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Immediately after the baptism, Our Blessed Lord withdrew into seclusion. The wilderness would be His school, just as it had been the school of Moses and Elias. Retirement is a preparation for action. It would later serve the same purpose for Paul. All human consolation was left behind as “He lodged with the beasts.” And for forty days, He ate nothing.
Since the purpose of His coming was to do battle with the forces of evil, His first encounter was not a debate with a human teacher, but a contest with the prince of evil himself.
And now Jesus was led by the Spirit
Away into the wilderness,
To be tempted there by the devil.
MATTHEW 4:1
Temptation was a negative preparation for His ministry, as baptism had been a positive preparation. In His baptism, He had received the Spirit and a confirmation of His mission; in His temptations, He received the strengthening which comes directly from trial and testing. There is a law written across the universe, that no one shall be crowned unless he has first struggled. No halo of merit rests suspended over those who do not fight. Icebergs that float in the cold streams of the north do not command our respectful attention, just for being icebergs; but if they were to float in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream without dissolving, they would command awe and wonderment. They might, if they did it on purpose, be said to have character.
The only way one can ever prove love is by making an act of choice; mere words are not enough. Hence, the original trial given to man has been given again to all men; even the angels have passed through a trial. Ice deserves no credit for being cold, nor fire for being hot; it is only those who have the possibility of choice that can be praised for their acts. It is through temptation and its strain that the depths of character are revealed. Scripture says:
Blessed is he who endures under trials.
When he has proved his worth,
He will win that crown of life,
Which God has promised to those who love Him.
JAMES 1:12
The defenses of the soul are seen at their strongest when the evil which has been resisted is also strong. The presence of temptation does not necessarily imply moral imperfection on the part of the one who is tempted. In that case, Our Divine Lord could not have been tempted at all. An inward tendency toward evil, such as man has, is not a necessary condition for an onslaught of temptation. The temptation of Our Blessed Lord came only from without, and not from within as ours so often do. What was at stake in the trial of Our Lord was not the perversion of natural appetites to which the rest of men are tempted; rather, it was an appeal to Our Lord to disregard His Divine Mission and His Messianic work. The temptation that comes from without does not necessarily weaken character; indeed, when conquered, it affords an opportunity for holiness to increase. If He was to be the Pattern Man, He would have to teach us how to gain holiness by overcoming temptation.
It is because He Himself
Has been tried by suf ering,
That He has the power to help us
In the trials we undergo.
HEBREWS 2:18
This is illustrated in the character of Isabella in Measure for Measure:
’Tis one thing to be tempted,
Another thing to fall.
The tempter was sinful, but the One tempted was innocent. The entire history of the world revolves around two persons, Adam and Christ. Adam was given a position to maintain, and he failed. Therefore his loss was humanity’s loss; for he was its head. When a ruler declares war, the citizens declare war also, although they do not make an explicit declaration themselves. When Adam declared war against God, man declared war too.
Now, with Christ, everything was at stake again. There was a repetition of the temptation of Adam. If God had not taken upon Himself a human nature, He could not have been tempted. Though His Divine and human natures were united in one Person, the Divine nature was not diminished by His humanity, nor was the humanity swollen out of proportion through union with His Divinity. Because He had a human nature He could be tempted. If He were to become like us in all things, He would have to undergo the human experience of withstanding temptation. That is why, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, we are reminded of how closely bound He was to humanity by His trials:
It is not as if our High Priest was incapable
Of feelings for us in our humiliations;
He has been through every trial,
Fashioned as we are, only sinless.
HEBREWS 4:15
It is part of the discipline of God to make His loved ones perfect through trial and suffering. Only by carrying the Cross can one reach the Resurrection. It was precisely this part of Our Lord’s Mission that the devil attacked. The temptations were meant to divert Our Lord from His task of salvation through sacrifice. Instead of the Cross as a means of winning the souls of men, Satan suggested three short cuts to popularity: an economic one, another based on marvels, and a third, which was political. Very few people believe in the devil these days, which suits the devil very well. He is always helping to circulate the news of his own death. The essence of God is existence, and He defines Himself as: “I am Who am.” The essence of the devil is the lie, and he defines himself as: “I am who am not.” Satan has very little trouble with those who do not believe in him; they are already on his side.
