Those who read these little studies will bear with me if I take a further glimpse, and a final one, at our Lord and His tempter. He had many private interviews, as with Nicodemus by night; but here in the desert He was quite alone--there was no witness of what happened except the Devil. And what makes the narrative so compelling of attention is that it was thus strictly autobiographical--a personal disclosure by Christ Himself. He who was afterwards the Friend of publicans and sinners here asserted that, behind the scenes, His constant and unwelcome associate had been the Evil One.
Many and terrible as were the blasphemies pronounced against His character, no one ever suggested that Jesus was, during those six weeks, other than sinless. And this is the more notable because He had to face constant calumnies, of which the most iniquitous was a charge of what we should call witchcraft. When He rebuked people, they said He had a devil; and when He healed them, it was by the prince of the devils that He cast out devils. Yet these wicked allegations did not once include a reference to the wilderness. The Slanderer who inspired the abuse was silent about that experience. The tongue of the whisperer, who spares the private life of no public man, was here tied and dumb. To the accounts of the matter in the Gospels there is no alternative record. Those documents stand unchallenged, and it would be irreverence even to suggest the measureless contrast between our Lord's inner experiences and those, let us say, of Mohammed or Buddha.
"One Unalterable Magna Charta"
Influence is reciprocal, and in resisting temptation Jesus gave even the very Tempter a chance. The Master did not content Himself with saying that man shall live by every word proceeding from the mouth of God. As, later, He preached to the spirits in prison, so here He came to closer quarters with His adversary, offering him personally the very word which sustained the Chosen People when they crossed that same bleak and torrid region. Thou, He declared, shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve. The message of God to man was thus seen to be, not a local by-law for a planet, wandering, a speck of dust, through boundless space. It is the one unalterable Magna Charta, for all that lives in every region-be it in time or be it in eternity, be it in spirit or be it in body. The claim is absolute, here and hereafter, on the proudest and most rebellious, as on the humblest and the weakest. Satan set out to seduce the Son of Man into worshiping him. He found that he was tempting his God, to whom all service and worship were due.
As one reads these accounts, one realizes what is sometimes forgotten, namely, that our Lord and the Devil did not here meet for the first time. Not long afterwards, He Himself told the people that Satan was the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning--that beginning when the Word, since made flesh, dwelt with God. He could detect at a glance the lineaments of that evil spirit, incarnate, as it were, in the faces of men. It was the Devil who picked up the good seed and sowed tares amid the wheat. It was the Devil who established his fatherhood over the stubborn and argumentative Jews--turning their grip of truth into the clutch of self and sin. It was the Devil who, contaminating kindliness itself, prompted Peter to dissuade the Saviour from His purpose to meet death at Jerusalem, and would have sifted that Apostle like grain. Nor did Jesus for one instant doubt that the Devil lived in an outer darkness where was weeping, as of sorrow, and gnashing of teeth, as of anger and pain. The Everlasting Son of God did not doubt, because He knew it as a fact. He had watched the Devil from the beginning. And it was because He thus knew the Devil that He afterwards fathomed the tragedy of the Iscariot's heart.
The Wiles of the Devil
In modern-war, the combatants are concealed and their plans held secret. But goodness is armed cap-à-pie, and rides panoplied into the field, with helmet and breastplate and sword flashing recklessly in the Sun of Righteousness. When the temptations were failing of their objective, the Devil, with insidious tact, summoned Scripture to his aid, quoting a psalm, every verse of which applied to our Lord's special trouble in the wilderness. We seem to hear our Saviour repeating to Himself those matchless verses which He had learnt in the synagogue, about the secret place of the Most High, the shadow of the Almighty, the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon, to be trampled underfoot. Here were the armorial bearings of Satan, known the world over--the serpent that poisons life and the lion that devours It, opposed in deadly conflict to the Redeemer who saves life. It was from this, of all other psalms, that, with remorseless ingenuity, the Devil drew his deadliest "arrow" to aim at the nobler "Lion of Judah."
