When Milton wrote his Paradise Regained, he only showed that genius, even like his, can add nothing to the simple yet formidable prose which records our Saviour's temptation in the wilderness. One would have thought that the Spirit like a Dove which rested on Him would have called Him at once to His appointed career of help and healing; but what happened was that this very Spirit drove Him forth, suddenly and inexorably, to the dangers and privations of an empty desert, where was not one body to be healed or soul to be saved.
It was not enough to submit, as Christ did, to John's baptism. Such was His love for His first friend that He must share in His own person John's deepest experiences. He must brave John's solitary life. He must endure John's loneliness. From which it follows that the explorer, marooned on an iceberg; the criminal, thinking things over in his cell; the sailor, maintaining his wintry vigil; the soldier, tired of the trench; the missionary, toiling through the night and praying for a dawn delayed; the student, who sees self writ large across his every page--every man, every woman, thus isolated, may know that the Lord Jesus also lived where no human comfort could sustain Him. He suffered hunger, as on the Cross He suffered thirst, and was so utterly neglected by mankind that few would have known whether He lived or died. In a word, the Lord seemed to be quite unimportant, just a forgotten unit among millions, a single line in small print among the missing; lacking even John's locusts and wild honey--yet still illuminating that amazing, almost defiant declaration: Though He slay Me, yet will I trust in Him. It was a foretaste of His whole life; He was amid the wild beasts-that was His environment-but angels ministered unto Him. On the one hand raged His circumstances, but within was peace.
Forty Days in the Wilderness
The world is too much with us, and sometimes we think that by leaving it behind we must perforce find God. The monk, the nun, and the anchorite so arrange their lives. It was after forty days spent thus in the mountain that Moses saw the glory of Jehovah and received His law. It was after forty days in the desert that Elijah heard the still small voice. And Moses, with his laws, and Elijah, with his vision, were our Saviour's chosen companions when He was transfigured on the uplands. Jesus did not ignore the secret room where, with the door closed, souls submit themselves to God. Teaching us that no one is great who cannot be his own intimate friend, He would often spend a whole night alone upon the mountain. But He destroyed asceticism as an end in itself. For Moses, as an individual, to receive the law was, after all, nothing; for law, by its nature, assumes a society. Better break the tables to fragments if the people are still to worship the golden calf. When Elijah heard God's voice, it was not for himself alone. It was that he might inspire others--Hazael and Jehu and Elisha. The transfigured Christ, with His countenance aflame with glory, must needs cure the epileptic boy. And when He lay prostrate in the desert, His body famished, His every sense vanquished, what He discovered was, not the outward calm of the cloister, but the very Devil himself. How terrible that experience was to Him we know from His prayer: "Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from the Evil One." Watch and pray," said He, lest ye enter into temptation." The weakness of the flesh, the willingness of the spirit--He tested them both. He was perfected through sufferings. Vigilance and worship are the price of victory.
And by His wisdom, so costly in its winning, He makes it clear to us, first, that He is with us always, even when we are most alone; and, secondly, that, where possible, we should do His work in association with one another. He sent forth His disciples, not singly, but in couples, that the strong brother might be at hand to help the weak when he stumbles. If things are desired, or if things have to be decided, He suggests that two or three should gather together, when He will be in the midst, bringing every private judgment into unity with His own. And when He rose from the dead, He sent His disciples, not into the wilderness, which He knew so well, but into Galilee, where service-the best eternal safeguard against temptation-was to be done. After His ascension, His disciples had to face the future without His bodily presence, but they did not spend their forty days in the desert, each by himself; they assembled in an upper room, like a family, and so awaited the tongues of fire. There was safety, there was helpfulness, in numbers.
Before the War broke out, many doubted whether there was a Devil. They talked about environment and heredity, but they denied that Evil, like Good (or God), is personal; and gradually God faded away too. Nowadays, we are not quite so assured of our negations. Jesus did not argue about the existence of Satan--He did not ridicule Beelzebub, Prince of Demons. The good angel and the bad angel were to Him as actual as you are or as I am. Living as we live in a vast spiritual universe, He had eyes to see how its limitless spaces are densely peopled by souls, immortal, yet not always human, with wills of their own, which strive with man, and even strive with God. We have seen that every child has his appointed angel, and that twelve legions of angels were at the Christ's immediate command, even when He was under arrest. Similarly, legions of demons--spiritual in essence, though wicked in aim--encamp within the heart, irresistible until a Stronger drive them forth--sifting men, as Satan sifted Peter, like wheat, and Judas, like the chaff. Modern history has been described as the failure of Christianity, but it is rather a panorama of astonishing conflict--grim, incessant, pitiless--in which Christ helps us, because, amid poison gas, and all the trickery of warfare, He, with eagle eye and steady finger, has located, once for all, the Arch-Enemy. He drew the fire, and, by His heroic reconnaissance, unmasked for all time the entrenched batteries of iniquity.