The temptations of man are easy enough to analyze, because they always fall into one of three categories: they either pertain to the flesh (lust and gluttony), or to the mind (pride and envy), or to the idolatrous love of things (greed). Though man is buffeted all through life by these three kinds of temptation, they vary in intensity from age to age. It is during youth that man is most often tempted against purity and inclined to the sins of the flesh; in middle age, the flesh is less urgent and temptations of the mind begin to predominate, e.g., pride and the lust for power; in the autumn of life, temptations to avarice are likely to assert themselves. Seeing that the end of life is near, man strives to banish doubts about eternal security or salvation, by piling up the goods of earth and redoubling his economic security. It is a common psychological experience that those who have given way to lust in youth are often those who sin by avarice in their old age. Good men are not tempted in the same way as evil men, and the Son of God, Who became man, was not tempted in the same way as even a good man. The temptations of an alcoholic to “return to his vomit,” as Scripture puts it, are not the same as the temptations of a saint to pride, though they are, of course, no less real.
In order to understand the temptations of Christ, it must be recalled that at the baptism of John, when He Who had no sins identified Himself with sinners, the heavens opened, and the Heavenly Father declared Christ to be His Beloved Son. Then Our Lord went up into the mountain and fasted for forty days, after which, the Gospel says, “He was hungry”—a typical understatement. Satan tempted Him by pretending to help Him find an answer to the question: How could He best fulfill His high destiny among men? The problem was to win men. But how? Satan had a satanic suggestion, namely, to bypass the moral problem of guilt and its need of expiation, and to concentrate purely on worldly factors. All three temptations sought to woo Our Lord from His Cross and, therefore, from Redemption. Peter would tempt Our Lord later on, in the same way, and for that reason would be called “Satan.”
The human flesh, which He had taken upon Himself, was not for leisure, but for battle. Satan saw in Jesus an extraordinary human being Whom he suspected of being the Messias and the Son of God. Hence he prefaced each of the temptations with the conditional “if.” If he had been sure that he was speaking to God, he would not indeed have tried to tempt Him. But if Our Lord was merely a man whom God had chosen for the work of salvation, then he would do everything in his power to lead Him into ways of dealing with the sins of mankind other than the ways that God Himself would choose.
THE FIRST TEMPTATION
Knowing that Our Lord was hungry, Satan pointed down to some little black stones that resembled round loaves of bread, and said:
If Thou art the Son of God,
Bid these stones turn into loaves of bread.
MATTHEW 4:3
The first temptation of Our Blessed Lord was to become a kind of social reformer, and to give bread to the multitudes in the wilderness who could find nothing there but stones. The vision of social amelioration without spiritual regeneration has constituted a temptation to which many important men in history have succumbed completely. But to Him, this would not be adequate service of the Father; there are deeper needs in man than crushed wheat; and there are greater joys than the full stomach.
The evil spirit was saying, “Start with the primacy of the economic! Forget about sin!” He still says this today in different words, “My Commissar goes into classrooms and asks children to pray to God for bread. And when their prayers are not answered, my Commissar feeds them. The Dictator gives bread; God does not, because there is no God, there is no soul; there is only the body, pleasure, sex, the animal, and when we die, that is the end.” Satan was here trying to make Our Lord feel the terrific contrast between the Divine greatness He claimed and His actual destitution. He was tempting Him to reject the ignominies of human nature, the trials and the hunger, and to use the Divine power, if He really possessed it, to save His human nature and also to win the mob. Thus, he was appealing to Our Lord to stop acting as a man, and in the name of man, and to use His supernatural powers to give His human nature ease, comfort, and immunity from trial. What could be more foolish than for God to be hungry, when He had once spread a miraculous table in the desert for Moses and his people? John had said that He could raise up children of Abraham from the very stones; why, then, could He not make bread of them for Himself? The need was real; the power, if He was God, was also real; why then was He submitting His human nature to all the ills and sufferings to which mankind is heir? Why was God accepting such humiliation just to redeem His own creatures? “If You are the Son of God, as you claim to be, and You are here to undo the destruction wrought by sin, then save Yourself.” It was exactly the same kind of temptation men would hurl at Him in the hour of His Crucifixion.
