concilianda.' This is also a Rabbinic canon. The Rabbis frequently insist on the duty of not exposing oneself to danger, in presumptuous expectation of miraculous deliverance. It is a curious saying: Do not stand over against an ox when he comes from the fodder; Satan jumps out from between his horns. (Pes. 112 b.) David had been presumptuous in Ps. xxvi. 2, and failed. (Sanh. 107 a.) But the most apt illustration is this: On one occasion the child of a Rabbi was asked by R. Jochanan to quote a verse. The child quoted Deut. xiv. 22, at the same time propounding the question, why the second clause virtually repeated the first. The Rabbi replied, 'To teach us that the giving of tithes maketh rich.' 'How do you know it?' asked the child. 'By experience,' answered the Rabbi. 'But,' said the child, 'such experiment is not lawful, since we are not to tempt the Lord our God.' (See the very curious book of Rabbi So oweyczgk, Die Bibel, d. Talm. u. d. Evang. p. 132.).] And thus once more Jesus not only is not overcome, but He overcomes by absolute submission to the Will of God.
To submit to the Will of God! But is not this to acknowledge His authority, and the order and disposition which He has made of all things? Once more the scene changes. They have turned their back upon Jerusalem and the Temple. Behind are also all popular prejudices, narrow nationalism, and limitations. They no longer brethe the stifled air, thick with the perfume of incense. They have taken their flight into God's wide world. There they stand on the top of some very high mountain. It is in the full blaze of sunlight that He now gazes upon a wondrous scene. Before Him rise, from out the cloud-land at the edge of the horizon, forms, figures, scene, come words, sounds, harmonies. The world in all its glory, beauty, strength, majesty, is unveiled. Its work, its might, its greatness, its art, its thought, emerge into clear view. And still the horizon seems to widen as He gazes; and more and more, and beyond it still more and still brighter appears. It is a world quite other than that which the retiring Son of the retired Nazareth-home had ever seen, could ever have imagined, that opens its enlarging wonders. To us in the circumstances the temptation, which at first sight seems, so to speak, the clumsiest, would have been well nigh irresistible. In measure as our intellect was enlarged, our heart attuned to this world-melody, we would have gazed with bewitched wonderment on that sight, surrendered ourselves to the harmony of those sounds, and quenched the thirst of our soul with maddening draught. But passively sublime as it must have appeared to the Perfect Man, the God-Man, and to Him far more than to us from His
infinitely deeper appreciation of, and wider sympathy with the good, and true, and the beautiful, He had already overcome. It was, indeed, not 'worship,' but homage which the Evil One claimed from Jesus, and that on the truly stated and apparently rational ground, that, in its present state, all this world 'was delivered' unto him, and he exercised the power of giving it to whom he would. But in this very fact lay the answer to the suggestion. High above this moving scene of glory and beauty arched the deep blue of God's heaven, and brighter than the sun, which poured its light over the sheen and dazzle beneath, stood out the fact: 'I must be about My Father's business;' above the din of far-off sounds rose the voice: 'Thy Kingdom come!' Was not all this the Devil's to have and to give, because it was not the Father's Kingdom, to which Jesus had consecrated Himself? What Satan sought was, 'My kingdom come' a Satanic Messianic time, a Satanic Messiah; the final realisation of an empire of which his present possession was only temporary, caused by the alienation of man from God. To destroy all this: to destroy the works of the Devil, to abolish his kingdom, to set man free from his dominion, was the very object of Christ's Mission. On the ruins of the past shall the new arise, in proportions of grandeur and beauty hitherto unseen, only gazed at afar by prophets' rapt sight. It is to become the Kingdom of God; and Christ's consecration to it is to be the corner-stone of its new Temple. Those scenes are to be transformed into one of higher worship; those sounds to mingle and melt into a melody of praise. An endless train, unnumbered multitudes from afar, are to bring their gifts, to pour their wealth, to consecrate their wisdom, to dedicate their beauty, to lay it all in lowly worship as humble offering at His feet: a world God-restored, God-dedicated, in which dwells God's peace, over which rests God's glory. It is to be the bringing of worship, not the crowning of rebellion, which is the Kingdom. And so Satan's greatest becomes to Christ his coarsest temptation, [1 Sin always intensifies in the coarseness of its assaults.] which He casts from Him; and the words: 'Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve,' which now receive their highest fulfilment, mark not only Satan's defeat and Christ's triumph, but the principle of His Kingdom, of all victory and all triumph.
