10. Christ's Victory, The Pledge and Power of our Victory over Temptation and Sin

Christ’s Victory, The Pledge and Power of our Victory over Temptation and Sin

" There hath no temptation taken you but such as man can bear: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it." (1 Corinthians 10:13) " Apart from me ye can do nothing." (John 15:5).

" I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me." (Php 4:13) "I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." (Galatians 2:20) " Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might." (Ephesians 6:10)

" He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me in my throne, as I also overcame, and sat down with my Father in his throne." (Revelation 3:21) WE have already seen that temptation, even of the fiercest kind, need not imply a fallen state. The temptations of Christ are not only the proof that sin in no way necessarily follows previous temptation, but they are also the proof that temptation in no way necessarily implies previous sin. Temptation, in fact, is an inevitable condition and result of probation; and had man never fallen he would still have required the searching discipline of trial, for until good ness is proved it can never be assured of its own reality and stability. In this light Christ’s temptations may be regarded as types of the temptations through which each man would have passed if sin had never " entered into the world, and death through sin," and His victories as types of the victories man would have gained over sin. The whole of the life of our Lord indeed was a representative life, as truly as His death was a representative death for human sin. As " the Son of Man," His life was the realized ideal of the Divine Image in which man was originally created, but which had been lost through his fall. Even the great facts of the Incarnation and Resurrection, which stand at the commencement and the close of the human life of the Lord Jesus, have their relation to us as well as to Him. In the suggestive words of Canon Westcott, [" The Revelation of the Risen Lord," Preface, p, xiii] " the Incarnation gives the absolute pledge of the fulfilment of man’s destiny: the Resurrection shows that fulfilment already attained, as far as our present powers enable us to realize the truth. So it is that Christ, as raised from the dead, is spoken of as ’the second Adam,’ in whom men are reborn, and also as ’the head of the body, the Church.’ The Resurrection, as answering to death, so far depended on the fall, but the glory of the Risen Lord, answering to the accomplishment of the Idea in which man was created, is independent of it. We see in the Risen Christ the end for which man was made, and the assurance that the end is within reach. The Resurrection, if we may so speak, shows us the change which would have passed over the earthly life of man if sin had not brought in death."

We may take these last words and apply them with equal truth to the Victories which Christ gained over the temptations of the devil. If His temptations are the ideal forms under which sinless humanity, if it had remained loyal to God, would have had to meet temptation, His victories are types and illustrations of the successive conquests man would have won over temptation had he never fallen. The tree of forbidden fruit, as we have said, would have been found in every garden, but any garden would have been a paradise, and a paradise never " lost " through transgression. But the race, alas! has fallen. We have sinned, and in our revolt against the authority and love of God, have brought disaster and death on our selves, and the question at once arises, whether the victories of our Lord over the devil have therefore lost their significance to the life of fallen humanity? Is the rich and glorious promise they would have afforded to us, as a sinless race, of a life of victory over temptation unchecked and untarnished by a single defeat, emptied of all its meaning now that we have " sinned and fallen short of the glory of God"? To this question the teaching of the New Testament, and the experience of innumerable generations of saints, return an unhesitating response. As the life of Jesus still remains, even to sinful man, at once the revelation and the example of the glory still possible to him in his fallen state, so the triumph of the Lord Jesus over the tempter is the pledge and prophecy of His final triumph over sin. " If we endure" either suffering or temptation with Him "we shall also reign with Him."

