When the Apostles returned safe after being sent through the cities, our Lord regards this as an augury of their success in the great conflict and says that He “beheld Satan fallen as lightning [pg 126] from Heaven.”[62] We have clearly impersonation here. He says also “If Satan hath risen up against himself and is divided,”[63] a supposition which excludes the idea of an individual being, and agrees with the collective meaning I attribute to the term. When St Peter rebukes our Lord for declaring before His followers that He would be “rejected and killed and after three days rise again,” our Lord says “Get thee behind me, Satan.” St Peter, by saying of the suffering of which our Lord spake “this shall never be unto thee,”[64] unwittingly had acted as the ally of those who would tempt our Lord from yielding implicitly to His Father's will, and our Lord therefore calls him Satan. On the whole then I lean to the view that the communication, or discourse of our Lord, which has been preserved in the form of the narrative of the Temptation, was delivered by Him in the form of an apologue or species of parable, in which our Lord, after Eastern fashion, introduced Satan as an embodiment of the powers of evil.
It must not be supposed that by giving up here the personality of the tempter we are making an abatement of what is superhuman in the Gospel, in order that, in virtue of having so done, we may hope to win this or that section of doubters over to our side—the whole question of evil remains a mystery, and in mystery there can be no degrees. It is of no use endeavouring to make infinity a trifle less infinite.
Whether the word Satan be here used collectively or personally is altogether a different question from the existence of intermediate intelligences, and is quite an open one even for the most orthodox.
Temptation to turn stones into loaves.
I now come to the Temptations themselves. As these trials were mental, we can only realise them by imagining what, consistently with our history, may have passed in our Lord's mind. What actually did so pass is of course beyond our knowledge altogether. We are however justified in supposing that, as our Lord was “tempted as man,” the thoughts and feelings which actuated Him would be such as men might follow and more or less understand.
It would appear that when God lays a work on a man He gives him a general view of the end to be kept in sight, a vehement desire to accomplish it, and a forefeeling of the capacity so to do. But He does not shew him how he is to do it, He does not make the way clear so that he sees his course before him and marks its several stages. If a man were so guided he would not fulfil the conditions of human agency, there would be no room for his own will to act, he would have no responsibility. He would move along a pre-arranged path. God would, in effect, be doing all and he nothing, and [pg 128] so it would come to much the same thing as if the work were done once for all by God's fiat, independently of human action—and this, as we have already seen, is not God's way of governing the world.
When St Paul takes his last journey to Jerusalem, the Spirit, he tells us, “testifieth unto me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions abide me.” That he must go to Jerusalem he knew and to go he was resolved, but what course of conduct he was to adopt or what the result was to be he did not know at all; afterwards in like manner, he knew that he was to bear witness at Rome, but he had no directions as to what he was to do. It was left to him to act as seemed to him to be the best. This may give us a help towards understanding how it may have been with our Lord, when the mighty charge unto which He was born came home to His mind, and He felt, rising in Him, the wondrous powers given to aid Him in carrying it out.
Our Lord when driven by the Spirit into the wilderness would take no thought of food or shelter. The one thing He craved for was to be alone; He must have solitude, and the wilderness provided that.
When He reflected, He could hardly help asking Himself whether this light which had shone upon Him—this voice from Heaven,—were the resuscitation of His Diviner life or only [pg 129] something in His own eyes and ears? A sure test lay ready: when He had heard Himself hailed as the Son of God a conviction had risen in Him that God would give effect to His commands. He had only to try whether this was so and all doubts would be resolved. Perhaps the whisper came “Try this experiment in a very small matter first.” Who could think this apparent caution and prudence came from an ill quarter?
Spiritual evil always chooses a trifle, something from which it seems that no harm can possibly come, to win its victim to the first false step. Our Lord was hungry, and loaf-shaped stones were lying all about Him. Why not turn a few actually into the loaves they looked like? In so doing, how could He possibly be wrong?