Come down from that cross,
If Thou art the Son of God.
MATTHEW 27:40
The answer of Our Blessed Lord was that even while accepting human nature with all its failings and trials and self-denials, He nevertheless was not without Divine help.
It is written, Man cannot live by bread only;
There is life for him in all the words
Which proceed from the mouth of God.
MATTHEW 4:4
The words quoted were taken from the Old Testament account of the miraculous feeding of the Jews in the desert when manna fell to them from heaven. He refused to satisfy Satan’s burning curiosity as to whether He was, or was not, the Son of God; but He affirmed that God can feed men by something greater than bread. Our Lord would not use miraculous powers to provide food for Himself, as He would not use miraculous powers, later on, to come down from the Cross. Men in all ages would be hungry, and He was not going to dissociate Himself from His starving brethren. He had become man and He was willing to submit Himself to all of the ills of man until the moment of His glory would at last arrive.
Our Lord was not denying that men must be fed, or that social justice must be preached; but He was asserting that these things are not first. He was, in effect, saying to Satan, “You tempt Me to a religion which would relieve want; you want Me to be a baker, instead of a Savior; to be a social reformer, instead of a Redeemer. You are tempting Me away from My Cross, suggesting that I be a cheap leader of people, filling their bellies instead of their souls. You would have Me begin with security instead of ending with it; you would have Me bring outer abundance instead of inner holiness. You and your materialist followers say, ‘Man lives by bread alone,’ but I say to you, ‘Not by bread alone.’ Bread there must be, but remember even bread gets all its power to nourish mankind from Me. Bread without Me can harm man; and there is no real security apart from the Word of God. If I give bread alone, then man is no more than an animal, and dogs might as well come first to My banquet. Those who believe in Me must hold to that faith, even when they are starved and weak; even when they are imprisoned and scourged.
“I know about human hunger! I have gone without food Myself for forty days. But I refuse to become a mere social reformer who caters only to the belly. You cannot say that I am unconcerned with social justice, for I am feeling at this moment the hunger of the world. I am One with every poor, starving member of the human race. That is why I have fasted: so that they can never say that God does not know what hunger is. Begone, Satan! I am not just a social worker who has never been hungry Himself, but One who says, ‘I reject any plan which promises to make men richer without making them holier.’ Remember! I Who say, ‘Not by bread alone,’ have not tasted bread for forty days!”
THE SECOND TEMPTATION
Satan, having failed to win Our Lord away from His Cross and Redemption by turning Him into a “Communist Commissar” who promises nothing but bread, now turned the attack directly upon His Soul. Seeing that Our Lord refused to subscribe to the belief that man is an animal or a mere stomach, Satan now tempted Him to pride and egotism. Satan displayed his own kind of vanity by taking Him to a lofty impressive pinnacle of the temple, and saying:
Cast Thyself down to the earth.
Then he continued by quoting Scripture:
For it is written, He has given charge to His angels
Concerning Thee,
And they will hold Thee up with their hands,
Lest Thou shouldst chance to trip on a stone.
MATTHEW 4:6
Satan was here saying, “Why take the long and tedious way to win mankind, through the shedding of blood, the mounting of a Cross, through being despised and rejected, when You can take a short cut by performing a prodigy? You have already affirmed Your trust in God. Very well! If You really trust God, I dare You to do something heroic! Prove Your faith, not by struggling up Calvary in obedience to God’s will, but by flinging Yourself down. You will never win people to Yourself by preaching sublime truths from steeples, pinnacles and crucifixes. The masses cannot follow You; they are too far below. Clothe Yourself with wonders instead. Throw Yourself down from the pinnacle, then stop just before You hit bottom; that is something they can appreciate. It is the spectacular that people want, not the Divine. People are always bored! Relieve the monotony of their lives and stimulate their jaded spirits, but leave their guilty consciences alone!”