It remains only to enquire how this pledge is fulfilled. In the first place, and beginning on the lowest ground, the fact that one man has over come the subtlest and deadliest temptations, has passed unscathed out of the fiercest fires of assault, is alone of immense significance to the race. It is sometimes asserted that the life of Jesus loses all its glory and meaning if its supernatural character be denied. But it is not so in reality. That we should lose much how much it would be impossible to say if we abandoned our faith in the supernatural birth and the supernatural resurrection of our Lord; that the supreme glory of the life of Christ as the personal revelation of the Eternal God to man, the power of His cross as the Divine atonement for human sin, are gone forever if His Divine Sonship is denied, no Christian can for a moment doubt; but notwithstanding this, no theory of the person and work of Christ, however erroneous or insufficient, can utterly destroy His significance to our race. The most hostile unbelief can never empty the life of Jesus of its surpassing value and preciousness. He may be nothing but "the sweet Galilean vision" which has faded for ever away in the fuller light of the nineteenth century; the vanished Master " On whose face, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down," but the vision has passed before the eyes of man, and the world can never wholly lose the ["Speech at the admission of M. Cherbuliez to the French Academy," May 1882.] spell of its sweetness and beauty. It may be that we " live," as M. Renan said, [ speaking of Christianity], " on a shadow, on the perfume of an empty vase," but the shadow is more wonderful than all realities besides, and the perfume is still there although the vase be empty. Christianity may be a dream, but it is still true, as M. Renan himself confesses, that " it is often to its formulas " the formulas of a dream! " we owe the remains of our virtue." This significance of the victory of Christ over temptation is not wholly lost, even if Christ were only one of us. This, at least, that victory proves, that once in the slow evolution of humanity it has given birth to one in whom goodness was triumphant over every form of evil; that once in the weary progress of the race towards perfection it has borne " one consummate flower," without spot or imperfection, the fragrance of which has come down through all the ages; that one man, at least, has been victor, not vanquished, in the life-long conflict with evil that all men have to wage. As the sweetest, if saddest, poet of unbelief exclaims " Was Christ a man like us? Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he! " [Sonnets by Matthew Arnold, "The Better Part."]. But to the Christian the victory of Christ over the devil has a far more solemn and glorious significance than if it were the solitary triumph of one exceptionally holy man over the forces of evil within and without him. The unique value of Christ’s temptations and victory as those of " the Son of Man " has already been referred to both as the pledge of Christ’s own complete triumph over evil, and of His redemption of mankind from the corruption and slavery of sin; but we have yet to see how the victory of our Lord at once prophesies and secures the triumph of those who trust in Him.

