The Spirit of God had driven Jesus into the wilderness; the spirit of the Devil now carried Him to Jerusalem. Jesus stands on the lofty pinnacle of the Tower, or of the Temple-porch, [1473] presumably that on which every day a Priest was stationed to watch, as the pale morning light passed over the hills of Judæa far off to Hebron, to announce it as the signal for offering the morning sacrifice. [1474] If we might indulge our imagination, the moment chosen would be just as the Priest had quitted that station. The first desert-temptation had been in the grey of breaking light, when to the faint and weary looker the stones of the wilderness seemed to take fantastic shapes, like the bread for which the faint body hungered. In the next temptation Jesus stands on the watch-post which the white-robed priest had just quitted. Fast the rosy morning-light, deepening into crimson, and edged with gold, is spreading over the land. In the Priests' Court below Him the morning-sacrifice has been offered. The massive Temple-gates are slowly opening, and the blasts of the priests' silver trumpets is summoning Israel to begin a new day by appearing before their Lord. Now then let Him descend, Heaven-borne, into the midst of priests and people. What shouts of acclamation would greet His appearance! What homage of worship would be His! The goal can at once be reached, and that at the head of believing Israel. Jesus is surveying the scene. By His side is the Tempter, watching the features that mark the working of the spirit within. And now he has whispered it. Jesus had overcome in the first temptation by simple, absolute trust. This was the time, and this the place to act upon this trust, even as the very Scriptures to which Jesus had appealed warranted. But so to have done would have been not trust - far less the heroism of faith - but presumption. The goal might indeed have been reached; but not the Divine goal, nor in God's way - and, as so often, Scripture itself explained and guarded the Divine promise by a preceding Divine command. [1475] 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 breathe 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, scenes -- 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, [1476] 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.