01. The Possibility and Necessity of the Temptation

The Possibility and Necessity of the Temptation

"For it became Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings." Hebrews 2:10.

BEFORE entering on any exposition of the Temptation of Christ as recorded for us in the Gospels, there are some preliminary questions of grave importance which demand our serious consideration.

Assuming for the time the account of the temptation given by the evangelists, it may be asked how was temptation possible to Christ, or if its abstract possibility be conceded, how could it in any way have been necessary for Him to have passed through any personal conflict with the Tempter, seeing that from the first hour of His human life to its last, He was "holy, guile less, undefiled, and separated from sinners." We can readily understand the necessity for so sharp a discipline as temptation in our own case, because we are conscious of impurity and imperfection, and these are often so intimately mixed up with our character and life that nothing but the most searching fire and temptation is such a fire can separate the dross from the gold; but why should Christ have needed the fire, seeing there was no dross to be separated from the gold in Him? Was not the Lord Jesus, for this is what the question really comes to, too good to be tempted?

It is to the consideration and discussion of this question we now invite attention.

There can be no doubt that if the Lord Jesus Christ had not become incarnate He would never have been tempted, and for the simple reason that temptation is not possible to God. James 1:13 tells us that "God cannot be tempted with evil," and although the literal accuracy of the translation which both the "Authorised," and the "Revised" Versions have given of the original¹ may be open to question, still there is no doubt that the Greek fairly bears the meaning given to it in our version, even though it should mean something more as well. Probably the nearest English equivalent would be "inexperienced in evil," and a Being who has no personal experience of evil must necessarily be an untempted and untemptable Being. In fact we cannot conceive of God being tempted. Temptation involves, as we shall see, the possibility of yielding to it, and therefore of sin, but we can no more think of the possibility of God sinning than we can think of the possibility of God ceasing to exist. Necessary Being and necessary Goodness are equally inseparable from our idea of God, and although it may be difficult for us to understand how a Being Whose nature is necessarily good can possess, as we believe God possesses, a will which is everlastingly free, and which freely chooses that which is good, yet the solution of the difficulty is not to be found in the denial of either of these apparently contradictory truths, but in a higher truth, possibly inconceivable by us, which harmonizes and reconciles them both.

God is above the possibility of temptation. But if God is above temptation the beasts are below it.¹ It is impossible to think of a beast being tempted, but for the opposite reason to that which made it impossible to think of God being tempted. God is too high, but the beasts are too low, to be tempted.

[¹I owe this thought to Principal Fairbairn’s suggestive studies of the Temptation published in the Expositor.]

They are removed from the possibility of falling below their own nature by being placed on so low a level that a fall from it is impossible. God, on the other hand, is equally removed from the possibility of falling, but through the possession of a Nature which by its eternal and necessary goodness places Him too high for even the approach of evil. The "beasts that perish" are at one end of the scale of being, whilst the Infinite and Eternal God is at the other, and of neither is temptation thinkable. But with man the case is altogether different. Standing midway between God and the lower animals, allied in one part of his nature with God above, and in another part with the beasts below him, with a lower and a higher nature ever contending for the mastery within him, by the very constitution of his nature man is necessarily a temptable being. He may rise to the Divine Image, or he may sink into the mere animal, but which of these two opposing alternatives shall be his final destiny can be revealed only by trial. And hence temptation is not an accidental incident of man’s existence on earth, it is an essential part of that state simply because it is a state of probation. The gracious purposes which temptation is made to fulfil in the spiritual training and perfecting of his nature we shall consider later on; it is sufficient now to emphasize the fact that by the very conditions and laws of our nature we are subject, and necessarily subject to temptation. We are not above it, as God is: nor are we below it, as the beasts are: we are in it, as men. Nor is this all. The possession of an animal nature is not the only possible source of temptation, or the "angels who kept not their own principality" would never, and could never, have fallen. It would seem that the conditions of any moral goodness possible to a creature necessarily involve the possibility of its opposite. For what is goodness? It is not doing the will of God, or the sun and stars would have a right to claim this glory for themselves: it is the doing the will of God by a will free to obey, and free therefore to disobey, that will. The only conception we can form of spiritual goodness in man is of his voluntary and glad submission to the will of God; if the will be coerced into obedience, goodness is at an end. Goodness, both towards God and towards man, ceases the moment its opposite becomes impossible; and hence the highest and the spiritual part of man’s nature, his will, must necessarily be as temptable as his lowest and animal nature. In fact, the most perilous temptations which assault us are not exhausted in the sins of the flesh. Pride, avarice, vain glory, malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness, are distinctly spiritual sins, and for their motives appeal to a region of man’s nature far removed from his bodily appetites. In whatever way we regard man, so far as his existence here is concerned, temptation is inseparable from our idea of goodness.

