VII

THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS

"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. 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. 1-4.

Two Sundays ago, brethren, we read in the book of Genesis how Adam and Eve fell by listening to the evil counsels of the serpent who tempted them. We also heard how God pronounced judgment on all three, and fixed for each their place and their punishment for the time to come. In that early day it was already seen what evil might come to men from the tempter, what power he had to estrange them from God by poisoning their minds. But his power

was not unbounded. God declared that Adam and Eve and their future children were not given up helpless into the serpent's power. Nevertheless, as they had listened to his deceitful voice, they would

still be liable to suffer grievous harm from him. Wherever any child of man went, whatever was his path of life, there the tempter would always be found lurking in the dust beneath his feet, seeking only an occasion to bite and injure him. Such attempts would often succeed. The serpent would often prevail to bruise the heel of the woman's seed. But he was still a lower creature. The seed of the woman would be able to set his heel on the tempter's head and bruise that with a far more deadly hurt. Man would have strength to resist temptation: at times he would refuse to sin against his Lord. Then the tempter's power would suffer loss. Every act of faith and righteousness would encourage others, there would be on the whole a steady advance from darkness to light. And those words, brethren, have been fulfilling themselves from that day to this: and yet it has been hard to believe them true. It was so in the old world, and it is so now. For indeed it is but too true that the tempter's venomous bite spreads upwards from the heel, and we feel the poison in every vein and again we find him so strong, so constantly and steadily strong, rising up again against us after a while after every defeat, that it seems as if the bruises which we can inflict on his head were slight indeed.

But, thanks be to God, there has been one among the sons of men, of whom God's words spoken at the beginning of the world are fully and exactly true. A seed of the woman has come, whose heel and that alone the tempter was able to wound, and who prevailed to give him a deadly hurt, from which he

never can rise up altogether. Henceforth we know that he is indeed under Christ's feet, and therefore under ours, and so we may be assured that he will never be able to prevail against us, except by neglect and fault of our own.

This crushing of the serpent's head by Christ our Lord we read in the Gospel for to-day, or rather the early part of it, the beginning of what was completed when He rose from the dead. It is what we call the Temptation. Whatever struggle any human creature since the world began has ever had with the power of sin was gathered up in that. It is a perfect picture of the temptation of all mankind, but also it is the temptation which did not succeed in any wise, which sent the tempter away in disappointment and shame.

The season of Lent, on which we entered last Wednesday, is appointed in memory of this our Lord's temptation. I have spoken of it to you before as a time for remembering with sorrow our sins, and seeking God's blessed gift of repentance. But it does not leave us to the dreary work of counting up our offences all alone. It bids us think first who not only died for our sins but also was tempted to sin even as we are. We say, and we say truly, that no man can really enter into the trials of another, so as to be able to judge him fairly. Each has his own besetting sins and therefore his own. besetting temptations; and thus there is nothing which places us so completely alone in the world as the thought of our own struggles, successful or unsuccessful, against the evil one. But even here it is

not God's will that we should be alone. He sent His Son upon earth that He might be with us, and that we might know that He is with us wherever we are, even in our loneliest and most desolate hours. As the hymn says, "Christ leads us through no darker rooms, than He went through before." The Bible does not at all encourage us to have our eyes always turned inwards upon ourselves. That is not a wholesome kind of spiritual life. Whenever we must look in upon ourselves, as sometimes we must lest we be lost unawares, we are taught to let our first thought be of Christ. When once we have a firm hold on Him, we may venture to look down into the depths of our own hearts.

The temptation of which we read in the Gospel happened at a remarkable time in our Lord's life. He had just before received baptism from John in the river Jordan. As He had risen up out of the water, the heaven had seemed to open, and a dove came down and rested upon Him as a sign of the Spirit which was given to Him without measure. At the same moment a voice was heard from heaven, saying, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." At this time He was, as we know from St. Luke, about thirty years old. He was going to begin what we call His ministry, the work which His Father had given Him to do in going about among the people. The first and most needful thing for Him to do was to show that He was not separate from them in anything. John was inviting all who felt the weight and burden of their sins to repent, to come to him and be baptized and receive thereby

the assurance of God's ready forgiveness of their sins, and start afresh on their life as new men. Christ had no burden of sins of His own to bear, but that only made Him feel more painfully the burden of His people's sins: on Him was laid the iniquity of all. He went therefore into the waters of the Jordan as they did, not choosing in any way to stand apart from them, but desiring to fulfil every act of righteousness which was due from them as due also from Himself. And as He came up again, God bore witness to Him in a wonderful manner. When the dove was seen to rest upon Him in the eyes of all, it was made known that the Spirit was resting upon Him within-the spirit of innocence and gentleness and peace; and God in heaven declared that He was indeed His Son, His beloved Son: and more than that, a Son without the least shadow of undutifulness or disobedience, a Son in whom His love had to struggle with no wayward opposition, but on whom it could rest freely and without hindrance, a Son who answered exactly to His own mind and will, in short, a Son in whom He was well pleased. We must not for a moment suppose that the Holy Spirit of peace had not rested on Jesus till that day. Assuredly it was with Him all His days, even as may be seen in His conduct when He was found in the temple and in His life afterwards in His mother's family. Still less dare we think that He then for the first time became God's well beloved Son, when we know that He was begotten before all worlds, and that on that same day in the temple He was about His Father's business.