SECTION VII.

THE PERSONAL PROBATION OF THE LORD IN THE WILDERNESS.

(Luke iv. 1-13.)

The testimony which the Lord received in divers manners had to be confirmed, by Himself affording a practical demonstration that He was the Christ, by His approving Himself victorious over the temptations of Satan, and thus opening for Himself a free path to His public ministration.

The history of His temptation appears to us here in the form of a single journey from the Jordan into the desert, and from the desert over the mountainous region to Jerusalem. According to this order are the successive temptations represented. The first temptation takes place in the desert, the second on the top of a high mountain, the third on a pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem.

We must distinguish, however, from these three great temptations, which the Lord had to endure at the end of His sojourn in the wilderness, a general temptation which occupied Him during the time of His residence there.

After His baptism, Jesus returned from the Jordan full of the Holy Ghost. The Spirit, however, led Him into the solitude of the desert. Here He remained forty days, all the while occupied with temptations of the devil. In those days He did eat nothing; and when they were ended — along with their temptation — He afterward hungered.

Now, however, occurred the three last temptations, as conclusive acts, in which the previous more general temptation was terminated and completed. If, perhaps, the form assumed by the latter was, that He should withdraw Himself from mankind and the world (as eremite), inasmuch as Satan seemed to obstruct every way of access to men (see above, i. 384, &c.), the character in which the temptation now presented itself was that of a threefold incitement to worldly enjoyment. The tempter sought a point of attachment for these allurements in the circumstance of His manifest indigence — in the fact of His hunger.

The first temptation was in these terms: 'Command this stone, that it become bread'. The answer of Jesus, on the other hand: 'It is written, Not by bread alone shall man live, but by every word of God.' He ought, even as Son of God, to regard bread and sensual enjoyment as the first condition of life; on the contrary. He declared that for Him, even as man, the first condition of life, the nourishment which sustains life, and the enjoyment of life, are not found in bread, but in the word of God. Even in the consciousness that He was a God, He should give place to the painful cravings of appetite, and with the haste of a sorcerer procure for Himself bread, according to Satan's suggestion; He, on the contrary, declared that He, as man, according to the statement of the word of God, finds the life of His life in the word of God.

The second temptation was as follows: — The devil, taking Him up into a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time,¹ and said to Him, 'All this power will I give Thee, and the glory which they — all these kingdoms — afford; for to me it is delivered, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If Thou wilt therefore bow the knee in worship before me — thus he spoke with Satanic logic, putting a gloss on sin — Thine it shall be — the glory — whole, and without reserve.' Jesus answered, 'It is written,² Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.' In the refulgence of the world's grandeur, it was intended that the Lord should see the power and glory of its prince, and that this sight should excite in Him the lust of ambition. He was to have possession of the world's dominion on the condition of secretly bowing the knee to Satan. But to the word of Satan, which sought to turn the splendour and beauty of the world into an object of fascinating enchantment, He opposed the word of Holy Scripture. To this worldly dominion and glory which He should possess, with secret self-contempt, in the consciousness that He was Satan's slave,_ He opposed the consciousness of Him who is poor, but stands right royally free over against all the glory and enchantments of the world, and only falls down before the Lord His God, whom alone He serves.

On this, Satan prepared the way for the third temptation, by bringing Him to Jerusalem, and setting Him on a pinnacle of the temple. When there, he thus spoke, 'If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence; for it is written. He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee; and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.' To this Jesus replied, 'It is said. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God/ Thus the Lord also triumphed over the temptation to fanatical presumption and spiritual pride, — a temptation, which, with diabolical artifice, misemployed a word of Holy Scripture itself to attain its object. Jesus shows that the more special declarations of the word of God are to be explained by the more general, the more figurative by the more literal, the darker by the more distinct; and thus sets aside the false application of the passage quoted. And to the fanatical and hierarchical presumption which, with hypocritical perversion of the word of God, seeks to make even the government of God subservient to its own interests, He opposes the obedience of the child of God, who refuses to tempt his God, or turn His supreme dominion into a means of attaining his own private and selfish ends, and repels with holy indignation the daring insinuations of the tempter, who would have him so to do.

This last temptation appears to human feeling as the most horrid and the most dangerous of all, and compliance with it as the most terrible apostasy; and thus might the Evangelist of Christian humanity be led to place it as the last and highest of the series.³

After the devil had tried the Lord with all these various forms of temptation, he departed from Him for a season — probably until the time of His passion.⁴

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