06. The Second Temptation

The Second Temptation

" Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: And on their hands they shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." (Matthew 4:5-7)

" And he led him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, to guard thee: and, On their hands they shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." (Luke 4:9-12) IN considering the instrument of the temptation of Christ we saw there was no necessity to suppose there was any literal and visible appearance of Satan to our Lord. The reality of our temptations does not depend on our seeing the tempter nay! the force of the seductions to evil to which we are exposed often depends on the source whence they proceed, being hidden from us and in the same way the reality of Christ’s temptations in no way demands the external and bodily appearance of the tempter to Him. It is quite possible that each of these three successive temptations was, as one of them, and that the last and most terrible must have been, purely subjective to the mind of Christ; subjective, however, with this important limitation, that their origin was not subjective but objective, in other words, they did not, in the first instance, arise from within the mind of Christ, but were inducements to sin suggested by the tempter from without. Nor is it any serious objection to this view that in the account of the second temptation we are told, " Then the devil taketh Him into the Holy City, and he set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto Him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down" In the vision recorded by the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:1) of the valley of dry bones, we read " The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about; " words which, but for the insertion of the single clause " in the Spirit," would have appeared to imply a bodily and literal translation of the prophet from the banks of the river Chebar to the desolate Mesopotamian plain where the scene of the vision is laid. There is, moreover, in the same book, a still more striking illustration of the subjective nature of the prophetic vision, and a still more striking proof that the reality of the spiritual in no way de pends on its visibility to sense. A few chapters later in the same prophet (Ezekiel 40:1), we read, " In the five and twentieth year of our captivity, in the beginning of the year, in the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was smitten, in the self-same day the hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me thither. In the vision of God brought He me into the land of Israel, and set me upon a very high mountain, by which was as the frame of a city on the south " the concluding words bearing a singularly close resemblance to the terms in which our Lord’s third and last temptation is described. So, too, to take one further illustration, and this time from the New Testament, we read in the Book of the Revelation (Revelation 17:1-3), "There came one of the seven angels that had the seven bowls, and spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will show thee the judgment of the great harlot that sitteth upon many waters... and he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; " in which case again the translation of the seer was entirely subjective, but nevertheless real. If it be said that in the cases which have been quoted we are expressly told the translation of the prophet in the one case, and of the apostle in the other, was " in the Spirit," it may fairly be replied that this also is exactly what we are told of the temptation of Christ. " He was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness," or, as St Luke has it, "was led in the* Spirit in the wilderness," the very words which, as we have just seen, are used of the translation of Ezekiel and of John, There are moments of exalted experience like the rapture of which St Paul speaks (2 Corinthians 12:2), in which he was " caught up even to the third heaven," when the share the body has in the experience is so infinitely insignificant, and so completely unnecessary to the reality of the experience itself, that it is impossible to say whether it was " in the body," or " apart from the body;" and so in the case of our Lord’s temptation, the temptation was as real to Christ as the vision was real to Ezekiel or to John, although like the vision it was a purely subjective representation to the mind. In a dream everything seems, and for the time is, as real as our waking life, and in like manner the translation from the wilderness to Jerusalem, and the standing on " the pinnacle of the temple," with the temptation that immediately followed, were as real to Christ even if purely visionary and subjective, as if His feet had literally been placed on the summit of the pinnacle, and He had heard the voice of the tempter bidding Him cast Himself down from thence.

If this view be correct it becomes a matter of complete unimportance for us to spend any time in the attempt to determine which part of the temple is meant by " the pinnacle " to which Christ was taken by the devil. The answer to the question may have a feeble archaeological interest: it has no bearing on the significance and reality of the temptation itself.

Following the plan we have pursued in considering the first temptation, it will be well for us to study the second temptation first in its relation to our Lord; we shall then be prepared for the lessons it was intended to teach ourselves. The diabolic subtlety of the second temptation will be seen if we consider what the first temptation and the first victory had been. That temptation, it will be remembered, was a temptation to Christ to use His Divine power on His own behalf: to satisfy His hunger and want by a miracle, and so to separate Himself from His brethren, who in their hours of need had no miraculous power on which they could fall back, and had no resource but their faith in God. Christ refused to work the miracle: refused to work it even though such a signal display of supernatural power would have quenched the awful doubt suggested by the tempter’s question, " If Thou art the Son of God." He will live by faith in God. He will be " in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." One with us in all that belongs to our true humanity, He declares for Himself, not less than for us, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Christ’s first victory is the victory of a triumphant trust. And now out of this sublime trust arises the second temptation. With equal cunning and daring, the tempter seizes the weapon with which Christ had just defeated him, and turns it against the Lord Himself.