It would seem, therefore, that if the Lord Jesus was "in all points made like unto His brethren, yet without sin," one part of His voluntary assumption of our human nature must have been his submission to temptation. Lifted above temptation as the eternal Son of God, Christ deliberately put Himself within its reach by becoming the Son of Man. To say that Christ was temptable is really only another way of saying that Christ was man. The possibility of His being tempted, and the reality of his humanity, are inseparably conjoined. But even this does not fully meet the difficulty which surrounds the temptation of our Lord it may explain its possibility; it does not justify its necessity. We need temptation because of the imperfection and sinfulness of our natures; but for this very reason it would seem to have been needless for Christ. Was He not, as has already been asked, too good to be tempted?

Now to this difficulty two sufficient replies may be given. In the first place, all human goodness needs the strain of temptation to reveal its reality and depth. Even when that goodness, as in the case of the Man Christ Jesus, and in His case alone, is absolutely without fault or imperfection, temptation is still required to prove its strength, and by the proof to reveal the depth and solidity of its foundations in the soul. The ship that lies at anchor in the harbour when hardly a breath of wind ripples the surface of the water, may hold to her moorings, but this is no proof of the strength and soundness of her cable, for no strain has been put upon it; but if she is out at sea, and caught in a furious storm, and drifting fast on to a lee shore, and then lets go her anchor, and it holds, there is proof enough of the quality of her cable. The soldier who marches proudly along on a review day may be a brave man at heart, and a good soldier, but no one can be sure of it. See him under fire in actual battle, and you will know in a moment of what stuff he is made. Just so temptation is at once a test and a revelation of all true goodness. No doubt it may reveal, and often does reveal to us, unsuspected weaknesses and flaws in the character, just as the storm at sea may show the rottenness of the cable by snapping it, or the battlefield may prove the soldier to be a coward, but we cannot avoid this. All proof involves risk, the risk of discovering weakness as well as strength, but there is no other way of being assured there is no weakness to be discovered.

Here, then, is the first great reason for the necessity of temptation. Man needs it, not because he is fallen and sinful, but because he is man. Had Adam never fallen, every child of Adam would have required the same discipline which their first parents passed through to test the reality of his loyalty to God. The tree of forbidden fruit would have been found in every Paradise.

We may now see how it was that the Lord Jesus Christ in becoming man voluntarily subjected Himself to the discipline of temptation. It tested and revealed, as it alone could, the inner allegiance of His human soul to God. The struggle with the tempter, prolonged for forty days, and culminating at the hour of greatest weakness in the great temptations recorded in the Gospels, was at once the proof that He who came forth victorious from such a conflict was no holiday soldier, no make-believe hero, but in very deed and truth "the Captain of our salvation," Himself foremost in the thickest and fiercest fight; and also the proof that if in such a fight no weak places in His armour were discovered, it could only have been because there were none to be found. The majesty and glory of the human goodness of Jesus were never seen more brightly than when He came forth from the wilderness victorious over every assault which the craft and malignity of Satan could devise, "tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin." But temptation accomplishes more than the revelation of the reality of goodness, it positively strengthens goodness by assaulting it. To say that a man who has been met by some subtle inducement to evil, and who has refused to yield to it, although at the cost of personal loss and suffering, has shown the reality of his goodness, is only to say half the truth. He has not only maintained his former goodness unimpaired, but he has received new moral strength from the very act of resisting evil. He is a stronger and a better man than he was before he was assaulted by the tempter. We cannot pass through any temptation and come out of it morally unaltered. We may yield to it, in which case we have done more than sin against God, we have made the next act of sin easier by weakening the strength of the will, and by deadening the keenness and sensitiveness of the conscience; or we may resist it and overcome it, but then the victory is more than a victory, it has actually multiplied the forces of righteousness within us, and has made the next victory easier, and the next sin harder, by the moral strength which it has imparted to the whole character. There are some shells which cling to the rocks in spite of the continual buffetting of the tides, but these shells are thickest and strongest where the tide has smitten them with its fullest might, and just so the defences of the soul against evil grow firmer, and its armour of righteousness becomes more formidable, in proportion to the evil which has been resisted and victoriously overcome. And this is why no human character becomes stable or strong in goodness until it has been exposed to temptation. Shield it from all the fierce blasts of temptation, preserve it in a forced isolation from the world, and it will remain as unstable as water beneath a summer sky: but let the rough frosts of winter fall on it, and the biting winds lash it, and it will slowly knit itself into compact and solid strength, and like the ice, will defy the storm which has only given it strength by attacking it. Christian parents sometimes fondly wish that it were possible for them to preserve their children through life from all experience of the evil which they know too well awaits them in the great world without, and that they could throw around the conscience of childhood a shield, through which no assaults of temptation could pierce, but they could hardly wish for their children a more unwise or fatal boon. To preserve goodness from being assaulted by evil, is to endanger the stability and growth of goodness itself; for just as plants which have been reared in a hot-house, and shielded from every wintry blast, are never strong, but are in danger of being cut off by the first frost they have to endure, so children who have been brought up in an unnatural and artificial atmosphere of piety, who have been guarded by mistaken parental love from those recurring conflicts with evil which, however slight in themselves, are enough to test a child’s strength, and are intended by a merciful Providence to develop that strength by testing it, are often the first to make "shipwreck of faith," and sometimes of moral character itself, when they have to endure the sharp discipline of personal contact with the world, and with the evil that is in the world.

