV. 40. 
 
THE WILDERNESS 27 
 
 after deed, are woven into a new robe of God's 
 will for men and His righteousness among 
 them. 
 
 This is what we do in our small, poor 
 measure ; and this is what Jesus in the desert 
 did on the grand scale of His Divine humanity. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS. 
 
Jesus being full of the Holy Ghosl, returned frvm Jordan , 
 and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty 
 days tempted of the Devil. And in those days He did eat 
 nothing. — Luke iv. 1,2. 
 
 And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights.. 
 He was aftcnvard an hungered. — Matt. iv. 2. 
 
 30 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS. 
 
 FROM S. Matthew's account we might have 
 supposed that the Temptation of Jesus was 
 preceded by forty days of fasting/ after which the 
 Tempter came to Him for the first time. But 
 from both S. Mark and S. Luke we know that 
 this was not the case, but that He was tempted 
 during the whole period of His fast. These 
 six long weeks were the time of the Temptation. 
 Round them are the curtain of darkness and 
 the separation of silence. We are not told one 
 word of the spiritual struggle that then took 
 place ; for Jesus has told us nothing. While 
 this is so, let us realise the fact that for six 
 weeks He was exposed to the terrors of the 
 howling Wilderness, and there met and fought 
 with and vanquished a prolonged and definite 
 onslaught of the utmost streno^th of the Evil one. 
 It was a tremendous spiritual conflict, in which the 
 
 ^ See Appendix, I. p. 2ig : The number forty. 
 
32 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Spirit of God, in the guise and with the nature of 
 a man, stooped to contend in mighty personal 
 struggle with the Evil one. It is a wondrous 
 thouorht : the soul that was agitated was the 
 heart of God. This is the greatest of all 
 mysteries : God tempted in the flesh. 
 
 It is not on a little inland lake that we can see 
 the full force of the tempest's fury ; it has not 
 scope to gather strength there. The waves of 
 the shallow mere are no more than surface 
 ripples ; there is no depth of agitation. Great men 
 sometimes know a large measure of soul-tempest ; 
 for there are breadths and depths in them not 
 found in ordinary hearts. But the agitation of 
 most men is a very trifling thing. Our hearts 
 are like to shallow little pools ; their smallness 
 secures them from great storm-tossed turbulence. 
 It is on the wide ocean with its vast expanse of 
 restless heaped - up waters that the storm can 
 rush with the sweeping violence of potent rage. 
 And this figure may help us to realise that the 
 intensity of conflict experienced by our Lord was 
 no ordinary thing, for in Him there were ocean- 
 like expanses and depths. And these were all 
 roused and tossed by the Tempter's strong 
 assaults. 
 
 The source of the Temptation is explicitly 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 33 
 
 stated : Jesus was tempted of the Devil. This has 
 given much offence to those who have wished to 
 explain away Satan ; but, though safely abolished 
 from their systems of thought, he is persistent 
 all through the Bible ; and we shall do well 
 humbly to recognise his presence in our Lord's 
 experience, and also to accept the fact of his 
 agency in our own. 
 
 Inquirers into the exact manner of the Tempt- 
 ation have come to various conclusions. Some 
 questions that have been raised have naturally 
 been directed to the form or way in which the 
 Tempter came : whether his suggestions were 
 inwardly presented to Jesus, or spoken by an 
 outwardly visible presence. Ingenuity has fur- 
 nished many guises to the Tempter ; but without 
 deciding, at this stage, whether Satan was visible 
 or invisible at one time or another, we may learn 
 from the narrative simply taken, that he was 
 present personally, and that he dealt with our 
 Lord without intermediate agency. The Devil 
 was allowed an opportunity in which to exert 
 his fearful strength to try the Son of God. The 
 powers of evil defied God in that wilderness of 
 trial. 
 
 In the Temptation of Jesus we witness, on the 
 one side, an exercise of Jesus' Spirit, in which, 
 3 
 
34 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 with the new consciousness which was heaven- 
 born at His Baptism, He faced the problems and 
 trials of His mission of salvation for mankind. 
 On the other side we witness an attempt of Hell 
 to blast redemption ere it burst from the bud of 
 preparation to the flower of unfolding completion, 
 rich with the seed of everlasting life. These two 
 aspects must always be before us in considering 
 the recorded temptations in detail ; but the one 
 which chiefly concerns us is that in which we see, 
 not Satan face to face with human salvation, but 
 Jesus face to face with evil. 
 
 We do not need to know precisely how evil 
 appealed to our Lord's consciousness. We can- 
 not know it, even as we cannot know how evil 
 first found a place in the good creation of God. 
 But we have intimations of a mysterious process 
 in the inner life of our Lord, — of a perfecting 
 through temptation and sufl*ering. We may 
 witness in the life of Jesus a progressive permea- 
 tion of His human nature by the Divine, through 
 constant suppression of human desire by spiritual 
 impulse. In accordance with this is the fact that 
 the circumstances of the Wilderness Temptation 
 indicate that its purpose was private to our 
 Lord's self. It was not meant to be a spectacle 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 35 
 
 to admiring faith. It was removed from obser- 
 vation and transacted in all possible sacred 
 solitude. 
 
 One great fact includes the whole of our 
 Lord's relation to temptation : in Him evil was 
 met by sinlessness which remained sinless. He 
 Himself has told us this; and in the Gospels 
 we have a picture of His character and a record 
 of His deeds and words which show His perfect- 
 ness. Yet, while we know these things, we feel 
 that the Temptation of Jesus presents us with 
 a great problem.^ When we question about the 
 possibility and character of sinless temptation, we 
 may not allow any suspicion that it was an unreal 
 thing. It was part of the work of Christ to meet 
 with sin and overcome it ; and if that work was 
 not one of strong endeavour and painful accom- 
 plishment, then His life was not a meritorious 
 one. It is rendered utterly mechanical unless we 
 recognise in Him a true and human free will ; a 
 power of choice capable of weighing right and 
 wrong, and deciding between their alternatives. 
 
 It is a difficult and supremely delicate ques- 
 tion : whether the relation of Jesus to sin should 
 be described as one of Possibility of not sinning, 
 
 ^ See Appendix, IV. p. 226 : The Relation of Huvian Nature to 
 Sin : especially in Jesus. 
 
36 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 or as Impossibility of sinning: the posse non 
 peccare and non posse peccare of the Schoolmen. 
 The point is one that opens up a tempting field 
 to a kind of subtlety which rarely, if ever, is a 
 means of spiritual profit. In a sense, both of 
 these qualities belong to Jesus ; but they are His 
 in different ways. The former, ability not to 
 sin, was a practical or active quality, and was 
 constantly exercised. The latter, impossibility 
 of sinning, has something of the nature of a 
 metaphysical basis : it is there as the meta- 
 physical background of His life and work. We 
 know it to be there when we feel that we dare 
 not contemplate the abortion of God's redeeming 
 work, even as we dare not conceive God's throne 
 abdicated, and His universal reign subverted by 
 anarchy. 
 
 Perhaps Christ's impossibility of sinning and 
 its relation to temptation may be compared to 
 the decrees of God in His predestinations con- 
 cerning all men, and the relation of these 
 counsels to the work of grace in men and their 
 moral growth. Would we solve the problems 
 that surround our Lord's holy will .'* Let us first 
 solve those that beset all human will in its won- 
 drous freedom under God. We do not doubt 
 the stability of God's purposes, but we do not 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 37 
 
 regard them as interfering with the moral sig- 
 nificance of human action ; and we are not 
 called upon, nor are we able, to trace the mode 
 of their relation to occurrences, the manner of 
 their translation into history. 
 
 In the common experience of ordinary men, 
 conflict between the absolutely good and the 
 utterly evil may be comparatively rare. The 
 usual occasion of temptation in all men is rather 
 some question of moral expediency or permissi- 
 bility. The clash of moral opposites is a crude 
 phase of the heart's life, which ought to be early 
 passed in all of us ; but the balancing of things 
 which are in themselves indifferent, the arrange- 
 ment of them in order to the attainment of moral 
 ends, — this is the delicate task which is as long 
 as human life. So far from the end justifying 
 the means, the greater and more perfect the 
 end sought, the higher is the necessity that none 
 but stainless means be used to compass its at- 
 tainment. Often in our small lives doubt and 
 difficulty arise in this connection ; and, arguing 
 from the little to the great, we can realise that 
 our Lord, on the eve of His ministry, had to 
 face many a problem immense in scope and 
 importance, and of exquisite delicacy. A world 
 
38 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 of sinful men was before Him ; all the future 
 age of the world was in His hand. Closely 
 environed by the material, He must achieve a 
 purely spiritual aim. As His Father's relation 
 to Him was vital, He must establish a vital 
 relation between Himself and men. The inward 
 pressure of the Spirit and the outward pressure 
 of the great world's need combined to drive Jesus 
 away to solitude, that He might think and plan 
 and debate within Himself. It was in this state 
 and situation of Jesus that Satan found his 
 opportunity for sinister suggestion and subtle 
 snare. He went to commune with Himself and 
 God ; and He met temptation instead of en- 
 couragement ; conflict and exhaustion instead of 
 strenorthenincr solace. 
 
 We gain a certain light upon the way in which 
 Jesus dealt with the Tempter in these forty days 
 from the way in which He met the three recorded 
 Temptations. Two of these are plainly given as 
 examples of subtlety on the part of Satan ; but 
 in each of these cases, as in His third answer, we 
 see Jesus simply referring the matter to the word 
 and will of God. He, as it were, unburdens 
 Himself of independent responsibility. There 
 is no trace of argument in any of His answers. 
 We are not feasted with a combat of wits when 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 39 
 
 we see the Wisdom of God meet the world's 
 keen wisdom. Each of Satan's tempting words 
 has an if in it, and in no case is that if 
 answered. 
 
 The only match for perfect subtlety is perfect 
 simplicity ; and this was what Jesus displayed. 
 Not only in the brief space of the recorded 
 Temptations, but all through the forty days and 
 nights, it was with the perfect simplicity of 
 dependence upon God that He unravelled the 
 toils of the Tempter; and with the same 
 simplicity His perfect loyalty to God turned 
 back the assaults of defiant wickedness. 
 
 Yet we know that in these curtained days and 
 nights, which were alike dark with the presence 
 of evil, the harrow of temptation entered 
 mysteriously and deeply into the heart of the 
 Sinless One. When we wonder how this 
 experience could approach the pure soul of 
 Jesus, we must remember that His life and death 
 were alike unique in their character and meaning ; 
 even His human nature may have needed the 
 discipline of severe effort in rising to their task, 
 f Even for the Sinless One, the way to enlarge- 
 ment, deepening, and enrichment of experience 
 and character was through temptation. Also, 
 the way to enlargement of activity and influence 
 
40 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 was by the same hard road. The access of God 
 to the human nature of Jesus was enlarged by 
 every urgent moment in which His heart recoiled 
 from wrong and chose the good. 
 
 When we read that "He was in all points 
 tempted like as we are," the disparity between 
 the person and character of Jesus and our own 
 is apt to obscure the essential similarity between 
 His trial and ours. The likeness is to be found 
 less in a correspondence of detail in His case 
 with detail in our experience. It was more in 
 the general moral conditions which were around 
 Him, and in those particular conditions which 
 were internal to Him in His submission. In 
 several essential points we may trace the likeness 
 of temptation in Jesus and in ourselves. 
 
 First : In the conditions in which He stood. 
 We may sum these up in one word : contiguity 
 with evil. Elsewhere we see a great gulf fixed 
 between the abodes of evil and of good. There is 
 a throne of God, which is unapproachable by sin. 
 But the Son of God in His Temptation shares 
 the human condition of contiguity with evil. In 
 the world He meets the Prince of the world. 
 He might have stood apart ; but He came not 
 only to bear the "contradiction of sinners," but 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 41 
 
 also to meet the contradiction of sin, and to 
 answer the challenge of its sovereignty. 
 
 Second : In the moral and spiritual principles, 
 whose character is unchanging and whose applica- 
 tion was not varied when He met them. 
 
 Jesus was born and lived and fought and 
 worked and died ''under the law." He came to 
 manifest " the righteousness of God without the 
 law";^ but, while that righteousness was in Him 
 and for others, it was not made by Him the wide 
 basis of a singular prerogative. He took. He 
 used no privilege of royalty, but was morally 
 and spiritually the humble subject of God. 
 Submitting to His will in its transcendent large- 
 ness, He also accepted those restraints and 
 limitations which are upon men as men ; and 
 on Him they became the mundane fetters of 
 Divinity. 
 
 The likeness between the Temptation of 
 Jesus and ours is seen — 
 
 Third: In the effects which flowed from His 
 strong conflict. 
 
 He, having the human nature, and sharing 
 the general and particular conditions of human 
 life and conflict, the effects of temptation within 
 
 ^ Rom. iii. 21, X'^P'' means without in the sense outside of, 
 apart from. 
 
42 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Him were like the effects in us. Yet, when He 
 withstood evil and did not swerve from righteous- 
 ness, what we see in Him is unlike what we find 
 in ourselves, as perfectness is unlike imperfection. 
 We may suspect that Satan holds the keys 
 of human nature. As men in the body we are 
 in the world and of nature ; and he is the god of 
 this world, and Prince of its power. We may see 
 him come to Jesus bringing the keys of His human 
 nature. He touched each secret spring, and opened 
 each inmost door. But he controlled no spring, 
 he entered no door. The purpose and choice of 
 good in Jesus drove him back. Each unsealed 
 spring yielded to God and was grasped by His 
 hand. The opened, inward door was open only 
 for His approach and entry. So as Satan un- 
 locked secret after secret and door after door of 
 Jesus' nature, He did but receive more and more 
 of God's power and was more and more filled by 
 His Spirit. 
 
 In this process the afflatus received at Jordan 
 was applied to the tempted Jesus. It had rested 
 on His head as the symbol of beauteous purity ; 
 now it became in a new way intimate to every 
 channel of His consciousness and thought, and to 
 every fibre that might thrill to emotion or stir 
 with energy to will and do. Thus the god of 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 43 
 
 this world and Prince over nature unlocked the 
 heart of Jesus but could not enter in. His power 
 of the keys of men's hearts did but minister to 
 sinlessness the occasion of enlargement in holi- 
 ness ; and each of his attempts to ensnare or 
 corrupt made a new inrush into Jesus of the 
 endowment of the Spirit of God, which was 
 given "not by measure to Him." 
 
 This is how temptation ought to minister 
 growth in grace and increase in holiness in all 
 men, even as it wrought these in Jesus. The 
 effects of temptation within our Lord were like 
 the effects of temptation overcome in us, only 
 perfect. 
 
 Fourth: There were results beyond Himself 
 that flowed from His Temptation, in respect of 
 which also it is like ours. 
 
 All moral processes have always results be- 
 yond the one who is immediately exercised by 
 them ; and as we best understand the effects of 
 temptation which are inward to the tempted one, 
 when we realise the personalness of moral conflict, 
 so we may best understand those results of it 
 which are beyond the tempted one when we 
 realise the personality of the Tempter. 
 
 Behind our moral conflict we may always see 
 the purposes of God, though these are often 
 
44 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 meanwhile thwarted. In the conflict and victory 
 of Jesus we see this great result : the purposes of 
 God achieved. The defeat of Satan and the con- 
 quest of evil, these are the purposes of God which 
 are behind all moral conflict ; and these are the 
 results which in the Temptation of Jesus we see 
 attained. This is the siornificance and effect of 
 the Temptation of Jesus in its results beyond His 
 own person : a battle has been waged in the 
 world, by evil against good ; and the good has 
 perfectly prevailed. This battle is one incident 
 in an ancient, long war. But it is an unexampled 
 incident, and destined to remain pre - eminent. 
 The strength of God has now turned the tide of 
 battle : for the first time, the King of this world is 
 defeated on his own ground and within his own 
 realm ; and that by a man. By this his sover- 
 eignty over men is broken ; and in this is foreseen 
 the downfall of the reign of unrighteousness in the 
 earth, for Jesus in the Wilderness laid the founda- 
 tion stone of a new throne of God in all the 
 world. 
 
 The three recorded Temptations may be taken 
 as typical of what is not told, and we may believe 
 that the record of them is given because they are 
 such as are easily grasped by our understanding. 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 45 
 
 In presence of the whole Temptation which is thus 
 indicated we may learn something about the 
 relation of the sinlessness of Jesus to His miracle 
 powers. His Temptation was a transaction 
 between Him and Satan ; His victory was a 
 transaction between Him and God. Under 
 shock upon shock, He held to the strength of 
 God ; He stood and withstood. In snare after 
 snare, He cherished the wisdom of God and 
 escaped. Against assault upon assault, He was 
 loyal to Heaven and prevailed. His separation 
 from evil was confirmed in each refusal to 
 entertain its suggestions. But more : the re- 
 lation of His manhood to God was not only con- 
 firmed but drawn closer. With each entrance 
 of the will of God, the Power of God became 
 more fully His. 
 
 When He said, "■Man shall not live by bi^ead 
 alone, but by every word that proceedeth out 
 of the mouth of God,' He grasped the secret 
 of life ; and in that hour He gained that 
 control of life and life's processes which He 
 afterwards exhibited in many a miracle of 
 healing. 
 
 When He said, "// is written, Thou shall 
 not tempt the Lord thy God,'' He showed 
 the perfect temper and spirit which God could 
 
46 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 trust with ascendency over nature. In Him who 
 would not take that false step from the Temple 
 ledge we see the Man whose hand made the meal 
 of one lad serve for thousands of men, whose 
 word once turned water into wine, and again 
 blasted a luxuriant fig tree, and yet again calmed 
 the violence of a storm with one command. The 
 Man who refused to tread upon air is He whose 
 feet afterwards trod the waters of the lake as if 
 they had been dry land. Because He eschewed 
 magic and all thaumaturgic display, nature was 
 subject to Him. In His youth He had lived, like 
 other men, within the boundaries of nature and 
 subject to those laws which are the indirect 
 restraints of God ; now He was promoted to 
 ascendency over them, and, with the sanction of 
 His Father, passed beyond their bounds. The 
 continued loyalty of Jesus to the rule which He 
 saw in the Wilderness and chose to obey was 
 afterwards shown in this : that never till His 
 humiliation was finished in death did He use His 
 power over nature for His own service or 
 convenience. He was hungry and thirsty and 
 tired by the way, and in peril from His enemies ; 
 but always He stayed within the bounds of 
 ordinary nature, and always refused to save Him- 
 self. By this submission, He entered into and 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 47 
 
 maintained that sovereignty over nature which 
 was the seal of His sinlessness and the token of 
 His perfect manhood. In the Wilderness He was 
 tempted to prove with impious rashness that 
 which in the years of His ministry He proved in 
 long toil ; and the powers which he would not 
 abuse in Himself He constantly had, and used in 
 the service of others. 
 
 When Jesus said, ''It is written, Thou shalt 
 worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt 
 thou serve,'' He led Humanity. His refusal 
 was for Himself first ; but, in the end, for 
 all men. In this hour of triumphant loyalty He 
 founded that kingdom in which He was the first 
 perfect human subject of God, and, at the same 
 time, King over men. There was gained in this 
 hour His sway over men's hearts, to turn them to ' 
 God — that perfect attraction which is destined to 
 draw all men to Him. 
 
 We must not suppose that the end of the 
 Wilderness Temptation was the end of all such 
 experience for our Lord. S. Luke guards against 
 this error, saying, " When the Devil had ended all 
 the temptation, he departed from Him for a 
 season" ^ While we know the truth about this, we 
 
 ^ Luke iv. 13. 
 
48 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 are apt to think about the life of Jesus as if it 
 were not so. The prominence which we give to 
 the three Temptations in the Wilderness, calling 
 them, after S. Luke, the Temptation, is apt to 
 hinder us from apprehending their true propor- 
 tion, both in relation to the forty days preceding 
 and in relation to the succeeding years. 
 
 In Gethsemane we get a closer view of the 
 tempted Jesus than any glimpse afforded in the 
 Wilderness. Once, also, He heard the voice of 
 Satan in the words of S. Peter, and answered the 
 Tempter rather than the apostle.^ He rebuked 
 the same spirit of evil in James and John,^ saying, 
 " Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." 
 Another and a most affecting notice of the per- 
 sistence of the Tempter is found in S. Luke's 
 account of the night in which He was betrayed. 
 There we read that, in one of the last greetings 
 of the Master to His devoted and bewildered 
 followers. He embraced them with loving gratitude, 
 in the words : Ye are they which have continued 
 with Me in My temptations^ It was thus that He 
 saw His ministry as it drew fast to its tragic close : 
 it had been temptation after temptation. And as 
 He hung on the Cross in the darkness, the Tempter 
 still spoke. Through the rulers and the soldiers 
 
 ^ Matt. xvi. 21-23. - Luke ix. 55. ^ Luke xxii. 28. 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 49 
 
 and the railing thief, he urged the insistent tempt- 
 ing suggestions of doubt and of possible escape : 
 " Let Him save Himself, if He be Christ, the 
 chosen of God." " If Thou be the King of the 
 Jews, save Thyself." " If Thou be Christ, save 
 Thyself and us." 
 
 The Wilderness Temptation of Jesus was the 
 most private of all His Temptations, and has for 
 us the fascination of great mystery. We may not 
 pry into its secrets, but we ought to understand 
 its meaning. While evidently its purpose was in 
 a special sense personal to our Lord, the mere 
 fact of it has a great significance for us. We may 
 see in it an epitome of His whole redeeming work 
 for men. 
 
 In the wealth of His measureless endowment 
 with the Spirit of God He suffered Himself to be 
 led into the place of trial for our sake. He en- 
 dured a great banishment, wherein His heavenly 
 light was veiled. Hell strove to eclipse His 
 brightness with its lurid glare, and to pervert His 
 truth and thwart His love. And Hell was abashed 
 in defeat while He came forth in calm victory. 
 This is the story of Jesus' Temptation in the 
 Wilderness ; also it is the history of redemption in 
 the world. For the song of salvation in all the 
 ages is one long music with a recurring, frequent 
 4 
 
50 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 refrain. And always In that refrain the final note 
 is victory. 
 
 The Temptation of Jesus was a victory of God, 
 for us and with us, in a battle He waged with 
 Satan and sin. He fought for us that we might 
 be delivered by His strength. He fought with 
 us, as one of us, that we might share His conquest, 
 and with Him receive the spoils of victory and 
 enjoy the peace of God. 
 
 This Temptation in the Wilderness is but one 
 wild stanza in the great song of Jesus' life and 
 death on earth. In that larger song the last note, 
 again, is victory in His rising, in which He broke 
 the power of death. And that life and death and 
 rising are not yet the whole of salvation's song as 
 it shall be sung hereafter in eternity. Its music 
 is but a part of the hymn of history, whose pulses 
 throbbed during ages of loving promise and 
 patient preparation. 
 
 And still that long measure is unfinished. In 
 its larger scope, the Temptation of Jesus is not 
 ended. The Spirit which drove Him into the 
 Wilderness came again with a baptism for all the 
 Church ; and it has driven Jesus and His Church 
 into the world's wide wilderness, there to be 
 tempted of Satan and tried. And the strength 
 of God that overcame the Devil long since is still 
 
THE FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS 51 
 
 with Jesus and His own. He who once con- 
 quered evil for us and with us, in the end shall 
 have a larger victory with us and in us. 
 
 Let us know, then, when we suffer sore con- 
 flict with sin, that this is the battle of Jesus waged 
 over again and continued in us. Let us not 
 wonder at our trial, nor doubt its end. Let us 
 not shrink from its pain ; for this is God's fight 
 for kingship over evil, and He honours us to bear 
 His name and His armour and to defend His 
 cause. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 "IF THOU BE GOD'S SON." 
 
 53 
 
When He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He ivas 
 afterward an hungered. And when the Tempter came to 
 Him, he said, If Thou be God's Son . . . — Matt. iv. 2, 3. 
 
 Being forty days tempted of the Devil, in those days He 
 did eat nothijig : and when they were ended. He afterward 
 hungered. And the Devil said unto Him, If Thou be God's 
 Son . . . — Luke iv. 2, 3. 
 
 54 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 " IF THOU BE GOD'S SON." 
 
