11 And Immediately the Spirit Driveth Him Into the Wilderness

XI AND IMMEDIATELY THE SPIRIT DRIVETH HIM INTO THE WILDERNESS

Mark 1:12 Our classical scholars have a recognized rule that they observe as often as they are engaged upon an ancient manuscript. A rule to this effect: that the more difficult to receive any offered reading is, the more likely it is to be the true reading. Now each one of the three evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, has his own peculiar reading in the way he narrates to us the manner of our Lord’s entrance upon His time of temptation. And since that threefold variation of theirs allows and indeed invites me to take my free choice among those three readings of theirs, I have no hesitation, for my part, in preferring the reading of Mark before the other two. For if his reading is the most difficult at first sight to receive of the three, afterwards it becomes the most lifelike, the most arresting, and the most suggestive, of the three offered readings. And all that goes to prove to me that Mark’s reading is the true and original reading, and that the other two readings have, so to speak, been toned down from it. " And immediately the Spirit driveth Him into the wilderness. And he was there forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto Him." But what exactly does Mark mean by his, at first sight, not very reverent-looking language about our Lord? With what propriety and becomingness can this evangelist write that our Redeemer was driven away from His fast-opening work, and away out into the solitude’s of the wilderness? My brethren, you must never think of our Lord as having been at any time driven anywhere by any compulsion outside of Himself. You must take care not to misread this admittedly strong expression of Mark as if our Lord went into the wilderness against his own will. If He could, with any propriety of speech, be said to be driven at all, it must be clearly understood that all the driving came from within Himself. We ourselves sometimes say that our own thoughts are driving us to do such and such a thing: our consciences or our hearts. And so was it with our Lord. It was His own mind, and His own heart, and His own imagination, that all worked together to drive Him away from the presence of men. And when it is said that He was driven of the Spirit, what is that but that both His mind and His heart were as full as they could hold of the Holy Ghost who had just descended upon Him. His whole soul was full of the Holy Ghost; somewhat as so much water, while still remaining water, is filled with the warmth of wine; and somewhat as so much otherwise cold and hard iron is heated and softened and made malleable with the all-penetrating and all-softening fire.

Let this be held fast, then, that our Lord was not driven at that time, or at any other time, by any force or any other kind of influence outside of His own mind and heart. It is the Spirit that quickeneth, He was wont to say. And He said that, as He said so much else, out of His own experience. For He Himself was at all times and in all things quickened and led and directed and driven, if you will, by the Holy Spirit who dwelt within Him without measure. And it was the same Holy Spirit of God filling His own spirit that drove Him away from the Jordan, and away out into the wilderness there to seek a seclusion in which to meditate and to pray till He had wrestled Himself free from all invading doubts, all unsettling fears, and all distracting thoughts, after which victory He was able to return and take up His work and finish it. No; you must beware not to misread Mark as if our Lord was driven away into the wilderness against His own will; if He was driven at all He was driven by His own mind and heart and imagination, all filled and enforced by the indwelling and the inward drawing of the Holy Ghost. But all that only throws us back the more on this previous question. What was it that took such sudden and overpowering possession of our Lord at His baptism? What new thing concerning Himself could it be that came to Him in those days so as to drive Him away for such a long time from the neighborhood of all men? Well, I cannot claim to have divine inspiration for it, but I think it was this. For my part, I feel sure that it was the Baptist’s salutation that so suddenly and so completely overcame our Lord. BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD, WHICH TAKETH AWAY THE SIN OF THE WORLD. That annunciation came on our Lord that day as if He had never heard it before. As a matter of fact He had both read it and heard it read a thousand times before, but He had never fully realized it till now that He was actually entering upon it. When John took Him and pointed Him so unmistakably to the cross, Jesus looked away forward to the cross, and as good as answered and said to it--I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee! Did not our heart burn within us, said the two disciples, while He talked to us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures? And did not His own heart burn as never before when John pointed to Him as He walked, and said, BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD? Yes; His heart burned almost to ashes under the fierce heat, as it did once again in the Garden of Gethsemane, where He was again driven into a still more awful wilderness. You and I are stocks and stones. Our hearts are harder than the nether millstone. We read and hear and speak about sin and its atonement like men in a dream. Our hearts are so besotted that we never reflect what sin is, nor what its wages is. But hear Him. "Now is My soul troubled; and what shall I say Father, save Me from this hour; but for this cause came I unto this hour." Some of you will lie in wait, and will turn upon me, and will say to me in anger, that our Lord knew quite well and from the beginning, that He was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. So He did. But He was a man of like passions as we are. And as a consequence He was tempted in all points like as we are. And thus it was that when the Baptist brought Him face to face with the cross, and that so suddenly and so unexpectedly, He said to Andrew, to Peter, and to John, "Tarry ye here while I go and pray yonder." By all that had gone before His Baptism: by His humiliation of Himself from heaven, by His birth, by His circumcision, by His thirty years of growth in grace and in wisdom, and now by the unmeasured descent upon Him of the Holy Ghost--The only gain He had purchased for Himself by all that was to be made capable of loss and detriment for the good of others. And it took Him all those forty days and forty nights alone with His Father and with Himself to completely reconcile Himself, and to completely surrender Himself, and to completely submit Himself to all the loss and detriment that the Lamb of God must first and last undergo. And till He returned back to all His undertakings, saying--"Lo, I come, in the volume of the Book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will."--The Son of God, Musing, and much revolving in His breast How best the mighty work He might begin Of Savior to mankind, and which way first Publish His God-like office, now mature, One day walked forth alone, the Spirit leading, And His deep thoughts, the better to converse With solitude; till far from track of men, Thought following thought, and step by step led on, He entered now the bordering desert wild, And, with dark shades and rocks environ’d round, His holy meditations thus pursued. Sole, but with holiest meditations fed, Into Himself descended, and at once All His great work to come before Him set; How to begin, how to accomplish best His end of being on Earth, and mission high.

