"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil" (Matt. 4:1).
Posted : 20 Sep, 2011 02:23 AM
Dear Christian reader, imagine yourself shut in for a single day with one of the most vile and corrupt of our species. Imagine that, during that period, his whole aim would be to tamper with your allegiance to Christ, to undermine your principles, to pollute your mind, to instill blasphemous thoughts, to wound your conscience, to destroy your peace. What mental suffering, what grief, what torture your soul would endure during that time!
Yet all this�and infinitely more�is what Jesus passed through. For forty days and nights he was shut in with Satan in the wilderness. The prince of darkness's assaults were never more fearful, his fiery darts were never more surely aimed and powerfully thrust, and he had never had so bright a target for the object of his attack as now.
Our Lord's exposure to temptation, and his consequent capability of yielding to its enticements, is based on his perfect humanity. It surely needs no argument to show that, as God, he could not be tempted, but that, as man, he could. His inferior nature was finite and created; it was not angelic, it was human. It was just like our own, with one exception�he was without sin. He had a human body and a human mind, with all their essential and peculiar properties. He was "bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh." He grew up through the stages of infancy, boyhood, and manhood. He was subject to all the weaknesses, surrounded by all the circumstances, and exposed to all the inconveniences that belong to our nature. He breathed our air, walked our earth, ate our food. The higher attributes of our being were his also. Reason, conscience, memory, will, affections, were essential elements of that human soul which the Son of God took into union with his Divinity. As such, then, our Lord was tempted. As such, too, he was capable of yielding. His finite nature, though pure and sinless, was yet necessarily limited in its resources and weak in its own powers. Touching his inferior nature, he was but man. The Godhead was not humanized, nor was the humanity deified, by some sort of blending together of the two natures. Each retained its essential characters, properties, and attributes�distinct, unchanged, and unchangeable.
But let no one suppose that a danger in Jesus to yield to Satan's temptation necessarily implies the existence of the same sinful and corrupt nature which we possess. Far from it. To deny that he was capable of succumbing to temptation would be to neutralize the force, beauty, and instruction of this eventful part of his history. It would be to reduce a splendid fact to an empty fable, a blessed reality to a ambiguous theory. It would be to rob Jesus of the great glory which covered him when he was left alone, the victor on this battlefield.
And yet it does not follow that he had to be sinful in order to be thus capable of yielding. It is an error to suppose that the force of a temptation always depends upon the inherent sinfulness of the person who is tempted. The case of the first Adam disproves this assumption, and in some of its essential features strikingly illustrates the case of the second Adam. In what consisted the strength of the assault before whose fearful onset Adam yielded? Surely not in any indwelling sin, for Adam was created pure and upright. There was no appeal to the existence of any corrupt principles or propensities, no working upon any fallen desires or tendencies in his nature. Until the blow knocked him to the earth, no angel in heaven stood before the throne more pure or more faultless than Adam. But God left him to the necessary weakness and poverty of his own nature, and thus withdrawing his Divine support and restraint, that instant he fell! That our adorable Lord did not fall, and was not overcome in his fearful conflict with the same foe, was owing solely to God's upholding, and the Holy Spirit's indwelling and restraining power, which he possessed without measure.
"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil" (Matt. 4:1).
Posted : 20 Sep, 2011 11:01 PM
Jesus did nothing because of his title he did all that he did as a man anointed of God, he could just as well given to temptation but he did not. That is why that was his first test after being anointed, he was tempted as Adam was, but he had to overcome the temptation, this was a vital part of his substitution.