 THE complete silence of the Gospels regard- 
 ing all that passed in the forty days and 
 forty nights is fitted to enhance our reverent 
 sense of the greatness of what is veiled from our 
 observation. It is enough for us to know that 
 there was then a great contest between Jesus 
 and Satan — a contest whose character and peculiar 
 conditions are not explained to us. In the narra- 
 tive which we have, only the outer edge of the 
 curtain that has been drawn round the Tempt- 
 ation is lifted, and we are allowed to visit its 
 closing scenes. The silence concerning the rest 
 is specially significant, because it is the silence of 
 Jesus Himself. He has kept His counsel, because 
 it is not for us to share these mysteries. 
 
 When we see this, we realise also that what 
 we are told must have come from His own lips. 
 No fellow of the human race intruded on that 
 sacred solitude and told what he had heard or 
 
56 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 witnessed there. It was the Master who, when 
 He had gathered His Httle band of faithful hearts, 
 told them one day: "I was in the Wilderness, 
 driven thither by the Spirit's fresh-descended 
 power ; and I was among the wild beasts of the 
 desert place, being forty days tempted of the 
 Devil. And in those days I did eat nothing." 
 When we think of the story thus told, it gains 
 a great meaning for us. Do we wonder at the 
 smallness of our information ? Do we wonder at 
 the greatness of what is left untold ? Nay ! it 
 may well be that we could not know that greater 
 part, that it had heights and depths surpassing 
 quite the limits of our understanding. 
 
 The period of temptation is described by each 
 of the Evangelists as a fast. It would be natural 
 for a Jew to connect this fast with those fastines 
 that were familiar in his religion. But this fast 
 was not ceremonial nor arbitrary, nor was it 
 disciplinary. It was not even intentional. It 
 was a result at once of the afflatus of the Spirit 
 and of the Temptation by the Devil, and had its 
 origin in the intense excitement of our Lord's 
 whole being. This is indicated by the fact which 
 S. Luke as well as S. Matthew tells, that while 
 Jesus ate "nothing in those days," it was 
 not till afterwards that He felt the pain and 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD'S SON" 57 
 
 weakness of hunger : "He was afterward an 
 hungered." 
 
 This subsistence for so long a time without 
 food is probably to be regarded as a spiritual and 
 mental phenomenon rather than scrutinised as a 
 mere physical marvel. We see the same thing 
 in the fasts of Moses and Elijah, which were of 
 similar duration ; and kindred fasts are not un- 
 known to modern observation as occurring in 
 experiences of a much more common sort than 
 these. It seems that, in certain states of great 
 mental and spiritual tension, the material body 
 can be sustained by simple contact with the 
 intense energy of the spirit.^ This was the case 
 with Jesus in the Wilderness when His spirit was 
 freshly and largely touched by the Spirit of God 
 and He was tempted of the Devil. During the 
 eventful time, physical needs were as if sus- 
 pended, and He had no consciousness of want. 
 But at the end of the forty days a great reaction 
 came. The excitement, nervous and mental, 
 which had accompanied His spiritual exaltation, 
 was gone ; nature reasserted her claims, and the 
 man Jesus sank down in utter exhaustion of body. 
 
 At this point let us think carefully of the full 
 
 ^ Analogous are the abnormal energy and endurance which are 
 sometimes observed in morbid states : for example, in hysteria. 
 
58 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 siofnificance of the hungfer which S. Matthew and 
 S. Luke both tell of as succeeding our Saviour's 
 prolonged fast. The onset of hunger marks the 
 close of a super-ordinary state in which He was 
 without food yet insensible of want. Jesus has 
 now descended from that exaltation in which He 
 met His unique and unrecorded trials. Its 
 physical effects are now felt in a prostration 
 whose depth matches the height which has pre- 
 ceded it. The resources of the Tempter are 
 almost exhausted. The siege of the Saviour's 
 soul has been relaxed, so that the tension of His 
 trial has been succeeded by a corresponding 
 mental, nervous, and bodily relaxment. The 
 delayed sense of His accumulating weakness now 
 overtakes our Lord ; and in this state of readiness 
 to faint the Tempter sees his final opportunity ; 
 and it is with so great a disadvantage that Jesus 
 has to meet his last attempts to snare His faith 
 and beat down His loyalty. 
 
 We note that in what we are told of the 
 Temptation we see Jesus tried in the hour of His 
 greatest weakness. This is important, because it 
 brings His experience near to us who also suffer 
 exhaustion and depression. The super-ordinary 
 character of the forty days of fasting trial removes 
 it from our sympathy, and largely hinders the 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD'S SON" 59 
 
 coming of definite help from it to us. Its mingled 
 ecstasy and agony are foreign to our experience, 
 who live on a plain level of ordinariness, which is 
 broken by depths far oftener than by heights. 
 But there is comfort and encouragement for us 
 in the fact that the trial of Jesus was not confined 
 to the days and weeks of His exaltation. He 
 returned to the level of ordinary consciousness. 
 He there took up the burden of great weakness, 
 and, sharing our greatest disadvantage, He met 
 Satan " like as we are " in our weakest moments ; 
 and with only fainting strength He overcame 
 temptation. 
 
 Perhaps this is one reason why these tempt- 
 ations, and these only, are told us : because they 
 show us Jesus, standing on no height of vantage, 
 but in a situation differing from ours only in the 
 depth of His state and the direness of His straits. 
 See Him there in the Wilderness, in the sunken 
 weariness of six weeks' abstinence, and compare 
 His trial with ours, in which in health and comfort 
 we meet temptation in the affairs of every day ; 
 and seeing, let us know that He suffered all that 
 we can, and immeasurably more. 
 
 To Jesus in this state and situation the 
 Tempter comes. 
 
6o THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Comhig up to Hmi, — for that is the realistic 
 phrase/ — he says, in the rendering of our A.V., 
 If Thou be the Son of God. This should read, If 
 Thou be a Son of God or God's Son} It occurs 
 in the same form in S. Luke's Gospel. There is 
 an official ring about The Son of God, and that 
 form has passed into our English version from 
 theology. The Son is a title ; and while it is not 
 unnatural for believers to expect the title here, 
 we may see that God's Son is more in place in 
 the Gospel interpretation of the great Outlaw's 
 address to the Son of the King. The acquaintance 
 of the Devil with the Christ could only be of an 
 unofficial sort. 
 
 When the recorded Temptation opens with 
 this abrupt challenge, If Thou be God's Son, we 
 hear a mocking echo of the voice of Jesus' heart 
 and the cry that had been His since He was a 
 young lad. " My Father " He had said these 
 twenty years ago. " My Father " He now cried 
 in the Wilderness when sore pressed by the 
 Devil. And Satan took up His words saying: 
 If Thou be God's Son. Further, this challenge 
 seems to hint that, in the unchronicled time pre- 
 ceding, a battle had been fought regarding the 
 
 1 7rpo(reX6o)V avroJ, Matt. iv. 3. 
 
 2 See Appendix, II., Ec vtos t' toO Otov, p. 220. 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD^S SON^' 6i 
 
 Sonship of Jesus. Whether or not Satan pro- 
 fesses to doubt this, the purpose of his address 
 may well be to suggest to Jesus the doubt ex- 
 pressed in the If. . . . The moment was certainly- 
 opportune for such a suggestion. There is a 
 strength in conflict which the conflict itself en- 
 genders. Strength is confident; but doubt is a 
 disease of prostration. And Jesus is now prostrate 
 after His recent exaltation. To its ecstasy there 
 has succeeded a severe reaction. If ever He 
 could be induced to doubt God and Himself, this 
 is the psychological moment when that might be. 
 God's Son ! How unlike that was His state ! 
 To the Devil He seemed, as in Himself He felt, 
 only a fainting man. There He shrank, crushed 
 and bent by the heaviest weight a man can know 
 — the weight of utter weakness. Thus He stood, 
 torn by the pains of forty days' fasting. Son of 
 God, indeed ! How could such a One suffer 
 so? Where was His strength, and where His 
 dignity? Where was the power of God to 
 command ? '* My God, My God, why hast Thou 
 forsaken Me?" might well be the cry of Jesus 
 now as on the Cross ; for this was the hour and 
 the power of darkness : this was the time for 
 doubt. 
 
 When the Tempter says. If Thou be God's 
 
62 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Son, we witness a bold attempt to come between 
 the Tempted One and His sense of the fulness of 
 God which had recently descended upon Him 
 and filled Him with all strength. The exhaus- 
 tion of Jesus seems to indicate a possibility that 
 He may be severed from His fellowship with 
 the Spirit of His Father. He is prostrate and 
 pained with hunger: can His sense of Sonship 
 to God and of trust in His Father stand this 
 test of weakness and suffering? In exaltation 
 He was full of confidence ; but now, may He 
 not hesitate ? 
 
 If Thou be . . . The essence of this sug- 
 gestion is that it would turn the eyes and the 
 thought and affection of Jesus away from God 
 and towards Himself. Each of the first two re- 
 corded Temptations invites Him to think about 
 Himself; to assert and vindicate Himself. The 
 third Temptation is a proposal to enrich and 
 glorify Himself by means that shall deny God. 
 Each of our Lord's replies to these several 
 suggestions meets this aspect of them. Each is 
 a simple assertion of God, and Him only. God's 
 word is His first answer ; God's will is His 
 second ; God's worship His third. Thus does 
 Jesus look up to God and forget Himself. His 
 Sonship does not concern Him. He is content 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD'S SON" 6$ 
 
 to rest in the Fatherhood of His God, and to let 
 His Father vindicate His Son according to His 
 pleasure. 
 
 There is a great lesson here for all the 
 brethren of Jesus. We must sink self and raise 
 God. We must forget self and remember God, 
 and trust Him without care for self. If we 
 magnify His loving Fatherhood, we shall not 
 linger to look at ourselves and admire or vindi- 
 cate our standing as His sons. 
 
 There is a remarkable parallelism between 
 the saying of Satan to Jesus, If Thou be God's 
 Son, and the saying of the Serpent in Eden, 
 " Ye shall be as gods." The temptation is the 
 same in both cases : viz. to make an upward 
 reach on behalf of self — a stretch and grasp with- 
 out regard to the word and will of God. Per- 
 haps S. Paul had in view these two temptations, 
 that in Eden and that in the W^ilderness, when 
 he wrote to the Philippians : " He thought it 
 not a prize to be snatched, to be equal with God, 
 but emptied Himself."^ For Jesus not only 
 evaded doubt when His consciousness of God 
 precluded consciousness of self and self-assertion. 
 In His rejection of the suggestion, 1/ Thou be 
 God's Son, we find the exact reversal of the 
 1 Phil. ii. 6, 7. 
 
64 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 choice of mankind which is pictured in the drama 
 of the Fall. To be as gods, men sinned : to 
 redeem from sin, Jesus refused to arrogate the 
 privilege of Sonship in the way to which the 
 Tempter prompted. He looked not "on His own 
 thinos, but on the things of others," ^ those others 
 whom He came to save. And always He looked 
 chiefly on the things of God. 
 
 The suggestion contained in the Tempter's 
 If Tho7t be God's Son is not only a subtle but also 
 a very complex snare, because the paralysis of 
 doubt and the impulse to self-assertion are very 
 close to each other, both in this temptation and in 
 the common experience of men. The note of 
 doubt which occurs in the two first Temptations 
 goes along with the prompting to self-assertion, 
 which is a chief feature of all the three. This 
 note of doubt was recurrent, and indeed per- 
 sistent, all through our Lord's ministry. He did 
 not advance Himself, but "emptied Himself,"^ 
 both here and all through His active work. And 
 the humiliation and emptying of Jesus were an 
 offence to those to whom He appealed. It was a 
 cloud that darkened their sight of Him ; and it 
 would have darkened His own heart if the light 
 of God's Spirit had been only near Him and not 
 
 1 Phil. ii. 4. - Phil. ii. 7. 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD'S SON" 65 
 
 within Him. In His poverty and meanness of 
 surroundings, in His toil and pain, men looked 
 at Him ; and the mighty works He did made 
 His humiliation only the more marked. God's 
 Son, indeed ! The absurdity was plain to un- 
 spiritual eyes. Often it must have been spoken 
 in His ears ; oftener far it was whispered by 
 Satan in His heart. "This shall not be unto 
 Thee," said S. Peter : if Thou be God's Son. 
 " Wilt Thou that we command fire to come down 
 from heaven and consume them : " ^ if Thou 
 be God's Son. Satan's doubtful If was by no 
 means heard by Jesus for the last time when 
 He had answered it twice over in the Wilder- 
 ness. We may learn that this was the very 
 heart of the Temptations of " God manifest in 
 the flesh," when we hear how it hissed around 
 Him as He hung upon the Cross. Satan found 
 many to do his bidding and speak his words 
 that day. It is his voice that we hear above 
 the clamour : If Thou be God's Son, come down." 
 If He be the King of Israel, let Him now come 
 down from the Cross? Not till the last hour in 
 which Jesus died did Satan cease to play this 
 snare upon His heart. 
 
 In, one aspect of it, our Lord's consistent use 
 
 ^ Luke ix. 54. - Matt, xxvii. 40. ° Matt, xxvii. 42. 
 
 5 
 
66 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 of the title Son of Man may be seen to be a 
 sustained answer to this Temptation in its per- 
 sistent recurrence. It was important that there 
 should be no ambiguity concerning the true 
 humanness of our Lord's nature. It might be 
 one design of the Tempter to commit Him to 
 such a line of conduct as would create or con- 
 firm confusion on this point. This confusion 
 certainly arose in the minds of many during 
 His ministry. We find in the Gospels abun- 
 dant traces of the theory that Jesus was a Son 
 of God in the sense that Satan himself was 
 held to be so. It was the refuge of those who, 
 devoid of spiritual insight and moral discern- 
 ment, credited His super-ordinary powers to an 
 evil source. 
 
 The dependence of Jesus upon God, which 
 He constantly cultivated, is one great key to the 
 mystery of the Divine power which filled Him. 
 His refusal to assert Himself, which is found here 
 and all through His life, is essential to its inner 
 meaning and secret. He emptied and effaced 
 Himself in order to show forth God ; and God 
 answered His self-effacement, which was perfect, 
 with a perfect filling and glorifying of His Son. 
 It is strange that, while the New Testament so 
 emphasises the nXijpcoiia, the Fulness of Jesus, 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD'S SON" 6j 
 
 recent theology should have made so much of 
 His k4vo}(ti<;, emptying. All that we are told of 
 the Father's dealing with His Son is of the nature 
 of 7r\ijpa)(TL<;, giving to Him of His fulness; and 
 there was no conflict between the Son's emptying 
 of Himself and this filling by His Father. The 
 Kevo)cn<5 of the Son of God is seen perfectly in all 
 His Temptations, and especially in the Wilderness 
 and in Gethsemane and on the Cross. The 
 Wilderness Temptation is specially instructive in 
 this connection, because here we see the TrXtjpcoixa, 
 of the Baptism of Jesus in close conjunction with 
 His AceVcoo-t? before Satan. Far too much dog- 
 matic significance has been drawn from specula- 
 tion and put into the emptying. He had the 
 fulness of God without measure, even in His 
 bodily life : J^or in Him dwelleth all the fulness of 
 the Godhead bodily} He had fulness of Sonship, of 
 equipment and all fitness. The emptying which 
 we see in the Wilderness is an emptying of His 
 human will, in order that the will of God might 
 be fully operative in Him. His K-eVwcrt? is self- 
 emptying not towards God, but in His manifest- 
 ing of Himself and His powers. While filled 
 with God's Spirit, we see Him in the Wilderness 
 empty Himself specially of pretensions, as He 
 
 ^ Col. ii. 9. 
 
68 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 afterwards did, often and all along.^ He emptied 
 Himself of all that was merely for Himself. He 
 was emptied of nothing that was of use for 
 others or for the glory of God. Such an 
 emptying made no emptiness ; it did but make 
 room for the fulness of God. It was the way 
 for the man Jesus to be filled with the Spirit and 
 all knowledge and power. And so is it the way 
 for all men and for Humanity to be filled from 
 God. 
 
 In an earlier glimpse of the life of Jesus, 
 when we are shown Him as a boy in the 
 Temple, we hear Him claim God as His 
 Father with that marvellous simplicity which 
 moves our heart to admiring: love. He 
 brought that faith to His Baptism at Jordan ; 
 and there, by a particular revelation and in 
 a special sense, it was confirmed. With a 
 new grand consciousness of this. He left His 
 Baptism and faced the Wilderness. God was 
 His Father: the knowledge of this was His 
 great strength and equipment as His purpose 
 turned towards the world's salvation and grew 
 clearer and more firmly definite. God was His 
 
 ^ With much insight, the makers of our A.V. have made this 
 interpretation of S. Paul's use of the word Mvoiii ; but they have 
 not iraiislatcd it. 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD'S SON" 69 
 
 Father: the world was to Him His Father's 
 house ; His heart was filled with love and music. 
 He was God's Son : this was the revelation of 
 the descending Spirit which John saw as a Dove, 
 and of the accompanying voice. This called Jesus 
 out to the world and to His work in it. That 
 strength Satan sought to unnerve to weakness, 
 that its purpose of Salvation might be turned 
 aside to failure. That love he would undermine 
 with distrustful doubt. That music of the heart 
 he would change to discord. So victory for evil 
 might be easy, and the enterprise of Salvation be 
 prevented ere it was begun. But Jesus brought 
 out from the Wilderness Temptation the faith and 
 strength of heart and the loving harmony with 
 God, which were His when He went up from 
 Baptism with the Spirit to meet that conflict 
 and sore trial which are the closest baptism, 
 enlarging the gifts of God with every endea- 
 vour, and sealing their application with every 
 choice. 
 
 The first call of the Christian life is to know 
 God as our Father in Jesus and by His Spirit. 
 In the confidence and joy of that knowledge, 
 nothing else in all experience matters much. 
 "As many as received Him, to them gave He 
 power to become the sons of God, even to them 
 
70 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 that believe on His name : which were born, not 
 of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the 
 will of man, but of God." ^ If we know this son- 
 ship, which belongs to those who are born again, 
 all else follows naturally. The low is not loved, 
 the sordid is despised, the noble is chosen : when 
 the fellowship of God is held, the temptations of , 
 Satan are robbed of their power. Just because 
 this faith is the foundation of Christian life and 
 experience and power, it is specially assailed by 
 the Tempter in our hearts, as it was in Jesus'. 
 But in us its confidence is too often turned to 
 doubt and its dignity foregone. On the threshold 
 of activity, when we are in the wilderness, it is 
 doubt that unnerves the spirit and slackens the 
 fibre of character and relaxes the tension of en- 
 deavour. Youth, which is the season of high 
 hopes and purposes, is also, for many a one, the 
 season of doubt. Youth has many a doubt as to 
 its relation to God ; and, for the cure of this, 
 youth has need to be among them that continue 
 with Jesus in His Temptations. One of these 
 has given this message to his brethren : "Now 
 are we the sons of God ; and it doth not yet 
 appear what we shall be : but we know that, when 
 He shall appear, we shall be like Him ; for we 
 
 * John i. 12, 13. 
 
"IF THOU BE GOD'S SON" ^l 
 
 shall see Him as He is."^ And this is the mean- 
 ing, for us, of the Temptation, If Thou be God's 
 Son — a meaning that we learn when we see the 
 example of Jesus in meeting it : ** Every man 
 that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even 
 as He is pure."^ 
 
 ^ I John Hi. 2. 2 I John iii. 3. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 THE SNARE OF HUNGER. 
 
 I. As IT CONCERNED JeSUS. 
 
When He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He 
 was afterward an hungered. And "when the Tempter came 
 to Him, he said, If Thou he God^s Son, command that these 
 stones be made bread. But He answered and said, It is 
 written, Man shall not live by bread alone, hut by every 
 word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. — Matt. iv. 
 2-4. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 THE SNARE OF HUNGER. 
 
 I. As IT CONCERNED JeSUS. 
 
 DOUBT and presumption are the opposite 
 ends of the one swing of the pendulum 
 of an unsettled heart that fails to sink to rest 
 on the central will of God. Both of these ex- 
 tremes are found within the compass of the first 
 Temptation. 
 
 The hungry faintness which followed our 
 Lord's long fast is the link that joins the re- 
 corded Temptations to what has gone before 
 them but is left untold. We doubt not that 
 Satan had already assailed Jesus with all his 
 strength. Instead of assault he now essays to 
 trap Him in a Snare. The first Temptation is the 
 Snare of Htmger. The first coil of its entangle- 
 ment is a suggested doubt of the Sonship of 
 Jesus ; the last is the proposal of a presumptuous 
 
 75 
 
^6 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 assertion of that Sonship and an unwarranted 
 exertion of its power. 
 
 The Tempter makes Jesus a spectacle to Him- 
 self. He had been filled with a strange new 
 consciousness of His Divine relation, and with 
 a joyous assurance of the Fatherhood of God, to 
 whom He was the well-beloved and well-pleasing 
 Son. But now, in His prostrate weakness and 
 apparent desertion — Can it be ? There is de- 
 rision in the accent of the question, which in- 
 spires to doubt ; there is insolent challenge in 
 the suggestion, which provokes the Son of God 
 to verify His standing. When Jesus was thus 
 shown Himself as seen by the eye of Satan, there 
 was no appearance of Sonship as the Tempter 
 understood that rank. How could it be ? So 
 the suggestion of doubt was pressed in upon the 
 Saviour's heart, if He would but entertain it ; 
 and the impulse to assert Himself was prompted 
 urgently. The merest possibility of doubt might 
 be abolished on the instant, on the spot. Let 
 Jesus but command that these stones which lie 
 within His hand's reach be turned to bread : 
 this one God-like act shall suffice at once to 
 reassure Himself and to silence the taunts of 
 Satan with conviction. 
 
 The suggestion was a feasible one. There 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER TJ 
 
 were the stones, and His was the power to 
 command : one word and it should suffice. And 
 while Satan thus pled, his plea was reinforced by 
 the urgency of Jesus' hunger. To this also the 
 Tempter appealed with mingled commiseration 
 and challenge : Thou art faint and hungry ; that 
 need not be. If Thou be God's Son, Thou hast 
 power to make the very stones around Thee turn 
 to bread at Thy commanding word. Further, 
 Jesus felt ready to die in His exhaustion ; and 
 the Tempter's proposal may have meant : Let ^ 
 God's Son preserve the life and strength of His [( 
 manhood for His work as a man. In this view, 
 our Lord's faith is here tried by the fear of im- 
 minent death; and in this aspect His Temptation 
 is like the trial in which that "profane person" 
 Esau ^ failed, when he sold his birthright for food, 
 saying: " Behold, I am at the point to die; and 
 what profit shall this birthright do to me? "^ 
 
 The Snare of Hunger was thus a very subtle 
 net, and widely spread to catch our Lord at one 
 point and another. It (i) suggested the Devil's 
 doubt for Him to convince, and (2) proposed to 
 Jesus a doubt on His part to be dispelled: 
 (3) it appealed to the pain of hunger, and (4) 
 it conjured up the fear of death, which threat- 
 
 1 Heb. xii. 16. '^ Gen. xxv. 32. 
 
78 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 ened to cut short the Saviour's work or ever 
 He had entered on its ministry. 
 
 But there is another aspect of this Temptation 
 that is deeper than any of these, and so compre- 
 hensive as to include them all. 
 V- We have seen that Jesus is here tempted to 
 
 ' jimeet His circumstances, in His own interest, as 
 ' God's Son. This is the heart of the Snare. To 
 do so would have been to abandon the attitude 
 of His humiliation and evade His mission of 
 Salvation. The mission of God's Son among 
 men was to be a man and to behave as a man ; 
 to suffer and die as a man. And here, at the 
 very outset of His undertaking in its public 
 phase, we see Him tempted to a course which 
 was inconsistent with that mission and its 
 conditions. 
 
 This deepest aspect of this Temptation, which 
 it shares with the following one, is indicated by 
 Jesus Himself in His reply to the Tempter. He 
 answers, not as Son of God, but as a man. Even 
 in His fainting weakness He takes up the 
 burden God has laid upon Him. This Tempt- 
 ation is a seemingly harmless proposal to allay 
 natural appetite by a lawful exertion of power. 
 But our Lord sees that to acquiesce would 
 involve a violation of the conditions under which 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 79 
 
 He is placed, an evasion of His trial as a man. 
 Therefore He refuses to shirk the consequences 
 of His humiliation ; He speaks as a man, and as 
 under God's law which is for men when He says : 
 It is written, " Man shall not live by bread alone, 
 but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 mouth of God." 
 
