THE METHODS OF SATAN DON’T CHANGE
“Lest Satan should get an advantage of us:
for we are not ignorant of his devices.”
2 Cor. 2:11
Satan can be defined as Christ as
being the same yesterday, today, and forever. The third crisis in the mission
of Christ followed the second almost immediately. On the threshold of the
second period in His work—the three years of public ministry—He met in conflict
the arch-enemy of the race. Not that this was by any means the first encounter.
All the thirty years had been years of conflict. There is no room for doubt that questions
intended to cast reflections upon the motives of God had been asked in
Nazareth, similar to those asked in the Garden of Eden. The last
Adam was familiar by the experience of the years with the METHOD OF ATTACK which
had issued in the ruin of the first Adam. The suggestion had certainly been
made to Him that the will of God was capricious and unkind. No day had passed
in which He had not been subject to temptation. To think of the tempting of
Jesus as beginning and being exhausted in that special season in the
wilderness which is the subject of present consideration, is to misunderstand
utterly the years at Nazareth, and the full meaning of the wilderness
experience. During those thirty years He had been unceasingly victorious. At
His baptism, the opened heavens, the descending Dove, the Divine voice are
each and all significant of the perfections of the thirty years, that is, of
the absolute victory Jesus had won over all the attacks of the enemy. The
Master had met and triumphed over the entire temptations incidental to private
life.
He is now entering upon the three
years of public ministry, and He meets the foe of the race in the highest
conflict of all His testing,—ultimate, that is, in the fact that now evil appears
before Him in all its tremendous strength and naked horror in the personality
of the devil. In all likelihood never had there been such an attack
before, and certain it is that it never occurred again. After this experience
His attitude towards Satan and all his emissaries is that of the VICTOR TOWARDS
THE VANQUISHED. Never again is He seen in the place of temptation in the same
specific way. Suggestions which as to their inner meaning are identical are
made to Him by Satan through Peter, and yet once more in the Garden of
Gethsemane, but the
victory won in the wilderness is most evidently the source of strength in
subsequent experiences.
The attack of the foe is directed
against Him in view of HIS COMING WORK. Its subtlety is manifest in that it is
directed against THREE ASPECTS OF TRIUMPHANT SERVICE. 1. To serve God there must be manhood strong in
the realization of Divine ideals. Against this the first attack was
made. 2. There
must also be such implicit trust in God as expresses itself in contentment with
the Divine arrangement, and refusal to tempt God by false heroics. The
second temptation was craftily aimed at the breaking down of this confidence. 3.
And yet again, the
servant of God must accept the methods of God at whatever cost to himself.
The final temptation was a suggestion that a Divine end should be reached by
other than the Divine method.
In this preliminary article the
subject is that of the setting of the temptation, reserving for future articles
the temptations themselves. In thus viewing the temptation in its relation to
the whole mission of Christ, there are four matters to be considered,—1. The
time of the temptation; 2. the place of the temptation; 3. the agent of the
temptation; 4. the significance of the temptation. For the purpose of this article,
reference will have to be made to the three accounts by Matthew, Mark, and
Luke. John has no chronicle of the temptation, his Gospel being essentially
that of the Deity of Jesus, and God cannot be tempted.
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