Thou wilt not work a miracle to supply Thyself with bread, and to save Thyself from perishing from hunger! Thou sayest Thou wilt live by trust in the care and love of God. Be it so. But dost Thou really trust, as Thou sayest? To refuse to command the stones to be made into bread because of Thy trust in God is but a small thing, for Thou art not yet ready to perish: but lo! I offer Thee a worthy test of the greatness of Thy trust. Seest Thou this dizzy height? Thou standest on the pinnacle of the temple far above the valley below: now, at length, Thou canst prove the reality and the greatness of Thy trust: Cast Thyself down: and if Thou art the Son of God, no evil shall befall Thee. Yes! If Thou art the Son of God, cast Thyself down, and Thou shalt do more than prove the greatness of Thy trust in God: Thou shalt prove the greatness of Thine own Divine Sonship as well. Thou art not yet assured of it: Thou hast given to Thyself no proof that the voice at Thy baptism, and Thine own consciousness of a Divine birth and a Divine mission, are more than a dream and a vision: Thou canst banish doubt by one supreme and triumphant act of trust in God. If Thou art the Son of God Thou wilt not, canst not perish. Nay! the very word of God which Thou hast quoted will warrant this great act of trust. Listen to it, for it is written ’ " He shall give his angels charge concerning Thee, And on their hands shall they bear Thee up, Lest haply Thou dash Thy foot against a stone.’"

Such was the second temptation: and poorly as it has been set forth by the dark suggestions which we have thus imagined to have passed through the Saviour’s mind, enough has been said to show its infernal subtlety and cunning.

It appeals to the trust which had been triumphant over temptation a moment before. It does not ask Christ to separate Himself from His brethren by any miraculous exertion of His Divine power: it only bids Him commit Him self yet more fully to that care in which they and He alike have to trust. It challenges trust to nobler victories over sense and fear. Nay! it demands this new venture of faith in the interests of His Divine Sonship itself. How shall the Son of God perish with such words spoken of Him, words which declare that an angel guard shall ever surround Him, and deliver Him from so much as dashing His foot against a stone? And now let us consider the victory of our Lord over this second temptation. We lose sight altogether of the profound significance of Christ’s reply to Satan if we imagine that it was merely a quotation from Scripture forbidding Satan to tempt Him, because He was God. A far deeper meaning lies beneath Christ’s words, a meaning which will become clear if we attempt to discover the original reference of the words which our Lord here solemnly uses in his answer to Satan’s temptation: " Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord Thy God."