 The quotation is from the eighth chapter 
 of the book of Deuteronomy, where the reference 
 is to the miraculous sustenance of Israel in the 
 wilderness. His use of this shows that Jesus 
 first affirms trustful reliance upon God for the 
 supply of His necessity. He has been tempted 
 to distrust ; and the turning of stones into bread 
 would have been, as it were, an act of theft from 
 God perpetrated by the Son of Man. As for 
 His life that seemed likely to perish, the faith 
 and understanding of Jesus were not inferior 
 to those of His Forerunner, who had said in 
 the wilderness of Jordan : " God is able of these 
 stones to raise up children unto Abraham." 
 And Jesus may well have told Satan that God 
 was able, not merely to make bread for Him 
 of these stones, but of them to raise up a Son 
 to Himself, to do His perfect will. 
 
 The Snare of Hunger, therefore, by which 
 our Lord was tempted, did not merely affect 
 
8o THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 expediency ; it involved principles that touched 
 both His relations with God His Father and 
 with the men whose Salvation it was His mission 
 on earth to accomplish. Thus, also, the Tempter's 
 finger pointed far further than these stones of 
 the desert which he challenged Jesus to turn 
 into bread. It pointed to the whole extent 
 of His savino- work, and counselled a false 
 step which would have led to false methods in 
 these. And the answer of Jesus was not less 
 inclusive in its scope. We have seen (in Chapter 
 IV.) the parallelism between the Eden Tempt- 
 ation, "Ye shall be as gods," and this in the 
 Wilderness, If Thou be God's Son. So also we 
 must notice that both the Eden Temptation and 
 this of our Lord in the Wilderness are examples 
 of the Snare of Appetite. In Eden we see men 
 despise the will of God and distrust His word. 
 We see them choose the gratifying of an appetite 
 which was not hunger, but mere lust amid ample 
 provision. In consequence of this we see them 
 turned away from the Tree of Life. But here 
 we see Jesus turn away from appetite to choose 
 the way of the Tree of Life — that tree which 
 is the Word of God, and whose " leaves are 
 for the healino- of the nations."^ He chose the 
 
 o 
 
 ^ Rev. xxii. 2. 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 8i 
 
 higher instead of the lower, and in so doin^ 
 He grasped the secret of life and healing and 
 health not only for Himself, but for all men 
 who should come after Him in faith. The 
 life-giving results of this choice were shown in 
 all His works of power and healing in His 
 ministry ; and they are still seen working in the 
 world, and shall be seen increasingly till the 
 last enemy is destroyed, even death. Here, then, 
 the choice of Eden is reversed by the Second 
 Adam. Men had been banished from the Tree 
 of Life by a sin of appetite and faithless distrust ; 
 and now the way is opened for their return to 
 it by the trustful faith of Jesus towards God, 
 and by His refusal of Satan's Snare of Hunger. 
 
 Broadly stated in general terms, the heart 
 of this Temptation was its incitement to put 
 bodily life and physical interests before trust 
 in God and obedience to Him. The miracle 
 proposed to Jesus would have been an act of 
 confidence in Himself instead of faith in God ; 
 and "whatsoever is not of faith is sin."^ There 
 was no sin in a miraculous making of bread. 
 Jesus Himself did that more than once, 
 and fed thousands of hungry folk by the very 
 power which He now refused to exercise. But 
 
 ^ Rom. xiv. 23. 
 
82 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 on one of these occasions we see the recurrence 
 of one phase of His present Temptation when, 
 because He had fed them, the people wished 
 "to take Him by force to make Him a King."^ 
 The Snare of Hunger was then once again 
 laid by the Tempter, if haply he might catch 
 the Saviour in its toils along with the crowds 
 He had fed. But He who overcame temptation 
 in the solitary wildness of the desert turned 
 from it amid the Galilean crowd, and went His 
 
 I way to be alone with God. 
 
 ' — There is a familiar saying of our Lord's, 
 the terms of which may be best understood 
 when read in the li^ht of this Snare of the 
 Wilderness: "If a son shall ask bread of any 
 of you that is a father, will he give him a stone ? 
 Or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him 
 a serpent ? Or if he shall ask an e.gg, will he 
 offer him a scorpion ? " ^ There is an apparent 
 exaggeration about these terms that requires ex- 
 planation. To enforce Divine truth by contrast 
 with evident absurdity is very unlike our Lord's 
 calm speech. Why should He so speak who 
 so often and so beautifully made truthful nature 
 illustrate His higher spiritual truth? We 
 naturally ask this ; but the difficulty of these 
 
 •Johnvi. 15. * Luke xi. II, 12. 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 83 
 
 words disappears when we find in them a hidden 
 reference to the Wilderness Temptation of the 
 Snare of Hunger. In this saying our Lord 
 speaks the language of His experience in the 
 desert ; and that not confessedly nor purposely, 
 but inspired by vivid recollection. How deeply 
 the impression of this Snare in the Wilderness 
 was scored upon His mind and heart, is seen 
 by this. He remembers that He was hungry 
 in a far-off, stony place, where there were 
 serpents and scorpions. And in His faintness 
 He asked His Father for bread. And the 
 Tempter pointed to a stone, saying that in this 
 He might find the answer to His asking. If 
 He but took it as God's Son, whose word had 
 power, that stone might be bread in His hand; 
 that serpent, a fish ; that scorpion, an egg. 
 And Jesus indignantly resented the insinuation 
 that His Heavenly Father would so answer 
 the asking of His Son. God would not do so. 
 If any hungry son of His shall ask bread of 
 Him, He will give him His living word and 
 the Spirit who is His breath. For as an 
 earthly father will not give his boy a stone to 
 break his teeth on, so God will not be outdone 
 by man, but will give to His children only what 
 is life-giving. 
 
84 THE TEMPl^ATION OF JESUS 
 
 The Wilderness Temptation did but con- 
 centrate into a word temptations that beset our 
 Lord through all His ministry. In all His work 
 amongst hungry men Jesus had to avoid the 
 Snare of Hunger which was both around Him 
 and upon them. The Son of God, who " so 
 loved the world," was the great Philanthropist 
 of all the ages. His heart of love ached with 
 the sorrows and burdens that were upon the 
 men around Him ; and as " He went about 
 doing good," often the Snare of Hunger must 
 have tempted Him to minister to hungry want 
 with the power of His Divine Sonship. He who 
 healed disease, and walked upon the waters, and 
 fed thousands on a hillside, could have gone 
 to the homes of poverty, and by His mere word 
 have given plenty in the place of want. Had 
 He done so, then He had been ensnared by 
 Hunger, the hunger of His fellow-men. They 
 would have made Him King because He fed 
 them. But His throne had then been made of 
 earth, such as might be turned to bread ; and, 
 though His crown had been of gold, it had been 
 less the symbol of true sovereignty than a picture 
 of the price men paid for bread ; and His sceptre 
 had never been free from the toils of the Snare 
 of Hunger meshed round it and round the hearts 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 85 
 
 which it ruled not by the fear or love of God, 
 but by the fear of Hunger and the love of 
 plenty. 
 
 Jesus, who said, " My kingdom is not of 
 this world," both said and lived the truth : My 
 Bread is not of this world. To the poor He gave 
 no largesse ; and when He made them rich 
 towards Heaven, He left them poor towards the 
 world. He never touched the problem of the 
 world's Hunorer and its need for bread. God's 
 laws of industry and honesty are written upon 
 nature, and these suffice to meet the world's want 
 for its own life. But the ministry of Jesus was 
 concerned with another and a spiritual life : that 
 ministry He steadfastly pursued, and never 
 swerved to spend His heavenly power on less 
 than heavenly ends. He constantly and urgently 
 taught against the Snare of Hunger, warning men 
 of their minds' and hearts' entanglement : " Take 
 no thought for your life what ye shall eat ; " 
 " Labour not for the meat which perisheth ; " 
 " Seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall 
 drink ; but rather seek ye the kingdom of God." 
 By such teachings Jesus offended His hearers. 
 They fixed and hastened His rejection. By a 
 bread policy for others in His ministry, He might 
 have saved His life from the death of the Cross, 
 
86 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 as really as He might have supported it in the 
 Wilderness by turning stones to bread to feed 
 Himself. 
 
 The fatal operation of the Snare of Hunger 
 is well illustrated in the history of Rome. By 
 means of bread, Caius Gracchus filled the city 
 with his subversive proletariate. Constantine, the 
 first Christian emperor, gave an immense daily 
 largesse of bread to the poor of his Byzantine 
 capital, and handed down a very curse to those 
 who came after him. His successors, at Rome, 
 fed a hungry idle multitude with daily distribu- 
 tions of bread and meat. To food was added 
 costly spectacles ; and it was not only that the 
 provinces were drained to glut the capital, but on 
 a foundation of unsound finance Rome became 
 one vast gilded theatre filled with an excited 
 mob of dissipated sight-seers. And, with all this 
 pampering, the empire was rotten and totter- 
 ing to its fall. The Snare that Jesus rejected, 
 the Snare of Hunger, did this fatal work. It 
 smothered noble aspiration, strangled worthy 
 purpose, and crippled wholesome enterprise. Out 
 of free Romans it made ignoble slaves. To learn 
 what Jesus rejected when, in His ministry, He 
 cleared His footsteps of the Snare of Hunger, read 
 the history of later Rome. The escape from 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER Sy 
 
 hunger and toil was almost complete ; but it led 
 to a deepening entanglement in cruelty and lust 
 and every fleshly vice, and through these to 
 destruction. This was the fate of Csesar's 
 throne, and it was the fate designed by the 
 Tempter for the throne of Jesus. But the way , 
 of life was the way of toil for Jesus, and so it \ 
 is for us. 
 
 The refusal of our Lord to deal with men's 
 hunger was necessary ; and its reason was that 
 He came with a commission so much higher than 
 a chancellary one, and was bent upon an errand 
 so much harder than any ministry of temporal 
 supplies. When Jesus refused to make bread out 
 of the desert stones, He chose the way of life for 
 others ; and for Himself He chose the way of the 
 Cross. When He refused to give the power of 
 His Godhead to cut the strangling cords of the 
 Snare of Hunger, He fixed the fate of His ministry 
 as it affected the many hungry of Israel. For a 
 while "the common people heard Him gladly;" 
 but only few had any hunger for the Bread of 
 Life He offered them ; and it was because He had 
 for men no promise of the world's bread that in 
 the end they turned from Him and cried Him to 
 His death. They would have crowned Him 
 when they saw that He could dine them every 
 
8S THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 day ; they crucified Him when they knew He 
 would not. 
 
 " If Thou be God's Son, command that these 
 stones be made bread." This is a cry of men 
 to Heaven till this day. As Satan derided the 
 ungodlike aspect of Jesus and His helplessness to 
 help Himself, so do men now speak the language 
 of the Tempter. Amid a world of stones and dead 
 things, He is challenged to show Himself a God 
 after the likeness of the unworthy thoughts of 
 unspiritual hearts. Still He is in the world, the 
 very picture of self-defenceless love ; and still He 
 is tempted in " His body, which is the Church." 
 He is the Son of Man lifted up ; and men cry to 
 Him, "Who is this Son of Man .> " If He be 
 God's Son, let Him prove His Sonship ; let Him 
 give us bread and save our toil ; "let Him come 
 down from the Cross, and we will believe Him ; " 
 " let Him save Himself and us." And this is the 
 answer of Jesus to hearts ensnared by Hunger : 
 " I am the Bread which came down from Heaven : 
 I am the Living Bread." 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 THE SNARE OF HUNGER. 
 
 2. As IT CONCERNS Us. 
 
When the Tempter came to Hi7n, he said, If Thou be 
 God's Son, com.m.and that these stones be made bread. 
 But He answered and said^ It is written, Man shall not 
 live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth 
 out of the mouth of God. — Matt. iv. 3, 4. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 THE SNARE OF HUNGER. 
 
 2. As IT CONCERNS Us. 
 
 IN the broadest view, this Temptation concerns 
 the control of physical impulse by moral 
 effort ; the suppression of appetite ; the sub- 
 serviency of material need not only to spiritual 
 power, but also to spiritual purposes and ends. 
 In human experience, the claims of animal life 
 constantly assert themselves in opposition to 
 moral principle and spiritual expediency ; and 
 the answer and example of Jesus in His Tempt- 
 ation teach that we must deny even the most 
 urgent claims of physical life and material things, 
 if these oppose themselves to the word of God 
 and His will. 
 
 Bread is an appointed means of physical life ; 
 but it is only one implement among many in 
 God's hand. From the mouth of God came man's 
 breath at the first ; and from His mouth can come 
 
92 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 his sustenance without bread. Jesus trusted God 
 for that ; and, if need be, so must we ; for this is 
 the secret of the life that cannot die. Physical 
 life is not the whole of life. It is not first in 
 importance even now ; it shall not be last as the 
 goal to which we shall attain. To teach this was 
 one great aim of Jesus in His ministry ; to realise 
 it is the task of faith ; to live worthily according 
 to that faith is the callino- of the Christian life. 
 
 O 
 
 That faith and that life are hard to men. 
 The Snare of Hunger besets every man ; he is 
 born within its toils and trapped by its deception 
 before he knows good from evil, or can judge 
 between his rigrht hand and his left. It is fittiuL^ 
 that, among these typical Temptations which Jesus 
 suffered and overcame, the first should be this one 
 in which Satan points to earth's stones, saying : Of 
 these make bread. The world is full of stones ; 
 the world is made of stones. And man, though 
 made of earth, has life, and his life needs bread ; 
 and the problem of ordinary life is : How to turn 
 dead stones into bread for life. Round the need 
 of bread centres the interest of every day. To 
 work for it, we give our hours and days and 
 years. How eager are all men about bread ! 
 How great is that quiet earnestness that never 
 slacks from the endeavour to secure and enlaro-e 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 93 
 
 their livelihood ! Men have a higher life than 
 the beasts ; but human life is little more than 
 a disguised ravening ; and, though wits and 
 handiwork take the place of teeth and claw, 
 the fight for bread is often as keen and cruel 
 among men as it is among the beasts that tear 
 each other for their prey. 
 
 When Satan pointed the hungry Jesus to 
 those stones, he saw not only the hunger of the 
 Son of Man, but the great hunger of the world 
 which Jesus shared. When he said, Satisfy that 
 hunger by the power of God, he tempted Jesus, 
 as he tempts us also, to revolt from the conditions 
 under which the life of man is lived ; for it is 
 ordained that by work earth's stones shall be 
 turned to bread, and not by words. That law 
 is written over all nature, whose life each man 
 shares for a while, till, with the rest of nature, he 
 too must die. We may not, cannot live by our 
 own word. Our work and God's word : these 
 are the conditions of life for us. The Snare of 
 Hunger is upon us every time our heart revolts 
 against the necessity of labour and the hardness 
 of toil, and every time our weakness cries out 
 against the burdens laid upon its faintness. We 
 escape that snare only when we take toil and 
 heaviness as the will of God for us, and seek 
 
94 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 His strength to do and bear, and trust His love 
 to save. 
 
 On the level of practical considerations, bread 
 means life to us. Jesus sought to raise men's 
 thoughts to a higher level than this. When He 
 urged them, saying, "Take no thought for your 
 life, what ye shall eat," He added the profound 
 and important dictum : " The life is more than the 
 meat." This more is not merely more important ; 
 it means that the meat is not a sufficient cause 
 to account for the life which it sustains. The 
 meat seems to touch and feed the life directly ; 
 but no — -man does not live by bread alone. Some- 
 thing else comes in between the bread and the 
 life — something without which it could not feed 
 the life of man. What is that.-* It is the ivord 
 of God. It is true, in ordinary life, that we 
 do not live by bread alone, but by bread plus 
 the word of God, which makes it efficacious for 
 the sustenance and increase of our life. Our 
 complex physical frame, with all its mysterious 
 chemistry and mechanism, is the product of the 
 word of God, and is maintained by the word 
 that continually proceedeth out of His mouth. 
 His word is our life; and, in everyday feeding, 
 the life is more than the meat. 
 
 In the pitifully common experience of disease 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 95 
 
 we see plainly that man does not live by bread 
 alone. In diseased conditions, the life is there, 
 and the bread is there ; but the bread may be 
 useless for sustaining the life. The health-givino- 
 word of God, which was so abundantly in Jesus, 
 is wanting : without that word there is no link 
 between bread and life. 
 
 Our Lord's dictum, "The life is more than 
 the meat," may be read as a commentary on 
 His quotation : " Man shall not live by bread 
 alone." Israel proved this in the wilderness ; 
 and if we will but see it, we prove it every day : 
 we live by the word that proceedeth out of the 
 mouth of God. To know this dependence is to 
 learn one great lesson of godliness ; and to em- 
 brace it cordially is to find that contentment which, 
 with godliness, is the greatest of all gains. 
 
 The answer, Man shall not live by bread 
 alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
 the mouth of God, has a greatness which not 
 only meets the varied aspects of the Tempter's 
 guile as these concerned the immediate situation 
 and circumstances of Jesus, — it has a meaning 
 that reaches far beyond these, and contains an 
 essential part of spiritual truth. Man's life, it 
 says, is found in union with God ; and for bread, 
 that life requires Divine truth, which must be 
 
96 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 received in a spirit of acquiescence, by a heart in 
 harmony with the Divine will. This is the life 
 of filial obedience ; and it was to be exemplified 
 in Him who came to fulfil all righteousness. 
 Gifted He was with miraculous power, but its 
 purpose was definite. It was not meant to 
 minister to His own wants, and never could be 
 used to procure release from suffering or escape 
 from difiiculty. He saved others ; Himself He 
 might not save. Therefore, though the Tempter's 
 suggestion was plausible and very attractive, the 
 Lord's pure heart and calm eye detected its hidden 
 guile ; and He answered it with a reference to prin- 
 ciples that guided Him and must also control us. 
 These Wilderness Temptations are indeed typical 
 ones. They are understandable by us ; and more, 
 they are such as we share. And often Satan 
 addresses wiles to our mind and in our circum- 
 stances that are like those Jesus tells us of; and 
 these must be met with the same weapons of 
 Truth that He used to disarm the Tempter of 
 his power. 
 
 The toils with which Satan beset Jesus, alike 
 in the Wilderness and in His ministry, are still the 
 snares with which he would entangle the Church 
 of Christ in the world. This is true, on the large 
 lines of human policy. 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 97 
 
 The world is still hungry; and there is set before 
 us the temptation to deal with hunger rather than 
 with sin. This is a latter-day temptation, belong- 
 ing to this age of much philanthropic endeavour ; 
 and many are ensnared by it. Its error is to 
 look to economic and social reforms for results 
 that can only come by spiritual means. There 
 are many, to-day, who have a zeal for good which 
 is not according to Gospel knowledge. They 
 have a great hope in Acts of Parliament ; or, it 
 may be, in Trades Unions for the protection of 
 wage-earners ; or in education and the diffusion 
 of culture. The cheapness of bread is more 
 important to them than the " free course " of 
 God's word. Realising the evils of poverty and 
 all misery, they set themselves with a great direct- 
 ness to their alleviation. 
 
 We know that all just laws and all kindness 
 and true charity are the will of Christ. But we 
 must know and remember that the world might 
 be nothing the better, but rather grow worse, 
 though the very stones of our streets were turned 
 to bread to feed men's hunger. Social reforms 
 in themselves may be good ; dy themselves they 
 can be no more than superficial. They are 
 pleasant unguents, that do but lightly heal a 
 wound that festers deep below the surface. At 
 7 
 
98 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 the root of every social sore is sin. And sin is a 
 moral disorder which has a spiritual source, and 
 which must be dealt with by spiritual means. 
 To every sound scheme for social improvement 
 and every philanthropic enterprise the Church of 
 Christ is bound to give her support in the name 
 of the good Physician and the God of Love. 
 To all beneficent and reformative legislation let 
 her lend her influence in the name of the God of 
 Righteousness and the Prince of Peace. But 
 these things are not her first concern : their 
 advancement is not her mission, by whose success 
 or failure she must stand or fall. That concerns 
 the individual hearts of men in their personal 
 relation with the Spirit of God and His word. 
 In this, the message of Salvation is one that goes 
 to the heart of every wrong the world knows, and 
 to the source of every woe she suffers. The 
 strongholds of injustice it does not assail with 
 the strength of present judgment ; the bars of 
 hungry slavery it does not unlock with the key 
 of Reform. But it undermines the foundations of 
 sin, upon which every wrong is based ; and though 
 meanwhile it has no word for many a hardship, 
 one day even the great world-snare of Hunger 
 shall be broken. Yet not by force, nor by law ; 
 but by love. 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 99 
 
 Not only are we tempted to err in the large 
 matters affecting policy and the lines of conduct 
 in Church and State, — we stand where Jesus 
 stood in the Wilderness when, in our personal 
 experience, we meet the inducement to sacrifice 
 moral and spiritual obligation for the sake of 
 material gain or for any alleviation of physical 
 straits. It was to such a sin that Jesus was 
 tempted when He was hungry, and might have 
 eaten save for the restraints that God had laid 
 upon Him in His mission to mankind, and which 
 He accepted as one born under the law of God, 
 and subject to the burdens of Humanity. 
 
 When Jesus says, Man shall not live by bread 
 alojie, bread is the symbol of physical life and all 
 its accessories. These are not all, says Jesus. 
 Though a man have them to the full, yet he does 
 not fully live on that account. " A man's life 
 consisteth not in the abundance of the thingrs 
 which he possesseth."^ The beasts live by 
 bread alone, because they have only lower wants 
 to be satisfied. Man needs bread, but not bread 
 alone : his higher life, his moral and spiritual 
 nature and capacities, must be provided for ; their 
 needs have an importance which is far greater 
 than that of any mere physical want. Their 
 
 ^ Luke xii. 15. 
 
lOO THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 supply is the first requirement of human life ; and 
 it must be placed first, if that life is to be rightly 
 lived. 
 
 The right arrangement of the order of pre- 
 cedence of the spiritual, the moral, and the 
 physical levels of life is the commonest require- 
 ment of ordinary duty. It is the lack of this 
 order that makes thieves and drunkards and all 
 unclean livers and misers ; also it makes careless 
 and irreligious folk. The thief puts the satisfac- 
 tion of material possession above those moral 
 considerations that are most jealously guarded by 
 society as necessary to its life. The drunkard 
 prefers his indulgence to domestic duty and social 
 decency. Persons of unclean life are tersely 
 sketched by S. Paul in terms of this disordering 
 of the several levels of human nature : " Whose 
 god is their belly, and whose glory is in their 
 shame, who mind earthly things."^ They make 
 a religion of lust ; they have inverted the order 
 of nature and religion, and pursue a course which 
 is downwards and away from God, and towards 
 destruction. 
 
 A place above those who thus disorder the 
 physical and moral levels of life is occupied by 
 those who accept the moral platform of human 
 
 * Phil. iii. 19. 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER loi 
 
 living and observe the conventions and restraints 
 of common law, yet place the physical life and 
 material advancement above spiritual interest and 
 oblicration. The thief and drunkard and unclean 
 
 o 
 
 offend by pursuing physical and material inter- 
 ests, without reference to spiritual possibilities 
 and privilege and responsibility. The sin is, in 
 essence, the same in both cases ; though the one 
 class sins on a lower level than the other. The 
 lower class are beast-like in their relation to the 
 physical elements and accessories of life. The 
 higher class are human because moral, but ungod- 
 like because unspiritual. Both classes deify the 
 body and are deaf to the " word which proceedeth 
 out of the mouth of God," which is life to the 
 soul. The true man, the man that Jesus was and 
 that Jesus came to make of others, is the man to 
 whom and in whom the spiritual is paramount. 
 He does not live by bread alone, or chiefly, but 
 by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
 of God. 
 
 The example of Jesus when He says, Man 
 shall not live by bread alone, is a dissuasive from 
 any violation of principle for a temporal advantage. 
 That dishonesty which disobeys the command- 
 ment, " Thou shalt not steal," is only one gross 
 form of such sin. Probably the evil eminence 
 
102 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 which that sin has amongst us is owing to its 
 offence against our neighbour rather than to its 
 disloyalty towards God. But dishonesty, which 
 violates human law, also denies the providence of 
 God. There is a will of God which determines our 
 temporal circumstances. Under that will Jesus 
 placed Himself for our example ; and, though He 
 had power to control His circumstances, He 
 denied Himself its use in order that He miorht 
 be obedient and suffer conditions which were like 
 to our own, even when these are very hard. 
 