Now, my truly Christian brethren, here again, and in all that, as He was so are all they who are His in this world. This is a very dreadful world of ours, by reason of sin. It was so to Him, and it is so still, and will remain so, to all who are His and who walk in His footsteps. And it is so in this way, as well as in many other ways. There came to Him many successive stages in His appointed life as our Savior from sin; many successive and sudden steps and stages, when He was driven, as we have just seen, into new and unexpected and as yet unprepared-for wildernesses of trial and temptation. Those experiences came to our Forerunner far oftener, and in far more terrible ways, than we could bear to be told. And as He was in all that, and without measure, so are all His true followers, each one in his own measure. Look around, look within, and you will see it for yourselves. For no man will be able to make you believe these things, either about your Lord, or about yourselves, till you have both seen them and experienced them in yourselves. You, then, who have experienced them, witness for me if this is not the truth. That, like your Lord, you come to turning-points; to new departures and new experiences in your life, not wholly unlike what our Lord’s baptism was in His life. Things come to you that simply drive you into situations and circumstances, the terrible temptations arising out of which are almost more than you can bear. Sometimes it will be the case that your temptations will arise from among the best blessings of your life. Sometimes a great endowment of gifts, followed with a great baptism of sanctifying and consecrating graces, will point you out as the man prepared of God for some great office in the Church. And this providence and that so besets you behind and before, and God and man so lay their hands upon you, that you may truly be said to be driven to take such and such a step. But no sooner have you taken that step than you are thereby plunged into a whole sea of more terrible temptations than ever before, till your very promotion threatens to be your perdition. You look back to the days of your youth and obscurity and silence as, I have no doubt, our Lord often looked back to His thirty years in Nazareth. I will not say that he ever wished that He was back there again never to leave it; but you sometimes wish you were. Such a life is this to you; so sin-possessed, so sin-warped and entangled, and so full of untold temptations to sin. The sweetest relationships of life also are so surprised with new and unexpected temptations and trials, that you would not have believed could possibly invade your Eden-like life; your life which you have been led into, as Luke has it, have been driven into, as Mark has it. Driven into, you say, as you look around you and within you and before you and see that only death will release you from some of your worst trials and temptations. You are a study in sin and in temptation to sin to yourself. You wonder at God and at yourself. The house you live in; the street you live in; the city in which your house stands; your next door neighbor; the congregation in which you try to worship; and a thousand things arising out of all these things, make you cry,--who shall deliver you? He will, who was your first Forerunner ill all manner of trial and temptation. He will, who plotted and planned all these trials and temptations for you. And who modeled all your circumstances and all your relationships as near as could be to His own. He will watch over you and He will in His own time and way deliver you. For He still remembers how He Himself was driven of the Spirit into the wilderness, and was kept there forty days and forty nights, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts. And then to crown it all, and to be the absolute tragedy of it all, the holier you are, and the more like Christ you become, the more awful, and the more continual, will your temptations and your trials become. You will not really know what temptations and trials worth the name are, till you meet them when you are fairly started and are well on to be for ever out of them. If you would see really wild beasts and hear them roar and gnash their teeth and have their hot breath on your cheek; and if you would learn how devilish the devil can be, let the Spirit drive you deep into a still unsanctified heart and life. As thus: " About the midst of this valley, I perceived the mouth of Hell to be, and it stood also hard by the wayside. Now, thought Christian, what shall I do? And ever and anon the flame and smoke would come out ill such abundance, with sparks and hideous noises (things that cared not for Christian’s sword, as did Apollyon before), that he was forced to put up his sword, and betake himself to another weapon called All-Prayer, so he cried in my hearing--O Lord, I beseech Thee, deliver my soul. Then he went on a great while, yet still the flames would be reaching towards him; also, he heard doleful voices, and rushing to and fro, so that he sometimes thought he would be torn in pieces, or trodden down like mire in the streets. This frightful sight was seen, and these dreadful noises were heard by him for several miles together; and coming to a place, when he thought he heard a company of fiends coming forward to meet him, he stopped, and began to muse what he had best to do. Sometimes he had half a thought to go back. One thing I would not let slip, I took notice that now poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice; and thus I perceived it. Just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded out of his own mind. But he had not the discretion neither to stop his ears, nor to know from whence these blasphemies came. When Christian had traveled in this disconsolate condition for some considerable time, he thought he heard the voice of a man, as going on before him, saying--Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no ill, for Thou art with me. Then was he glad, and that for these reasons. (Let those who are interested in these things look up the reasons and lay them to heart.) Then sang Christian :-- O world of wonders! (I can say no less) That I should be preserved in this distress That I have met with here! O blessed be That hand that from it hath delivered me!

Dangers in darkness, devils, hell, and sin, Did compass me while I this vale was in;

Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie My path about, that worthless, silly I Might have been catch’t, entangled, and cast down But since I live, let Jesus wear the crown."