Space is but narrow — east and west — There is not room for two abreast.
No one of us is like any other, either in his needs or in the mode in which these needs must be satisfied. Every man bears the impress of his finitude, with its infinite variety of form. Hardly less is that impress borne by even the greatest and highest expression in which the truth is told to us. Yet if that truth be hard to reach — nay, even if the most genuinely strenuous effort to reach it must ever remain incomplete, and the work have to be done over again by each one for himself, we have no justification for despair, or for sitting in idleness with folded hands. For in the search for truth, as in all the other phases of our activity, we gain and keep our life and freedom only by daily conquering them anew.^
(3) But more than that. The wilderness was necessary to the temptation, because isolation is death. What was the death He died for sinners on Calvary ? It was separation from the Father. " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " — that was His death on Calvary. For fellowship with God is life ; and the moment that a man sins he dies because he breaks that fellowship. As a Saviour our Lord identified Himself with man even in baptism ; but that was only a foretaste. He drank the cup of identification on the Cross when the Father made Him feel His unity with sinners in their separation from God. But He is to be a man as well as a Saviour. Before He can enter into the fulness of fellowship with man He must be separated from man and feel the separation. He must of His own free will die to man that He may rise again into the enjoy- ment of human fellowship, and be indeed the Son of man. " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone." Unless Jesus had been driven into the wilderness He would have remained without the human family.
Thou wast alone through Thy redemption vigil,
Thy friends had fled; The angel at the garden from Thee parted,
And solitude instead. More than the scourge, or Cross, 0, tender-hearted, Under the crown of thorns bowed down Thy head.^
> R. B. Haldane, TJut Pathway to Reality. ' H. E. H. King.
ST. MARK 41
III.
Satan. "Tempted of Satan."
i The Form of the Temptation.
In what sense is the narrative to be taken ? Many writers accept it as literal history, and suppose the tempter to have appeared in bodily form and to have conveyed our Lord, also in the body, both to the mountain top and to the pinnacle of the Temple. Others have regarded it as a vision ; and intermediate views have been adopted by many. On one point, fortunately, we may be pretty confident. The substance of the history came from our Lord. The most unfavourable critics allow this, from the extreme difficulty of referring it to any other source. It cannot have been introduced in order to make the Gospel fall in with the Jewish notions of the Messiah, for there are no traditions that the Messiah should be tempted; and if the passage had been devised by men, the drift of it would have been plainer, and the temptations would have been such as men would feel might have come upon themselves. "We have many accounts, in the legends of the saints, of the sort of trials which present themselves to the imagination of human writers ; and they differ totally from these.
That Satan should have appeared in a bodily form is, to my mind, opposed to the spirituality of all our Lord's teaching. Such an appearance presents endless difficulties, not only physical but moral. If our Lord knew the tempter to be Satan, He was, as I have said, forearmed ; if He did not know him, that intro- duces other difficulties. He must at any rate have been sur- prised at meeting a specious sophist in the wilderness. Milton deals with the subject with great skill, from his point of view, in Paradise Regained. Certain points he leaves unexplained, and those I believe to be inexplicable. They are these. I cannot understand that our Lord should suffer Satan to transport Him to the mountain top, or to the pinnacle of the Temple, or that the Evil One should propose to Jesus to fall down and worship him.
42 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
I can, however, readily comprehend that our Lord should represent under this imagery and under these personifications what had passed within Himself. He could not indeed bring the lesson home to His hearers in any other way. To have represented mental emotions, to have spoken of the thoughts that passed through His mind, would have been wholly unsuited to His hearers. We know how difficult it is to keep up an interest in a record of inward struggles and experiences. Men want something to present to their mind's eye, and they soon weary of following an account of what has been going on within a man's heart, void of outward incident. A recital of what had passed in our Lord's mind would have taken no hold of men's fancy, and would soon have faded from their thoughts. But the figure of Satan would catch their eye, the appearance of contest would animate the hearer's interest ; while the survey of the realms of the earth, and the dizzy station on the pinnacle of the Temple, would take possession of men's memories and minds.^