It prophesies our victory, first, because it is the victory of the new head and representative of humanity. A race which owns Christ as its Elder Brother can never be wholly vanquished by sin. Individual members of the race may fall before temptation, and be "hurt of the second death," through not " overcoming," just as individual soldiers in a victorious army may perish on the battlefield, but the race as a whole is not doomed, can never be doomed to final defeat in the warfare against sin. There are great words in the New Testament concerning the future of mankind the full significance of which only the eternal world will reveal, but even here it is impossible altogether to miss the brightness of the hope they shed on the destiny of man. Such verses as these, " Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world; " (John 1:29; Luke 19:10 ) " God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him; " (John 4:17) " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself; " "The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost; " " We have beheld and bear witness that the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world; " (1 John 4:14) " He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world; " (John 12:32; 1 John 2:4) " For God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all;" (Romans 11:32) "Through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things upon the earth, or things in the Heavens; " (Colossians 1:20). " For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive; " (1 Corinthians 15:22) " When all things have been subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected to Him that did subject all things unto Him, that God may be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28) and the number of such passages might be largely increased are filled with a new and glorious meaning when we remember that already One has overcome in whom every man may claim a brother’s part. It may be true that the advocates of the final salvation of all men have failed in their induction from such texts as these fully to weigh with them those which speak, in language not less plain and distinct, of the doom of those who deliberately reject the offer of mercy, and of eternal life, which Christ brings to every human soul; it may be true that they have failed to appreciate the measureless forces of resistance to God possible to the human will, and that in their pleading for " the larger hope," they have forgotten that God will never overpower the freedom with which He originally endowed man; but it is equally true that the severe and narrow theology which doomed let us hope not without misgiving of heart the vast majority of mankind to eternal destruction had for gotten the immortal hopes which the Headship of Christ has made the heritage of the human race. It is for His honour, not solely for man’s salvation, that these hopes are not utterly frustrated by human sin and unbelief. And when we are tempted to despair of our work for our Lord and Master and who is not tempted jn the long and weary work of bringing the world to the feet of Christ sometimes to despair of ever seeing " the will of God done on earth as it is in heaven? " it is enough for us if we " lift up our hearts," and remember Whom it is we serve, Whose kingdom it is we seek to bring in, and that the " One far-off, divine event, To which the whole creation moves," is nothing less than this, "HE SHALL SEE OF THE TRAVAIL OF HIS SOUL AND BE SATISFIED." But the victory of the Lord Jesus over temptation is more than a Hope to the Christian; it is the assurance and power of His own triumph over sin, because Christ dwells in him, and he in Christ. It is difficult, if not impossible, to convey in any human words the reality and intimacy of the union which exists between Christ and His people. To them He is in finitely more than the Divine Head of the race to which they belong; more than the " elder brother," who is "not ashamed to call them brethren;" He is " the Vine," of which they are the branches, the " Head of the Body," of which each one of them is a living member. His Incarnation, as the assumption of the human by the Divine, is also the pledge of the participation of the human in the Divine, and the pledge is fulfilled when Christ " dwells in their hearts by faith." To the apostles there was nothing in the whole sphere of their Christian experience more wonderful or more glorious than the relation which they knew existed between themselves and Christ. They were not only " saved from wrath through Him," (Romans 5:1; Romans 5:9; 1 Peter 1:3) not only "justified by faith"! in Him, not only "be gotten again unto a living hope by His resurrection from the dead;" (Romans 16:7) but they were "IN CHRIST,’’ and in Him had " become partakers of the Divine nature, " (2 Peter 1:4) so that the springs of their best and truest life were not human but Divine. Words which on the lower levels of Christian experience would have sounded almost blasphemous, St Paul uses as the simple and natural expression of his daily life in Christ: " For to me to live is Christ;" (Php 1:21); " I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." (Galatians 2:20; Acts 5:31). But that which was true of the spiritual life of the apostles is equally true of the spiritual life in every age. " The Christian man " to quote the words of Dr Dale in his masterly Congregational Lecture [“Atonement," pp. 413, 414] does not simply develop and perfect his own life; he is constantly receiving and appropriating the life and power of the Son of God. Christ does not merely exhort us to repent, and reveal new motives by which we should be constrained to repent; He gives repentance, inspiring us with His own sense of the evil of sin, His own sorrow for it, and His own desire that we should sin no more. We escape from evil habits and evil passions, not by the force of any moral struggles which can be called our own: sometimes the habits fall away from us at the touch of Christ, as the chains fell away from Peter at the touch of the angel; sometimes the passions are expelled by the power of Christ, as evil spirits were driven out of men by His word; and if we struggle for freedom we are conscious that we are ’ strong ’ only ’ in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Even in the presence of violent temptation there are some Christian people to whom it seems that the victory is given them by Christ rather than achieved by themselves through Christ’s help, and who say they do but ’ stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.’ And though to others, and perhaps to most, there is real and prolonged conflict, their own part in it disappears when they look back on their triumphs; and they declare, in no false humility, but in their desire to express the exact truth, that if they have rescued their moral nature from the power of sin, ’they got not the land in possession by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them; but (God’s) right hand and (God’s) arm, and the light of (God’s) countenance, because (God) had a favour unto them.’ " In the development of the virtues and perfections of the Christian life, as distinguished from conquest over sin, it is, if possible, still more obvious that the life and power of Christ are revealed in us. We lose our selfishness and hardness through receiving, direct from Him, the spirit of compassion which made Him to relieve every form of human infirmity and suffering.... Hence the possibilities of the Chris tian life are not to be measured by our native resources, but by the infinite perfection of Christ Himself. We dwell in Him; He dwells in us; and He is the living prophecy of the height and glory of our holiness a prophecy never to be fulfilled on earth or in heaven, but perpetually moving towards fulfilment, through struggle and sorrow and frequent defeat in this world, and through endless ages of joy and triumph in the world to come.... As we never find rest in the mercy of God until we discover that neither our penitence, nor our amendment of life, nor our faith, can create any claim to the remission of sins, and are willing to receive it as God’s free gift ’ for Christ’s sake; ’ so we can never receive perfect deliverance from sin until we are so anxious for holiness itself as to care nothing for winning any personal credit by becoming holy, until in renouncing the hope of achieving victory over sin for ourselves, renouncing even the desire to achieve it for our selves, we are willing to accept victory and freedom as part of that large inheritance which God has given us in Christ."