These words are taken from the Book of Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 6:16), but they are followed there by a significant addition which is left out by our Lord in His answer to the devil, " Thou shalt not tempt the Lord Thy God, as ye tempted Him in Massah." In what way did Israel tempt God at Massah? The answer is clear enough. It appears from the history in the Book of Exodus (Exodus 17:1-16) that when the children of Israel in their journeyings in the wilderness came to Rephidim, " there was no water for the people to drink." They come, in bitter indignation, to Moses, and demand that he should give them water. Moses answers, " Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the Lord?" One sentence, a few verses later on, lets a flood of light on the meaning of these words of Moses. After the rock has been smitten in obedience to the command of God, and a miraculous supply of water has been secured for the people, we read that Moses "called the name of the place Massah (’ Temptation ’), and Meribah (’ Chiding ’), because of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the Lord, saying, Is the Lord among us, or not?" Here was the sin of Israel. They refused to trust God, refused even to believe in His presence among them, unless He wrought a miracle to prove it. They came to Moses with a demand which seemed to rest on a great faith, for they asked him to supply them with water by a miracle, but which was not really faith at all, but the daring presumption of unbelief; of unbelief which refused to " wait patiently for the Lord," and openly challenged Him to prove His own presence among His people, and to justify their trust in Him, by an immediate exertion of supernatural power on their behalf. And this was tempting God. To dictate terms of trust in God, to deny God’s care and love unless He miraculously demonstrated them, to presume on the supernatural as the condition of our faith, is not faith, but unbelief; it is to dishonour God under the pretext of honouring Him. Now what was this second temptation of Christ but a repetition of the sin of Israel under a different form? The devil urges our Lord to cast Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, in order to demonstrate to Himself the sovereign care and love of God: accepting Christ’s trust which had vanquished him in the first temptation, he puts it to a new and, as it seemed, a severer and a nobler test; He is to trust God even to work a miracle to hold Him harmless in faith’s most daring venture; He is to prove God to be God, and faith to be faith, by one sublime and glorious act of abandonment to the mighty power of God. But Christ refuses the temptation. He will not tempt God. Such an act as that to which Satan tempted Him would not be faith, but presumption. It might resemble faith, but only as the counterfeit coin resembles the true; and the Lord takes from the ancient history of the people of God the one illustration of unbelief daring to assume the appearance of faith, which stood in closest likeness to His own temptation, and utters for Himself, but with new and deeper emphasis, the warning Moses uttered to Israel of old, " It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." But leaving the special occurrence in the history of the children of Israel to which our Lord refers, and returning to the temptation itself, let us endeavour to see more clearly why such an act as that of Christ casting Himself down from the temple summit, would have been the presumption of unbelief, and there fore a guilty tempting of God, rather than the honouring Him by a great act of trust. Is there any law which can be laid down which will serve in all cases to distinguish faith from presumption; which will warn us that we are no longer honouring God by our trust, but dishonouring Him by our unbelief. There is, and it is as follows: The moment trust in God presumes to break any one, even the least of the laws of God, and then expects God to save it from the consequences of its disobedience, it is not trust, but unbelief; it is not faith, but presumption; it is not honouring, it is tempting God. The laws of nature, one of which the devil was now tempting Christ to disregard and to violate, are as much God’s laws as the ten commandments given from Mount Sinai; they are as truly the reflexion and the revelation of the eternal will of God as the moral law itself, and God will never require us in the interests of our trust in Him, to dishonour, by breaking, the laws which He has ordained. It was God’s law that men who fling themselves down from the summit of the temple should be dashed to pieces on the ground; death was to be the wages of that sin; and for Christ first to break this law of God by casting Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and then to expect God to save Him from the consequences of His disobedience, was not a faith that honoured God; it was a presumption which dishonoured Him. And so it is with us. It is a sure and certain sign that our trust has passed from the sweetness and strength of childlike confidence in God into the impertinence of unbelief, if we find ourselves breaking the laws of God, and doing so in the expectation that God will interfere to save us from the penalties of our own transgression. The practical applications and illustrations of this truth may be seen in almost every province of human life. When Christian parents, for instance, whose own lives are undevout and worldly, and whose homes are prayerless and unspiritual, who perhaps take a keen interest in politics, or literature, or art, or science, but manifest none whatever in the great work for which Christ died, and for which He still lives, the redemption of the world from sin, when such parents expect their children to grow up godly and devout, and to take their parents’ place in the Christian Church, they are not trusting God by this expectation, they are dishonouring Him by the presumption of unbelief. They have no right, their own lives being what they are, to expect anything of the kind. They are living in daily and open violation of some of the most sacred and solemn laws of God, and there is not one word in the whole compass of Scripture to warrant them in hoping that God will interfere to save them, or their children, from the penalties of their dis obedience. If they dishonour God by transgression of His laws, they must not complain if the rewards of their transgression come down on themselves, and on their children after them. To sow tares, and then expect by some Divine miracle a harvest of wheat to spring up, is to " tempt the Lord our God.’’ Or again: There are multitudes of Christian people who are living self-indulgent and slothful lives, but who nevertheless hope, often vaguely enough that after death, and in the day of judgment, the rewards of heaven will not be altogether denied them. They read in the New Testament of the welcome of " well done " given by the King to the good and faithful servant, and they hope such a greeting may await them; or they read of " the crown of glory which fadeth not away," and they trust that it one day may be theirs; or they catch some glimpse of the gladness and splendour of the City of God above, they hear that no tears and no darkness are there, and they trust that its splendour and bliss will be theirs when once they have entered within its golden gates. But what right have such professing Christians to expect anything of the kind? If the New Testament promises, with lavish hand, crowns and rewards in heaven, it does so under the sternest moral conditions. They are to be given to the "good and faithful servant;" to "them that overcome;" not to all that enter heaven. The Bible never conceals from us the fact that the moral in equalities we see in the Church on earth will reappear on a vaster scale in the Heaven above; that there are "first" there, and "last" there; that some servants shall have " ten cities ’’ to rule over, but others only "five;" and that the final reward will in each case be deter mined by the strictest, and yet most merciful moral laws. The rewards may be, and are, of grace; but grace will never put the servant whose pound had gained ten pounds over five cities, nor put the servant whose pound had only gained five pounds over ten cities. That would be unjust grace, and paradox as the expression may sound, unjust grace if such a thing were possible would be a deeper offence to the moral nature than ingracious justice. What right then, we ask, have any Christians who are slothful and prayerless and self-indulgent in their lives to look for reward hereafter? Is such an expectation an act of faith, or is it not rather a great presumption? Does it not repeat, in another and widely different form, the essential sin of this temptation of Christ, inasmuch as they have first broken the known laws of the kingdom of God, and then they look to God to save them from the consequences of their disobedience. To live a Christian life which is a life of self-pleasing, to shrink from the daily self denial which is the condition of all true discipleship of Christ, to put this world and its pleasures and rewards before the kingdom of God and its righteousness, to make the service of self the real end of life, and then to expect to be rewarded as a servant of God, is not to trust, but " to tempt the Lord our God." Or to take one final illustration of the same sin. There are thousands of men and of women who are living altogether without God and with out Christ in this world; who have never heartily and truly repented or abandoned any one sin which they really liked; who have never given to God the love He demands, nor sought from Him the mercy He is willing to bestow on all who seek it through Christ, and yet who live and who die in a vague hope that "the Almighty," as they say, will have mercy on them at the last day. Once more we ask, what right have they to any such expectation? There are laws of the kingdom of heaven as fixed and as inexorable as any of the laws of the physical universe fixed and inexorable, because to change them in the least jot or title would be to imply that they were not originally the perfect revelation of infinite wisdom and infinite righteousness and infinite love laws which reward obedience, and punish disobedience, as infallibly as any physical law does, and these laws are neglected, broken, trampled under foot from the beginning to the end of life, and yet it is said that at the last God will suspend their action, and mercifully and miraculously interpose to save such disobedience from its "just recompense of reward.". Why? Because they trust in the mercy of God? But trust, as we have seen, which first disobeys any known law of God and then looks to Him to avert the result, is not trust; it is presumption; and to live and to die disregarding the solemn laws of the kingdom of heaven, careless of fulfilling the one supreme condition of entrance into the kingdom, and yet hoping to enter it at last, is not to trust, it is to " tempt the Lord their God."