Answering Temptation
We marvel at Verdun--how persistent and varied the attack, how costly the defense! And as Verdun has been of value only as the symbol of France, so it was the soul, worth more to Him than all the world, for which our Lord fought with unflinching courage. One feels, as one reads, how everything depended on the issue of that battle. Thrust and counterthrust were leveled with incomparable skill. The Devil constantly maintained a bold and varied offensive. Our Lord, as constantly, was ready with an exactly direct counter-attack. All His Divine knowledge, ready for instant use, was available as munitions of war. There was not one page in Holy Writ that did not furnish Him with a high explosive, the thunder of which reverberates to this day. He did not waste one moment on dates and authorship, on alleged discrepancies and erasures in manuscripts, and such-like tactics. He took the words as written--placed Himself as Scholar on the level of anybody who spends sixpence on a Bible and reads it--and handling texts, as an accomplished duelist uses his rapier, He parried instantly every stroke.
Though a battle of words, and words alone, here was no sham fight. To Christ, words condemn and words justify us. It is the word of the diplomat that sheds the blood of millions. It was Christ's refusal to compromise with the world that set the world against Him ; and with the flesh, that caused His flesh to be rent; and with the Devil, that brought Him inevitably to the day when, with Him, was quenched the Light of the World, leaving the Prince of Darkness for three hours supreme.. It is a true instinct that leads the bigot to burn the Bible, and the despot to suppress freedom of speech. The thought which leaps to the lips determines the fate, not of mind alone, but of money, and health, and thrones, and empires--hearths, happiness, heaven, and hell. Others rule with a rod of iron; our Lord has been able to govern us with the rod of His mouth.
Against those words of His the Devil recoiled, three times baffled. Yet, throughout this opening campaign, Satan showed that he knew precisely what was the prize to be won. His blows were aimed, not at our Lord's body, but rather at His soul. He did not enter into the wild beasts, as his demons entered into the Gadarene swine, and cause them to attack Jesus. The food with which he tempted Him was not poisoned food, except to the immortal part of Him. Satan did not try himself to cast down the Saviour from the pinnacle of the Temple. Nor did he desire that our Lord should be dashed in pieces. And when he asked Jesus to worship him, he did not threaten Him with death if He refused. All he wanted was that the soul should go astray. Given that great success, he would have been glad to see the Son of God well fed, well clothed, healthy, popular, and even philanthropic. To this extent, if I may say so, Jesus and His antagonist met on common ground, and understood one another. They realized, both of them, the paramount value of the unseen life. Neither cared for anything else.
The Enemy's Sleepless Hostility
Reserving, for the present, some words about the particular temptations, let me here conclude by reviewing, broadly, the strategy which began at Bethlehem and ended at Calvary. The Prince of the Power of the Air worked throughout, not directly, and, as it were, in his own person, but by instigating or influencing men, so that at one point Peter himself was addressed by our Lord as "Satan." The first stroke was an attempted assassination at Bethlehem. The second was the long oblivion of Egypt and Nazareth. The third was the desperate conflict in the wilderness, after which the Devil left Jesus for a time. In the years that followed, we can detect frequent traces of the enemy's sleepless hostility--how men tried to make Jesus an earthly king; sought to dissuade Him from going up to Jerusalem to die; slept in the garden when, in agony, He prayed that the cup might pass from Him, but only as God willed; and railed on Him when, on the Cross, He cried out that God also had forsaken Him.
During this conflict, slowly but surely, Jesus forced the Devil back from the spiritual to the physical plane. We see how, as His soul was found to be impregnable, His body was drawn into danger. At Nazareth, they tried to hurl Him from a precipice. In the Temple, they took up stones to stone Him. More than once, they sent to arrest Him, but dared not do it in the daylight. And, with all this going on around Him, our Lord told His disciples not to fear those who could only attack the body, but to fear Him who could destroy body and soul in hell. Whence it follows that, in every age, His followers, few or many, have been ready to suffer even torture for His sake, and this joyfully, because they have known that from the realms of evil thus closely confined to that which perishes the eternal in man has been finally liberated.