03. The Instrument and the Divine Ordering of the Temptation

The Instrument and the Divine Ordering of the Temptation " Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. "Matthew 4:1.

"Straightway the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness: and he was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan."Mark 1:12-13.

"Jesus, full of the Holy Ghost, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days being tempted of the devil."Luke 4:1.

ALL the Evangelists who record the temptation of our Lord tell us expressly it was a temptation by"the devil."We have already remarked on the impossibility of accounting for temptation assaulting Christ unless some external and objective source of temptation be pre supposed, and as in the special circumstances under which He was now placed He was removed from the possibility of temptation by man, the evangelic records are alike true to the facts of our Lord’s position, and to the inherent necessity of the case, when they tell us that the temptation through which He was now to pass, arose from the malignity and subtlety of the devil. To those who believe in the supernatural there will be no difficulty in the account which the Scriptures give, and nowhere more fully, or more explicitly, than in the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, of the agency and power of the devil. That there are evil spirits as well as good spirits constantly surrounding man the infranatural, if the word may be used, as well as the supernatural, that these spirits, in accordance with their nature, are banded together in rebellion against God, and in a ceaseless effort to overturn His kingdom; that they are under the leadership and control of a prince, or archdevil, of vast, although strictly limited power, and of infernal malignity and cunning, who is called"the Devil,""Satan,""Beelzebub,""the Prince of the Power of the Air,"" the Prince of this world,"the two last expressions possibly summarizing the extent of the territory over which the power of the devil extends, that this evil spirit has usurped, and has been permitted by God provisionally to usurp, the government of this world, and to occupy the throne which belongs to God alone; that his sole object during the limited time of his dominion over men is to seduce them to join him in his revolt against the authority of God, and that for this purpose he approaches and assaults every human soul with an endless variety of seductions to evil, whence he derives the darkest and most terrible name given to him in Scripture of"the Tempter,"is only the briefest summary of the teaching of the Bible on the agency and personality of the devil.

It is true that of late years doubts have arisen, not only amongst those who deny any authority to the Christian revelation, but also amongst some who accept its authority, as to whether there is any valid ground for assuming the existence of a personal devil. It has recently, for example, been gravely asked whether it would not be as well in future to spell the devil’s name without the initial letter; and the recent outcry at the alteration by the Revisers of the New Testament of one petition in the Lord’s Prayer from" Deliver us from evil "to" Deliver us from the evil one,"was perhaps as much due to the theological implication of the alteration, as to a critical objection to the new translation itself; but in addition to the fact that any denial of the existence of a personal devil must necessarily be a denial of that of which, apart from Scripture, we can know nothing either way, it is difficult to see how such a denial can be reconciled with submission to the supreme authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. There has been an almost unanimous consent amongst all the profoundest theologians of the Christian Church on this point, and without therefore encumbering these pages with a discussion, which to be exhaustive would have to be too technical and theological for general readers, we shall assume what is generally understood by the personality of the devil, and we have now to consider the relation the temptation of our Lord bears to the devil as its instrument and cause. In the previous chapters we have dwelt on the reality and the significance of the temptation to Christ Himself, and these have been the aspect in which both theology and the pulpit have commonly regarded it, but it has been too much forgotten that real as the temptation was to Christ, it was just as real to the devil himself. In point of fact the relation and significance of the temptation to the devil have hardly been so much as raised, and yet on the right apprehension of the meaning and motive of the devil in the temptation of Christ, depends very much of the reality of the temptation to Christ Himself.

Christ had become Incarnate to redeem the world from sin, and to restore the authority of God over a revolted race. His whole mission was summed up in the words of St John,"To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil."(1 John 3:8). That He might overturn the kingdom of Satan, and reinstate the kingdom of God among men, might reveal at once the greatness of the sin of man, and the greatness of the glory which had been lost to him through his sin, might make it possible to man to recover this glory once more, Christ did not hesitate to abandon the infinite bliss and glory of Heaven, and to enter on a life filled with sorrow, and ending in the shame and darkness of the Cross. Is it to be wondered at, then, if he who had seduced man from his allegiance to God, whose infernal kingdom had been set up in the world on the ruins of the kingdom of God, who for long ages had been" the prince of this world,"knowing the full significance of the advent of Christ, should rouse himself at the very outset of Christ’s mission for a desperate struggle with the Prince of glory, Whose victory meant the destruction both of Satan and of his kingdom?