These illustrations will suffice to shew us the innumerable applications which the great lesson of this second temptation has to our daily life; there are, however, other and incidental, but not less valuable lessons which we may learn from the narrative, and which it will be well for us now to consider. And amongst these subordinate lessons stands first this truth, that the teaching, or the apparent teaching, of any isolated text in Holy Scripture, always needs to be interpreted, and, if necessary, limited by the teaching of the whole of Scripture. There is no book in the world so precious as the Bible, and yet there is no book so easily perverted, or so perilous to those who pervert it, as this Book. It warns us itself of some who "wrest" the Scriptures " to their own destruction," (2 Peter 3:16) and Satan’s quotation of Scripture in this second temptation is an illustration of the meaning of St Peter’s words. It was a quotation, and a true quotation, from Scripture, and yet it was so quoted as to make Scripture to teach a lie instead of the truth, and to warrant Christ in an act of sin, if He had yielded to the temptation. The same perilous and illegitimate use of the Bible may be made to-day. It is possible to prove anything, it has been said, out of the Bible; and the statement is true, provided by " the Bible " be meant, not the whole teaching of Scripture, but the apparent teaching of isolated passages in the sacred record. It is only necessary to take a verse, to tear it out of all connection with the context, to refuse to modify its interpretation by other verses in Scripture, to quote it as if any one promise of God contained absolute and unqualified truth, irrespective of the conditions under which the promise was given by God, and you may prove that it was right for Christ to cast Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, as you may prove that darkness is light, or light darkness. And even where such grievous perversions of the truth of Scripture do not take place, the same error of the misquotation rather than the quotation of Scripture may be detected in other and hardly less serious ways. There is not one heresy, there is not one form, however debased, of ecclesiastical government, there is not one eccentricity or extravagance in the Church of Christ, which has not appealed to Scripture for its justification and support. Sabellianism, Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, Mormonism, Christadelphianism, all alike quote Scripture in their defence; whilst the Papal Church and Plymouth brethrenism both profess to derive their distinctive ecclesiastical principles from the teaching of the Bible. The worst systems of Church government, and the greatest errors in Christian doctrine have fled to Scripture for defence and support, and have declared they were derived from its teaching alone.

