(Continued from page 41.)

CHAPTER IV.

The fourth subdivision follows the third, as Numbers follows Leviticus, with the story of the temptation in the wilderness. The Israelites took forty years, and then how little had they learned the lessons which they were put there to school to learn! The Lord is there forty days, and approves Himself as all the way through perfect,- Master, and not disciple.

He had fulfilled, as we have seen, in the thirty years of His private life at Nazareth, His own human responsibility before God. He had then come forth from that retirement to take His public place as Mediator for others. He is now accepted as perfectly pleasing to the Father, the unblemished Lamb of sacrifice, the Priest able to offer for the sins of men. To this office He is consecrated by the descent of the Spirit upon Him, and is now the Christ, the "Anointed," proclaimed openly to be this.

In obedience to the law of responsibility He must be now tested as to His ability for the path upon which He has entered. The book of Job shows us Satan allowed of God for this purpose to be " the accuser of the brethren." He who is to be the "firstborn among" these pleads for Himself no exemption from this trial. He is expressly "led up of the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted of the devil" who is designated thus, according to the meaning of the term, as the "false accuser."

But God had pronounced, Is not that enough ? Alas, sin had come in, distrust of God Himself:He
also is upon trial; and Satan's reasoning in Job's case clearly takes that ground. God pronounces as to Job, and he takes exception as to it. "Hast Thou not made a hedge about him, and about his house?" is as much as to say '' This sentence is not after fair trial."And God, in His mercy to man, who had, to his undoing, accepted Satan's malignity for truth, does not retreat behind His privilege. If He is and must be sovereign in His doing, so that '' none can stay His hand, or say unto Him, what doest Thou?" yet He will suffer question, and let all be brought into the fullest light. Job's "hedge" is taken away, and Satan is allowed large limits within which to deal with him,- the end being, of course, blessing to the sufferer, and vindication of God's perfect ways.

Here is His own Beloved, and there is no remnant of a hedge about the person of the Christ of God. Nor will He use the power that is His against the adversary. As conflict between good and evil, power cannot decide it. The good must manifest itself as that, and stand by its own virtue against all odds, The glorious Wrestler is stripped, therefore, for the wrestling. Son of God, though He be, He ordains for Himself the poverty of the creature, the conditions of humanity, and these in their utmost straitness. Man in Adam in his first perfection had been tempted in a garden, specially prepared and furnished for him. But one thing was denied him ; and in the denial there was contained a blessing, among the chief of all the blessings there. Real want there was none, and need was in such sort ministered to as to be itself in every character the occasion of a new delight. The weakness of the creature is owned, but tenderly provided for, so as to witness of the tender arms of love that were about him:he had but to shrink into them to be in perfect safety, outside of all possible reach of harm.

But not so sheltered, not so provided for, was the new Adam, the Son of man. The garden had gone:in its stead was the wilderness; nor was there nurture for Him even, from Nature's barren breast. For forty days He fasts, and then the hunger of those forty days is on Him:then the tempter comes. It marks the contrast between Him and other men, that whereas a Moses or an Elias fasted to meet God, He must fast to meet the devil.

There are three forms of the temptation; though with the first broken we see, indeed, that victory is gained over them all. Yet for our instruction, however, it is that we are permitted to have all before us, that we may realize the points in which the subtlety perfected by ages of experience finds man to be above all accessible, and how Satan is to be resisted still. We shall do well to consider them closely, therefore, and with the closest application also to ourselves. The battlefield here may seem to be a narrow one; the points of attack few; the weapons employed against the enemy a scanty armory; but here lies one of the excellencies of Scripture, that its principles, while they may seem simple, have in them the depths of divine wisdom, and far-reaching application to the most diverse needs.

"And when the tempter came unto Him, he said, If thou be Son of God, command that these stones be made bread."