 Our powers of resistance to the grasp of 
 circumstance are very limited. We can hardly 
 interfere at all to alter materially the conditions in 
 which we are placed by God. But the deepest 
 faults are those of the heart ; and in spirit we 
 yield to Satan's Snare of Hunger when we are 
 filled with worldly desire and calculation and 
 anxiety. We are snared by this world's stones 
 when we fail to obey Christ's injunction, " Seek 
 first the kingdom of God and His righteousness ; " 
 and when we fail to trust that promise with which 
 He points to lower goods, "All these things 
 shall be added unto you."^ It is the purpose of 
 God, in the Gospel, for every believing heart, 
 that He should bring us forth of earth's shadows 
 
 1 Malt. vi. 33. 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 103 
 
 into the sunshine of unclouded trust ; that, amid 
 the snares of Satan and the seductions of sense, 
 we should enjoy the untrammelled liberty of a 
 disembarrassed faith ; that, whether in the solitary 
 wilderness or jostling in the city's crowd, we should 
 have an unencumbered heart, ready always for 
 activity and praise. This was life as Jesus knew 
 it when He said, Man shall not live by bread 
 alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 mouth of God ; and the knowledge of this life He 
 sends forward to us in the tale of His Temptation 
 and His victory. 
 
 It might seem as if the super-ordinary Sonship 
 and power of Jesus to which Satan appealed were 
 an element in His trial which removed it from all 
 real likeness to any temptation we can know. 
 But that is not the case. The super-ordinary 
 powers of Jesus were held by Him from God, to 
 use for the salvation of men. And "the power 
 of God unto salvation " is in the hand and mouth 
 of every believer. And this greatest gift of God 
 to men may be abused by us, who hold it by His 
 grace. In a deeper aspect than the surface shows, 
 the Temptation of Jesus was less a temptation to 
 turn stones into bread than one to turn bread into 
 stones. The word which He was tempted to use 
 for the satisfaction of His hunger was the word 
 
104 'J^HE TEMFl^ATION OF JESUS 
 
 given Him to use for the salvation of souls by 
 turning them to God. Thus He was tempted to 
 spiritual malversation, to the misappropriation of 
 a heavenly inheritance. And thus are we also 
 tempted : to make the spiritual gifts of God, and 
 His heavenly grace, yield only a temporal satisfac- 
 tion. If we take the love of Jesus, and His power, 
 and all His salvation in the selfish hand of an 
 unhallowed heart, if we use these for any lesser 
 end than His end, then we ticrn bread into stones. 
 There is a great beauty in the Gospel ; but It 
 is not meant merely to decorate our life withal. 
 There is a wondrous music in the word of love ; 
 but its errand is not to charm our ears and soothe 
 our mind and heart with the sensuous satisfaction 
 of a selfish peace. There Is a marvellous wealth 
 in the heritage of those who are the sons of God ; 
 but it is not theirs to make life easy and opulent, 
 nor to dignify it with any proud nobility. We 
 turn the Bread of God Into the stones of earth 
 when we take Christ's salvation selfishly ; and 
 when with It we build any temple which is not for 
 the worship of God, or furnish any chamber which 
 Is not for the service of His Christ. If, as 
 Christians, we build with spiritual stones that 
 which Is not spiritual, then our own souls, and 
 those to whom we should have ministered salvation 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 105 
 
 in the name and by the word of God, are starved. 
 For we have turned bread into stones when we 
 have used the word of God not according to His 
 will ; and we have been caught in the snare of 
 the world's hunger for " the meat that perisheth." 
 
 The fact is, that the sins of turning bread into 
 stones and of turning stones into bread are sins 
 that always go together in those who abuse the 
 Gospel instead of using it. We have seen that 
 Jesus was appealed to as God's Son, and tempted 
 to use the power of His Sonship unlawfully. In a 
 particular aspect of our experience we are tempted 
 in this way too. The Tempter's "If Thou be 
 God's Son " contains a reference to the recent 
 Baptism of Jesus and the descent of the Spirit 
 of God. And there are snares which beset us in 
 the very hour of our assurance of God's love and 
 of His reception of us as His sons. We are sons 
 of God in Jesus ; in Him we have eternal life ; so 
 we cannot perish, says the Tempter. The very 
 stones of earth shall feed our souls, because we are 
 the new-born sons of God : they are not spiritual, 
 indeed, but in our hands they shall be changed 
 to such a character that they shall feed our 
 souls. 
 
 In this we are tempted to turn from reliance 
 on the word of God to dead, earthly things, and 
 
io6 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 to take them up with a vain self-confidence that 
 presumptuously prostitutes the grace of God. We 
 may make stones into bread by trying to feed our 
 hearts upon the things of earth. The world's 
 work may replace the work of God ; its words may 
 silence God's word within us ; its pleasures may 
 be used to yield us satisfaction of the empty need 
 that only God Himself can fill. And so we may 
 be starved in our soul while fictitiously fed upon 
 things that are stones and not bread. 
 
 We are in danger of this ; and God is better 
 to us than our own heart's desire or asking. 
 Many of the disappointments of the Christian's 
 life may have this explanation : that he has 
 desired things of this world instead of spiritual 
 gifts, and has asked stones instead of bread ; and 
 God has denied him his desire for temporal fulness 
 or advancement, in order to g'ive him that which 
 is of everlasting worth. Even if we ignorantly 
 ask Him for stones, He will disappoint us with the 
 gift of bread. God, who is the Author of life, does 
 not ask us to give life to what is dead. Therefore 
 let no dead thing delude us. If the Tempter point 
 to earth's stones, saying, Take them as God's sons 
 and live by them, let us turn from them, and still 
 trust God and ask from Him. And, asking, we 
 shall receive, for " If ye being evil know how to 
 
THE SNARE OF HUNGER 107 
 
 give good gifts unto your children, how much more 
 shall your Father which is in heaven give good 
 things to them that ask Him? " 
 
 When Jesus asserted that man should live by 
 the word of God, He spoke for Himself as a man, 
 but also for all men who should come after Him. 
 When we hear Him speak thus, we may hear 
 Him say, Man shall not live by bread alone, but 
 by Me. He who was tempted is the Word of 
 God. When we see Jesus in this Temptation, we 
 not only see a man choosing the way of life for 
 Himself and others, — we see Him who was the 
 Life opening the way of life amid the snares of 
 death ; Himself walking that way, that He might 
 show it to us. "In Him was life; and the life 
 was the light of men." By Him men shall live 
 with a life that bread cannot feed, and that 
 starvation cannot touch that it should die. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION. 
 
 109 
 
The Devil taketh Him up into the Holy City, and setteth 
 Him on a pinnacle of the Temple, and saith 7{nto Him, If 
 Thou be God's So?i, cast Thyself dow?i: for it is written, 
 He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee : afid in 
 their ha^ids they shall hear Thee up, lest at any time Thou 
 dash Thy foot against a stone. Jesus said tinto him, It is 
 written again. Thou shall jwt tejnpt the Lord thy God. — 
 Matt. iv. 5-7. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION. 
 
 IN the first of the three recorded Temptations 
 of Jesus in the Wilderness, the Tempter 
 appealed to our Lord on the level of the common 
 needs of Humanity, which He there suffered in 
 an exaggerated degree owing to His circum- 
 stances of recent strain and present great exhaus- 
 tion. In that Snare of Hunger our Lord's whole 
 state and surroundings have been made to speak 
 a powerful inducement towards an unlawful act. 
 And that appeal has been resisted and turned 
 into an occasion of witness to that higher life 
 which is beyond the need of bread and is sus- 
 tained by every word of God. The occasion and 
 materials of that Temptation were within Jesus 
 and around Him as He stood, hungry and faint, 
 in the Wilderness of stones. 
 
 The second Temptation is very different 
 from the one preceding it. It is a mark of the 
 Tempter's art, that he embarrasses the Tempted 
 
112 THE TEMFIATION OF JESUS 
 
 One with a sudden, vivid change in the scene and 
 nature of His appeal. From the Wilderness he 
 takes Him to the Holy City, and, placing Him 
 on a high point in the Temple buildings, invites 
 Him to throw Himself down from it, in reliance 
 on the power of God and on His care to safe- 
 guard Him from injury. 
 
 In the statement, "The Devil taketh Him up 
 into the Holy City," the phrase more exactly 
 rendered is, "carries Him off;"^ and it suggests 
 possession of our Lord's person, forcibly used for 
 His passive conveyance from the desert to 
 Jerusalem. The same suggestion is found in the 
 phrase " setteth Him"^ on a pinnacle, which 
 represents Jesus as passively at the Tempter's 
 disposal. 
 
 By many, this has been felt to be a matter of 
 some difficulty ; indeed, it must be such to all who 
 read the narrative thoughtfully. And it is not 
 unnatural that there should be an inclination to 
 regard the transportation of Jesus as an imaginary 
 one, in which the scene was vividly presented to 
 His imagination and will, as one that He might 
 seek at another time, after He had left the Wilder- 
 ness in the manner in which He had come to it. 
 
 ^ Trapakafifidvii airbv. 
 2 LOTTrjcriv avTov. 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 113 
 
 We ask, then, was our Lord carried really 
 and bodily to the Holy City? That is the state- 
 ment of the Gospel, simply taken ; and we may 
 believe that He was. It is contrary to all the 
 possibilities of everyday life ; but that need not 
 stumble us. We live within a circle of nature, 
 where natural laws both seem and are to us 
 irrefragable. Many of the laws of nature we 
 know ; but even a full knowledge of all nature 
 were not all knowledge. Nature, as we know it, 
 is but one circle of the limitless whole over 
 which God reigns. We live and move within 
 the iron grasp of laws whose operation is in- 
 exorable, and which to us are necessary ; but we 
 are ignorant of what is beyond the circle we know 
 as nature. The place we live in is so narrow, 
 and the common facts we deal with are so 
 familiar, that we feel far too knowing, and are 
 prone to forget that our knowledge is but a 
 spot of brightness encompassed by a vast ignor- 
 ance which is dark to us, and unseen. God has 
 kindled a lamp in the world, and within the circle 
 of its rays lie our life and work. Let us be 
 content with the knowledge of our one lighted 
 room in the great house of God. Among the 
 things of nature it contains there is scope for 
 ages of extending search and enlarging sight. 
 
114 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 But when we turn round from the work of our 
 hands in the lamplight of nature, and see nothing 
 but darkness, let us know that all around the 
 narrow limits of our gaze God Is, and a law that 
 is above our understanding, and a light that is 
 not for our eyes. Even in ordinary experience, 
 the unknown touches the known, and as we 
 handle the familiar we find the inscrutable within 
 our grasp. Nowhere is this more marked than 
 in our dealing with the facts of life. For life 
 transcends matter and controls it, and the point 
 where these touch is hid from our searching, 
 though it be very long and laboriously close. 
 
 The marvel of Satan's transporting Jesus 
 bodily from the Wilderness to the Holy City is 
 outside the bounds of what we know as possible ; 
 but that does not remove it from the sphere of 
 fact. Rather, it shows us one glimpse of fact on 
 a level to which our experience is foreign. It 
 exhibits a transaction on a plane to which our 
 sight is unaccustomed. It belongs, so to say, to 
 the realm of an unknown Fourth Dimension. Yet 
 this marvel well befits that personal meeting of 
 Satan with the Son of God, which was not all or 
 chiefly of nature, though its scene was within the 
 bounds of nature's territory. It concerns the 
 control of matter and space by spirit and life ; 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 115 
 
 and it sets at nought the notions we have learned 
 by observation. 
 
 In our experience, life has only a precarious 
 hold on the materials which are its tabernacle 
 and its tools. In a short-lived mastery it takes 
 and uses these, but on the whole and in the end 
 it is not life that controls matter ; but matter con- 
 trols life and drags it down from a brief victory 
 to the dire defeat of death. And this we call 
 natural. To us it is natural, and the only thing 
 possible. Yet, in a higher sense, it is this accepted 
 order which is unnatural. To us, life shows itself 
 only in material embodiment ; and it shows itself 
 only enslaved. This bondage of life is the great 
 irony of nature. Nature is not a sphere of life, 
 but a kingdom of death. This kingdom, life 
 invades, and, in every generation, takes by storm 
 in a fleeting success ; and in every generation life 
 suffers repulse and defeat in the inevitable victory 
 of death. 
 
 Yet, if there be any truth in religion, if any 
 strength in life, if any life in God, the reign of 
 death is surrounded by the kingdom of life. The 
 place of matter's supremacy is but a gross island 
 in a great sea of life — victorious, endless life. 
 Within this island, life seems a fleeting illusion ; 
 but it is matter that is the illusion. Life is real ; 
 
ii6 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 its material oppressor is a figment of God's word, 
 created by the impulse of His thought and will. 
 Life is the very breath of God Himself, and can 
 not be really enslaved. Physical life, by which 
 gross matter is vitalised, is but a phase of the 
 showing of God. And all the life and reality we 
 know are no more than episodes in a boundless 
 immortality. 
 
 Who knows what matter is ? ^ Who can tell 
 upon what its strength is based ? As we probe 
 the secrets of matter, its reality vanishes. Inward 
 and inward we proceed from truculent matter to 
 ethereal force ; and force is the manifestation of 
 energy ; and all power is the strength of God. 
 
 From the spiritual standpoint, therefore, the 
 mastery of matter is grossly unnatural ; and life 
 in this world is a perverted dream, a nightmare 
 in which strength is enslaved by imaginary 
 bonds. 
 
 Man, in whom is the life of God, though it 
 be but a spark, has in him the germ of a final 
 supremacy over all material bondage. Mean- 
 while his soul largely serves that body which is 
 its instrument. Where the material body is, 
 
 ^ The most recent answer to this question is, " Matter repre- 
 sents the absence of mass." It is given in the Rede Lecture for 
 1902 : On an Inversion of Ideas as to the Structure 0/ the Universe, 
 by Prof. Osborne Reynolds, Owens College, Manchester. 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 117 
 
 there the soul is found in its normal manifestation 
 and operation. And the body is a piece of 
 nature ; awkward, crass, heavy ; a cumbersome 
 house for a spiritual tenant, withal that it is so 
 wondrous in its mechanism. Our mind can roam 
 with the marvellous speed of thought; but our 
 body cannot move with any corresponding agility. 
 Our wishes can compass the world with a wider 
 movement than the winds, with a swifter flight 
 than the lightning flash. But our body, the while, 
 sits dully still, or walks with that clumsy gait 
 which mocks the soaring aspirations of our fancy 
 and the strengfth of our eao^er will. 
 
 This is ordinary ; but it is not natural, in that 
 higher sense of nature which takes account of 
 God and of our kinship with Him. It ought to 
 be, that our body can go with our thoughts, and 
 show itself and work its will, irrespective of the 
 illusions of matter and the cumbrous conventions 
 of space and time. We may hold, so far, with 
 the Theosophists, — believing that this power is 
 latent in our human nature, and that its perfec- 
 tion is our future heritage, — that the day will 
 come, when nature, as we know it, shall be turned 
 inside out and upside down, and when life shall 
 be no more subservient, but supreme. 
 
 We may see the promise of this in our Lord's 
 
ii8 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Resurrection life. He then did grasp and use 
 the powers which are reserved for us in our 
 completed redemption. He "went before" His 
 disciples to Galilee by no earthly road. He 
 entered the locked doors of the upper room. 
 He ascended into heaven in a cloud. And in 
 these incidents, and in others like them, He had 
 His own true body; and His living Spirit used 
 it easily and wonderfully, with such a control that 
 it was where He willed to be, and went with His 
 thoughts and appeared. And in this we shall be 
 like Him when we are admitted to the plane of 
 His risen life. Meanwhile " it doth not yet 
 appear." Meanwhile we are caged and op- 
 pressed by nature, and we chafe with a dim 
 sense of our servitude and a deep resentment 
 against its bonds. We have obscure hints of 
 these higher possibilities, in which what are every- 
 day impossibilities emerge into a fugitive actuality. 
 But we recognise such phenomena as abnormal, 
 and stigmatise them as morbid. Yet these things 
 have their lessons for us ; and they are useful if 
 they teach us a reverent knowledge of our ignor- 
 ance, which is the largest knowledge we can 
 meanwhile know. 
 
 In this Temptation we see an unaccustomed 
 control exerted by life upon matter, in which, at 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 119 
 
 the bidding of a spiritual impulse, Jesus is bodily 
 transported to the Temple at Jerusalem ; and, for 
 once, physical carriage keeps pace with the 
 rapidity of thought. This super-ordinary trans- 
 portation is distinctly and directly related to the 
 character of the Temptation, to which it forms 
 the prelude. The Devil, having carried Jesus 
 off to the Holy City, — in the words of our version, 
 setteth Him on a pi7inacle of the Temple, and 
 saiih unto Him, If Thou be the Son of God, cast 
 Thyself down : for it is written. He shall give His 
 angels charge concerning Thee, lest at any time 
 Thou dash Thy foot against a stone. 
 
 Here, as in the Snare of Hunger, an apparently 
 simple proposal covers a complex plot. And, as 
 in the former Temptation, the first point we notice 
 is, that Jesus, the Son of Man, is challenged to 
 act in His own behalf as God's Son. "Ye shall 
 be as gods," said the Tempter in Eden. Be as 
 God's Son, says the same Tempter in the Wilder- 
 ness. The Serpent in Eden offered a new sphere 
 of knowledge ; Satan now invites to a new realm 
 of experience, saying : Step safely from this great 
 height. He proposes an excursion in the Fourth 
 Dimension. 
 
 We may distinguish two aspects in this Tempt- 
 ation : the one affecting solely the relation of Jesus 
 
I20 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 with His Father; the other concerning also His 
 dealings with the men whose lot He came to 
 share, and whose souls He sought to save. 
 
 Addressing Jesus in the terms, If Thoti be 
 God's Son, the Tempter taunts Him with His 
 ungodlike humiliation. It is the " Prince of the 
 power of the air " ^ who speaks ; and he has just 
 shown his power in the transporting of himself 
 and the object of his wiles to the Holy City from 
 the far Wilderness. With that fact in mind, we 
 hear a boast in his challenge : Cast Thyself down. 
 If I have brought Thee safely hither, shall not God 
 be able to keep Thee in this short, swift flight } 
 This is a challenge not only to Jesus but also to 
 God His Father, as our Lord at once indicates in 
 His reply. He does not dispute the possibility 
 of doing as the Tempter suggests ; but as in the 
 former Temptation He had detected distrust lurk- 
 ing to betray Him in the guise of confidence, so 
 now He finds presumptuous rashness counselled 
 in the place of quiet trust. The Devil is guilty of 
 a monstrous intrusion between Jesus and His 
 God ; and this our Lord resents and repels in His 
 answer : Tko2c shall not tempt the Lord thy God. 
 
 In this Temptation the Devil makes Jesus feel 
 f His humiliation as the Son of Man, and tempts 
 
 ^ Eph. ii. 2. 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 121 
 
 Him to rebel as^ainst the bondaee which His 
 Father has laid upon Him. Has He Godhead ? 
 Why then must God's Son walk ? To the Prince 
 of the power of the air it is but a step from the 
 Wilderness to the Holy City — a swift flight, like 
 the flash of thought. Jesus has shared this even 
 now; may He not show that God's Son has a 
 power like to, if not greater than, the Devil's ? 
 Must He with toilsome steps walk here and there 
 like other men? Thus Satan, in the very hour of 
 his own power's display, points the finger of scorn 
 at Godhead walking \ and it might be hard, even 
 for Jesus, to bear this insult to the Godhead which 
 His voluntary manhood veiled. Yet He accepts 
 it, and owns Himself a man, cribbed by the limits 
 of ordinary human experience, and confined by 
 the bounds of common means of progress and all 
 action. Though He be God's Son, He will walk 
 as a man among men, nor envy nor emulate the 
 proud flight of Satan in his princely power of the 
 air. So He answers humbly, and quotes the 
 Divine law, to which as a man He submits : Thou 
 shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. 
 
 Once, in His ministry, Jesus made an explicit 
 reference to this aspect of His life as a man, in 
 which He stooped to walk, — when " there came 
 certain of the Pharisees, saying unto Him, Get 
 
122 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill 
 Thee. And He said unto them, Go ye, and tell 
 that fox, Behold I cast out devils, and I do 
 cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day 
 I shall be perfected. Nevertheless I must walk 
 to-day, and to-morrow, and the day followijig"^ 
 
 In this, Jesus says that He must walk till the 
 appointed end of His mission ; and the reference 
 seems to be to the hardships and perils amid 
 which His footsteps went, and which He must 
 not evade, to purchase His own comfort or 
 safety at the cost of the fulfilment of God's will. 
 
 Often during His toilsome ministry must this 
 Temptation have recurred to Jesus. Constantly 
 He was worn by toils to which His Godhead was 
 superior. Often He was threatened by and sub- 
 ject to inflictions which He had the power to 
 evade. Yet through and under all these things 
 His Godhead walked with a submission and 
 humility which were Divine. And to human 
 footsteps He gave a new great dignity, so that 
 intimates and enemies alike were abashed before 
 His august mien. 
 
 We may find in the Gospels several occasions 
 on which Jesus was tempted to use His Divine 
 power and God's care, conveniently but in a way 
 
 ^ Luke xiii. 31-33. 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 123 
 
 inconsistent with the humiliation of His state. 
 When at Nazareth they would have thrown Him 
 over the cliff, " He, passing through the midst of 
 them, went His way." When they took up stones 
 to stone Him in the Temple court, "He hid 
 Himself, and so passed by." In both of these 
 cases it is emphasised that He went throttgh the 
 midst of His eneinies ; and we may take it that 
 this means that His escape was not compassed by 
 supernatural means. We see our Saviour subject 
 to the same Temptation when, in Gethsemane, He 
 cries, " Let this cup pass from Me ! " and we see 
 the same victory when He answers His own 
 appeal, saying, " Not My will, but Thine." And 
 next day we hear the Tempter's voice and this 
 same Temptation in the mocking calls of those 
 who stood about Him in His last sufferings, 
 crying, "Come down from the Cross." 
 
 These things Jesus might have done as Son 
 of God, but not as the Saviour of men. This 
 Temptation ceased to visit Him only when, of His 
 own will, He gave up the ghost and yielded Him- 
 self to death. And, when in His resurrection and 
 His appearances after it we see Him outside the 
 limits and restraints of His humiliation, we see 
 Him use freely the very powers of which the 
 Tempter here solicits the untimely display. The 
 
124 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 leap to which Satan invited Jesus was thus a 
 greater than any leap from the Temple ledge ; it 
 was a spiritual step from the path of submission 
 and suffering, which He must walk as a man while 
 with the footsteps of Divinity He pursued the 
 salvation of His fellow-men. 
 ^ It must always be a question full of mystery 
 to us : Of what nature was the Divine-human 
 consciousness of Jesus? And, when we think of 
 Him as tempted, we are apt not to have a sense 
 of the reality and severity of the trial to which evil 
 might subject Him. But, in this Temptation 
 which is addressed to Him as God's Son, we may 
 clearly discern that our Lord was subject to great 
 temptation, by very reason of that consciousness 
 which was peculiar to Him. By virtue of His 
 unbroken communion, the life of God flowed 
 without interruption into Him and from Him. 
 By virtue of that Spirit, which was His without 
 measure, He had a unique spiritual control of the 
 material world around Him. By reason of His 
 sinlessness, He could command the power of 
 death, l^hese powers which were possessed by 
 Jesus made a wide endowment, broadening 
 heavenward while poised upon the narrow point 
 of a human life. But Jesus left the great wealth 
 that was His, in the grasp of His Father's hand ; 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 125 
 
 and He took nothing from its store, save with the 
 sanction of His will and the bidding of His word. 
 Thus, the poise of His super-ordinary powers was 
 not reared upon Himself; for He made Himself 
 dependent, and all He had was held in all its 
 breadth and height by the Hand which upholds 
 the heavens and the earth. 
 
 But for Jesus to step from the Temple ledge, 
 would have been to dictate to Heaven instead 
 of waiting its command. Such abandonment of 
 His dependence would have shifted the poise of 
 His Divinity, which was steadied by the fingers 
 of God ; and His descent would have cast down 
 the path of salvation from life to death, and the 
 shock of His fall have shaken the throne of God 
 in all the earth. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 
 —CONTINUED. 
 