Now against this illegitimate use of Scripture Christ warns us by the use He makes of it in His answer to Satan’s temptation. That solemn word " again," " It is written again," is the foundation stone on which the true use of the Bible ought to be built. Truth is unlimited, but truths are not. Each verse contains not truth, but a truth; each verse only reflecting some partial rays of the central sun of all truth. Each verse, therefore, is true, but true within limits. Take away those limits, and you destroy the truth. Just as it is the banks of a river which make it navigable, which make it indeed a river at all, so it is the bounds and limits of truths which make them true; and those who would grow up into all " the truth as it is in Jesus," who would avoid all one-sided views of truth, who neither in theory, nor in practical life, would be angular or narrow, who would shun any of the intellectual or moral monstrosities professed to be founded on the teaching of the Bible, must learn first of all the many-sidedness of Holy Scripture; must read it with the light shining, not on one chapter nor on one Book, but on the whole Book; must learn how to modify and correct and supplement one Scripture by another; and must be capable of that large and wise spirit of induction which in the interpretation of Scripture, as in the interpretation of nature, always yields the richest results, building the sacred Temple of Truth, not like a mean hut of one solitary room, but like a glorious Palace, with many mansions, each with its own noble occupant, and all built according to what Scripture itself calls "the proportion of faith." A second and not less valuable lesson taught us by the second temptation is the warning that vice is often nothing but the exaggeration and distortion of virtue. Trust in God becomes presumption, but how hard it is to say where trust ends and presumption begins. And so it is with nearly all the excellences of the Christian life. They pass by steps which are so small as to be almost imperceptible from the region of light into that of darkness. Righteous indignation against wrong degenerates into un righteous hatred; just self-respect becomes unholy pride; healthy emulation ends in sinful envy. How easily the purest unselfishness may become conscious of itself, and feed the most subtle forms of selfishness within; what a narrow line divides the legitimate territory of the reason from those provinces where only faith has eyes to see, or feet to tread; how soon intelligent enquiry becomes presumptuous unbelief, or the submission of faith is degraded into the ignoble slavery of superstition. Our virtues might almost seem to be like the strings of a harp: stretch any one of them too far, and discord and not music is the result. Earnestness becomes severity; gentleness falls into moral weakness; activity degenerates into meddling; moderation becomes indifference; decision of character settles into dogmatic self assertion; consideration for the feelings of others passes into moral cowardice; trust, as we have seen, goes to seed in presumption, and self-reliance in pride.

Strike any one note of human goodness and you will be sure to hear its accompanying discord. You reap the harvest, but the tares are gathered with the wheat. Goodness is not merely tainted with evil, but evil itself is too often nothing but the bastard child of goodness.

There has only been one human life in which goodness has been exhibited in its " perfect and consummate flower," every virtue making sweetest music without one discordant note, the pure light of its heavenly holiness un tarnished even by the impurities which float in the sunbeams of earth the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. We shall speak later on of the miracle of the sinlessness of Jesus a miracle far surpassing in wonder and glory the mighty works which He wrought when on earth but how impressive a testimony is borne by this mixed character of all human goodness, its proneness to fall away into sin, or to become exaggerated into imperfection, to the sinfulness of man. The springs of his moral life are poisoned at their fountains within. He not only does wrong, but he is wrong; and the evil with which he is born into the world taints his very efforts after goodness, so that even the tempter himself can turn the noblest achievements of holiness into occasions of stumbling, and make each successive victory over temptation a new peril to the soul. From our achievements in the Divine life as much as from our failings comes the warning to us all, "Watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation.’’