The second temptation was to forget the Cross and replace it with an effortless display of power, which would make it easy for everyone to believe in Him. Having heard Our Blessed Lord quote Scripture, the devil now quoted it too. The Savior had said in answer to the first temptation, that God could give Him bread if He asked for it, but He would not ask for it if it meant a surrendering of His Divine Mission. Satan retorted that if Our Lord really trusted so much in the Father, He should prove it by doing a daring deed and giving the Father an opportunity to protect Him. In the desert, there was no one to see Him perform a miracle by making bread from stones; but in the great city there were plenty of spectators. If one were to be the Messias, the people would have to be won; and what could win them more quickly than a display of wonders?
The truth that would answer this temptation was that faith in God must never contradict reason. The unreasonable venture never has the assurance of the Divine protection. Satan wanted to make God the Father do something for Our Lord that Our Lord refused to do for Himself; namely, to make Him an object of special care, exempt from obedience to natural laws which were already the laws of God. But Our Blessed Lord, Who came to show us the Father, knew that the Father was not just a mechanical, impersonal Providence which would protect anyone, even someone who surrendered a Divinely ordained mission for the sake of winning a mob. The answer of Our Lord to the second temptation was:
But it is further written, thou shalt not
Put the Lord Thy God to the proof.
MATTHEW 4:7
Our Blessed Lord was to have that same temptation later on in His public life when a mob would stand around Him demanding a miracle, any miracle, just to prove His powers and to make it easy for them to believe.
The multitudes gathered round Him,
And He began speaking to them thus;
This is a wicked generation;
It asks for a sign.
LUKE 11:29
If He did show such signs, He would certainly have all men running after Him; but what would it profit them if sin was still on their souls?
In answer to modern requests for signs and wonders, Our Lord might say, “You repeat Satan’s temptation, whenever you admire the wonders of science, and forget that I am the Author of the Universe and its science. Your scientists are the proofreaders, but not the authors of the Book of Nature; they can see and examine My handiwork, but they cannot create one atom themselves. You would tempt Me to prove Myself omnipotent by meaningless tests; you have even pulled watches on Me and said, ‘I challenge You to strike me dead within five minutes.’ Know you not that I have mercy on fools? You tempt Me after you have willfully destroyed your own cities with bombs by shrieking out, ‘Why does God not stop this war?’ You tempt Me, saying that I have no power, unless I show it at your beck and call. This, if you remember, is exactly how Satan tempted Me in the desert.
“I have never had many followers on the lofty heights of Divine truth, I know; for instance, I have hardly had the intelligentsia. I refuse to perform stunts to win them, for they would not really be won that way. It is only when I am seen on the Cross that I really draw men to Myself; it is by sacrifice, and not by marvels, that I must make My appeal. I must win followers not with test tubes, but with My blood; not with material power, but with love; not with celestial fireworks, but with the right use of reason and free will. No sign shall be given to this generation but the sign of Jonas, namely, the sign of someone rising up from below, not of someone flinging Himself down from the pinnacles.
“I want men who will believe in Me, even when I do not protect them; I will not open the prison doors where My brethren are locked; I will not stay the murderous Red sickle or the imperial lions of Rome, I will not halt the Red hammer that batters down My tabernacle doors; I want My missionaries and martyrs to love Me in prison and death as I loved them in My own suffering. I never worked any miracles to save Myself! I will work few miracles even for My saints. Begone, Satan! Thou shalt not tempt the Lord, thy God.”
THE THIRD TEMPTATION
The final assault took place on the mountaintop. It was the third attempt to divert Him from His Cross, this time by a plea for coexistence between good and evil. He had come to establish a kingdom on earth by acting as the Lamb going to sacrifice. Why could He not choose a much quicker way of establishing His kingdom, by striking up a treaty, which would give Him all He desired, namely the world, but without the Cross?
And the devil led Him up on to a high mountain,
And showed Him all the kingdoms of the world
In a moment of time; I will give Thee command,
The devil said to Him, over all these,
And the glory that belongs to them;
They have been made over to me,
And I may give them to whomsoever I please;
Come, then, all shall be Thine,
If Thou wilt fall down before me and worship.