If this be a true account of the relation that exists between the Lord Jesus Christ and the believer, and to its truth every page of the New Testament bears witness, very grave practical results follow, some of which profoundly affect the moral life of the Christian Church. To say that the Christian has to struggle against temptation and sin is only to say half the truth. The Christian has not only to struggle, he has to overcome. Victory, not defeat, is to be the normal condition of the Christian life. The temptations to sin which beset us are as various as human character itself; they may come to the soul from the intellect or the affections quite as much as from "the world, the flesh, and the devil," but the issue of the conflict is to be the same in every case. We have an armour wherewith we are " able to stand against the wiles of the devil," (Ephesians 6:1-24) and a shield wherewith we are " able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one." (Ephesians 6:16). This is the ideal of the Christian conflict; why is it that in actual experience we come so far short of the ideal? There are children of God who ought long ago to have been freed from the bondage of evil habit or the tyranny of besetting sin, but instead of this, the power of the habit over them seems hardly broken, and the sin still fills them with sorrow and shame as they remember how often they have struggled against it in vain. Why is this melancholy experience so common? In the great majority of cases, because they have never yet learnt the secret of the Christian life. They strive, and strive honestly, against temptation and sin, but they strive, looking to Christ rather to supplement the deficiencies of their own moral strength, than to fill them with His own Divine and victorious power in the conflict. They do what they can, and when they fail, they ask Christ to help them; but they never dream of doing nothing at all except to cast them selves from the first wholly on their Lord, and emptied of all confidence in their own power to resist sin, to appeal to Him to fight in them and for them, because " the battle is not theirs, but the Lord’s." Or to put the same truth in an other form. Christian people never doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ, through His Holy Spirit, stands in some relation to their will, but if they were to ask themselves what relation it is that Christ thus sustains to them, they would answer that it is an indirect and instrumental relation.

They believe, that is, that Christ influences them through His word, or in the acts of Christian worship, or in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or by the discipline of life, but they do not believe, or at least they do not realize the fact, that He also stands in a more immediate and direct relation to their souls than one human soul can stand to another: that He is able directly and personally to communicate of His own exhaustless might to the broken will, so that even the feeblest Christian may rejoice to say, " The strength of Christ may rest upon me." The result is seen in those failures and de feats in the Christian life with which we are all, alas! too familiar, and which are sometimes so frequent as to reverse the true order of Christian experience, and to make victory the exception rather than the rule.

