4 And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned
from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the
wilderness, 2. Being forty days tempted of the devil.
And in those days He did eat nothing: and when they
were ended, He afterward hungered. 3. And the devil
said unto Him, If Thou be the Son of God, command this
stone that it be made bread, 4. And Jesus answered him,
saying, It is written, That man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word of God. 5. And the
devil, taking Him up into an high mountain, showed
unto Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of
time. 6. And the devil said unto Him, All this power
will I give Thee, and the glory of them: for that is
delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.
7. If Thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be
Thine. 8. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get
thee behind Me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt
worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou
serve. 9. And he brought Him to Jerusalem and set Him
on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto Him, If
Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down from hence:
10. For it is written, He shall give His angels charge
over Thee, to keep Thee; 11. And in their hands they
shall bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash Thy
foot against a stone. 12. And Jesus answering, said
unto Him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord
Thy God. 13. And when the devil had ended all the
temptation, he departed from Him for a season.'
--LUKE iv. 1-13.
If we adopt the Revised Version's reading and rendering, the whole
of the forty days in the desert were one long assault of Jesus by
Satan, during which the consciousness of bodily needs was suspended
by the intensity of spiritual conflict. Exhaustion followed this
terrible tension, and the enemy chose that moment of physical
weakness to bring up his strongest battalions. What a contrast these
days made with the hour of the baptism! And yet both the opened
heavens and the grim fight were needful parts of Christ's
preparation. As true man, He could be truly tempted; as perfect man,
suggestions of evil could not arise within, but must be presented
from without. He must know our temptations if He is to help us in
them, and He must 'first bind the strong man' if He is afterwards
'to spoil his house.' It is useless to discuss whether the tempter
appeared in visible form, or carried Jesus from place to place. The
presence and voice were real, though probably if any eye had looked
on, nothing would have been seen but the solitary Jesus, sitting
still in the wilderness.
I. The first temptation is that of the Son of man tempted to
distrust God. Long experience had taught the tempter that his most
taking baits were those which appealed to the appetites and needs of
the body, and so he tries these first. The run of men are drawn to
sin by some form or other of these, and the hunger of Jesus laid Him
open to their power--if not on the side of delights of sense, yet on
the side of wants. The tempter quotes the divine voice at the
baptism with almost a sneer, as if the hungry, fainting Man before
him were a strange 'Son of God.' The suggestion sounds innocent
enough; for there would have been no necessary harm in working a
miracle to feed Himself. But its evil is betrayed by the words, 'If
Thou art the Son of God,' and the answer of our Lord, which begins
emphatically with 'man,' puts us on the right track to understand
why He repelled the insidious proposal even while He was faint with
hunger. To yield to it would have been to shake off for His own sake
the human conditions which He had taken for our sakes, and to seek
to cease to be Son of man in acting as Son of God. He takes no
notice of the title given by Satan, but falls back on His
brotherhood with man, and accepts the laws under which they live as
His conditions.
The quotation from Deuteronomy, which Luke gives in a less complete
form than Matthew, implies, even in that incomplete form, that bread
is not the only means of keeping a man in life, but that God can
feed Him, as He did Israel in its desert life, with manna; or, if
manna fails, by the bare exercise of His divine will. Therefore
Jesus will not use His power as Son of God, because to do so would
at once take Him out of His fellowship with man, and would betray
His distrust of God's power to feed Him there in the desert. How
soon His confidence was vindicated Matthew tells us. As soon as the
devil departed from Him, 'angels came and ministered unto Him.' The
soft rush of their wings brought solace to His spirit, wearied with
struggle, and once again 'man did eat angels' food.'
This first temptation teaches us much. It makes the manhood of our
Lord pathetically true, as showing Him bearing the prosaic but
terrible pinch of hunger, carried almost to its fatal point. It
teaches us how innocent and necessary wants may be the devil's
levers to overturn our souls. It warns us against severing ourselves
from our fellows by the use of distinctive powers for our own
behoof. It sets forth humble reliance on God's sustaining will as
best for us, even if we are in the desert, where, according to
sense, we must starve; and it magnifies the Brother's love, who for
our sakes waived the prerogatives of the Son of God, that He might
be the brother of the poor and needy.
II. The second temptation is that of the Messiah, tempted to grasp
His dominion by false means. The devil finds that he must try a
subtler way. Foiled on the side of the physical nature, he begins to
apprehend that he has to deal with One loftier than the mass of men;
and so he brings out the glittering bait, which catches the more
finely organised natures. Where sense fails, ambition may succeed.
There is nothing said now about 'Son of God.' The relation of Jesus
to God is not now the point of attack, but His hoped--for relation
to the world. Did Satan actually transport the body of Jesus to some
eminence? Probably not. It would not have made the vision of all the
kingdoms any more natural if he had. The remarkable language 'showed
... all ... in a moment of time' describes a physical impossibility,
and most likely is meant to indicate some sort of diabolic
phantasmagoria, flashed before Christ's consciousness, while His
eyes were fixed on the silent, sandy waste.
