His Temptation and Ours
His Temptation and Ours
Hebrews ii. 18; iv. 15–16
The Isolation of Mastership (Matthew iv. 1–2).
His Watch in Faith (Matthew ii. 3–4).
His Wait in Hope (Matthew iv. 5–7).
His Way of Love (Matthew iv. 8–10).
The Limit to the Devil (Matthew iv. 11).
The Inner Martyrdom (1 Peter iv. 12–13).
Our Lure of Wits (Matthew xi. 6).
Our Light of Wisdom (John xii. 16).
Our Liberty of Wonders (Luke xvii. 21).
The Limit to Temptation (1 Corinthians x. 13).
Temptation is not sin; we are bound to meet it if we are men. Not to be tempted would be to be beneath contempt. Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realisation of the highest at which we aim. The way steel is tested is a good illustration of temptation. Steel can be ‘tired’ in the process of testing, and in this way its strength is measured. Temptation is the testing by an alien power of the possessions held by a personality in order that a higher and nobler character may come out of the test.
This makes the temptation of our Lord explainable. He held in His own Person His unspotted sanctity and the fact that He was to be the King of men and the Saviour of the world; and Satan was the alien power that came to test Him on these lines. The period of temptation came immediately after one of spiritual exaltation (Matthew iii. 16–17; iv. 1). It was a period of estimating forces, and the records reveal how our Lord faced and rejected the visions of a swift fulfilment of His vocation presented to Him by Satan. Jesus Christ in His baptism had accepted His vocation of bearing away the sin of the world, and immediately He was put by God’s Spirit into the testing machine of the devil. But He did not ‘tire’; He retained the possessions of His personality intact. He was tempted, “yet without sin.”
The temptations of our Lord have no home at all in our human nature; they do not appeal to us because they are removed from any affinity with the natural. Our Lord’s temptations and ours move in different spheres until we become His brethren, by being born again (Hebrews ii. 11). The temptations of Jesus are not those of Man as man, but the temptations of God as Man. The statement that our Lord was tempted as ordinary men are is readily accepted, but the Bible does not say that He was so tempted. Jesus Christ was not born with a heredity of sin; He was not tempted in all points as ordinary men are, but tempted like His brethren, those who have been born from above by the Spirit of God and placed in the Kingdom of God by supernatural regeneration.
The records of our Lord’s temptations are given not that we might fathom Him, but that we might know what to expect when we are regenerated. When we are born again of the Spirit of God and enter into fellowship with Jesus Christ, then the temptations of our Lord are applicable to us. We are apt to imagine that when we are saved and sanctified we are delivered from temptation; we are not, we are loosened into it. Before we are born again, we are not free enough to be tempted, neither morally nor spiritually. Immediately we are born into the Kingdom of God, we get our first introduction into what God calls temptation, viz., the temptations of His Son. God does not shield any man or woman from the requirements of a full-grown man or woman. The Son of God is submitted to temptations in our individual lives, and He expects us to remain loyal to Him (Luke xxii. 28). The honour of Jesus Christ is at stake in our bodily life. Are we remaining loyal to the Son of God in the things, which beset His life in us? The personality of a saint holds all that God intends a man or woman to be, and the temptation to him comes along the line it came to our Lord—to fulfil what his personality holds on a line other than God intends.
The Isolation of Mastership
“Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He was afterward an hungred ” (Matthew iv. 1–2).
The Spirit of God drove our Lord into the wilderness for one purpose—to be tempted of the devil, not only to test Him, but to reveal what Christian mastership means. In that isolation the Lord Jesus Christ met the strong man and overcame him and bound him, and He gives us “power ... over all the power of the enemy.” The writer to the Hebrews does not say, ‘When you are tempted, imitate Jesus’; he says, ‘Go to Jesus, and He will succour you in the nick of time.’ That is, all His perfect overcoming of temptation is ours (Hebrews ii. 18). The Bible reveals that man is responsible for the introduction of Satan. Satan is the result of a communication between man and the devil, and man must deal with Satan; God does not deal with him direct. Satan is to be overcome and conquered by human beings. That is why God became Incarnate. It is in the Incarnation that Satan is overcome
The Inner Martyrdom
“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy” (1 Peter iv. 12–13).