We have not yet fully learned "the unsearchable riches of Christ." He has already done more for us than in the beginnings of our Christian life we could have believed it possible even for Him to do, but He has not yet accomplished all His "good pleasure " in us. We have yet to learn what is the " exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe." (Ephesians 1:18-19). We may come nearer to Him, and He may come nearer to us than we think. His own parable of " the Vine," and " the branches; " His own words, "Abide in Me, and I in you, for apart from Me ye can do nothing," may be translated into the daily but blessed reality of the Christian life. It is impossible to expect Him to do too much for us when He has Himself told us, " He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father." (John 14:12). But this supreme triumph of the power of God in us, which is the one unfading ideal of the Christian life, never reached but ever before every one who has "known the Lord," is impossible unless we are prepared to fulfil the conditions on which that power descends on the human soul. And of these the first and simplest, and yet perhaps the most difficult, is the confession of our own helplessness and impotence. It is the emptied vessel which alone can be filled with the grace of God, and until we are emptied of all self-confidence, and realize in the depths of our own soul the meaning of the Master’s words, " Apart from Me ye can do nothing," it is vain for us to expect the fulness of His power to rest upon us. In a little village in Switzerland there stands a Roman Catholic Church, the whiteness of whose spire shines above the dark roofed chalets around, and on the wall behind and above the altar within the church, there is painted a rude picture of the crucified Christ, of the kind so commonly seen in Catholic churches on the continent. Below the figure of Christ there is written the single word " I " in German, but some of the drops of blood which have fallen from the pierced hands and side have splashed on that " Ich," and have struck it through as with a crimson line. That village artist had learned "the secret of Jesus," that "he that loseth his life " for Christ’s sake " shall find it; " and not until we have learned the same lesson, and discover, perhaps after many humbling defeats and much painful experience, that it is as impossible to trust self too little, as it is to trust Christ too much, shall we find the secret of a life of victory over sin in the words, " I live, yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in Me." But this appeal to the strength of Christ can only be made " by faith," and faith in Christ is as essential a condition of the exercise of His power as distrust of self. In the prayer of St Paul for the Ephesian Church which has been already quoted, [Tage 233] he asks God that they may know " the exceeding great ness of His power to us-ward who believe" as if even the answer to his prayer was limited by their faith. And it is so. It has been one of the saddest misfortunes to Christian truth that this one act of the soul which Christ and His apostles have made the condition, not only of personal salvation, but of the reception of those large and precious gifts which Christ has ascended to bestow on all who trust in Him, has been so often degraded, largely through the indiscretions and exaggerations of ignorant but well-meaning evangelists, into a mechanical and meaningless fetish. When faith in the Lord Jesus Christ has been made to mean little more than the utterance of the words, " I believe,’’ " I do believe," as if there was magic even in the sound of the words, it is little wonder if the sceptical and critical have scornfully asked how a talisman like that can open the treasures of the kingdom of heaven to the soul.

Faith is no such fetish as this. It is the supreme act of the soul; the synthesis of all its powers; the union of thought, of feeling, of will, in one critical and glowing response to the offer of Christ; the submission of the whole man to His authority and love; the uplifted and emptied human hand which receives " the gift of God." "By faith," to use only a few of the great Scriptural words concerning it, we are " grafted in " to Christ; (Romans 11:20; Romans 11:23) " through faith " Christ "dwells in our hearts; " (Ephesians 3:17) "by faith" we have " access into this grace wherein we stand; " (Romans 5:2; 1 John 5:1; 1 John 5:18) "by faith’’ we are "begotten of God;" nay! so limit less is its power that our Lord Himself declares " All things are possible to him that believeth." (Mark 9:23). This is faith, and such faith we must have if we are ever to conquer temptation, and to be saved from our sins. It is not because Christ’s power is exhausted that we so often fail in the conflicts of the Christian life; it is because we have not yet learned to trust Him as He deserves to be trusted. If " all things are possible to faith," it almost seems as if all things were possible to unbelief, for it can limit omnipotence itself, so that even of Christ it can be said, "He could do there no mighty work, and He marvelled because of their unbelief." (Mark 6:5-6). To us His own question comes as it came to the blind men of old, ere He can do for us any miracle of grace, "Believe ye that I am able to do this?" and to us, as to them, He still declares the great law of His power, "According to your faith be it done unto you." (Matthew 9:28-29) But even this is not all. This undivided trust in the power of Christ does not supersede that moral discipline of ourselves which is an essential condition of all true holiness of character and of life. Not only is faith in Christ not inconsistent with such a discipline, but the discipline itself is one of the conditions of a strong and triumphant faith. For, as has already been observed, faith is not a mechanical act, it is the highest moral attitude of the soul to God; and if so, this attitude must be determined in the last resort by the moral condition of the soul itself. To imagine that because nothing but faith in Christ is required to enable us to overcome sin, we may be careless of ourselves, may venture perilously near danger, may "enter into temptation," may abandon watching and self-denial and prayer, may forego all that inward disciplining of self which St Paul says is part of the "gift of God," (2 Timothy 1:7) is to imagine we may sow the seeds of the flesh and reap the fruits of the spirit. The one perfect example which the world has ever seen of faith, the Lord Jesus Himself, has not only revealed to us the triumphs possible to faith, but He has also shown us the secret places where alone these triumphs are won. He lived a life of constant watching and self -discipline and prayer; He "pleased not Himself;" (Romans 15:3). His cross was so constantly with Him that He said, " If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself daily and follow Me;" (Luke 9:23) and He found in prolonged communion with God, the nourishment and strengthening of His own spiritual life. He entered on His public ministry with prayer; He repaired the exhaustion of spiritual work by " rising up a great while before day" to pray; (Luke 3:21; Mark 1:35). He "continued all night in prayer to God," before choosing the twelve apostles and founding His Church among men; (Luke 6:12-13). He met temptation twice over with watching and prayer; (Matthew 14:23 cp. John 6:15; Matthew 26:36; Matthew 26:40). He enters both the way of the Cross and the glory of the Transfiguration through prayer; (Luke 9:18; Luke 9:28). He begins His passion with prayer (Luke 22:40-41); He dies with the words of prayer on His lips (Luke 23:46). This is the life of "the Leader and Perfecter of the Faith," (Hebrews 12:2) a life from which we learn that the most watchful self discipline, the most constant self-denial, the most fervent prayer, are only the human conditions of that fulness of Faith, which in its turn becomes the condition of the fulness of the Power of God. But with these conditions fulfilled on our part, it is with great diffidence that I venture to differ from the Revised Version, but surely the revisers, by the insertion of the word "our" in italics in this verse, have misconceived its true meaning. The writer is not speaking of Jesus as the "author of our faith," but as the one perfect Example of faith to whom we are to "look" while we "run with patience the race set before us." The words which follow are enough to show that he is thinking of Christ’s life as the life of the " Leader and Perfecter of Faith."