Foiled, defeated, the Enemy has spread his dark pinions towards that far-off world of his, and covered it with their shadow. The sun no longer glows with melting heat; the mists have gathered or the edge of the horizon, and enwrapped the scene which has faded from view. And in the cool and shade that followed have the Angels [2 For the Jewish views on Angelology and Demonology, see Appendix XIII: 'Jewish Angelology and Demonology.'] come and ministered to His wants, both bodily and mental. He has refused to assert power; He has not yielded to despair; He would not fight and conquer alone in His own strength; and He has received power and refreshment, and Heaven's company unnumbered in their ministry of worship. He would not yield to Jewish dream; He did not pass from despair to presumption; and lo, after the contest, with no reward as its object, all is His. He would not have Satan's vassals as His legions, and all Heaven's hosts are at His command. It had been victory; it is now shout of triumphant praise. He Whom God had anointed by His Spirit had conquered by the Spirit; He Whom Heaven's Voice had proclaimed God's beloved Son, in Whom He was well pleased, had proved such, and done His good pleasure.
They had been all overcome, these three temptations against submission to the Will of God, present, personal, and specifically Messianic. Yet all His life long there were echoes of them: of the first, in the suggestion of His brethren to show Himself; [a St. John vii. 3-5.]of the second, in the popular attempt to make Him a king, and perhaps also in what constituted the final idea of Judas Iscariot; of the third, as being most plainly Santanic, in the question of Pilate: 'Art Thou then a King?'
The enemy 'departed from Him', yet only 'for a season.' But this first contest and victory of Jesus decided all others to the last. These were, perhaps not as to the shaping of His Messianic plan, nor through memory of Jewish expectancy, yet still in substance the same contest about absolute obedience, absolute submission to the Will of God, which constitutes the Kingdom of God. And so also from first to last was this the victory: 'Not My will, but Thine, be done.' But as, in the first three petitions which He has taught us, Christ has enfolded us in the mantle of His royalty, so has He Who shared our nature and our temptations gone up with us, want-pressed, sin-laden, and temptation-stricken as we are, to the Mount of Temptation in the four human petitions which follow the first. And over us is spread, as the sheltering folds of His mantle, this as the outcome of His royal contest and glorious victory, 'For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever!' [1 This quotation of the Doxology leaves, of course, the critical question undetermined, whether the words were part of the 'Lord's Prayer' in its original form.
THE ASCENT: FROM THE RIVER JORDAN TO THE MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION
THE DEPUTATION FROM JERUSALEM, THE THREE SECTS OF THE PHARISEES, SADDUCEES, AND ESSENES, EXAMINATION OF THEIR DISTINCTIVE DOCTRINES. [1
This chapter contains, among other matter, a detailed and critical examination of the great Jewish Sects, such as was necessary in a work on 'The Times.' as well as 'The Life,' of Christ.
CHAPTER II
(St. John i. 19-24.)
Apart from the repulsively carnal form which it had taken, there is something absolutely sublime in the continuance and intensity of the Jewish expectation of the Messiah. It outlived not only the delay of long centuries, but the persecutions and scattering of the people; it continued under the disappointment of the Maccabees, the rule of a Herod, the administration of a corrupt and contemptible Priesthood, and, finally, the government of Rome as represented by a Pilate; nay, it grew in intensity almost in proportion as it seemed unlikely of realisation. These are facts which show that the doctrine of the Kingdom, as the sum and substance of Old Testament teaching, was the very heart of Jewish religious life; while, at the same time, they evidence a moral elevation which placed abstract religious conviction far beyond the reach of passing events, and clung to it with a tenacity which nothing could loosen.
Tidings of what these many months had occurred by the banks of the Jordan must have early reached Jerusalem, and ultimately stirred to the depths its religious society, whatever its preoccupation with ritual questions or political matters. For it was not an ordinary movement, nor in connection with any of the existing parties, religious or political. An extraordinary preacher, or extraordinary appearance and habits, not aiming, like others,
