The Answers of Jesus Christ
Matthew iv. 1–11 (continued)
AiiMiGHTT God, thou knowest why we are in haste, for our days are but a handful, and our breath is dying in our nostrils. Few and evil have been the days of thy servants, yet hast thou given unto us great mercy and gladness, though we have often turned aside from thy gifts and have not enjoyed the bounty of thy love. Behold our years are hastening away: no man hath hand long enough and strong enough to catch and detain them; they fly away on broad, swift vsdngs, and we cannot tell which way they go, nor can any man find his dead yesterdays. O that men were wise, that they would consider these things, and lend an attentive mind to all thy Word, so that their lives might be founded in wisdom, and rise up in all the brightness of hope. Yet we are foolish before God, and obstinate: with a strange hardness of heart we receive his rain as the barren rock receives it, and return nothing that is beautiful and useful to him. God be merciful unto us sinners, and remember not the past against lis as an accusation; give us the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, which will lead us to better life, that we may treasure our moments with most miserly care and spend them as men who must give an account of their outlay. Then shall our lives be filled with the beauty of a loving service, and in our very breath there shall be the expectation of a great hope.
We bless thee that we are still in the land of the living, that though the days yet to come may be few and dark, yet we shall spend them here, where the altar is, where the open Bible may be read, where the great cross of Christ rises above all our sin, and where even yet we may know the joy and the liberty of divine salvation.
We bless thee for the year that is now dying, so full of mercy, though full of trouble. Thou hast watched us and tended us night and day, and though our life has been a daily peril and a nightly trouble, yet through all hast thou shown thy presence and given proof of thy government and dominion. The Lord overrule all things to happy ends, the Lord pardon his servants through Jesus Christ, the Priest and Saviour of the world, for every sin that has marred their lives; the Lord accept any sacrifice we have rendered, not as gifts of our own, but as expressions of his inspiration.
We bless thee for all thy tender care and thy loving mercy; and as for thy rod, so long and sharp and heavy, we would endeavour to kiss it, and bless the hand that has dealt the stroke. Wherein thou hast taken away from our eyes the beauty which filled them, hast thou not transplanted the flower to fairer climes? Wherein thou hast dug the grave where we least of all would have it dug, is it not that thou mightest wean our love to things worthy of its fire? Help us to see the divine meaning of our life, and to hide ourselves within the ample purpose of God’s love and wisdom; may we keep our lives from sin, and our hearts from that aching despair which leaves an open gate for the devil and his angels. May we at all times rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him, knowing that we must not tempt him to our rescue, nor bring about our own purpose by deceitful means.
The Lord give cheerfulness of heart to those who have known long sorrow; the Lord show one small rift in the dark cloud, through which the morning may be seen — yea, the lord be tender with his own comfortableness to those who have been long strangers to ought of joy and high delight.
Enable us all to make better vows and to keep them. Permit us all to see the New Year with a higher courage and a nobler faith in God and in his Son. May our motto be — “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our lord Jesus Christ,” and upon the banner of our life may there be written, “For me to live is Christ.” And grant unto us thy Holy Spirit, an indwelling guest and friend, to inspire the right thought, to dictate the right word, to show us the right course in life. When the last day comes and the last word is spoken, and the farewell is bidden to a world, by our sin not worth living in, may we have given us an entrance into the city of gardens, the city of light, the mother Jerusalem, the tender one, in whose breast we shall be nursed and nourished for ever. Amen.
Matthew iv. i-ii. {continued.)
We are speaking now about the temptation of Jesus Christ. Last Sunday morning we considered the temptations, one by one, and promised that we should consider this morning the replies made to them by Jesus Christ.
Referring to a remark I made last Sunday morning, that all things were under the control of an independent and self-existent Being, even the devil himself being included in all things, the question has been asked whether, considering there is one self-existent being, there might not be a possibility of there being two. I think if we look a little attentively into the matter, we shall find that there is only one representative or original of everything. We shall find that there is only one word in human speech: all other words come out of that as the branches and the leaves come out of the root. There is only one verb in all grammar: for the sake of convenience we have, perhaps, a thousand verbs, regular and irregular, but looked at closely we shall find that there is only one verb in all human speech; that is the verb to be. All the other verbs come out of it; no other verb can live without it — all the other verbs are phases and moods and aspects of that — “I am that I am.” We shall find that there is only one number, and that number is One. Two is an invention of yours. The multiplication table is a trick of man’s; there is only the number one. Two is a guess, a conjecture, something that has to be granted in order that other reckoning may be made, but all these numbers will run round again and come back to — One. There is only one light; our sun is lighted by some other flame. There is an inner and essential Shekinah in the universe at which all the meaner torches are lighted; planets and constellations catch their tiny blaze from that central and infinite lustre. There is but one life, God and the devil is part of him. So is man, so is every angel. Mystery of mysteries — there is but one mystery in the universe, and that is not how the devil came to be, but how God came to be.
These I give as rough indications of lines of thinking, and simply pay this heed to thf suggestion which has been thrown out and for which I am thankful. Follow me, if you please, in all these expositions, and assist me by questions, by difficulties, by putting things in my mind that have not occurred to it already. In this way we shall set a thousand lamps around the book and get light from one another. Do not let me teach alone; ask me if I am not wrong, correct me when I am inaccurate, amplify the teaching when it is incomplete. In this way let us be fellow-students of the Holy Word.