It is hard to say how much God may not do for us. The doctrine of " perfectionism," whether in the more ancient form set up by Pelagianism, or in the more modern form it took in the teaching of Wesley, and which has been reproduced without the qualifications Wesley gave to it, and the balance his ethical teaching afforded, in a crude and perilous form by the " Salvation Army," has always been discredited in the Church, not less by its general common sense, than by the teaching of Scripture, and by a profounder philosophy of sin. But erroneous, and oftentimes dangerous, as this doctrine is, it is not wholly error. It would never have lived in the Church of Christ, it would never have exerted so potent a spell as it has over the coarse and uneducated natures who have been taught by the Salvation Army that they may pass at one bound, from a life of bestiality and wickedness into the possession of a " clean heart," had it not contained, however mixed with error, a great truth the truth that when the moral conditions of the reception of the grace of God are perfectly fulfilled, there is no triumph over temptation and sin impossible to man, because there is none impossible to God. The Church of Christ has too much been allowed to regard defeats in the warfare against sin as part of the normal condition of the Christian life, instead of as a shame, and a disaster, and a sin. When victory over temptation has come, it has too often come as a surprise to the soul; and gloomy acquiescence in life long weakness or sin has taken the place of the shout of triumph, "Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

It is unnecessary to say we shall never wholly conquer sin, or be " made perfect " in this present life. The conditions necessary for the soul to be so filled with God as to make sin impossible will never be perfectly realized on earth. It is not a little thing, nevertheless, to know what God can do for us, if we will only wholly trust Him; it is not a little thing to have ever shining before us the promise which Christ has made our own, which is being fulfilled in this life in spite of its sorrows, and failures, and defeats, and which will crown us with immortal blessedness in the triumphs of the eternal world the promise that He will " bruise Satan under our feet," (Romans 16:20) and " will guard us from stumbling, and set us before the presence of His glory without blemish in exceeding joy." The glory of that final triumph over sin will be His, not ours; but even here on earth we may in part anticipate its glory, and join in the song of those whom He has made " more than conquerors," " UNTO HIM THAT IS ABLE TO DO EXCEEDING ABUNDANTLY ABOVE ALL THAT WE ASK OR THINK, ACCORDING TO THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US, UNTO HIM BE THE GLORY IN THE CHURCH AND IN CHRIST JESUS UNTO ALL GENERATIONS FOR EVER AND EVER. AMEN."