It is not a little remarkable that we find similar, if more limited, outbursts of the hostility and power of Satan at each of the great historical crises of the kingdom of God among men. Any special manifestation of the love and power of God in the gradual unfolding of the mystery of Redemption has always provoked a correspondent manifestation of the hatred of the devil both to God and to man. When Adam appears in Paradise the first subject of the new kingdom of God on earth the devil appears too, and at once begins to tempt him to his ruin (Genesis 3:1-24; Exodus 32:1-35; Zechariah 3:1-10). When Israel is delivered from Egypt, and the first great step is taken of the founding of the Theocracy on earth, then again, according to Jewish tradition, Satan appears in the wilderness and seduces Israel by the worship of the golden calf. When the worship of God is once more restored to the people of God after the exile, Satan appears hindering its re-institution, apparently suggesting that as Israel had been rejected by God the priesthood could never again be renewed. When Christ is born"who is to rule all the nations,"again we read," there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels going forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred and his angels: "(Revelation 12:7; 2 Thessalonians 2:9-10) the birth of our Lord being the signal for a furious outbreak of Satanic malignity and power. During the whole of Christ’s earthly life that mysterious revelation of the same power, which the New Testament calls ’possession by devils occurs again and again. When Christ’s kingdom is finally set up among men in the Church of the living God, Satan again appears," and working with all power and signs and lying wonders,"and" with all deceit of unrighteousness,"he enters the Church, falsifying the Gospel, falsifying the worship of God, falsifying the kingdom of God, with lying prophecy, a lying priesthood, and a lying kingship, all of which unite against the office and the kingdom of Christ. According to the Apocalypse Satan’s fury increases with his losses, and it finally culminates in that last and desperate assault on the kingdom of God as if he hoped, even at the moment of the triumph of the kingdom, to wreck it forever described in the mysterious words,"When the thousand years are finished, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall come forth to deceive the nations ... and they went up over the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city."(Revelation 20:7-9). Is it wonderful, we ask again, now the supreme moment in the history of the race has come, and the Deliverer of man from the power of the devil is about to begin His mighty work, that Satan should gird himself for a tremendous and deadly struggle with the Redeemer of the world? As Christ begins His Divine mission Satan arises to overturn it. The temptation is an attempt, almost majestic in its infernal daring, to assault the Son of God ere His work had fully begun; to destroy the kingdom by conquering its King. And here, it may be said in passing, we have another evidence of the reality of the temptation to our Lord. Satan was not playing at fighting. He would never have entered on the awful and perilous work of tempting Christ, if he had known from the outset his attack was doomed to failure.³ As the reality of our Lord’s man hood guaranteed on His side the reality of the temptation, so the reality of the struggle to Satan also guarantees from his side its reality to Christ. Instead of the temptation being an unreal encounter between the devil and Christ, it may be said without exaggeration that never has there been any encounter between the devil and a human soul so real, or on the results of which such vast and tremendous issues were depending. The redemption of the world, the final victory of good over evil, the glory of God Himself, were involved in the victory of Christ over the devil.

[³We may assume that so much as this Satan must have known, although, doubtless, the popular conception of the practical"omniscience"of Satan has no foundation in Scripture.]