"Blessed," says St James (James 1:12) and as we read the words we cannot forget he was our Lord’s brother after the flesh, and may have been thinking of this conflict in the wilderness as he wrote them, "is the man that endureth temptation," and we may still repeat the same words.

He is "blessed" if he "endures temptation," not if he yields to it because each assault of the tempter has strengthened the faith it was intended to destroy. He is "blessed" because he comes forth from the conflict a nobler and a stronger man. The storm which threatened to tear the tree from the mountain side has only made it drive its roots the deeper down, and has strengthened its anchorage there.

All this is true of the temptation of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are deep words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the full meaning of which we cannot grasp, which speak of Jesus having been "made perfect through sufferings," of His having "learned obedience by the things which He suffered," and we may understand something of the meaning of these words when we read them in the light of the temptation in the wilderness.

Temptation did for Jesus what it does for all who overcome it by the grace of God. He emerged from the deadly conflict with Satan, lifted, so far as His human goodness was concerned, to a loftier moral greatness, a surer and more commanding strength, than would have been possible without the struggle. Not without the deepest meaning does St Luke conclude his account of the temptation with these significant words, "And Jesus returned IN THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT into Galilee." (Luke 4:14). But we have not yet exhausted the meaning and purpose of our Lord’s temptations. We have seen their value to Himself as a personal discipline through which His human character needed to pass, at once to test and to confirm the reality of its goodness, but this is not the only value they had. They had a representative as well as a personal significance, as being the temptations and the victory of One who was not only "the man Christ Jesus," but the Elder Brother and Head of the whole human race. Christ was "the Son of Man." This name was His own name for Himself; a title never used until He created it, and, with one significant exception (the exception is in the dying speech of Stephen, Acts 7:1-60), never used in the New Testament except by Christ Himself. It was a title which in one pregnant word expressed not only the true humanity of the Lord Jesus, but His eternal and universal relation to humanity as a whole; the unique character of His own humanity as summing up and therefore representing all that belonged to humanity as such, and as revealing for the first time to the world the beauty and nobleness of that ideal goodness of which human nature was capable, and which was hinted in the great words which accompanied the creation of Adam, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." The life of Jesus, in this aspect, was as truly a representative life, as His death was a representative death: it was the life, in a word, of One who as really represented man to God as He represented God to man.

It is in this light that the temptation and the victory of Christ reach their last and fullest significance. Christ came to restore a fallen race to its loyalty to God; He came to redeem a world of sinners from their sin; to "destroy the works of the devil," and in the place of the usurping kingdom of Satan to set up once more, and on foundations which should never again be shaken, the everlasting kingdom of heaven. And the first public and official act of Him who was the Redeemer and Saviour of the world is to encounter the head and representative of the kingdom of evil, to be assaulted by his most furious malice, but to come forth from the conflict not vanquished but victor. The first victory of the new Head of Humanity over the devil is at once the prophecy and the pledge of His final triumph over sin, and of His redemption of the race with which He had now for ever identified Himself, from "the bondage of corruption" into "the liberty of the glory of the children of God." But the victory of Christ over the devil becomes even more significant when it is contrasted with the fall of Adam. Adam was the first head and representative of humanity, and as such had to endure, as Christ endured, the temptation of the devil. But in everything else how unmeasurably unlike were "the first" and "the second Adam." Adam fell; Christ conquered, and conquered although He was beset by a fierceness of assault Adam never knew: conquered, although fighting at a disadvantage Adam never experienced.

Adam was tempted in a garden, Christ was tempted in a wilderness. Adam was tempted in the fulness of bodily strength, and when feebleness and infirmity of the flesh gave no edge to the sword of the tempter. Christ was tempted when worn and weakened by a fast that had lasted without interruption for forty days. Adam was tempted once. Christ was "forty days tempted of the devil," the long, persistent assaults of the devil culminating in the three final and typical temptations the details of which are preserved to us in the Gospels. And finally, Adam fell; but Christ overcame.

It is the first great act of the redemption of the race from sin. It is the first clarion note that announces the advent of the new Head of humanity, the Redeemer of the world. It is the first conclusive defeat of the kingdom of darkness in that holy war which shall never end until "the end shall come" and the "kingdom of the world become the kingdom of our God and His Christ," who "shall reign for ever and ever." The shame and reproach of our first parents’ fall are already rolled away, and as the Son of Man returns from this mighty conflict in the wilderness with the prince of darkness, victorious in every assault, we may hear even from these desert sands a voice sounding in every dungeon bidding the prisoners, long held captive by Satan, "Lift up your heads because your redemption draweth nigh."