In the history of the Church inner martyrdom and external martyrdom have rarely gone together. We are familiar with external martyrdom, but inner martyrdom is infinitely more vital. Paul deals with it in Philippians ii. “Christ Jesus ... made Himself of no reputation”; that is, He annihilated by His own deliberate choice all His former position of glory, “and took upon Him the form of a servant.” If we are to be in fellowship with Him we must deliberately go through the annihilation, not of glory, but of our former right to ourselves in every shape and form. Until this inner martyrdom is gone through, temptation will always take us unawares. Peter says, “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which try you.” The internal distresses are accounted for by the fact that the saint is being taken into an understanding of what our Lord went through when He was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted. Satan tried to put Jesus Christ on the way to becoming King of the world and Saviour of men in a way other than that pre-determined by God. The devil does not tempt us to do wrong things; he tries to make us lose what God has put into us by regeneration, the possibility of being of value to God. When we are born from above he central citadel of the devil’s attack is the same in us as it was in our Lord—viz., to do God’s will in our own way.
His Watch in Faith. “And when the tempter came to Him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command 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” (Matthew iv. 3–4). In each of the three never-to-be-forgotten pictures which our Lord has given us the temptation of Satan centres round this point—‘You are the Son of God, then do God’s work in Your own way; assert Your prerogative of Sonship.’ The first temptation was to set up a Selfish Kingdom. ‘You are the Son of God, then command these stones to be made bread; You do not need to be hungry; satisfy Your own needs and the needs of men, and You will get the Kingship of men.’ Was Satan right? Read John vi. 15—“Jesus perceived that they would come and take Him by force to make Him a king.” Why? He had just fed five thousand of them! It must have been a dazzling vision that Satan presented to our Lord, for who could ever have such sympathy with the needs of men as He? For one impressive moment He must have wondered. But our Lord would not be King of men on that line. “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.” He deliberately rejected the suggested ‘short cut,’ and chose the ‘long, long trail,’ evading none of the suffering involved.
In His temptation our Lord does not stand as an individual Man; He stands as the whole human race vested in one Personality, and every one of us when regenerated can find his place and fellowship in those temptations.
Our Lure of Wits. “And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me” (Matthew xi. 6). The deep dejection of John is the dejection of a great man (Matthew xi. 11). John’s misgivings arose from the fact that the wonderful things God had told him about the Messiah, Whom he foreran, seemed to be without application to Jesus Christ (Matthew iii. 11–12). It was a case of wits versus revelation.
The first temptation of our Lord comes to us on this line—‘Be sensible, You are here for the service of men, and surely it is the most practical thing to feed them and satisfy their needs.’ The clamour abroad today is all on this line, ‘Put man’s needs first; never mind about the first commandment, the second commandment is the all-important one’ (see Mark xii. 29–31). This advice sounds sensible and right, but at its heart is the temptation of Satan to put men’s needs first. The insistent demand in the world today to put men’s needs before God’s will is the outcome of the reasoning of human wits and wisdom, and who can say that the demand is a wrong one? So long as our wits and human solutions are on the throne, to satisfy the needs of men is ostensibly the grandest thing to do. Every temptation of Satan will certainly seem right to us unless we have the Spirit of God. Fellowship with our Lord is the only way to detect them as being wrong.
The conditions of our civilised life today ought to be realised more keenly by the Christian than by the natural man, but we must see that the worship of God is put on the throne and not our human wits. The evidence of Christianity is not the good works that go on in the world; these are the outcome of the good there is in human nature, which still holds remnants of what God designed it to be. There is much that is admirable in the civilisation of the world, but there is no promise in it. The natural virtues exhaust themselves; they do not develop. Jesus Christ is not a social reformer; He came to alter us first, and if any social reform is to be done on earth, we will have to do it. Social reform is part of the work of ordinary honourable humanity and a Christian does it because his worship is for the Son of God, not because he sees it is the most sensible thing to do. The first great duty of the Christian is not to the needs of his fellow-men, but to the will of his Saviour. We have to remember the counsel of our Lord, given from the centre of His own agony, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation,” keep stedfastly true to what you know is God’s order and listen to no suggestions from elsewhere. The one thing that will keep us watching and praying is continuing to worship God while we do our duty in the world as ordinary human beings.