 \-2l 
 
The Devil taketh Him up into the Holy City, and seiteth 
 Him on a pinnacle of the Temple, and saith unto Him, If 
 Thoti be God's Son, cast Thyself doimi : for it is writtefi. 
 He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee : and in 
 their hands they shall hear Thee tip, lest at any time Thou 
 dash Thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him. It is 
 written again. Thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God. — 
 Matt. iv. 5-7. 
 
 133 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 
 —CONTINUED. 
 
 BESIDES that aspect of this Temptation, 
 which affects chiefly, if not solely, the 
 relations of our Lord with God His Father, there 
 is another aspect which concerns the dealings of 
 Jesus with men in His ministry. That there is 
 such a side, is indicated by the fact that the 
 Tempter took Jesus to the Holy City and set 
 Him on the Temple ledge. This is not explained 
 in the Gospels ; but it must have meaning. We 
 see that at once if we ask : Why was our Lord 
 taken there? If all the Tempter sought was to 
 lead Him to tempt God, and try His own powers 
 by a headlong leap, a precipice might surely have 
 been found in the desert. We have already seen 
 that the exhibition of Satan's power in the trans- 
 portation to Jerusalem was itself a part of the 
 challenge in which our Saviour was tempted to 
 cast Himself down; and we may judge that the 
 9 
 
130 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Holy City was sought for the sake of publicity. 
 Some have found the place where Jesus was set 
 by Satan, in the summit of the central part of the 
 Temple ; others, again, on Solomon's porch, or 
 the o-roa ySacrtXtK-rJ. Both of these latter were at 
 top of a precipice, and the giddy downlook from 
 Solomon's porch is described in impressive terms 
 by Josephus.^ But since we judge that it was 
 with a view to publicity that Satan had brought 
 Jesus to Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem to the 
 Temple, we may be sure that the place where he 
 set Him was one that overlooked the Temple 
 court. 
 
 It is no leap into obscurity that is proposed 
 to Christ. The time for His entry on His 
 ministry is near. The Forerunner has caught 
 the ear of the whole land. All men are awake, 
 looking with expectation for the coming of 
 Messiah. And here is suggested to our Lord 
 a startling mode of entry on His public work. 
 Malachi had prophesied : " Behold, I will send 
 My messenger, and he shall prepare the way for 
 Me : and the Lord, whom ye seek, s/ia// suddenly 
 come to His Temple'' The first part of this pre- 
 diction was already fulfilled, and being daily 
 fulfilled : the Tempter proposes a literal fulfilment 
 
 ^ See Appendix, III. p. 224 : to 7rr€/3i;yiov tow U/dov, 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 131 
 
 of the latter part — a grand entry into the Holy 
 City and the Temple ; a sudden, safe descent into 
 the midst of the astonished and admiring crowd 
 that filled the Temple court ; a striking and un- 
 mistakable exhibition of Divine power ; an in- 
 controvertible assertion of Divine origin and 
 commission. What more appropriate and effect- 
 ive beginning of His public ministry could be 
 proposed than that Messiah should so alight, as 
 if from heaven direct, and out of a supernal 
 chariot ? 
 
 In this view, we see our Lord tempted to 
 indulge in a spectacular effect which He would 
 have none of. His lowly, natural human birth 
 was the entrance God chose for Jesus to the 
 world. His Baptism, along with those who 
 sought to "fulfil righteousness," was the entry 
 He Himself chose to His ministry. These have 
 ofiven us the Saviour who is near to us, while 
 close to God ; round them have gathered count- 
 less reverent associations of faith's endearment. 
 Compare with them the Tempter's gaudy project ! 
 He would have annulled their holy simplicity, 
 and would have led Jesus forth as a supernatural 
 acrobat. The scene, as we imagine it, could be 
 portrayed on no page of our Gospels. It is like 
 a woodcut from a mediaeval book of magic. In 
 
132 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 His reply, Thou shall nol lempl, we hear our 
 Lord refuse to prostitute His Godhead to a use 
 which is merely theatrical. Repeatedly, during 
 His after ministry, He was urged to show just 
 some such "sign" as was now demanded by 
 Satan ; but He never lent Himself to thau- 
 maturgic display. All His miracles served a 
 purpose of mercy to the subjects of them, or were 
 instructive as large object-lessons ; and He never 
 stooped to the performance of a merely impressive 
 work of wonder, devoid of moral significance and 
 spiritual aim. 
 
 In this Temptation we must distinguish what 
 was peculiar in it, and of particular application to 
 our Lord, from what is of wider significance and 
 capable of application to ourselves. The super- 
 natural transportation from the desert to the Holy 
 City ; the giddy poising on the Temple ledge ; 
 the descent proposed from thence, — these were, 
 in a sense, accidental features of the Temptation. 
 They command our reverent interest ; and, so far 
 as may be, we must give them careful attention in 
 order that we understand them. Yet they are far 
 apart from circumstances such as ours. But our 
 Lord's clear, short answer to the Tempter shows 
 that the moral and spiritual issues underlying the 
 Snare were simple. And the fact that He couched 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 133 
 
 His answer in the terms of a command addressed 
 by God to all who own Him Lord, means that 
 this Temptation was in its essence such as other 
 men might suffer ; such also as they might meet, 
 as well as He, with weapons from the common 
 armoury of faith. 
 
 The Snare of the Fourth Dimension has 
 reference to a thing which Jesus in His earthly 
 life shared with us, namely, our imprisonment 
 within the bounds of material things, in which the 
 temporal is seen, and the eternal hid from sight. 
 
 In our ordinary life and work we accept the 
 limitations of physical existence without question 
 and almost without thought. But when the word 
 of God is in our ears ; and when faith in Him lifts 
 up the eyes of its inward and imperfect sight ; 
 when also the impulse of His spiritual law lays a 
 pressure to obedience on our backward will, — then 
 the material limitations of our ordinary life press 
 hard upon us. They seem to contradict the 
 spiritual with bold insolence. They drag down 
 our aspirations. They ^all our hearts with the 
 fetters of worldly weakness and want. Whether 
 in the Temple court of Jerusalem long ago, or in 
 the streets of our own town to-day, the earth is 
 the floor of a prison to man. It is hard and dark. 
 We cannot see through it, nor can we pass 
 
134 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 through it to find a gateway into largeness and 
 beauty beyond. If a man will cast himself down 
 upon the earth, he shall but prove himself a 
 stupid clod ; and where he falls there he shall lie, a 
 part of the dead earth around him ; and the height 
 from which he may adventure shall measure the 
 height of his folly, and not the elevation of his 
 faith. Thus the floor of our prison is solid 
 beneath us, and strong with a strength which is 
 deadly to resist. 
 
 But have we not freedom upwards in the 
 open heavens ? And on every hand a wide room 
 without walls ? Nay ! we are tied down with 
 invisible bonds ; and if we go far to east or west, 
 we do but make a weary circuit back to the 
 narrow place from whence we started forth. 
 Thus are we in prison ; and if our sight can go 
 beyond our prison-house, it sees no thing that 
 points us surely to the throne of God whence His 
 law comes, or to the light of His presence which 
 is eternal truth. Yet His word of love is in 
 our ears, and His law of righteousness upon our 
 heart. And these are within us ; and it is they 
 that make us beat against the hard pavement of 
 our life, and run abroad restlessly to find a wall 
 to the world with a door out to heaven. And 
 when we strain our eyes to see God afar in the 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 135 
 
 heavens, we see nothing but that temporal which 
 alone can be seen. 
 
 It is in such ways that this Temptation of our 
 Lord may come upon us. If ReHgion be true, 
 so many things ought to justify our faith. If we 
 be sons of God, the spiritual must transcend the 
 gross material. No distance can be vast enough 
 to stay our flight to the very feet of God. No 
 darkness can hinder the sight of our eyes when 
 they seek to His heart. If the spring of His 
 eternal life be within us, we hold within our- 
 selves the key that can unlock all physical impos- 
 sibilities with the skill and power of Him who 
 made these barriers and set them up between 
 the world and heaven. 
 
 Such feelinors and thoughts are not those of 
 submission and faith. When we are tempted to 
 try God, the suggestion may come in the language 
 of faith ; but unbelief may wear the guise of a 
 great confidence, and rise within us in an unholy 
 impulse to arrogate to our imperfect selves the 
 high prerogative of perfect knowledge and un- 
 hindered power. 
 
 The control of spirit over matter is a secret 
 that is still kept from us by God ; and the power 
 of the soul over its material body is still largely 
 hid. God has given us other things to learn at 
 
136 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 present. We chafe for the control of the spiritual 
 over material things : but there is something be- 
 tween us and that ; for now is the time God has 
 appointed for us to gain control of the spiritual 
 over moral things and powers. It is for this that 
 He has placed us in a certain school which we 
 rebelliously would call a prison. He has chosen 
 our surroundings and ordained their limits with 
 both wisdom and love. There is a great trial of 
 faith in the denseness and the distance which shut 
 us off from the powers that underlie nature and 
 transcend it. We must neither deny nor grudge 
 this, for it is of God. When we feel as if this or 
 that ought to be, in consistency with the demands 
 of faith, let us know that what ought to be shall 
 be. But as Jesus put first the fulfilment of all 
 righteousness, so, in our case, the moral necessity 
 comes first. By Scripture, as well as by reason, 
 we are promised a future great enlargement of 
 faculty and activity ; but first we must be morally 
 fit to grasp and hold and use it. 
 
 Though even now we are the sons of God, 
 "it doth not yet appear what we shall be;" but 
 we shall be like Him, who was tempted like as 
 we are, if in Him we avoid the Tempter's snare 
 and overcome his power. "It doth not yet 
 appear ; " meanwhile, (that long meanwhile of the 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 137 
 
 patience of God in which He waits for our im- 
 provement,) we cherish a faith in great, future 
 things not yet revealed ; and we must already 
 be like Him in a humble acceptance of the 
 conditions of God for our temporal life. 
 
 As this Temptation has an aspect that con- 
 cerned Jesus towards God alone, and another 
 that concerned His mission to men; as He was 
 tempted not only to presumptuous precipitancy 
 but also to display, so the lessons which His 
 trial has for us are susceptible also of this double 
 view. 
 
 The trial of the Temple ledge was unique ; 
 and the nearest analogue to it may not be general 
 among men, for perhaps not everyone is con- 
 scious of the material bonds which restrain the 
 human spirit in a subjection that may gall to 
 resentment, and a rebellious tempting of God. 
 Yet there is a lesson here for all ; for our Lord, 
 in His victorious reply, exposes all the tempt- 
 ations of Satan towards rashness and presumption 
 and prideful display. And these are common. 
 
 Often does Satan appear as an angel of light 
 to lead us out of the path of duty and safety, 
 under the pretext of trust in God. This wile 
 may invite us to recklessness of any sort, and 
 to the abuse of Divine care by trying to make it 
 
138 THE TEMFIATION OF JESUS 
 
 serve foolhardiness. We may rush into danger, 
 praying for preservation, when our first need is 
 pardon. Such snares beset reHgious life. Ex- 
 perience abounds in spiritual precipices, and we 
 have need to walk warily. We say that we are 
 sons of God in Christ, and the Tempter says : 
 Yea, and as sons ye may have much liberty ; go 
 where you will, do what you will, God will keep 
 you from harm. Deluded by such sophisms, we 
 have seen the amiable zeal of a recent faith 
 spoiled by the vapours of sin, which it went into 
 and meant to dissipate. Instead of seeking cir- 
 cumstances of difficulty that grace and power 
 may abound, we must avoid danger whenever 
 we seek our Father's care ; and His answer may 
 come in successful avoidance rather than in 
 extrication or repair. 
 
 In His attitude of waiting dependence, Jesus 
 is the perfect type of the relation we are meant 
 to bear to God. The secret of any life and 
 power we now have, or shall hereafter have, is 
 that dependence in which we take what God 
 gives, and do what He wills. 
 
 The promise quoted by the Tempter^ is one 
 given to walkers for their walking. It speaks 
 of ways and treading and trampling ; and to use 
 ^ Ps. xci. 11-13. 
 
THE SNARE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION 139 
 
 its terms in reference to a flying leap is to pervert 
 it. And our progress to the presence of God 
 and to His ends is a walk. In it we move as 
 ordinary men along a common road. We are 
 not borne on wings past toil, nor lifted up by 
 magic out of straits and danger. When, there- 
 fore, you are in doubt or difficulty, or harassed 
 in any wise, wait : stand firm and still. If you 
 are where God put you, He will meet you where 
 you are. And if He send you or beckon you 
 across even very rough, hard discouragements, 
 or through pressing perils, walk : go forward to 
 the place He has appointed, and He will guard 
 your way. Thus tempt Him not ; but trust Him 
 and obey. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE 
 WORLD. 
 
 141 
 
Again, the Devil taketh Him up into ayi exceeding high 
 mountain, and she^veth Hijji all the kingdoms of the world, 
 and the glory of the?n ; and saith unto Him, All these 
 things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down a7id wor- 
 ship Tne. — Matt. iv. 8, 9. 
 
 The Devil, taking Him up into an high mountain, 
 shewed unto Him all the kiiigdoms of the world in a 
 moment of time. And the Devil said tnito Him, All 
 this power will I give Thee, and the glory of them : for 
 that is delivered unto me; a7id to whomsoever I will I 
 give it. If Thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be 
 Thine. — Luke iv. 5-7. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE 
 WORLD. 
 
 < 
 
 IN studying the Temptations in the Wilder- 
 ness, it may strike us how apparently trivial 
 the first two are. In them the issues of good 
 and evil are hung upon such small things as a 
 meal of bread and a venturesome step. But we 
 may discern a progress in these typical Tempt- 
 ations. First, in His weakness and hunger, Jesus 
 is tempted to a faithless distrust of His Father's 
 care. The next snare is laid to catch, not faith- 
 lessness, but faith. Jesus has refused to exert 
 His power to make stones into bread, and has 
 elected to depend quietly on God, even in 
 extreme distress. So Satan says : Thou wilt not 
 use Thy power ? then take hold of God, and with 
 a great trust compel Him to exert His strength 
 to save Thee in this deadly leap. These earlier 
 Temptations, therefore, are snares of guile rather 
 than assaults of strength. And in this they are 
 
144 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 like most of the temptations to which we are 
 exposed ; for constantly do great moral and 
 spiritual issues hang upon trifles, and right and 
 wrong are guilefully obscured in the manner of 
 their presentation to our choice. 
 
 Very different from these is the third Tempt- 
 ation, in which the Devil taketk Him itp into an 
 exceeding high mountain, and sheweth Hi?n all 
 the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them ; 
 and saith unto Him, All these things will I give 
 unto Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship 77ie. "7 
 
 Notice the progress in the Devil's manifesta— > 
 tion of himself. First he came as one who shared 
 with Jesus the Wilderness environment of stones 
 and hungry barrenness. Then as one who could 
 transport himself and Jesus with a flight as of 
 thought from the desert to Jerusalem. Now 
 again his personality enlarges, and his power 
 extends before our view. And his role as 
 Tempter is altered correspondingly. He was 
 first a wanderer in the desert ; then his haunts 
 were shown to be as wide as the land of Israel, 
 which should be the scene of Jesus' ministry ; and 
 now he who had lately hovered on the topmost 
 places of the Temple extends his flight to the 
 high places of the earth, and, pointing to the 
 kingdoms of all the world and the glory of them, 
 
ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE WORLD 145 
 
 he says to Jesus, All these things will I give 
 Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and wo7^ship me. 
 
 In the earHer Temptations, Satan had dared 
 Jesus to a display of Divine power. His own and 
 His Father's ; and had prefaced his proposals 
 with an If Thou be God's Son : now from these \ 
 Snares he betakes himself to direct Assault. This 
 change of attitude is strategical. The abrupt 
 boldness of impious attack is meant to bear down 
 opposition by sheer force. The Tempted One 
 is to be appalled into submission at the same 
 time that He is dazzled by a stupendous display 
 of the Tempter's imperial power. To us it seems^^ 
 a cruel test; for Jesus is bowed with bodily 
 weakness and the fatigue of prolonged resistance 
 and the burden of His impending ministry. And 
 his heart is beset by the human longing for repose, 
 even if it be in the rest of defeat. To the eye of 
 the Tempter, skilled in temptation, the manhood 
 of Jesus seems about to preponderate and over- 
 balance His Divinity. Jesus has hitherto insisted 
 on answering as a man the appeals which have 
 been addressed to Him as God's Son ; and this 
 time the Tempter answers the implied rebuke with 
 which Jesus has unmasked his wiles. As a man ^ 
 Jesus is now addressed ; and with a magnificent 
 insolence of blasphemy Satan boasts to the Son of 
 
146 THE TEMPTATIOxN OF JESUS 
 
 Man his power over this his kingdom, the world. 
 Pointing to all of greatness and glory the wide 
 world displays, he says : All this is mine : it is 
 delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will I give 
 it} All these things zvill I give Thee, if Thotc wilt 
 fall down and ivorship 7ne. A moment's obeisance, 
 and the world's rule in return ; and upon that crucial 
 moment is hung the kingship of Satan and the 
 Kingdom of God in the world. The enormity of 
 the profaneness staggers us to contemplate. Surely 
 this is a second climax of Satan's proud defiance 
 of God ; an exaggerated repetition of the sin that ^ 
 cast him out of heaven ? But this is the way in 
 which the Tempter turns from his appeals to Jesus 
 as the Son of God ; this is how he measures out 
 defiant insolence to the tempted Son of Man. 
 Our Lord's dignity of deliberate response is 
 roused to a passion of indignation as, in tones of 
 powerful command. He replies : Get thee hence I 
 But still He answers as a man, and quotes 
 revealed authority : It is written, Thon shall 
 worship the Lord thy God; and Him only shall 
 thou serve. 
 
 We read that Satan took Jesus up into an 
 exceeding high mountain, and shewed Him all the 
 kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. 
 
 ^ Luke iv. 6. 
 
ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE WORLD 147 
 
 We know that there is not in all geography any- 
 mountain commanding such a prospect. This 
 is how the Temptation was understood by the 
 disciples to whom our Lord told it ; and it may 
 be that this was how it appeared to Jesus 
 Himself. What we are here told of is a 
 miraculous flash of sight, in which Jesus and His 
 Tempter surveyed the breadth of the world 
 and its pomp in one dazzling moment of super- 
 natural vision. S. Luke indicates that the 
 prospect was not displayed to the physical eye, 
 when he says that the things Satan showed were 
 seen in a moment of time} The human eye can 
 see but little in a moment ; and in presence of 
 a scene, if we do not take leisure and look from 
 point to point with careful observation, we are 
 blind although our eyes are open ; and though 
 beauty or power be unveiled before us, we can 
 not see their glory for lack of time to look. It 
 is the sight of the mind, therefore, of which the 
 Gospels tell ; and perhaps of the mind, not 
 merely independent of the eye, but untrammelled 
 by the limits of a material organ of mentation. 
 Thus, in this Temptation we have another 
 glimpse of the transcendency of spirit over 
 matter and space and time. And as, lately, 
 
 ^ Luke iv. 5. 
 
148 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Jesus was exalted during forty days and nights 
 of conflict so that He was unconscious of the 
 passing of the moments into hours and days till 
 six long weeks had passed ; so, now, a moment 
 of time is stretched so as to contain a vision of 
 the world's extent and an apprehension of the 
 greatness of its pomp. 
 
 tl It is impossible to see this Temptation rightly, 
 if we view it with a narrow look. It was 
 necessary, for its presentation to Jesus, that He 
 should be shown the kingdom of the Devil in 
 the world. And we must have the same outlook ; 
 and, understanding, we must see the fact of Satan's 
 sovereignty and the nature and extent of his rule. 
 This Temptation is no mere snare in which wily 
 deception is sought to be exercised upon our 
 Lord. The offer of Satan is evidently real. 
 The key to the transaction is in the fact that, in 
 a profound and most important sense, this world 
 belongs to Satan. This claim on his part is 
 implied in S. Matthew's version ; and it is ex- 
 plicitly stated in that of S. Luke : All this 
 power will I give Thee, and the glory : for that is 
 delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will I give 
 it. This is the Devil's assertion, and it is not 
 contradicted by our Lord. We may even observe 
 that there is credited to Satan the intention to 
 
ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE WORLD 149 
 
 be accurate ; for he implies the supremacy of 
 God while asserting his own mastery in the 
 world : that is delive7^ed unto me. 
 
 Here, in very remarkable surroundings, we 
 have a great mystery told, though not explained. 
 This world in its glory and power is claimed by 
 Satan, and his claim is not disputed, but virtually 
 recognised. This is an important glimpse of the 
 moral and spiritual background which lies behind 
 the life of this world and all its affairs. And not 
 only for our understanding of this Temptation, 
 but also for our understanding of all religion, it is 
 of immense importance that we realise in some 
 measure what this means. 
 
 All through Scripture we may find hints at 
 the sovereignty of Satan in the world. The 
 heart of the Eden story is its pictorial represent- 
 ation of his malignant triumph in the corruption of 
 humanity ; and this does but picture and enforce 
 the fact that evil has a foothold in the earth, and, 
 spite of God or by His leave, stands unashamed 
 and lords it in the affairs of men. How this 
 came to be, is never discussed in Scripture ; but 
 it is of great interest and meaning to have the 
 statement that behind the sin of the world is the 
 fact that men are the natural prey of evil, because 
 their home is in the world, and the world is the 
 
ISO THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 kingdom of an evil king, to whom is delivered Its 
 glory and power to give them to whomsoever he 
 will. No doubt, there will always be some inter- 
 preters of Christian truth who prefer to take both 
 the king and his kingship as symbolical. But that 
 does not affect the essential truth of the scrip- 
 tural regard of men and their affairs in relation 
 to the world and nature, though it may lessen 
 the intensity of the personal apprehension of the 
 Bible view. 
 
 If we read the Old Testament in the light of 
 this view, it is the history of God's attempt to 
 found a Theocracy within the realm of Satan's 
 rule. But at the time when Satan met Jesus in 
 the Wilderness that long endeavour had attained 
 only a small success, and the Devil's boast of 
 mastery was not unwarranted. He was still 
 king in the world ; and that not merely in name. 
 He was not endowed with only a shadowy rule, 
 whose interest was historical rather than present 
 and practical. The power of the kingdoms was 
 in his grasp ; and their glory was his, wherewith 
 to dazzle the eyes of men and even of the Son of 
 God. It is in the light of this actual sovereignty 
 and personal supremacy of Satan that we must 
 view this Temptation of Jesus by him. 
 
 The long endeavour of God to gain a king- 
 
ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE WORLD 151 
 
 dom in the world had, so far, been frustrated on 
 a large scale by the power of Satan within his 
 realm. But God had not abandoned that en- 
 deavour ; and now a climax in His effort had 
 arrived ; and here is His Son in the nature of 
 humanity, standing among men in the place 
 of their servitude to sin. By virtue of His 
 manhood, Jesus is within the area of Satan's 
 sovereignty ; and He has come, not to deny 
 his authority or dispute his reign, but to subvert 
 these. His purpose is confessed : to save men 
 from the Devil's power, to destroy his works, 
 and, in the end, to destroy Satan himself and his 
 kingdom together. 
 
 This Temptation shows the unveiled meeting 
 of the Prince of this world with the Son of the 
 Eternal King. To Satan, the coming of Jesus 
 was a foreign invasion, and His ministry an 
 incitement to rebellion. And that view is 
 perhaps the deepest we can have of Christ's 
 work on the earth. It is apparently His own 
 view, underlying all His deeds and expressed 
 in many of His words. Jesus constantly in- 
 sisted on the Kingdom of God as a new and 
 foreig'n thinof which He came to bring". And 
 we may find implied in this a reference to the 
 Kingdom of Satan which was native to the 
 
152 THE TEMFl^ATION OF JESUS 
 
 world. So, also, the mere phrase " Kingdom 
 of Heaven " may be seen to imply a contrast 
 with the kingdom of the world. \We remember, 
 too, our Lord's emphatic assertion : " My king- 
 dom is not of this world." ^ He said this 
 pointedly to Pilate. Here was the Wilderness 
 Temptation recurring ; and here it was again 
 rejected. He might have had the world's 
 sovereignty, but He expressly disowned and 
 refused it. We must relate with this our Lord's 
 urgency regarding the relinquishment of the 
 things of earth by those who would choose 
 heaven's treasure. And if we ask, Why might 
 not the kingdom brought by Jesus have been at 
 once a kingdom of the world and of heaven ? 
 the answer seems to be, that this world had 
 already a king, and his were the glory and power 
 of its reign ; and men could become subjects of 
 God only by rebelling against Satan's rule. It 
 has been held by some that here and now this 
 world is hell ; and there is much to be said for 
 their contention. 
 