This Subtle foe does not merely pander to the worst in man; he accommodates himself to the best; quoting Scripture for his purpose ' falsifying statistics; changing affections into vices, hopes into ambitions, faith into credulity, worship into superstition, art into seduction, law into cruelty, liberty into license, churches into vested interests; and, as here, a sense of God's care, Of the angels bearing us up lest we dash our foot against a stone, into the habit of taking things for granted, as if we may be sure of safety however willfully we choose our path. In the New Testament, we frequently come across paraphrases and summaries of what is said in the Old Testament. The Jewish Bible was handled, not slavishly, but with a splendid and audacious familiarity. But, in the Devil's mouth, the accuracy was that of a forger. The omission was the more deliberate, because the words quoted were exact.
Christ and the Scriptures
To Jesus, at that supreme moment, a merely general acquaintance with the Bible would have been useless. He had need to know its every parenthesis as a lawyer scrutinizes each word in a complicated title-deed. Few of us, hearing that ninety-first Psalm chanted, would have attached supreme importance to the little phrase about being kept in all our ways; yet we have therein a summing up of the entire revelation of God to the Jews. They were a chosen people. They had an appointed history. They were not mere flotsam and jetsam on the sands of time. In all their ways they were to acknowledge Him, and He would direct their paths. Iniquity is just this--a turning to our own way. And the whole point of the charge onto the angels to bear us up lest we be injured, is that the way is stony, uneven, and not at all what we would ourselves choose. He does not remove the stones. But, on the other hand, He would not have us "dashed" against them. We may appear to make no progress--but that matters little. What He would save us from is the fate of the disappointed man. Whatever may happen to our feet, He would not have our souls bruised.
In all of which, we find the answer to fatalism. Our path lies before us--that is plain; but we are not the sport of a blind destiny. We can, if we so determine, tempt--we can take liberties with--the Lord our God. Providence, like science, excludes chance, or luck; yet there was a truth in the idea of the pagan that the gods ought not to be offended. To steam full speed through icebergs is irreligious. To start the day without one thought of our Maker is to invite catastrophe. And we are sometimes less punctilious with the Almighty than we are with our employers, or our solicitors, or our sovereign. We tempt Providence and challenge consequences.
From the Temple, with its man-made pinnacle, our Lord proceeded to the mountain where--no longer an ecclesiastical Christ but the Christ that is universal--He surveyed the world. What Satan showed Him was the kingdoms and their glory; what He saw was the sin and suffering to which Satan was indifferent. More than once we read how He looked on the multitudes and was moved with compassion, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd. It was the world that God loved so intensely as to send into it His only begotten Son; and to corrupt our Lord's ambition to save the perishing was the last endeavor of the Devil. In casting oneself down there was danger. But to fall down and worship, what could be simpler? A little bribery on polling-day, a touch of insincerity in a peroration, a hint of sharp practice in business, a compromise of principles, a word of flattery to the influential, some innocent wire-pulling--we all know these genuflections to the Evil One, who boldly claims that kingdoms are given to him, and are thus his to give away. We who compose society, by our selfishness and subservience constantly surrender our institutions, until they belong neither to us nor to God. It is not only on the coast-line of Africa that the spirit of evil is worshiped.
Worship First
Surely, it might be argued, if the end were salvation, the means would be forgiven. Think what an Emperor we would have had in the Lord Jesus--what abuses He would have swept away, what tyrannies He would have broken down, what oppression He would have relieved! He was asked to choose right service by the aid of wrong worship; and, without an instant of hesitation, He set worship first. It is not what a man does that matters, but why he does it, and how he does it ; the means are more than the end; nor is there any service of men which is not, first, a service of God. The little maid who bore her witness was nobler far than Naaman, the Prime Minister, who was healed, only to bow himself once more in the house of Rimmon. And the sinful woman breaking her alabaster box upon the feet of the Christ was nearer the truth of things than Judas, who wanted those two hundred pennies for the poor. Joseph was sold for twenty pieces of money. Achan turned traitor for a wedge of gold and a Babylonish garment. Elisha's servant hankered after a few talents, and Judas sold his Master for thirty shekels. But Christ, in the temptation in the wilderness, would not exchange the whole world for His own soul. And for that soul it was the world that Satan offered.