His Wait in Hope. “Then the devil taketh Him up into the holy city, and setteth Him on a pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto Him, If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angel charge concerning thee: And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (Matthew iv. 5–7). This temptation presents a wild reach of possibility: ‘You are the Son of God, then fling Yourself off the pinnacle of the temple; do something supernatural; use signs and wonders and bewitch men so that they will be staggered out of their wits by amazement, and the world will be at Your feet. Set up a Spectacular Kingdom.’ Our Lord never once used signs and wonders to get a man off his guard and then say, ‘Now believe in Me.’ Jesus Christ never coerced anybody, He never used supernatural powers or the apparatus of revival; He refused to stagger human wits into submitting to Him, He always put the case to a man in cold blood, ‘Take time and consider what you are doing’ (cf. Luke ix. 57–62). Jesus Christ is engaged in making disciples in the internal sense, consequently He never entrances a man by rapture, or enamours him out of his wits by fascination. Instead, He puts Himself before a man in the baldest light conceivable, ‘If you would be My disciple, these are the conditions’ (see Luke xiv. 26–27 and iv. 33). A man must believe in Jesus Christ by a deliberate determination of his own choice. The temptation to the Church is to go into the ‘show business.’ Our Lord told His disciples they would be witnesses unto Him, a satisfaction to Him wherever they were placed (Acts i. 8).
Our Light of Wisdom. “These things understood not His disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things unto Him” (John xii. 16). Our Lord’s temptations are carefully presented so that we may know the kind of temptation to expect when His life is formed in us. This second temptation is apt to come with tremendous lure after the experience of sanctification—‘Now that I am saved and sanctified, God will surely turn the world upside down and prove what a wonderful thing He has done in me—every unsaved soul will be saved, every devil-possessed man delivered, and every sick person healed’! ‘You will easily get Your Kingship of men if You will use signs and wonders and stagger men’s wits,’ said Satan to our Lord, and the same temptation comes to the Church and to individual Christians, His brethren. It sounds right to ask God to produce signs and wonders, and all through the twenty centuries of the Christian era this temptation has been yielded to, every now and again, in the most wild and inordinate manner. For the past ten years or more it has been in our midst in the Tongues movement, and hundreds of those who were really enlightened by the Spirit of God have gone off on the line of this temptation.
We are apt to have the idea that we can only estimate what God is in us by what He does through us. What about our Lord and Master, what did He do? The marvellous thing about Him is what He did not do. Think what an ignominious failure His life was, judged from every standpoint but God’s. Our Lord did not say that signs and wonders would not follow, but that the one set purpose for us is that we do God’s will in His way, not in our way. All the wisdom seems to be with the temptations, but our Lord by the light of the Holy Ghost reveals where they are wrong. Are we prepared to continue with the Son of God in His temptations in us, or are we going to betray Him and say, ‘Now that I am saved and sanctified, I must expect God to do wonders’? It sounds right and wise, and it commends itself to our natural wisdom if once we forget our Lord’s counsel to watch and pray.
His Way of Love. “Again, the devil taketh Him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto Him, All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve” (Matthew iv. 8–10). Our Lord was then asked to compromise: ‘You will become the king of men and the Saviour of the world by judicious compromise; build Your Kingdom on broadminded lines; be judicious, You know there is evil in the world; then use it wisely, and don’t be so intense against sin; don’t talk about the devil and hell; don’t be so extreme and say a man needs to be born from above. Tolerate my rule of the world, call things ‘necessary evils;’ tell men sin is not anarchy, but a disease; fall down and worship me and my way of looking at things, and I will withdraw and the whole world will be Yours. Establish a Socialistic Kingdom.’ The first sign of the dethronement of Jesus is the apparent absence of the devil, and the peaceful propaganda that is spread after he has withdrawn. Will the Church that bows down and compromises succeed? Of course it will; it is the very thing that the natural man wants. This line of temptation as revealed by our Lord is the most appallingly subtle of all.