 It is a mystery to us, how rebellious Satan 
 shoul<;^ have such freedom and power ; but Scrip- 
 ture shows, though obscurely, that there are 
 definite limits to these, and that there is reserved 
 
 ^ John xviii. 36. 
 
ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE WORLD 153 
 
 for Satan and those under him a long delayed 
 judgment, which shall be followed by their final 
 doom, in which the enemies of God, with their 
 works, shall be destroyed. The mission of Jesus 
 was one of rescue. The world, Satan's kingdom, 
 was involved in his doom ; and the men to whom 
 God had given life from Himself were entangled 
 in the fatal toils of death. Therefore Christ 
 came ; the strength and life of God were centred 
 in Him. He came, and He remained, free from 
 the evil that severed men from God and made 
 them subject to Satan. His mission was to undo 
 the malignant work of Satan and reveal the 
 deadliness of sin ; and this He did by revealing 
 the love of God and imparting the secret of His 
 life. And He told the height and wideness of 
 His supremacy, and its future vindication in a 
 judgment which must perish all that is at enmity 
 with Him. 
 
 The errand of Jesus was to incite men to a 
 revolt from Satan which should make them freed- 
 men of heaven ; to induce an allegiance to God 
 in which they should be His sons. Within the 
 very bounds of Satan's principality He would 
 create a kingdom of heaven peopled by a 
 spiritual race of God's sons ; and it was for 
 this that He set Himself to found a Church 
 
154 THE TExMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 detached from those temporalities which were 
 the glory of Satan and the instruments of his 
 malign power. These were the husks of this 
 world, which were grasped by the strong hand of 
 Satan. The kernel was men's hearts; and Jesus 
 sought the living core, careless of the husk, and 
 in many urgent words He tried to teach men His 
 own eager assiduity regarding life, and His own 
 utter carelessness of the things that in this world 
 encumber it. His aim was to rob the hand of 
 Satan of its living prey ; and He was content to 
 leave in his clutch the glory and power of the 
 world, and that he who was dead to God should 
 carry these dead things to his own eternal death. 
 For, the last that we see in Scripture of Satan's 
 kingdom is a glimpse of this world perishing in 
 flames ; and that lurid evening is followed by the 
 morning of the new day of a new heaven and 
 earth, in which there is no King save God, and 
 no law save love, and no death, but only life. 
 
 We live so much on the surface of things that 
 we are apt not to realise that there is an unseen 
 basis of our moral life, and a hidden background 
 of the spiritual conflict of our toilsome days. 
 There is a depth in our experience that we are 
 apt to disregard. In our moral conflict there is 
 an intensity that is utterly disproportioned to the 
 
ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE WORLD 155 
 
 trifles it immediately concerns. The things that 
 test our character are in themselves ridiculously- 
 unimportant ; yet round them there turns an 
 immortal destiny. This fateful undercurrent of 
 our smooth and superficial life is vividly shown 
 in this Temptation ; there is a battle being fought 
 around us and by us, and we need to know it and 
 be strong and fully armed. What is hid from 
 easy, careless eyes was plainly seen by Paul, and 
 is pointed out by him in these remarkable terms : 
 "Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, 
 but against the principalities, against the powers, 
 against the world-rulers of this darkness ; against 
 the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly 
 places."^ 
 
 Our home, meanwhile, is in the camp of 
 Satan ; but Jesus carried His war of righteousness 
 into the camp of our enemy, who held us captive, 
 and thus we live in the midst of that strife in 
 which the stake on Satan's part is the kingship of 
 the world, and on our part is the life of our souls. 
 
 When the Devil met Jesus in the time of His 
 Temptation, the Wilderness was, as it were, the 
 frontier of his realm. There he met the Divine 
 Invader ; and in this third Temptation we see him 
 deal with Jesus regarding the gigantic enterprise 
 
 1 Eph. vi. i2(R.V.). 
 
156 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 He now essayed. In a moment of time, the rebel 
 king arrays himself in all the glory and power of 
 the kingdoms of the earth. With their splen- 
 dour upon him, he speaks to Jesus according to 
 His own election, as a man. But in the Divine 
 Man he recognises a kingly One, fit to be King 
 of all the world ; and that Kingship he offers 
 Him. All will I give Thee, if TJion wilt fall 
 down and worship me. In such a greeting, Satan 
 acknowledges that the coming of Jesus means 
 ultimate defeat for himself. There belongs to 
 Jesus a power which he cannot withstand ; and 
 its strength is in this : that He has not done 
 homage to sin. All men who have bowed to 
 wrong are the subjects of Satan. This Man is 
 not such. He is free though in the world of sin ; 
 and He is stronger than its kinor. Therefore 
 Satan seeks to buy Him over to alliance with 
 himself; and the whole world with its glory and 
 power is his bribe. 
 
 If Jesus would bend His heart towards Satan 
 and away from God, then He too should have 
 sinned ; and the forces of heaven which were in 
 Him should be powerless against hell; and the 
 powers of life, which were His for death's de- 
 struction, should be themselves cut off from life ; 
 and the avenue of God, whose door He opened 
 
ASSAULT OF THE KING OF THE WORLD 157 
 
 between heaven and earth, should be locked 
 behind Him so that He could not go back, and, 
 in a victory over death, set wide that "open door 
 which none can shut."^ This was Satan's im- 
 potent desire ; and in his bold bid of all he had 
 in all the world we see the price that he set upon 
 the man Christ Jesus. 
 
 If we miss here the subtlety which marks the 
 two earlier Temptations, let us not fail to realise 
 the vehement force with which Jesus is now 
 assailed. We may be sure that the sense of this 
 was very real to Him, and that its pressure was 
 hard to withstand. For the ministry of Jesus 
 was hard to His manhood. The way of life for 
 men must be for Him a way of death; and we 
 know, in our measure, how the trial pressed upon 
 Him, so that at one time and another He was 
 "sore amazed," and "troubled" in spirit, and 
 "straitened"; and how He cried out to God, that 
 He might intervene to recall the sentence of His 
 sacrifice. These sore things were the penalty of 
 His perseverance in His enterprise of life, within 
 the sphere of death. And He saw them as 
 vividly in the Wilderness as He did in Geth- 
 semane ; and there also He accepted them as 
 really as in the late night of His betrayal. Can 
 
 1 Rev. iii. 8. 
 
158 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 we doubt that this choice was hard in the presence 
 of this world's Prince ? For, when He indignantly 
 refused homage to any but God, and professed 
 His allegiance to Heaven, Jesus gave Himself 
 over to the fierce hate of Hell in the day of its 
 power, and to the cruelty of men who would not 
 be saved from sin. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 UNHALLOWED MEANS AND 
 UNHOLY ENDS. 
 
 »59 
 
The Devil . . . sheweth Him all the kingdoms of the 
 world, and the glory of them,; and saith nnio Him, All 
 these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down 
 and worship me. — Matt. iv. 8, 9. 
 
 160 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 UNHALLOWED MEANS AND 
 UNHOLY ENDS. 
 
 IN Satan's claim of the kingdoms of the world 
 and their power ^ and glory for his own, the 
 emphasis is on the power and glory. And if we 
 would understand the kingship of Satan, we must 
 think of what the power and glory of the world 
 are, and how it is that Satan can grasp and hold 
 these, so that he is a king within the dominions of 
 Almighty God while a rebel against His law. 
 
 Power and glory are not simple things ; also 
 they are not absolute, but relative. They take all 
 their meaning from the mind and heart that are 
 capable of swelling with the sense of greatness 
 controlled, and rising in the pride of glory 
 possessed. 
 
 There are natures to which power is non- 
 existent save in the form of brute force. The 
 
 ^ Luke iv. 6, ■whQxt power is added to the giory of S. Matthew's 
 report. 
 
1 62 THE TEINIPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 beasts of the field can have no conception of 
 power, beyond that of strength for fight ; and it 
 is the mark of beasts that have come under 
 human control, that they are subdued by a vague 
 sense of an ascendency in man which is stronger 
 and more subtle than mere strength. They have 
 a dim knowledge of his power, which, in its 
 rise, may be little more than a recognition of 
 his complex ability to inflict pain and devise 
 restraints. The beasts are embarrassed by man 
 when they yield to him ; we cannot credit them 
 with any real sense of what his power is. As 
 for a sense of glory on their part, the nearest 
 thing to it that we can see is that physical 
 exhilaration which is produced in some by wide 
 space and free air and bright light. In a high- 
 bred horse, for example, we may see that animal 
 nature reflects the world's glory in the tingling 
 response of his quivering strength. The brutes 
 share the pulse of the world's strength to the 
 full ; they are a part of its glory, and more or 
 less consciously enjoy the flow of its life. Also, 
 they are capable of terror in the presence of 
 exceptional manifestations of nature's forces. 
 
 But power and glory, in the human sense, are 
 very different from this. These are the products 
 of conscious reflection and of moral considerations. 
 
UNHALLOWED MEANS AND UNHOLY ENDS 163 
 
 Power becomes a new thing when we rise from 
 physical force to intellectual control, and to that 
 complicated ascendency which has its source and 
 sphere in moral factors and conditions. It is 
 one great difference that marks off civilisation 
 from savagery, that, as we rise in the scale of 
 development, mere physical force counts for less 
 and less ; and the mental and moral bulk more 
 and more in the sense of what is great and 
 glorious. 
 
 Yet the material things of the world are not 
 dropped out of account by man in his advance- 
 ment. They are taken up and transformed in 
 character ; they are grasped to be used for ends 
 beyond themselves. The problems of humanity 
 gather round the fact that man lives a moral life 
 in and through material things. As his spirit is 
 clothed and conditioned by the body, so his 
 whole life is clothed by the things of the world. 
 These make him what he is ; but he in turn 
 makes the world. Its gold is a new creation when 
 he mints it into money ; for he stamps it with a 
 new significance, which is moral and legal, national 
 and social. So, also, the jewels of the earth 
 become insignia of monetary and aesthetic rank ; 
 and the common comforts and necessities, which 
 are first the accessories of physical life, become 
 
 y 
 
1 64 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 still more the accessories of a life whose base is 
 not physical but mental and moral, in the sense 
 that all social things are such. 
 / The power and glory of the world, as these 
 
 are known to man, are moral, but made out of 
 the material. All riches and grandeur are 
 glorified dust ; and honour and power are subtle 
 webs spun out of man's heart and weaved round 
 his soul ; and they interlace each man's life with 
 his fellow's. 
 
 From this we may see the precise point at 
 which Satan can grasp the power and glory of 
 the world, and be a Prince in it over men, even 
 while it belongs to God the Creator. The king- 
 ship of Satan is a 7noral power ; his power is over 
 men who have sinned ; and when he touches the 
 moral affairs of men and sways the issues of right 
 and wrong, he touches the point where power and 
 glory emerge from brute force and common 
 matter. Gold is God's in the mine ; it may 
 become Satan's when it is put into currency ; 
 because, as money, it is more the creation of man 
 than of God. The gems of the earth are God's in 
 the mine ; they are His also in the hand of the 
 innocent child, who delights in their radiance and 
 colour. But they may become Satan's peculiar 
 possession and instrument when they have gained 
 
UNHALLOWED MEANS AND UNHOLY ENDS 165 
 
 the significance of wealth and social display and 
 rivalry. The beauty and sparkle which please 
 the little child cannot debase him ; but the same 
 lustre may kindle in the full-grown eye the light 
 of envious desire, and fill the lustful heart with 
 dull discontent or base dishonesty. So also 
 with shelter and food and clothing- : these are 
 good in God's hand, though they are material 
 things of this world ; and they are good in our 
 hand when we take them simply, and with thanks 
 to Him who gives us them. But Satan may be 
 the architect of fortune to the ambitious man, who 
 seeks, not sufficiency for want and good works, 
 but that abundance which makes power and 
 glory. His mark may be on every stone of the 
 mansion that is reared as a temple of Mammon ; 
 and the clothes that should serve decency and 
 health may become the livery of Satan ; and 
 though the table is spread with the best gifts of 
 God and uncovered with pious decorum, the 
 sumptuous meal may be, morally, an orgie of the 
 Devil's worship. 
 
 It is thus that Satan can claim and grasp the 
 power of the world and its glory. His hold on 
 men is moral ; and only through sin can he touch 
 men and their affairs. But power and glory are 
 each a compound made up of material things />/us 
 
1 66 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 moral interests ; and in all the affairs of men 
 which concern these Satan has a hold on the 
 moral part of those compounds, the world's power 
 and glory ; and a handle by which he can turn 
 them to his own use in establishing a moral sway, 
 which is founded on the material instruments of 
 moral interests, 
 / In view of this we may discern the nature 
 
 of the kingship that was offered to Jesus in the 
 third Temptation. 
 
 The Assault of the King of the world was 
 made in a Temptation of Unhallowed Means. 
 Jesus came seeking a spiritual and moral king- 
 ship which should subvert the rule of Satan 
 in the world. The means to that could only 
 be moral and spiritual ; but Satan sought to turn 
 Him aside to seek an influence like his own in 
 source and character. Jesus found Satan using 
 a long accustomed control of men's hearts by 
 means of the medley of moral and material 
 interests which go to make up worldly power 
 and glory. He found men holding to this 
 world's things with strained hearts and tense 
 grasp ; their moral nature bent down to the 
 material objects of their misguided, eager desire, 
 and their interest so engrrossed that heaven 
 had no attraction for them, and things spiritual 
 
UNHALLOWED MEANS AND UNHOLY ENDS 167 
 
 no reality. This, He came to reverse. He came, 
 that men might leave dead things and cling 
 to life, and, instead of grovelling earthwards, 
 might aspire to heaven. His coming was a 
 true epoch in the evolution of humanity ; for 
 when He came the moral was in the world, 
 with only the material below it to hold on to 
 or to stand upon. Jesus brought to light the 
 purely spiritual, and set it within reach of men's 
 hearts. Then, the moral was clearly set between 
 these two, the material and the spiritual — that 
 which was lower than itself and that which was 
 hipfher. Thus the choice between the world and 
 heaven was displayed. The project of Jesus 
 was to disentangle the entwinement of moral with 
 material. Out of that compound, earth's glory. 
 He would take the moral element that men's 
 hearts supplied, and wrest it from its debasing 
 partnership, and attach it to the gifts of God's 
 love and His Spirit and life. Thus He would 
 make a new union of moral with spiritual, in 
 which men should be drawn up with Him from 
 earth to heaven, from death to life, from Satan 
 to God. 
 
 It Is on the threshold of this errand that 
 Satan assails Jesus to turn Him aside from His 
 purpose. It is therefore that he leads Him into 
 
i68 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 the sphere of earth's power and glory, and invites 
 Him to take all that it contains, and with that 
 to be content. The choice put before Jesus is 
 the choice between a spiritual kingdom and a 
 kingdom of this world; and He turns resolutely 
 from the lower to the higher. 
 
 In his offer of the world, Satan tempted 
 our Lord with the bait of personal aggrandise- 
 ment, to lead Him aside from the salvation of 
 men. Power and glory were to be His ; but 
 His possession of them, so gained, could have 
 no promise for the men whom Jesus came to 
 save. We see the essential futility of this 
 Assault when we realise that it was an appeal 
 to a selfishness which was not in Jesus. His 
 mission was not merely incidentally self-sacri- 
 ficing, but unselfish as the very heart of God ; 
 and how beggarly does the imperial Devil look, 
 when we see him with his bribe, beside the 
 humble Jesus ! Jesus, who has no thought for 
 Himself, and no wish for His own things; who 
 for our sakes would not be rich, but was willingly 
 poor that so His help might come to us ! 
 
 Yet it had been easy for Christ to take the 
 world's kingship by means of the power and 
 glory men already loved ; and it was a hard, 
 long task that He faced : to turn the affections 
 
UNHALLOWED MEANS AND UNHOLY ENDS 169 
 
 and lives of men from the earthly and dead to 
 heaven and God's truth and life. He came, a 
 King and to be a King of men ; but, because He 
 disowned the power and glory compounded by 
 Satan with sin, His Kingship was first denied, 
 and then sent out into an unbelieving world to 
 be the subject of age-long debate, before it 
 finally shall win the world to recognition of its 
 Lord. 
 
 When in response to Satan's offer Jesus said, 
 Thou shall worship Ihe Lord, and Him only, He 
 refused the attainment of sovereignty in the 
 world by any other than the spiritual way of 
 God. It might well be hard for His manhood 
 to reject the easy way to the world's throne. 
 But Jesus was true to His God and true to His 
 love for men ; and temporal power and glory 
 were nothing to Him whose heart had not 
 suffered the binding of their spell. In His 
 victorious reply He proved Himself a King, and 
 we hear Him assert that freedom from Satan 
 and sense and sin which was His, and which 
 belonged to no other man. Though it was 
 man's birthright, it was a new gift from Heaven 
 with which Jesus was fully endowed. It was 
 this that made Him the Saviour of mankind ; 
 for He brought this freedom in Himself, to share 
 
I70 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 it with all who would receive the truth that it 
 should make them free. 
 
 There is a dramatic aspect of the Temptations 
 of Jesus, in which, without detracting from the 
 reality and intensity with which they affected 
 Him in the Wilderness, we may see in each of 
 them, rehearsed beforehand in epitome, things 
 which were afterwards to be acted out in the 
 larger scene of the national ministry of Jesus, and 
 which were again to be reproduced in the 
 experience of His followers and the history of 
 His Church. 
 
 Few things are clearer in the ministry of 
 Jesus than the constant besetting of His steps by 
 the Temptation of Unhallowed Means. In the 
 Wilderness, Satan offered Him power and glory 
 in the large and, as it were, in the abstract. 
 He was tempted to pursue the unhallowed 
 method of homage to Satan, and to seek by that 
 means the unholy end of an unspiritual reign. 
 So represented, this choice was between faithful- 
 ness to God and frank blasphemy against Him; 
 and there is no indication as to the way in 
 which Satan miorht Cfive the world's throne to 
 Jesus. 
 
 In His ministry, our Lord might not again be 
 
UNHALLOWED MEANS AND UNHOLY ENDS 171 
 
 subject to such an unveiled Assault as this in the 
 Wilderness is. But the same Temptation was 
 pressed closely home to Him in His dealings with 
 the people of Israel and their rulers. He was 
 met by a mass of Messianic expectation, which 
 would have welcomed His pretension to an 
 earthly throne. Was He not David's Son ? 
 Did He not tread the courts of His fathers' 
 capital and walk throughout the borders of the 
 fair principality that had been theirs? These 
 things Israel remembered, and did not let Him 
 forget. Cherishing the traditions of an ancient 
 glory, long since dead, they fed upon these their 
 present pride and their hate of Rome's oppression 
 and their hope of deliverance. The cliffs of 
 Jerusalem and her ancient stones ; the hills and 
 valleys of the land, — all had fingers that pointed 
 to the past, and each a tongue that longed to 
 speak allegiance to a native king. If Messiah 
 would but come and speak the word. He should 
 be answered with a loyal echo from every heart 
 in Israel. The throne of David was empty ; and 
 if He would claim it, every stone and hill and 
 vale should be a fortress to defend His right. 
 Then the glorious past might live again. Then 
 Jesus, rapturously embraced by an enthusiastic 
 nation, might overthrow the iron rule of Rome 
 
172 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 and centre a world-wide empire round the little 
 Hebrew state. There was a kingship in Jesus 
 that could have accomplished this ; and the power 
 and glory of such a dream were Satan's to give. 
 The whole pressure of popular opinion and 
 impulse was ready to further Him if He would 
 espouse its ends. The whole strength of world- 
 inlluence were with Him if, instead of a humble 
 walk to heavenly ends, He would choose a royal 
 progress to an earthly throne. 
 
 But the throne of Jesus was in heaven ; and 
 the enthronement that He sought on earth should 
 be in that bit of heaven which He would have 
 in every human heart. 
 
 If the Temptations of Jesus were thus the 
 trials of His ministry rehearsed beforehand in 
 an intense epitome, they were also the tempt- 
 ations that have beset His Church in the ages of 
 her unworthy following in the footsteps of her 
 Lord. Too often the Church has fallen before 
 Satan's Temptation of Unhallowed Means. At 
 one time and another, in a greater and a less 
 deeree, she has been unfaithful to God and 
 given homage to Satan, and sought the world's 
 sovereignty instead of heaven's kingdom and 
 reward. We see this on a great scale and with 
 terrible effects in the apostasy of Rome from 
 
UNHALLOWED MEANS AND UNHOLY ENDS 173 
 
 purity of faith and worship. The king of this 
 world bought her over to alliance with worldly 
 empire, and gave her a dominion which was 
 great and wide, but unspiritual in its source 
 and character ; and the debasement of Roman 
 doctrine and ritual and practice prove how 
 disastrous it was that the Church failed to stand 
 where her Lord had stood firm and prevailed. 
 
 Even where Roman errors have been re- 
 canted and eschewed. Christian communities 
 have yielded to the glamour of the glory of 
 the world. They have pandered to riches, and 
 bought wealth by the sacrifice of truth. They 
 have grasped influence by policy instead of 
 principle, and allowed temporal powers to usurp 
 spiritual prerogative. In these ways has the 
 Church of Christ been tempted and drawn from 
 her heavenward course. And wherever she has 
 grained emolument and ao-orrandisement from the 
 world, not by faith but by force or by secular 
 law, she has touched the sceptre of Satan, and 
 fallen from her trust in God. 
 
 But, even though she stumble, the Church of 
 Christ is led by God ; and, though she fall, His 
 grace will lift her up. For Jesus met the powers 
 of Satan and death and hell on her behalf; and 
 in the end His victory shall avail, and she shall 
 
174 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 share His completed conquest and His perfect 
 reign. 
 
 While faith and righteousness are always 
 simple, it is peculiarly characteristic of tempt- 
 ation that it is often complex. It begets mis- 
 conceptions and creates misunderstandings. It 
 prevails amid a confusion which is its own 
 atmosphere. It may be that the Temptation of 
 Unhallowed Means with which Jesus was assailed 
 was not merely a simple bid for His disloyalty 
 to God. In another aspect we may see in it an 
 attempt to deceive our Lord into the thought 
 that He might save the world by grasping the 
 lordship Satan offered Him ; that by a seeming 
 alliance with Satan He might effect a world- 
 revolt from him. So viewed, it is a Temptation 
 to seek, not an unholy but a good end by 
 Unhallowed Means. Then this Temptation is a 
 gigantic snare, and its flagrant audacity is the 
 exposure of all such snares. In these there is 
 always present, whether hidden or displayed, the 
 homage to Satan, which is here an expressed 
 term of the proposal. Jesus was not misled ; 
 and let us learn and remember, that goodness 
 cannot use evil means without becoming evil. 
 Thus the use of evil means gives away the power 
 
UNHALLOWED MEANS AND UNHOLY ENDS 175 
 
 of doing good ; and, though Satan may bargain 
 to give or accomplish this or that thing which is 
 near our heart, we must not deal with him ; for all 
 dealings are evil, that are not dealings with good. 
 And Satan does not hold to his bargain ; for, when 
 once evil means are adopted, his end is gained, 
 and we are vassals subject to his lordship, and 
 without appeal. Thus Unhallowed Means lead 
 certainly towards Unholy Ends. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE. 
 
 12 
 
All these things will I give Thee, if Thoic wilt fall down 
 and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, 
 Satan : for it is written, Thou shall worship the Lord thy 
 God, and Him only shall thou serve. — Matt. iv. 9, 10. 
 
 178 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE. 
 