It is not necessary, as has sometimes been asserted, to the reality of the temptation, to suppose there must have been a bodily and visible appearance of Satan to Christ. For not only have we no authority in the New Testament to warrant us in believing that Satan has the power to make himself visible at will, but if the visibility of the tempter is essential to the temptation, then it is certain none of us can be tempted by the devil. The truth is, as we shall see in a moment, that so far from a personal and bodily manifestation of the tempter being a necessary part of temptation, it is rather a hindrance to its reality and intensity than other wise. There is, moreover, not a word in any one of the three narratives of the temptation of Christ which would warrant the belief that the devil became personally visible to Christ. Indeed, one of the temptations, and perhaps the keenest and deadliest of the three, must necessarily have been visionary and subjective, for no one can imagine that there was any high mountain from the summit of which Christ could be shown" all the kingdoms of the world; "or that if there was an elevation sufficiently high for such an impossible view, Christ could have seen, with His bodily eyes, such a prospect" in a moment of time,"and if this temptation was mental and subjective without losing its reality, the rest of the temptations may have equally well been so too. Further, it may be urged, and with very considerable force, that the distinct assertion of Scripture that Christ" was in all points tempted like as we are,"precludes the supposition of any visible appearance of Satan to Christ The safest way of discussing the specific mode in which the devil approached Christ is to leave it in the vague and indefinite terms in which Scripture leaves it." The tempter came... unto Him "(Matthew 4:3) is all we are told, and yet vague and indefinite as the expression may be, it is full of suggestion because of its vagueness. Is it not so-with all our own temptations? Can we say, on looking back on them, more than this, that in some way, we knew not how," the tempter came "to us? How the tempter gains access to our own hearts, how he draws back one by one the bolts which bar his entrance there, how he creeps along the secret avenues of the soul, how the dark shadow falls on the chambers of imagery within, how he reaches the spring and fountain of life, the heart itself, and poisons it with evil; how he intermingles his foul and dark suggestions with our own thoughts, filling the soul with all disgusting and loathsome shapes and forms of sin; how, at last, he lays his hand on the citadel of the soul, the will itself, and slowly and surely leads it towards the evil from which it had struggled to be free, until his infernal work is done, and O hideous mystery! these unclean desires seem to be rising from our own hearts, these dark imaginations to be our own foul thoughts within, and these secret inclinations to yield to temptation seem to be our own will bending and swaying towards sin, and at length the voice of conscience is silenced, and" lust hath conceived and brought forth sin; "how all this can be we cannot tell; we only know it is so. The process and the mode of temptation may be a mystery, but its pain and peril are none the less real. We, too, can only say," the tempter came unto us." But it is not enough to speak of the temptation of our Lord as if the devil were solely responsible for it, and there was no Divine ordering to be seen in the conflict between the prince of darkness and the Saviour of the world. It is a remarkable fact that each of the three evangelists who record the temptation uses a different, and yet most significant expression to denote the Divine appointment of the temptation of Christ. St Matthew says,"Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil,"(Matthew 4:1) the gracious but effectual conduct of the Saviour by the Spirit to the temptation being implied in the word used:* St Luke says,"And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days, being tempted of the devil; "the Spirit for this seems the meaning of the word here used inspiring the journey to the desert and to the temptation that awaited Christ there; whilst St Mark with characteristic energy of expression compresses into its most vigorous form the Divine ordering and purpose of the temptation;" Straightway,"he says," the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan." The devil was the instrument of the temptation, but God ordained it. And this distinction between the agent and the ordainer of temptation is not one of words. For not only does the withdrawal of anything, save positive sin, from the sphere of God’s will, affect the integrity of His moral government of the race, and relax the hold which God has on the progress of human affairs (Mark 1:12), but the teaching of Scripture is only to be reconciled with itself by bearing in mind that God may ordain a moral discipline for the soul, of which it is impossible He should be the instrument and immediate cause. We are told, for example, by St James (James 1:13; Genesis 22:1)," Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempteth no man,"and yet we are equally told," It came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham;"and if it be said that this only means that God did try Abraham, the difficulty is removed but a step farther back, for trial is always temptation, just as temptation is always trial. The true solution of the apparent contradiction seems to be suggested by the typical temptation of Christ, that whilst God Himself never does offer, and never can offer personal seduction or inducement to sin to the soul’ the supposition itself is utterly blasphemous yet God may permit, and may will, that the soul should pass through temptation as the only means of that purifying and strengthening discipline to which we referred in the first chapter, as the chief object and result of all moral trial of every kind. And hence it is that the same temptation may be said, from one point of view, to come from God, and from another, to come from the devil. Thus, to take perhaps the most striking illustration of this truth to be found in Scripture, the numbering of the people by David is said in the Book of Samuel to have been the result of God"moving"David"against"Israel (2 Samuel 24:1-25); whilst in the parallel history of the Book of Chronicles we read,"And Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number Israel."(1 Chronicles 21:1-30). Of course there is an absolute opposition between the ends which God has in view and those the devil compasses in the temptation of men. God ordains our temptation in order to purify us as gold is purified in the fire. The devil tempts us to destroy us as rotten wood is consumed in the furnace. God leads us into temptation in order to bless and to crown us with the reward of the victory. The devil tempts us to curse us with the shame and the guilt of defeat. God tempts to save; Satan tempts to destroy. And this double aspect of temptation may suggest to us, in conclusion, some of the practical lessons which even thus early we may learn for ourselves from the temptation of Christ.