Satan thus would act upon Him by the conviction of what He was, and make Him assert Himself, in circumstances which seemed quite unsuited to Him as such. The Son of God, the beloved of the Father, at the extreme point of starvation in a desert! But then this was surely in His own power to set right:was it not true that He needed not circumstances to be adjusted to Him, who was able so easily to adjust them to Himself ? The power surely was His, the need was real, the hunger was sinless:why, then, should He not put forth His power, and make the stones of the ground into bread to supply His necessities ? So simple and plausible is the suggestion, so well it seems to recognize the truth of what He was, so natural is it with us to minister with what power we have to our own requirements, that to any of us, naturally, it would seem to be of no evil suggestion. at all,- no temptation. But it was such; and the Lord's answer will show us, better than any reasoning of our own, why it was such.

It has been noticed always – it could scarcely escape notice-that the Lord answers from the word of God. This is the sword of the Spirit, the only weapon we have wherewith to encounter the adversary. But it is striking to find the Lord, who could have certainly answered from His own mind, using always, and with distinct reference to it as such, the written word. We see that He takes the same ground as ourselves, answers as man, and subject, as we are, to the authority of God. And this the passage that He quotes fully proves,-going, indeed, beyond it:" It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

This is from Deuteronomy (8:3), the book that sums up the lessons of the wilderness for the people who had passed through the wilderness. And the passage shows that the dealings of God with His people had been directly designed to teach them this:"And He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knew-est not, neither did thy fathers know, that He might make thee know that man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live." How important – how supremely important, therefore, is this principle!

Man lives by the word of God,- in obedience to it. The true life of mail is nourished and sustained alone by this. Bread will not sustain it:the life of obedience is that which alone is "life." In this way we see, that though, because of inherent sin everywhere, the legal covenant had no life in it, yet there is another sense in which "which, if a man do, he shall even live in them," is to be understood. There is really a path of life thus, though grace alone can put us in it, or retain us there. Eternal life and disobedience cannot go together. This is, in the nature of things, impossible. The gospel docs not alter it; grace but affirms it:yea, "sin shall not have dominion over you, because ye are not under the law, but under grace."

All this is in the passage quoted by the Lord; but in His application of it we are made to go further than naturally we should carry it. What principle of disobedience, we might question, could be contained in the simple suggestion to use power that He really had, to minister to need that was as really His also, and in which, therefore, there could be no evil ?

Notice, then, that it is as "man" He speaks,- it is of man these things are written. Son of God He was,-adoringly we own it:it is that makes the path we are thinking of so wonderful an one; but it is not in the open glory of the Godhead that He is come to traverse the earth, but to learn obedience in a path of humiliation,- nay, by the things that He suffered. He is come as man to work out redemption for men; and for this to learn all that is proper to man, apart from sin. Thus He cannot save Himself out of this condition by the power of the Godhead. What He can use freely for others, for Himself He cannot use. It is He of whom it is written in the volume of the book, " Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God! … I delight to do Thy will, O my God; yea, Thy law is within my heart." (Ps. 40:7, 8.) Thus He is here subject, and subject in satisfaction and delight, to the will of Another. He has, in His whole course on earth, no other motive. Need may press, appetite may crave:He feels all this as other men; did He not feel it, the glory of His humiliation would be dimmed. But while He feels it, it is no motive to Him:there is but one motive – the will of God. To make Himself the motive would destroy this perfection,- come to do that will, nothing else.

This is the spirit in which He goes forth to service:the close of it on earth – closing with the deepest humiliation and dreadest shadow of all – affords so beautiful an example of this principle, even while at first sight it might seem in conflict with it, that one cannot forbear to speak of it here. One of the physical distresses of the great agony of the cross is the intense thirst that is produced by it. Almost the last words of the Lord there had reference to this, and gave it expression. His words, "I thirst," are answered by the sponge filled with vinegar, of which He tasted; and they were such as naturally to call forth such an answer. Was this, then, really any seeking of relief, in His extremity, even from the hands that had nailed Him there? No, this could not be; and we are carefully guarded from such a perversion. There was one scripture, we are told, that remained to be fulfilled; and of this it was, in all the agony of the hour, that He was thinking:"Jesus, that the Scripture might be fit I filled, saith, I thirst." This leads to what had been predicted, "In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." Thus the glorious obedience shines here without a cloud upon it; nay, with surpassing luster. " Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God," is throughout the principle of His life. F. W. G. (To be continued.)