 THE Tempter showed Jesus the world, and 
 dazzled the eyes of His manhood with its 
 power and glory. We must remember that our 
 Lord was a man, and a young man, when He 
 looked on what Satan displayed. The appeal 
 of such a vision to such a mind as His must have 
 been immense ; but its chief force was not a 
 pressure in that direction to which the Tempter 
 sought to turn Him. Still, let us see Jesus as 
 He looks, for the first time, on the wide scene 
 of the world's activity and feels the glow of its 
 fevered heart. He is newly separated from the 
 retirement of His prolonged youth. A new 
 consciousness of relation to the world and of 
 mission to it has filled His mind. A peerless 
 love for men is in His heart ; and along with it 
 an impulse to join Himself to them and to grasp 
 their affairs with His hand. In His motion and 
 
 strong resolve towards action, the steps of Jesus 
 
 179 
 
i8o THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 have been turned aside into the Wilderness. 
 There He has lingered in meditation, stern 
 conflict, long debate : the exaltation of these 
 exercises is now passed, the last wiles of Satan 
 have been plied upon His weariness. The end 
 of His sojourn in the Wilderness is at hand ; 
 already His thoughts are turned towards the 
 world which He is fain to save. This is the 
 moment in which Satan unfolds the vision of 
 the power and glory of all the kingdoms, and 
 presents himself as King of the kings of the 
 earth. 
 
 While we see those elements in this Tempt- 
 ation which are unmatched in the experience of 
 other men, we must not fail to observe those 
 aspects in which it comes nearest to ourselves. 
 Jesus in the Wilderness stands where all young 
 manhood stands — between private youth and 
 mature responsibility ; and He looks upon the 
 world with high expectation and strong purpose. 
 As He looks, His regard contains all the elements 
 that are purely natural and right in the outlook 
 of a young man who is reaching out towards his 
 /life-work in the world. We are in the world, and 
 we belong to it, and it claims us. Yet in another 
 sense we feel that the world belongs to us. There 
 is an instinct of sovereignty in us that claims 
 
FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE i8i 
 
 the world for our own. There is a world-hunoer 
 which is the passion of not ignoble spirits ; it is 
 prone to have wonderful visions of power and 
 glory seen in a moment of time. The ambition 
 to be someone in the world, and to do something 
 in it which shall leave an abiding mark, — these 
 are not unworthy aims ; and their dream is hid 
 in many an unlikely breast. And, withal, there 
 is found in every wholesome heart the impulse 
 to claim its native fellowship with other men. 
 Wherever the heart of manhood goes out to the 
 world in desire ; wherever its hand is reached 
 forth to the world's things to grasp them, there 
 Satan is found. He stands beside us as he stood 
 beside Jesus ; his hand filled with large offers, 
 his lips whispering disloyalty to God. 
 
 The aour in w 'lich we newly realise our 
 relation to the world is a dangerous one, because 
 of the pull it makes upon our heart to draw it 
 away from God and His service and His love. 
 We conceive that, when Jesus was tempted in 
 the desert. His sense of relation to the world 
 had been recently enlarged and perfected in His 
 Baptism ; and, viewing Him as a man tempted 
 by Satan in this new sense and situation that 
 were His, we may see that one thing made Him 
 safe in what is to other men a dangerous crisis. 
 
1 82 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 He brought to His Baptism, and had confirmed 
 in it, a perfect sense of His perfect relation to 
 God His Father. That made Him safe against 
 the Assault of the King of the world. 
 
 There is a great meaning for us in the fact of 
 those first words that we hear Jesus say in early- 
 youth : " My Father." The lesson is pointed by 
 the confirmation of His Sonship at Jordan as 
 He stepped from out of youth into manhood, and 
 went up into the Wilderness to bind the burden 
 of His work upon His willing heart. In our 
 humble distance from His perfectness we must 
 emulate the learning of Jesus which He carried 
 into the Wilderness and through its ordeal. Only 
 one thing can make it safe for us to meet the 
 world's king and see the vision he displays, 
 and feel the kinship of our hearts with the power 
 and glory of the earth. That one thing is to 
 know and love God as our Father. This is the 
 lesson of childhood and youth ; and if we learn 
 it, its meaning has a strength that is stronger 
 upon us than the power of the world, and 
 stronger than the pull which its glory can exert 
 on our affections to claim them and draw them 
 to itself. 
 
 We climb into manhood over a hilltop which 
 may be a Pisgah of Satan to us, if our hearts are 
 
FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE 183 
 
 not loyal to God. Our youth is cut off from us 
 when we pass the wilderness hilltop ; and we 
 lose sight of the home where we learned to call 
 God our Father, when we walk down the slope 
 that leads to the plain where men live and work. 
 Our need then is, to take the fellowship of God "^ 
 with us, and to carry His Kingdom within our 
 heart. 
 
 / will give thee, says Satan, We are always \/^ 
 ready to hear that word, and often too willing to 
 welcome it, without enough scrutiny of the gift's 
 moral quality, and of the source it comes from and 
 the conditions it brings along with it. I will give 
 thee, said Satan to the man Jesus, using the 
 terms of his constant appeals to men. Men are 
 so ready to listen to this offer, because life to the 
 ordinary man is so largely a matter of getting. 
 It is a scramble in which the man tries how 
 much he can get. Men have an instinct to 
 grasp, a desire to get, and a wish for always 
 more. The unsatisfiedness of most men is the 
 dominant, clamant note of their experience. The 
 love of what we have may be great ; the love 
 of what we have not may be much greater, so 
 we are too ready to listen to him who says, / 
 will give thee. It is round what men love and 
 
i84 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 have, and still more round what they love and 
 have not, that the world's battles rage. These 
 make the struggles of life, and urge to its exer- 
 tions. These also make life's tiredness, which 
 is very sore. We need not listen to Satan when 
 he says / will give thee, for, even if he gave his 
 all, it would not satisfy us. There is a room in 
 every heart of man which is larger than all the 
 world can fill ; and, ignorantly, men are prone to 
 try and fill it with the world. That room is for 
 the coming of God and for the holding of His 
 throne in the earth, which is in the hearts of men. 
 He also says / will give ; it is one of His words 
 in Christ. Jesus, who refused to take from 
 Satan, took freely from God ; and all He took 
 was not for Himself only, but for all men. The 
 only / zuill give that we need listen to is the 
 promise of God. For love of the world He gave 
 His Son ; and His whole life was one great act 
 of giving. The bread and the water of life ; the 
 true riches of the heart ; rest and peace ; the 
 Spirit of God, who is power ; His own glory, 
 which He will share with His own, — these are 
 the gifts of Jesus. He only can fill our heart ; 
 and the riches and power and glory that are 
 offered by Him, alone can satisfy our need. 
 
 When we realise that the essence of the Tempt- 
 
FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE 185 
 
 atlon of Unhallowed Means was the inducement 
 it offered to Jesus to abandon the spiritual for the 
 temporal and choose the world instead of heaven, 
 we discern that the choice which was set before 
 Him is one that is offered to us also every day. 
 We have a strong kinship with this world — with 
 its pleasures, its petty busy-ness, its sinfulness. 
 There is a whole world of truth in that saying of 
 S. Paul : " Ifourgospel is veiled, it is veiled in them 
 that are perishing : in whom the god of this world 
 hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving." ^ We 
 see the god of this world tempt Jesus with his 
 all. We in our smaller measure are tempted 
 with the same things. They are put before our 
 eyes, as S. Paul's vivid picture has it, " that the 
 light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is 
 the image of God, should not dawn upon them,"^ 
 Let us remember that these are the things which 
 were rejected by Jesus, that we might refuse them 
 after Him. 
 
 It is not only in large things that this tempt- 
 ation comes to us. A small thino- close to our 
 eyes may shut out all the heavens and all the 
 light of the sun. And so in moral seeinor : a trifle 
 seized or sought with passion " means the whole 
 world " to us, as we say ; and it is the common 
 
 1 2 Cor. iv. 3, 4 (R.V.). 
 
1 86 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 and contemptible trifles that are always within our 
 arm's length that may hinder our sight of heaven 
 and of the power and glory of God. These may 
 suffice to tempt our homage to the world's king 
 and away from God. Jesus was tempted with all 
 the power and glory of all the world ; we may not 
 be offered so much as a few more pounds to our 
 income, nor even so much as a snatch advantage 
 in business. But constantly we are offered the 
 citizenship of the world instead of the citizenship 
 of heaven. And when worldly interests obtrude 
 themselves and claim in our affections the room of 
 higher things, or when we regulate our conduct by 
 the dictates of self-interest instead of emulating the 
 unselfishness of Jesus, then, in our small way, we 
 are tempted as Jesus was in His great way. This 
 is the struggle of our religious life : to live with our 
 hearts in heaven while our feet and hands walk this 
 world and work in it. Jesus chose the worship of 
 God, and espoused His service at the hardest ; and 
 out of His experience of this trial and decision He 
 asks the question : " What shall it profit a man, if 
 he shall <yain the whole world, and lose his own 
 soul ? " He asks us, that we should answer with 
 the consecration of our hearts and the obedience 
 of our lives ungrudgingly given to God. And 
 this denial of self is the way to real control of the 
 
FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE 187 
 
 world, which comes by detachment from earth and 
 citizenship in heaven. 
 
 When Jesus says, Get thee hence, Satan, His 
 answer has a note of command and finality which 
 is absent from His former words in response to 
 the Tempter. But He still speaks as a man, and 
 quotes God's Law for men. We must notice that, 
 as a man, Jesus uses the language and tone of 
 command towards the Devil. Satan's kingship 
 in the world is not absolute or unlimited. The 
 world is his place ; its things are his possession ; 
 men are subject to him in so far as they are 
 enslaved by sin. But there is in manhood the 
 capacity for mastery over evil and its king. This 
 we see in the manhood of Jesus when He bids 
 Satan to be gone. The power of Satan lies in 
 the material influence which he wields and in the 
 moral control which he exerts. But the spirit of 
 man cannot be subject to Satan save voluntarily, 
 by choice. The soul of man is by nature nearer to 
 God than to the world, and it is made for direct 
 subjection to Him. Therefore this is the right of 
 men : to bid back Satan. The power to command 
 the Tempter belongs to us all. It is ours to exer- 
 cise. If our spirits are subject to Satan, it is by 
 our choice, in which we have refused the sovereignty 
 
1 88 THE TEMPl^ATION OF JESUS 
 
 of God before we have criven allesfiance to His 
 enemy. In the close of the recorded Temptations 
 of Jesus we see the possible and only right end of 
 all our temptations : the defeat and dismissal of 
 the Tempter. " Resist the Devil, and he will flee 
 from you," says S. James ; and we may read this 
 as a commentary on the triumphant close to the 
 Wilderness Temptation of our Lord. This is its 
 moral and application to ourselves in all our case 
 and circumstances. Resist, and the strength of 
 God is ours, and His victory is assured. 
 
 // zs written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy 
 God, and Him only shalt thoit serve. The end of 
 the Temptation is a word of God. This is for 
 our example. If Satan have the last word in 
 temptation, then he persists in his strength and 
 urgent assault. If we have the last word, that 
 may not avail to silence and banish him. But 
 if we give the last word of our conflict to the God 
 of our help, then in Him we are victorious ; and 
 our success is not a snatched respite, but a lasting 
 control, which shall be ready for any return of our 
 enemy's attack. 
 
 The last word of the Temptation of Jesus is 
 the first word of God's Law. Thou shalt ivoi'ship 
 the Lord thy God: it is the First Commandment, 
 
FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE 189 
 
 which was spoken long ages before to Israel in 
 the wilderness. Him only shall thou serve : when 
 Jesus takes this word to Himself, He embraces 
 obedience and goes towards the service which 
 He loves. The note of this Law, which He now 
 professes as His rule, is the same as that of His 
 words as He came to be baptized by John — the 
 fulfilment of all righteousness. Jesus will leave 
 conflict for labour. After His thrice - repeated 
 profession of allegiance, He will go to practise 
 loyalty. This is the order of life and service. 
 The end of temptation, in which we suffer and 
 resist, is the beginning of active obedience and 
 aggressive work for God. Henceforward Jesus 
 met temptation only in His work. That is 
 where all His followers ought to meet it — there, 
 and there only. We may be blessed in the 
 temptations of preparation and of activity, but 
 hardly can we be blessed in those of idleness. 
 The way of worship is the way of strength. The 
 way of activity is the path of peace. 
 
 Of the three Temptations which are recorded, 
 only one was presented in a scene and with 
 materials peculiar to the Wilderness. This pic- 
 tures what is true in our experience. 
 
 There are trials of the desert, such as hunger 
 
ipo THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 and passion and faithlessness. In these we seem 
 left alone in a want or a peril to which God has 
 abandoned us. 
 
 There are temptations of the temple top, in 
 which we are invited not to abandon faith but 
 to pervert it, and to abuse our privilege and 
 God's grace. When we are in the place of wor- 
 ship, let us remember that up there is the ledge 
 where Satan stood with Jesus to cast Him 
 down. When we are in the streets, even of the 
 Holy City, the flight of Satan is over us, and 
 his watchful eye can follow the busy network of 
 our ways. 
 
 But, on the watch-tower of insight and in- 
 spiration and wide outlook, his assaults may be 
 strongest and most bold. There we learn of the 
 powers that rule in this world, in all the wideness 
 of their scope and the depth of their foundations. 
 There we see the reins of this world's power 
 gathered in the Tempter's hand. The brightness 
 of the glory of the world is centred in the crown 
 that sits on Satan's brow. We are in the midst 
 of the toils of those things in which he is supreme. 
 If there is any earthly ambition in our heart, he 
 can fulfil it ; if any sense of greatness in our mind, 
 he is greater, and we cannot rise above his power. 
 And God has placed us in this princedom of 
 
FROM TEMPTATION TO SERVICE 191 
 
 Satan : He leaves us here. He has put within 
 us that urgent spirit which was made for mastery 
 over earth's dead things. Can He blame us if 
 we meet the kingly eye of Satan and give him 
 the homage of our inferior wit and strength ? 
 Can He judge us if we touch the Sceptre that 
 has the only evident authority in all the world ? ^ 
 
 Our case is hard. Our trial is great. God 
 knows it, and pities us. It was to meet this case 
 that He sent Jesus to our help. He has shown 
 a higher Kingship than the world could know, and 
 revealed a wider sovereignty than its breadth is 
 great enough to hold. Also, He showed a perfect 
 escape and victory when He met those toils and 
 assaults which were too subtle and too stronsf for 
 us to unravel and withstand. See, then, the 
 greatness of Jesus in His refusal to sin. Look 
 on the majesty of His humility. Turn from the 
 gaudy lustre of Satan to see in Him the beauty 
 of Heaven. What are glory and power compared 
 with purity and love .-* What is the empire of the 
 world when seen from the throne of God, or even 
 from the footstool of His service? Look thence 
 and see the inheritance which was Christ's and 
 is ours, and which He was tempted to barter 
 away : then know what Jesus did for us in the 
 Wilderness and on the Cross. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 HORROR AND HEALING. 
 
 13 
 
Then the Devil leaveth Him ; and, behold, angels came and 
 ministered unto Him. — Matt. iv. ii. 
 
 »<J4 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 HORROR AND HEALING. 
 
 THE Temptation of Jesus in the Wilderness 
 is full of wonder and of meaning ; but it is 
 far more full of instruction than of mystery. The 
 simplicity of the narrative marks its inspiration 
 and truth. No mere invention could have shown 
 that direct glance which goes straight to the 
 moral and spiritual significance of Jesus' conflict, 
 unfascinated by its weird accompaniments. There 
 is no savour of occultism here, nor any aspect of 
 mere wizardry. The whole vein is that of bald 
 fact and terrible reality. On this account, we 
 must the more earnestly seek and grasp the 
 meaning of what is told us. And, with this page 
 open before us, we may do so without any fear of 
 being misled into extravagance by the emphasising 
 of details and indications. It is for that they 
 are given us ; and may God give us insight to 
 understand them. 
 
 Remember the amazing trial to which Jesus 
 
 «9S 
 
196 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 in His Temptation has been subjected. Recall 
 His isolation and stern ecstasy during forty days 
 and forty nights. Realise the subtlety of Satan's 
 snares and the strength of his assaults. See him 
 personally present as a cunning counsellor of evil, 
 and a princely patron decked with the insignia 
 of a real royalty. See him stand by Jesus and 
 point the Saviour's hungry eyes to the water- 
 worn stones of the desert, in their mocking re- 
 semblance to cakes of the bread which He craved 
 for His very life. Conceive, again, the rapture 
 to the Temple ledge, and understand the fascina- 
 tion of the giddy depth below. Was He merely 
 "tempted like as we are?" It shames us to be 
 told that; so immeasurably greater was His trial 
 than ours. It seems greater than mortal frame 
 and nerve could bear. Yet Jesus bore it ; and 
 the health of His mind and the soundness of His 
 faith are shown in the way He could raise a 
 steady eye to God's throne, and give to His 
 word an undistracted ear. 
 
 There is a great meaning in the fact that the 
 Temptation story does not end with those words, 
 The Devil leaveth Him, but goes on to tell of the 
 coming of angels and their ministry. This points 
 to the very centre of our Lord's experience as it 
 
HORROR AND HEALING 197 
 
 affected His humanity, and casts a ligbt back on 
 what has gone before. 
 
 That last Assault of the Prince of the world 
 might well have a stunning effect even upon 
 Jesus. Its flash of dazzling revelation might tax 
 the balance even of His super-ordinary steadiness. 
 So, when the challenge comes, Fall down and 
 worship me, we see Jesus avert His eyes from the 
 Tempter's brilliancy ; and while He says, Get 
 thee gone, He turns to God and stretches forth 
 His hands to seek and claim the delivering grasp 
 of rescue from a fearful strait. That moment of 
 appeal saw the escape of Jesus from Satan's im- 
 portunities. The final incitement to treason so 
 stirred His loyalty to God that the links that 
 bound Him to Heaven were drawn tight and 
 close in a spasm of yearning desire. His soul 
 reached out to God, and His heart clave to Him. 
 It was thus that the angels came. They were 
 not sent to make up any lack in the power of 
 Jesus to resist in the crisis of His trial. It was 
 simply that He so recoiled from the induce- 
 ments of Hell, and so sought the fellowship of 
 Heaven, that the one went and the other came, 
 spontaneously and of necessity. 
 
 That had been no mere word which Jesus had 
 said, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
 
198 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 every word that proceedeth out of the vtoiUh of 
 God. The greatest hunger of these many days 
 had been the hunger of His heart for God. And 
 now it would no longer be denied. It had been 
 starved while the presence of evil, and its conflict, 
 preyed upon the vitals of His soul. And when 
 Satan said, Fall down and worship me, we see 
 Jesus turn away in giddy horror, lest His fainting 
 body should succumb and fall prone in the mere 
 semblance of unlawful homaore. With the last 
 strength of His manhood He stretched out hands 
 of appeal to God, and sent to Heaven an urgent 
 call that the arm of God would take and hold 
 Him. 
 
 So ofreat were the love and desire that welled 
 up in Jesus towards His Father, and so great the 
 response of God's heart towards Him, that the 
 place where He stood became heaven upon 
 earth, while He stood there held out to God for 
 His embrace. He was kindred with earth, but 
 still more closely kin to Heaven. His call 
 pierced the barriers of separation ; the interposing 
 powers of Hell were swept into an instant flight. 
 Deep called to deep ; like the flash of lightning 
 between thunder-clouds, the fellowship of God 
 rushed to meet the welcome of the man Jesus. 
 He claimed it, and in answer it claimed Him. 
 
HORROR AND HEALING 199 
 
 This is what the coming of the angels means ; 
 and thus they came. The tide of heavenly love 
 that rose in Jesus' heart was met by a great tide 
 of kindred love that swelled towards Him out of 
 heaven ; and these met in a visible concourse of 
 angelic presences that gathered round the Man 
 who first from earth had chosen, ay, compelled, 
 the full fellowship of God. The angels did not 
 compass the deliverance of Jesus ; nor did they 
 merely celebrate it in a pageant of glorious re- 
 joicing. Their presence was His victory in its 
 outward showing. In the hour of Satan's 
 majesty and insolent assault, the motions of 
 Heaven were so strong in Jesus, that suddenly 
 and with great strength He grasped the very 
 heart of Heaven and drew it to Himself. And 
 at once there was not room about Him for the 
 world's Prince, nor any place for Hell to plant 
 the foot of insubordination ao-ainst God. When 
 Jesus with the gesture of His soul's command 
 S2i\d Begone, He hurtled Satan thence. On behalf 
 of humanity He made insurrection from sin ; and 
 His act was a signal in all heaven, so that the 
 hosts of it gathered round Him to celebrate the 
 new great warfare of the Son of God, which, in 
 the end, should oust the Devil from both earth 
 and heaven. 
 
200 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 Can we believe that the glory of Heaven was 
 only around Jesus at this time? Nay! It was 
 upon Him and in Him, and shone out from Him. 
 Long afterwards, in agitated prayer to God re- 
 garding the trial of the Cross which was before 
 Him, Jesus was suddenly transfigured in company 
 with Moses and Elias, and in presence of a, well- 
 loved three of His disciples. And He was 
 transfigured now, amid that band of bright angels. 
 There was no man there to see and tell of it ; and 
 Jesus did not tell such things. Yet we may see 
 our Lord clothed in transfigured radiancy, and in 
 aspect not inferior to His visitants. 
 
 We see here the triumphant emergence of 
 Jesus from Temptation; we see Him, by faith and 
 obedience and heavenward desire, banish Hell 
 and summon the visible attendance of very 
 Heaven. And the way that Jesus found, out of 
 the snares of sin and the pressure of its strength 
 upon His weakness, is the one way still that we 
 must find and use for our escape, I shall live by 
 the word of God, He said ; and that we too must 
 fearlessly choose and trust for our life. I will not 
 tempt the Lord My God, He said ; and we must 
 humbly submit to what is narrow and hard, fore- 
 going all that is not offered us by God. I will 
 worship the Lord, and Him only will I serve, said 
 
HORROR AND HEALING 201 
 
 Jesus ; and the protest of His allegiance became 
 a cry for the presence of His King. And straight- 
 way He found Himself in the ante-chamber of 
 God's Majesty, surrounded by His angels ; and 
 Satan was gone, and His heart was embraced by 
 Heaven. 
 
 That impulsive entreaty of Heaven which we 
 see in Jesus' heart as He turns away from sin ; 
 that outstretching of His soul to God for a fellow- 
 ship that shall banish the enticements of evil and 
 its insolence, is what ought to be in our heart too. 
 It must be there, if we are to conquer in tempt- 
 ation with a victory like our Lord's. If we fall 
 where He stood firm ; if we falter where He pre- 
 vailed, it is for lack of that heavenward glance 
 that can catch the eye of God, and that desire that 
 can bring His presence to our aid and disarm the 
 strongest powers of Hell. Let us think. How 
 do we, when we are tempted ? Our many failures 
 tell how often we have cherished the suggestions 
 of evil instead of recoiling from them ; how often 
 we have welcomed the offers of Satan when we 
 ought to have rejected them. It is in these ways 
 that failure comes, and the fall into sin. When 
 ensnared into treason against God, we are willingly 
 betraying and betrayed. But if at any time, when 
 we are solicited by evil, we turn our mind and 
 
202 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 heart to God, He gives a fellowship that Hell 
 cannot abide, but is gone from in dismay. If we 
 will but suffer the tide of God's Spirit to rise up 
 in our heart, it shall swell till it meets the ocean 
 of Heaven's strong succour, the sound of whose 
 waves is victorious praise ; and these, meeting, 
 shall make one full flood to bear our spirit to 
 God's throne. Thus, in our measure, we may 
 know the experience of Jesus when His need and 
 desire called Heaven to Him, and made a temple 
 of the devil-haunted desert ; and we too may find 
 the place of our temptation prove to be the ante- 
 room of God. 
 
 We may connect the need of Jesus, to which 
 the angels ministered, not only with the great 
 strain of His whole Temptation, which was now 
 accumulated on Him, but specially with the 
 unnerving trial of that last assault of the Prince 
 of the world. This view may give us some 
 practical suggestions regarding phases of ex- 
 perience, which, if they are not common, yet 
 are frequent enough to require that we be 
 prepared to understand them, in ourselves or 
 others. 
 
