To restate in order our former conclusions, Jesus had deliberately, of His own accord and of set firm purpose, gone to be baptized. That one grand outstanding fact of His early life, that He must be about His Father's Business, had found its explanation when He knew that the Baptist's cry, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,' was from God. His Father's Business, then, was the Kingdom of Heaven,' and to it He consecrated Himself, so fulfilling all righteousness. But His being about it' was quite other than that of any Israelite, however devout, who came to Jordan. It was His consecration, not only to the Kingdom, but to the Kingship, in the anointing and permanent possession of the Holy Ghost, and in His proclamation from heaven. That Kingdom was His Father's Business; its Kingship, the manner in which He was to be about it.' The next step was not, like the first, voluntary, and of preconceived purpose. Jesus went to Jordan; He was driven of the Spirit into the wilderness. Not, indeed, in the sense of His being unwilling to go, [1464] or having had other purpose, such as that of immediate return into Galilee, but in that of not being willing, of having no will or purpose in the matter, but being led up,' unconscious of its purpose, with irresistible force, by the Spirit. In that wilderness He had to test what He had learned, and to learn what He had tested. So would He have full proof for His Work of the What - His Call and Kingship; so would He see its How - the manner of it; so, also, would, from the outset, the final issue of His Work appear.
Again - banishing from our minds all thought of sin in connection with Christ's Temptation, [1465] He is presented to us as the Second Adam, both as regarded Himself, and His relation to man. In these two respects, which, indeed, are one, He is now to be tried. Like the first, the Second Adam, sinless, is to be tempted, but under the existing conditions of the Fall: in the wilderness, not in Eden; not in the enjoyment of all good, but in the pressing want of all that is necessary for the sustenance of life, and in the felt weakness consequent upon it. For (unlike the first) the Second Adam was, in His Temptation, to be placed on an absolute equality with us, except as regarded sin. Yet even so, there must have been some point of inward connection to make the outward assault a temptation. It is here that opponents (such as Strauss and Keim) have strangely missed the mark, when objecting, either that the forty days' fast was intrinsically unnecessary, or that the assaults of Satan were clumsy suggestions, incapable of being temptations to Jesus. He is driven' into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted. [1466] The history of humanity is taken up anew at the point where first the kingdom of Satan was founded, only under new conditions. It is not now a choice, but a contest, for Satan is the prince of this world. During the whole forty days of Christ's stay in the wilderness His Temptation continued, though it only attained its high point at the last, when, after the long fast, He felt the weariness and weakness of hunger. As fasting occupies but a very subordinate, we might almost say a tolerated, place in the teaching of Jesus; and as, so far as we know, He exercised on no other occasion such ascetic practices, we are left to infer internal, as well as external, necessity for it in the present instance. The former is easily understood in His pre-occupation; the latter must have had for its object to reduce Him to utmost outward weakness, by the depression of all the vital powers. We regard it as a psychological fact that, under such circumstances, of all mental faculties the memory alone is active, indeed, almost preternaturally active. During the preceding thirty-nine days the plan, or rather the future, of the Work to which He had been consecrated, must have been always before Him. In this respect, then, He must have been tempted. It is wholly impossible that He hesitated for a moment as to the means by which He was to establish the Kingdom of God. He could not have felt tempted to adopt carnal means, opposed to the nature of that Kingdom, and to the Will of God. The unchangeable convictions which He had already attained must have stood out before Him: that His Father's business was the Kingdom of God; that He was furnished to it, not by outward weapons, but by the abiding Presence of the Spirit; above all, that absolute submission to the Will of God was the way to it, nay, itself the Kingdom of God. It will be observed, that it was on these very points that the final attack of the Enemy was directed in the utmost weakness of Jesus. But, on the other hand, the Tempter could not have failed to assault Him with considerations which He must have felt to be true. How could He hope, alone, and with such principles, to stand against Israel? He knew their views and feelings; and as, day by day, the sense of utter loneliness and forsakenness increasingly gathered around Him, in His increasing faintness and weakness, the seeming hopelessness of such a task as He had undertaken must have grown upon Him with almost overwhelming power. [1467] Alternately, the temptation to despair, presumption, or the cutting short of the contest in some decisive manner, must have presented itself to His mind, or rather have been presented to it by the Tempter.