There is much in Scripture that seems to bear out the boast that the
kingdoms are at Satan's disposal. But he is 'the father of lies' as
well as the 'prince of this world,' and we may be very sure that his
authority loses nothing in his telling. If we think how many thrones
have been built on violence and sustained by crime, how seldom in
the world's history the right has been uppermost, and how little of
the fear of God goes to the organisation of society, even to-day, in
so-called Christian countries, we shall be ready to feel that in
this boast the devil told more truth than we like to believe. Note
that he acknowledges that the power has been 'given,' and on the
fact of the delegation of it rests the temptation to worship. He
knew that Jesus looked forward to becoming the world's King, and he
offers easy terms of winning the dignity. Very cunning he thought
himself, but he had made one mistake. He did not know what kind of
kingdom Jesus wished to establish. If it had been one of the bad old
pattern, like Nebuchadnezzar's or Caesar's, his offer would have
been tempting, but it had no bearing on One who meant to reign by
love, and to win love by loving to the death.
Worshipping the devil could only help to set up a devil's kingdom.
Jesus wanted nothing of the 'glory' which had been 'given' him. His
answer, again taken from Deuteronomy, is His declaration that His
kingdom is a kingdom of obedience, and that He will only reign as
God's representative. It defines His own position and the genius of
His dominion. It would come to the tempter's ears as the broken law,
which makes his misery and turns all his 'glory' into ashes. This is
our Lord's decisive choice, at the outset of His public work, of the
path of suffering and death. He renounces all aid from such arts and
methods as have built up the kingdoms of earth, and presents Himself
as the antagonist of Satan and his dominion. Henceforth it is war to
the knife.
For us the lessons are plain. We have to learn what sort of kingdom
Jesus sets up. We have to beware, in our own little lives, of ever
seeking to accomplish good things by questionable means, of trying
to carry on Christ's work with the devil's weapons. When churches
lower the standard of Christian morality, because keeping it up
would alienate wealthy or powerful men, when they wink hard at sin
which pays, when they enlist envy, jealousy, emulation of the baser
sort in the service of religious movements, are they not worshipping
Satan? And will not their gains be such as he can give, and not such
as Christ's kingdom grows by? Let us learn, too, to adore and be
thankful for the calm and fixed decisiveness with which Jesus chose
from the beginning, and trod until the end, with bleeding but
unreluctant feet, the path of suffering on His road to His throne.
III. The third temptation tempts the worshipping Son to tempt God.
Luke arranges the temptations partly from a consideration of
locality, the desert and the mountain being near each other, and
partly in order to bring out a certain sequence in them. First comes
the appeal to the physical nature, then that to the finer desires of
the mind; and these having been repelled, and the resolve to worship
God having been spoken by Jesus, Luke's third temptation is
addressed to the devout soul, as it looks to the cunning but shallow
eyes of the tempter. Matthew, on the other hand, in accordance with
his point of view, puts the specially Messianic temptation last. The
actual order is as undiscoverable as unimportant. In Luke's order
there is substantially but one change of place--from the solitude of
the wilderness to the Temple. As we have said, the change was
probably not one of the Lord's body, but only of the scenes flashed
before His mind's eye. 'The pinnacle of the Temple' may have been
the summit that looked down into the deep valley where the enormous
stones of the lofty wall still stand, and which must have been at a
dizzy height above the narrow glen on the one side and the Temple
courts on the other. There is immense, suppressed rage and malignity
in the recurrence of the sneer, 'If Thou art the Son of God' and in
the use of Christ's own weapon of defence, the quotation of
Scripture.
What was wrong in the act suggested? There is no reference to the
effect on the beholders, as has often been supposed; and if we are
correct in supposing that the whole temptation was transacted in the
desert, there could be none. But plainly the point of it was the
suggestion that Jesus should, of His own accord and needlessly, put
Himself in danger, expecting God to deliver Him. It looked like
devout confidence; it was really 'tempting God'. It looked like the
very perfection of the trust with which, in the first round of this
duel, Christ had conquered; it was really distrust, as putting God
to proof whether He would keep His promises or no. It looked like
the very perfection of that worship with which He had overcome in
the second round of the fight; it wag really self-will in the mask
of devoutness. It tempted God, because it sought to draw Him to
fulfil to a man on self-chosen paths His promises to those who walk
in ways which He has appointed.
We trust God when we look to Him to deliver us in perils met in meek
acceptance of His will. We tempt Him when we expect Him to save us
from those encountered on roads that we have picked oat for
ourselves. Such presumption disguised as filial trust is the
temptation besetting the higher regions of experience, to which the
fumes of animal passions and the less gross but more dangerous airs
from the desires of the mind do not ascend. Religious men who have
conquered these have still this foe to meet. Spiritual pride, the
belief that we may venture into dangers either to our natural or to
our religious life, where no call of duty takes us, the thrusting
ourselves, unbidden, into circumstances where nothing but a miracle
can save us-these are the snares which Satan lays for souls that
have broken his coarser nets. The three answers with which Jesus
overcame are the mottoes by which we shall conquer. Trust God, by
whose will we live. Worship God, in whose service we get all of this
world that is good for us. Tempt not God, whose angels keep us in
our ways, when they are His ways, and who reckons trust that is not
submission to His ways to be tempting God, and not trusting Him.
'All the temptation' was ended. So these three made
a complete whole, and the quiver of the enemy was for
the time empty. He departed 'for a season,' or rather,
until an opportunity. He was foiled when he tried
to tempt by addressing desires. His next assault will
be at Gethsemane and Calvary, when dread and the
shrinking from pain and death will be assailed as
vainly.