 There is a point in the Temptation, where the 
 awe of Jesus' conflict amounts to horror. We can 
 
HORROR AND HEALING 203 
 
 hardly read, without shuddering, that impious 
 challenge of the Devil : Fall dowfi and worship 
 me. Doubtless, it was this scene that inspired 
 those mediaeval superstitions which said that men 
 could sell their souls to Satan magically, and 
 gain thereby an occult power. The day of that 
 ignorance is largely past. But still there are some 
 who are plagued with the horror of blasphemy, and 
 suffer a sore agony of soul. When Satan received 
 permission to tempt Job, he said to God, "He 
 will curse Thee to Thy face ; " and he used the 
 sufferer's wife as his mouthpiece when she said, 
 " Curse God, and die." That pictures what some 
 suffer from vivid imagination in league with un- 
 strung nerve. The horror of this experience 
 consists in the recoil of the heart from the blas- 
 phemies which seem whispered in the ear, and 
 almost adopted in the mind. Its terror depends 
 upon the weakness and self-distrust which, in their 
 bewilderment, fear that the evil thoughts have 
 been born of the heart's own sin, and that the guilt 
 of them is on the soul they torture. As Bunyan, 
 in the Pilgrims Progress, puts it, plainly writing 
 from his own experience of this thing : " The 
 Pilgrim is so confounded that he verily thinks 
 the grievous blasphemies to be his own." Then 
 the darkness of the valley Is around, and the face 
 
204 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 of God is hid as if behind a cloud of unpardon- 
 able sin. 
 
 The Evil one may work upon our weakness 
 and our fear, to upset our reason and our faith. 
 But Jesus Himself was tempted, in like manner, 
 with suggestions from the very mouth of Hell ; 
 and He is with us within the shadow of the 
 darkest cloud our mind or heart can know. He 
 will lead us out ao^ain into the liofht. This is 
 a temptation of the wilderness ; and God may 
 send us there to learn our own weakness and 
 His strength. 
 
 But we must not ascribe such experiences 
 too readily or exclusively to a spiritual source, 
 or give them a significance that is entirely 
 spiritual. They may mean malady of body 
 rather than of soul, and may be more fitly 
 ministered to by medicine than by the Church. 
 The nervous and mental merge into the spiritual; 
 and these may be confounded when there is 
 somewhat that is morbid in our state. 
 
 It is significant that the occasion of the 
 angels' ministry to Jesus was not during His 
 Temptation, but after it. He needed no angelic 
 support to enable Him to oppose and overcome 
 the Devil. But He did afterwards need recover- 
 ing from strain and shock. And, in this, our 
 
HORROR AND HEALING 205 
 
 experience is like His. In the excitement of 
 conflict and decision we may be strong. There 
 is health in active exercise of soul. But there 
 is a special pain and danger in hours of reaction 
 and reflection, when our mind and feelings have 
 leisure to turn in upon ourself. Our strife with 
 the Devil may nerve us to courage and strength 
 while it lasts ; its passing may leave us unstrung 
 and full of uneasiness and fear. The inward 
 echoes of past conflict may sadly distract us, if 
 we listen to them in our heart. And the thought 
 of things in imagination may be hurtful ; for 
 there is a power in imagination that surpasses 
 the strength of fact. 
 
 Here comes in our need of healing ministry 
 to meet our tendency to what is morbid. Those 
 who fear blasphemy are not those who blas- 
 pheme ; they suffer a malaise which is more akin 
 to nightmare than to sin, and whose immediate 
 cause should be sought in a physical rather than 
 a spiritual fault. If we sin against the Spirit of 
 God, it shall be in acts and not words, and in 
 affection rather than thought. There is a great 
 fatigue after spiritual strain, because our soul is 
 tenanted within a body which is feeble at the 
 best. There is an exhaustion after ecstasy, whose 
 collapse is physical, and must not be confounded 
 
2o6 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 with the inertia of unfaithfulness or with lapse 
 into sin. There is a depression after inspiration, 
 which aptly simulates ungodly despair, and is 
 amongst the deepest pains the heart can know. 
 We climb no height of emotional experience, but 
 there is a dark valley beneath it ; and our path 
 lies down there. On the height, we must see 
 the valley before we enter it, and take with us 
 the understanding there gained, to explain and 
 alleviate its gloom, 'i 
 
 This does not concern everyone ; but it 
 closely touches some. They need to be told 
 this, and to remember and quietly allow for it. 
 There is enough pain for all of us, without self- 
 torture. There is a place for healing ministry 
 in many a Christian experience ; and the time to 
 seek it may often come, while we live the life of 
 heaven, as Jesus did, in an earthborn body, and 
 in the midst of evil thinQs, We do not live in 
 a day of visible contest with Satan ; and we 
 neither expect, nor do we need, the evident 
 ministry of holy angels to attend us. But we 
 must take what God has given us for the health 
 of our mind as well as of our soul. All life and 
 work and religion may be very difficult to the 
 man who needs a tonic or a holiday. These are 
 the ministry many a one requires. 
 
HORROR AND HEALING 207 
 
 Again, we may believe that the chief ministry 
 the angels brought to Jesus was just their radiant 
 company. He was not left alone when the Devil 
 left Him. The sorest thing in His Temptation 
 had been its solitariness, and His choicest healing 
 was the end of that. And, if only for health's 
 sake, we ought to avoid solitary experiences, 
 when God does not lay these upon us. There is 
 a curative value in fellowship which none can 
 afford to despise ; and few, if any, can neglect it 
 without injury. 
 
 Besides the ministries of medicine, recreation, 
 and companionship, there is a wonderful healing 
 in healthy activity. This meets those phases of 
 experience in which the inward bulks too large. 
 It is not wholesome when we find ourselves, as 
 it were, in a wilderness of self; when the world 
 retires to a distance and becomes remote and 
 small, and fails to attract and attach our interest. 
 When our thought and oitr feelings loom into 
 a morbid prominence, then we require healing ; 
 and our cure shall be found in what takes us 
 out of ourself. The world does not revolve 
 round us ; when it seems to, that is because we 
 are giddy and ready to sink. It is we who are 
 reeling, not the world. Then we must take 
 hold of the things about us with our mind, and 
 
208 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 with the grasp of a busy hand ; for the healing 
 ministry of work is one great help to steadiness, 
 whether of mind or heart or soul. 
 
 Let us realise and frankly recognise that we 
 are called to live a life of exertion in spite of our 
 weakness, and of temptation and conquest in 
 spite of our insufficiency. Let us know that this 
 is in the care of God and of our own intelligence, 
 under Him. And let us use all lawful means to 
 healthful ends ; for these are His gifts, in which 
 He ministers assistance to our need. 
 
 When we see Jesus transfigured In the 
 moment of His deliverance from the Tempter, 
 let us not fail to realise the great weakness which 
 He suffered even while He was glorified. The 
 bright flame of His Divinity shone in a lamp of 
 human clay, whose fuel was now burning low. 
 As He fainted and fell He was caught and sus- 
 tained. Not at the feet of Satan did He fall, but 
 into the embrace of the angels of God. He was 
 cherished in the bosom of Heaven come down 
 to earth. 
 
 This is a beautiful fact as it concerns our 
 Saviour ; also it is a picture and example of 
 God's care of all His children in the hour of 
 their greatest trial and overwhelming weakness. 
 
HORROR AND HEALING 209 
 
 Whether in active Hfe or in the article of death, 
 the ministry of Heaven is near and ready for 
 those who turn to God. The call of our necessity 
 shall be answered from above. When we are 
 about to faint, we shall feel the sustaining hold 
 of our Father. When we seem about to fall 
 helpless at the feet of our oppressor, we shall find 
 ourselves in the bosom of angelic ministration. 
 It was thus with Jesus ; and thus it shall be with 
 His brethren, when, like Him, they call Heaven 
 to their aid. 
 
 14 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD! 
 
John seeth Jesus coming unto him^ aiid saith, Behold 
 the Lamb oj Gody which bcareth the sin oj the "world. — 
 John i. 29. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 "BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD!" 
 
 IN leaving the study of the Temptation of 
 Jesus, we may see Him as He came out of 
 the Wilderness, straight from His conflict and 
 victory and from the ministry of angels. He 
 went back to Jordan, where John was still baptiz- 
 ing ; and we must stand beside the Baptist, and 
 wait for His coming, after these Forty days and 
 nights. 
 
 Six weeks ago, Jesus had come there to be 
 baptized ; and John had looked upon the chaste, 
 fresh beauty of His youthful manhood, and 
 marked the calmness of His purity and strength. 
 John had dealt readily and sternly with all 
 other candidates ; but before this One he hesi- 
 tated. In Jesus' presence his message seemed 
 to fail him, and his rite to become meaningless. 
 But Jesus accepted the Baptism, and, so doing, 
 identified Himself with the repentance of His 
 brethren, and expressed His desire and expecta- 
 
 213 
 
214 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 tion towards the Kingdom of God which John 
 had heralded. 
 
 Then He had gone away into the Wilderness, 
 with the witness of the Spirit on His head, that 
 had been humbly bowed in acceptance of the 
 Baptist's rite. And every day for forty days 
 John had scanned the crowds about him, and 
 whispered in his heart : " There standeth one 
 among you, whom ye know not, whose shoe's 
 latchet I am not worthy to unloose." ^ This 
 became his answer to the deputation of Priests 
 and Levites who came from Jerusalem to ask the 
 Baptist, " Who art thou ? " and it shows how 
 eagerly he looked for the return of Jesus. The 
 day after that answer, Jesus came. And as 
 John looked on Him — how eagerly ! — there broke 
 from his lips that strange impromptu cry : Behold 
 the Lamb of God, which is bearing the sin of the 
 world} Our versions give a theological inter- 
 pretation : "which taketh away the sin." This 
 is misplaced and misleading ; it blinds our view 
 of what John saw. His speech may point forward 
 to the Cross ; but, first and chiefly, it points back 
 to the Wilderness. 
 
 What John sees is the marks of the long 
 Temptation time, written deep and plain upon 
 
 * John i. 26, 27. ^ John i. 29, niarg. 
 
" BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD ! " 215 
 
 the face of Jesus. How changed it is! How 
 strangely altered is that fresh beauty of six weeks 
 ago ! Then, He was the pure picture of unsullied 
 youth, crowned with the strength of manhood. 
 His calm eye was full of the repose of untried 
 readiness. Now, He is marred yet dignified by 
 long pain and conflict. That ennobled beauty has 
 been bought by suffering. That strength has the 
 aspect of hard-won victory. And as John looks 
 in mingled wonder, love, and awe, the explanation 
 bursts upon him as a revelation. He sees the 
 figure of a spotless victim pierced by the sacri- 
 ficial knife. So he speaks this cry of anguished 
 joy : The Lamb of God ! The Lamb of God ! 
 Already, He bears upon His blameless heart the 
 world's sin. Already, the pain of suffering with 
 men and for them tears His life, and the iron of 
 sore sacrifice has pierced His soul. He is on 
 God's altar, and He bleeds. 
 
 This is how John saw the Saviour when He 
 came from the conflict of the Wilderness. So 
 let us see Him, if we would understand the 
 Temptation of Jesus. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
APPENDIX. I. 
 
 Note from Page 31. 
 THE NUMBER FORTY. 
 
 THE associations of the numh^r forty in this 
 connection are interesting and significant. 
 Moses is represented as having thrice fasted for 
 this period : when he received the Law in the 
 Mount (Ex. xxiv. 18), and twice afterwards. The 
 three occasions are gathered together in Deut. 
 ix. 9, 18, 25. Elijah went fasting to Horeb 
 diUYmg forty days (i Kings xix. 8). 
 
 The symmetry of the use of the number yi?r/j)/ 
 in this relation, taken along with its evidently 
 approximate use in other connections, cannot fail 
 to suggest that a symbolical meaning is attached 
 to it. It certainly here means a fast prolonged 
 to the utmost known in human experience, and 
 beyond the utmost limit of endurance possible to 
 human nature in the normal state and level of its 
 life. 
 
220 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 APPENDIX. II. 
 
 Note from Page 6o. 
 Et vios el Tov Oeov. 
 
 Both vlo<s tov Oeov and 6 vto? tov Oeov are found 
 in the Gospels. We note the absence of the 
 article here ; vto? tov 9eov is the complement, and 
 the subject av is not expressed. It has been 
 noticed^ that, where the article occurs, the subject 
 is found expressed (crv or ovto^), and it has been 
 held that vto? tov Oeov is exactly equivalent in 
 meaning to 6 vlos tov Oeov. But the occurrence 
 of the article at one time, and its suppression at 
 another, cannot be fully accounted for in this 
 merely grammatical way. The fact seems to 
 be, that the expression of the subject coincides 
 with the ascription or the mention of a definite 
 Messianic title ; that the predicate 6 vto? tov Oeov 
 has more content than vto? tov Oeov, which is a 
 descriptive identification or classification of Jesus, 
 devoid of Messianic reference. 
 
 " When the title is found with the article after 
 a verb of existence, the identity of the subject with 
 a person, to whom it peculiarly belonged, is the 
 
 * Middleton, O/i the Greek Article^ 2nd ed. p. 178. 
 
APPENDIX, II 221 
 
 predicate, without particular reference to the 
 meaning of the words themselves ; and when it 
 is anarthrous, the attributes signified by the words 
 vLo<s Tov deov are the predicate, without regard to 
 their special association with the person of the 
 Messiah."^ 
 
 " The Tempter's challenge to our Lord is not, 
 If Thou be the Messiah ; but one of more subtle 
 and keener provocation, If Thou be God's Son, 
 and possessed of extraordinary powers in virtue 
 of that divine generation." ^ 
 
 " Both Matthew and Luke have vto? tov Oeov, 
 without the article, the reference being to the 
 relationship to God rather than to the office of 
 Messiah."^ 
 
 Throughout the Gospels the definite or titular 
 form, TAe Son of God, is never found as given to 
 Jesus, except by His disciples as an expression of 
 true faith. It is used by the Baptist (John i. 34), 
 by Nathanael (John i. 50), by Martha (John xi. 
 27), by the Evangelist himself (John xx. 31). 
 The enemies of Jesus also use the definite title 
 when they ask Him if He claims to be The Son 
 
 ^ T. S. Green, Grammar of the New Testament^ Ed. 1842, 
 p. 172. 
 
 ^ T. S. Green, ibid. p. 174. 
 
 ^ Alfred Plummer, D.D., Critical and Exegetical Commentary 
 on tlie Gospel atcording to St. Luke; in loc. 
 
222 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 0/ God (Maiit. xxvi. 63 ; Luke xxii. yo), the Son 
 of the Blessed (Mark xiv. 6 1 ). The only apparent 
 exception to the absence of the title, except when 
 ascribed to Jesus by disciples, is found in Mark 
 iii. II and Luke iv. 41, where the witness of the 
 spirit-possessed is quoted generally ; but when we 
 hear one possessed of a devil testifying, it is the 
 indefinite form that occurs (Mark v. 7 ; Luke 
 viii. 28). The reader of the texlus receptus will 
 find the form, The Son of God, given once, as used 
 by Satan, in S. Luke's account of the Temptation ; 
 but the article is not found in the best MSS. 
 
 The same indefinite God's Son, or a Son of 
 God, is found in the jibe of the passers-by at 
 Calvary (Matt, xxvii. 40), also in the taunt of 
 the rulers (Matt, xxvii. 43), and the testimony of 
 the Roman centurion on duty at the Crucifixion 
 (Mark xv. 39). This last case is the only one in 
 which our Revisers have indicated the difference 
 between the two forms. It is done in the margin, 
 apparently under pressure of the fact that the 
 Roman officer was, in all probability, an unin- 
 structed heathen. 
 
 It is important to note the absence of even 
 the mention of the peculiar Sonship of Jesus by 
 any save disciples, except when His enemies 
 designed to provoke Him to what they counted 
 
APPENDIX, II 223 
 
 blasphemy. The theological conception is seen 
 to be strange to the contemporaries of our Lord ; 
 and the faith of the disciples is thrown out in a 
 more bold relief when we realise this. 
 
 The Hebrews believed in the existence of an 
 order of beings superior in grade to men, but 
 subordinate to God. They occasionally mixed in 
 or interfered with the affairs of men. We find 
 them in Gen. vi. 2, where they are represented as 
 intermarrying with "the daughters of men." In 
 Job i. 6 and ii. i they are seen presenting them- 
 selves before the Lord : " And Satan came also 
 among them, to present himself before the Lord." 
 Having this element of popular belief in mind, we 
 are not required to suppose that Satan, in the 
 Temptation, formally recognised the Divinity of 
 Jesus ; rather, he addresses Him as one of his 
 own order of supra-human or angelic beings. 
 
 We do not need the witness of Satan. The 
 witness of Jesus to His own rank and title, though 
 rare, is clear (Matt. xvi. 17; Mark xiv. 61, 62; 
 John ix. 35, T,j). Further, in speaking of Himself 
 in relation to the Father, our Lord habitually 
 styled Himself The Son. This is the faith which 
 is found without ambiguity in the Epistles, and 
 which has passed into the assured belief of the 
 Church. 
 
224 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 APPENDIX, III. 
 
 Note from Page 130. 
 
 TO TTTepvyiov Tov lepov. — Matt. iv. 5. 
 
 Our A.V. has it, that Satan set Jesus on a 
 pinnacle of the Temple. The familiar "pinnacle" 
 has come out of the translators' minds and from 
 amongst their preconceptions, for TTTepvyiov does 
 not mean pinnacle, and the Temple was not a 
 pinnacled building. The R.V. does not greatly 
 improve matters by substituting l/ie for a pinnacle. 
 It, however, gives the key to a right interpretation 
 by restoring the definite article which King James' 
 translators had ignored, and by the marginal note 
 that TTTepvyiov means wing. In seeking to realise 
 the precise scene of this Temptation, we have to 
 inquire what is meant by the wing, or rather 
 winglet, of the Temple. Holtzmann says it may 
 be either (i) the extremity of a gable's ledge, or 
 (2) the actual summit of the Royal Hall. Some 
 take the word to apply to an out-building, and 
 support this by the use of tov lepov instead of 
 TOV z/aov. And Solomon's porch and the crroa 
 Paa-iXiK-q are pointed to as answering the require- 
 ments of our passage, especially since each of 
 them surmounts a precipice. But our view of the 
 
APPENDIX, III 225 
 
 ulterior purpose of this Temptation prevents our 
 admitting a position from which one would leap 
 into obscurity. Surely the same Trrepvyiov is 
 referred to, when Hegesippus tells us of S. James' 
 martyrdom that he was pushed over from to 
 TTTepvyiov Tov vaov, the main building being 
 certainly referred to in this case. From the word 
 TTTepvyiov itself we may learn at once, that it means 
 a projection, and one in a lateral direction. The 
 term has probably come from comparing, to the 
 wings of a bird, the sloping and projecting ledge 
 at the top of a gable, or the similar ledge often 
 surmounting a door or a window. 
 
 While our A.V.'s disregard of the article is 
 remarkable, our reassertion of it need not lead us 
 to require a uniquely conspicuous place to justify 
 its use. It more probably points to a general 
 architectural feature of the Temple buildings. 
 This is consistent with the fact that Hesychius 
 gives TTTepvyiov as equivalent to aKpcoTtjpiov, which 
 may mean simply any projection. So we con- 
 ceive the place indicated to be a projecting ledge 
 running along a wall-top. And we take the use of 
 the article to be like our use of it when we speak 
 of l/^e giittej'' of any building without claiming dis- 
 tinction for it, or for ourselves any familiar ac- 
 quaintance with architectural or economic details. 
 15 
 
226 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 APPENDIX, IV. 
 
 Note from Page 35. 
 
 THE RELATION OF HUMAN NATURE TO 
 SIN: ESPECIALLY IN JESUS. 
 
 We learn from the Gospels that the prepara- 
 tion of Jesus for His successful conflict with 
 evil began before His birth ; and, while we 
 reverently believe the fact of His extraordinary 
 generation, we may acknowledge that we have no 
 understanding of it. The origin of all human life 
 is wrapped in mystery ; it may well be an im- 
 penetrable veil that surrounds the Divine-human 
 birth of Jesus. 
 
 There are, however, two beliefs into either of 
 which we might readily fall, and both of which we 
 must avoid. First, we may not believe that Jesus 
 ofot His human nature from another than a human 
 source ; that God, contrary to appearance, gave 
 Him a new and specially-created nature of the 
 sort called human. In that case, the link that 
 binds Him to us were not one of relationship, but 
 merely the shadowy tie of resemblance ; and we 
 could find little meaning in His outwardly ordinary 
 birth and life, if these covered a nature similar to 
 
APPENDIX, IV 227 
 
 ours in kind but alien in source. Second, we may 
 not believe that, in the transmission of the human 
 nature of Jesus, a miracle prevented the trans- 
 mission of an evil taint which is present in the 
 nature of other men. That would make Jesus' 
 victory over sin the result of a mechanical miracle 
 of moral filtration ; and, giving God the Holy 
 Spirit that victory prior to His birth, would leave 
 us one who could by no means be tempted like as 
 we are, if we have qualities inherent in and essen- 
 tial to our nature, which were absent in Him. 
 
 Both of these views are easily understood, and 
 afford a ready solution of the difficulties which we 
 feel regarding the Temptation of our Lord ; but 
 they alike utterly spoil, for us, the victorious sin- 
 lessness of our Brother, the man Christ Jesus. 
 They rob of all meaning and help the assurance 
 that He can " be touched with the feeling of our 
 infirmities ; and was in all points tempted like as 
 we are, yet without sin." ^ 
 
 In the light of the sinlessness of Jesus, along 
 with His true humanness, we may see that our 
 original sinfulness lies, not in a taint which is 
 essential to our nature, but in alienation from 
 God, which makes communion with Him im- 
 possible. Man is born into estrangement from 
 
 1 Heb. iv. 15. 
 
228 THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS 
 
 God, and is therefore obnoxious to all evil, while 
 cut off from good. From this point of view we 
 see, how the union of the Divine with human 
 nature in our Lord's person did actually in His 
 person abolish that source of sin which makes us 
 all sinners by birth. While our estrangement 
 cuts us off from God and His holy life, in Jesus 
 we find human nature filled to the full with the 
 Divine Spirit ; and thus Jesus met Temptation, 
 not only with His pure heavenly strength, but 
 with every essential feature of that human nature 
 which He had received in His human birth. 
 
 The primary and chief super-ordinary element 
 in the human nature of Jesus was one of relation 
 with God. In this regard He was perfect, and 
 from this flowed His other perfections. We shall 
 best understand the Temptation of Jesus if we 
 realise that, while there was much about His 
 manhood that was extraordinary to men, there was 
 nothing that was unnatural to human nature. He 
 was more human than His brethren of mankind, 
 because He was perfect, which they are not. The 
 Temptations of Jesus were the trials of an ideal, 
 because a perfect, man. On this account they were 
 Temptations such as are common to humanity. 
 
 Man spiritual cannot be considered apart 
 from man physical. Our moral character and 
 
APPENDIX, IV 229 
 
 life are largely influenced by their organ, the 
 body. Sin cannot be rightly dealt with as a- 
 theological abstraction, but must be recognised, 
 as it is in the Bible, as a practical fact. The 
 modern view of heredity supplies a sufficient and 
 very impressive doctrine of original sin, which is 
 almost Augustinian in intensity, if rightly appre- 
 hended. We inherit in our physical organism 
 many traces of evil practice and wrong habit in 
 our ancestry. These, though not essential to 
 human nature, are actual in it, and these occasion 
 a predisposition to sin. Because in none is the 
 physical organ of life perfect, original sin is a 
 fact in all men, though a quantity varying in 
 each. 
 
 The relations of body and soul, which have 
 only in recent times begun to be investigated, 
 have a great importance for our understanding 
 of the nature of sin. The fact that man, who is 
 a moral and spiritual being, lives his life in a 
 physical body, implies sin, necessitates it, unless 
 the physical organ of his life is perfectly controlled 
 by spiritual impulse, purpose, and direction. The 
 imperfectness of this control is the fruitful source 
 of sin ; the perfecting of it is the work of God 
 in Christ and by His Spirit The perfection of 
 it is seen in Jesus by virtue of His measureless 
 
230 THE TEMPrATION OF JESUS 
 
 endowment with that Spirit. Hence His sinless- 
 ness while living a true human life in the body, 
 the organ of human life. 
 
 The sinlessness of Jesus is placed above 
 argument, by the perfect picture which in the 
 Gospels is mirrored by artless love. " Life, 
 like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the 
 white radiance of Eternity." Having, then, this 
 one window of unbroken rays, let us forbear to 
 peer with the prism of our angular intelligence, 
 and open wide our hearts to be bathed in the 
 flood of its purifying light. 
 
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