LUKE 4:5–5
The words of Satan seem, indeed, very boastful. Had the kingdoms of the world really been delivered to him? Our Lord called Satan the “prince of the world,” but it was not God that had delivered any of the kingdoms of the world to him; mankind had done so, by sin. But even if Satan did, so to speak, rule the kingdoms of the earth by popular consent, it was not really within his power to give them to whomsoever he pleased. Satan was lying in order to tempt Our Lord again from the Cross, by way of a short cut. He was offering Our Lord the world on one condition: that He worship Satan. Worship, of course, would imply service. The service would be this: that inasmuch as the kingdom of the world was under the power of sin, the new Kingdom which Our Lord would establish must be only a continuation of the old one. In short, He could have the earth, provided He promised not to change it. He could have mankind, as long as He promised not to redeem it. It was a kind of temptation that Our Blessed Lord would face later on, when the people attempted to make Him an earthly king.
Knowing, then, that they meant to come and carry Him of ,
So as to make a king of Him,
Jesus once again withdrew on to the hillside all alone.
JOHN 6:15
And before Pilate, He said that He would establish another Kingdom, but that it would not be one of the kingdoms that Satan could offer. When Pilate asked Him, “Art Thou a King?”
My kingdom, answered Jesus, does not belong to this world.
If My kingdom were one which belonged to this world,
My servants would be fighting,
To prevent My falling into the hands of the Jews;
But no, My kingdom does not take its origin here.
JOHN 18:36
The kingdom that Satan offered was of the world, and not of the Spirit. It would still be a kingdom of evil and the hearts of His subjects would not be regenerated.
Satan was saying in effect, “You have come, O Christ, to win the world, but the world is already mine; I will give it to You, if You will compromise and worship me. Forget Your Cross, Your Kingdom of Heaven. If You want the world, it is at Your feet. You will be hailed with louder hosannas than Jerusalem ever sang to its kings; and You will be spared the pains and sorrows of the Cross of contradiction.”
Our Lord, knowing that those kingdoms could be won only by His suffering and death, said to Satan:
Away with thee, Satan; it is written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God
And serve none but Him.
MATTHEW 4:10
We can conjecture how these terse, uncompromising words must have sounded to Satan, “Satan, you want worship; but to worship you is to serve you, and to serve you is slavery. I do not want your world, so long as it bears the terrible burden of guilt. In all the kingdoms which you claim as yours, the hearts of your citizens still long for something you cannot give them, namely, peace of soul and unselfish love. I do not want your world, which you do not even own yourself.
“I am a revolutionist too, as My mother sang in her Magnificat. I am in revolt against you, the prince of the world. But My revolution is not by the sword thrust outward to conquer by force, but inward against sin and all the things that make war among men. I will first conquer evil in the hearts of men, and then I shall conquer the world. I will conquer your world by going into the hearts of your dishonest tax collectors, your false judges, your Commissars, and I will redeem them from guilt and sin, and send them back clean to their professions. I shall tell them that it profits them nothing to win the whole world if they lose their immortal souls. You may keep your kingdoms for the moment. Better the loss of all your kingdoms, of the whole world even, than the loss of a single soul! The kingdoms of the world must be elevated to the Kingdom of God; the Kingdom of God will not be dragged down to the level of the kingdoms of the world. All I now want of this earth is a place large enough to erect a Cross; there I shall let you unfurl Me before the crossroads of your world! I shall let you nail Me in the name of the cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, but I will rise from the dead, and you will discover that you, who seemed to conquer, have been crushed, as I march with victory on the wings of the morning! Satan, you are asking Me to become anti-Christ. Before this blasphemous request, patience must give way to just anger. ‘Get thee behind Me, Satan.’”
Our Lord came down from that mountain as poor as when He ascended it. When He had finished His earthly life and had risen from the dead, He would speak to His Apostles on another mountain:
And now the eleven disciples
Took their journey into Galilee,
To the mountain where Jesus had bidden them meet Him.
When they saw Him there,
They fell down to worship…
But Jesus came near and spoke to them;
All authority in heaven and on earth
He said, has been given to Me;
You, therefore, must go out,
Making disciples of all nations,
And baptizing them in the name of the Father,
And of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,
Teaching them to observe all the commandments
Which I have given you.
And behold I am with you all through the days that are coming,
Until the consummation of the world.
MATTHEW 28:16–16
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