Temptation yielded to is lust deified. In the Bible, the term ‘lust’ is used of other things than merely of immorality. It is the spirit of,—‘I must have it at once , I will have my desire gratified, and I will brook no restraint.’ Each temptation of our Lord contains the deification of lust—‘You will get the Kingship of the world at once by putting men’s needs first; use signs and wonders, and You will get the Kingship of men at once; compromise with evil, judiciously harmonise with natural forces, and You will get the Kingship of men at once.’ At the heart of every one of our Lord’s answers are these words: “For I came down from heaven not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me” (John vi. 38), that is ‘I came to do God’s work in His way, not in My own way, although I am the Son of God.’
The temptation to win and woo men is the most subtle of all, and it is a line that commends itself to us naturally. But you cannot win and woo a mutiny; it is absolutely impossible. You cannot win and woo the man who, when he recognises the rule of God, detests it. The Gospel of Jesus Christ always marks the line of demarcation, His attitude all through is one of sternness, there must be no compromise. The only way in which the Kingdom of God can be established is by the love of God as revealed in the Cross of Jesus Christ, not by the loving-kindness of a backboneless being without justice or righteousness or truth. The background of God’s love is holiness. His is not a compromising love, and the Kingdom of our Lord can only be brought in by means of His love at work in regeneration. Then when we are regenerated we must not insult God by imagining that in dealing with our fellow-men we can afford to ignore the need for Redemption and simply be kind and gentle and loving to all.
Our Liberty of Wonders. “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke xvii. 21). “The Kingdom of God is within you”—uncompromisingly within you. We must never compromise with the kingdoms of this world; the temptation the devil presents is that we should compromise. We recognise his temptation in the teaching which proclaims that there is no such being as the devil and no such place as hell; much that is called sin is a mere defect; men and women are like poor babes lost in the wood; just be kind and gentle with them; talk about the Fatherhood of God, about Universalism and Brotherhood, the kindness of Providence and the nobility of man. Our Lord’s temptations reveal where the onslaught will come. Today, through an overplus of Christian activities, Jesus Christ is being dethroned in hearts and Christian wits and wisdom are taking His place; consequently, when trials and difficulties come most of us are at our wits’ end because we have succumbed to one or another of these temptations.
The Limit to the Devil. “Then the devil gaveth Him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto Him” (Matthew iv. 11). The sign of victory is that the temptation has been gone through with successfully. If our Lord had failed in any degree, the angels would have had no affinity with Him. The affinities of a man after a period of temptation prove whether he has yielded to it or not. The practical test for us when we have been through a season of temptation is whether we have a finer and deeper affinity for the highest. Temptation must come, and we do not know what it is until we meet it. When we do meet it, we must not debate with God, but stand absolutely true to Him no matter what it costs us personally, and we will find that the onslaught will leave us with higher and purer affinities than before.
The Limit to Temptation. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation ago make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it” (1 Corinthians x. 13). God does not keep us from temptation, He succours us in the midst of it. Temptation is not something we may escape; it is essential to the full-orbed life of a son of God. We have to beware lest we think we are tempted as no one else is tempted. What we go through is the common inheritance of the race, not something no one ever went through before. It is most humiliating to be taken off our pedestal of suffering and made to realise that thousands of others are going through the same thing as we are going through.
Under the three pictures presented by our Lord every temptation of the devil is embraced; we must ever remember the counsel of our Lord to watch and pray lest we enter into temptation. Prayer is easy for us because of all it cost the Son of God to make it possible for us to pray. It is on the basis of His Redemption that we pray, not on the basis of our penetration, or of our wits or understanding.