Having looked at the temptations one by one, let us now take the same course with regard to the answers. The first answer is, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” This is a profound view of life as contrasted with a. shallow one. The devil’s notion was that life could be sustained only ia one way; his short programme was, “Eat and live. Take plenty of bread and refuse to die.” That is his narrow conception of this wondrous immortality; he thinks it is something that must be spoon-fed, his notion of it is that if a man have bread enough, what more can he want? And it is thus he befools the world, by asking us to put a loaf in every cupboard, by asking us to fill the house from floor to ceiling with bread: and then we shall have no difficulty in maintaining and prolonging our life. With what a revealing flash must this answer have fallen upon his stupid mind — Man shall not live by bread alone. There are fifty other ways of living: if God so will it, there are ten thousand other ways of living. Man need not receive his life from his body at all, man can suspend his bodily functions and live in another way, if it so please God to sustain him. Do not suppose that God is shut up to one way of keeping our human mechanism going: he could feed us with hislreath, sustain us by his word, command our life to grow, and we need not resort to any of the little contrivances which so vex us by their detail to sustain our bodily life.
We have always been thinking that there was but one way of sustaining our breath: man has been victimised and befooled by the delusion, that if he had no bread, he could not live. Jesus Christ comes to enlarge the possibilities of life, to say to you, “Take no care or thought for to-morrow, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink. Life is not a question of drinking or eating. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, put your trust in the Lord and he will feed you, he will find bread for you which the soul can eat.” Thus Jesus Christ strikes at the foundation of our mistakes. He does not say, “Whatever you do, make bread enough.” He says, “Take no thought about bread at all. Rest in God, serve God, want to do the right, want to be the good, and all these things shall be added to you.” The true notion of the text is that God has innumerable ways of sustaining life.
and that we live, not because we eat, but because God wills that we live. Your bread is a secondary cause, or a transient occasion, it explains next to nothing: you live not because you have had a sufficiency of bread, but because God’s decree has gone forth, and your days are appointed and registered in heaven.
Suppose I should make the meaning a little more lucid, by putting it thus. Man can make bread by one trade alone. You see the mistake there. Man can make bread only in one way of commerce — you laugh at that as a sophism; you say, “There are a thousand trades by which a man may make bread. Now make that a spiritual conception and carry it up into the highest regions, and you will understand what Jesus Christ meant when he said, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Bread does not cover the whole possibility of living, it is the divine will that settles everything: if ■God mean me to live, you may take away from me all bread, and all the fruits of the earth and the juices thereof, all the rams of Nebaioth and the beasts that browse in the meadows, and you will find me, forty years hence, young, strong, without a wrinkle, without one token of infirmity in my body.
That is the true conception of life. We are misled by any other. We say if we do not make bread we cannot live. That is true only within very small limits, but the limits themselves may be atheistic. I live, not because I baked a loaf yesterday and ate it to-day, but because God wills that I should live. Your life is not a keeping up of yourself as the resultant of some cunning contrivance of yours; your breath is in your nostrils, and God himself keeps it there. When I receive that conception, in all its fulness and poetry, into my soul, I know what Jesus Christ meant when he -said, “Take no thought for the morrow: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” “Trust in the Lord, and do good,” said an older speaker still, “so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.” We shall have bread to eat that the world knoweth not of; our life shall not then be the vulgar result of bread-eating, but it shall be a mystery to everybody how we live, and live on so little — that is, so little that is measurable; but he who draws his life from God’s heart has more than a little to live on. Thou fool, thy loaf perishes in the handling, God’s life seems to grow in the using.
The second answer. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” This is a right use of liberty as contrasted with a wrong one. Let us understand the meaning of this word, tempt. Let us put it in this broad fashion — thou shalt not make experiments upon God, thou shalt not set traps for God, / thou shalt not put thyself into false relations just in order to try God and”’^ to put religion to the test. Do not run into danger for the purpose of being delivered from it. That, I take it, is the practical meaning and application of the word tempt. Perhaps we shall understand it better by g6 THESE SAYINGS OF MINE.
taking a social illustration, for we often see things clearly by means of human analogy.
There are persons who are always tempting our friendship. They do not broadly and lovingly trust it, they do not meet us half-way in joyful and hopeful co-operation, but they continually set little traps by which they may catch us if they can. Have you had acquaintance with such disagreeable persons and their detestable habits? If they are in company, walking with you, they fall a little way behind, just to see if you will look after them. They are always testing you, tempting you, giving you opportunities of showing how much you care for them. They stay away from church just to see whether the minister will miss them. Nice people to have to deal with! They will stay away another Sunday just to see whether the people in the next pew call upon them. That is tempting friendship, putting it to little tests, setting little snares for it to catch it, and then to say, “Now I see just how much you care for me.” If you have had experience of such persons, you understand what it is to tempt love, to tempt power, to tempt God.
Jesus Christ says, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” Do not put thyself into foolish situations in order to draw him forth from his secret tabernacle and to work some mighty wonder for thy deliverance. Do not use him for merely individual ends and purposes, do not fall into a pit, saying, “God will come and deliver me out of this pit, and so reveal his mighty strength in the eyes of all the people.” You try rather to give God as little trouble as possible. Work up to the end of your liberty; say to him, “Father, I would come a longer way to meet thee if I could; I will do all in my little power to carry out thy will, to keep myself, to preserve my life from danger. I will not run risks for the sake of bringing thee out of heaven in order to work some mighty demonstration on my behalf in the eyes of the vulgar and the profane.” That is true religion, and that is true friendship also. If I am truly your friend I do not set little traps for you. On the contrary, I take the best view of you, I love you, and if there be anything like mystery about your conduct to me, I say the misunderstanding is mine, there is nothing of purposed trial on the other side; I must be more on the alert, and I must co-operate more heartily and sympathetically with my friend. But if I be only your friend in a superficial and momentary sense, then I am always trying you, setting little gins and snares in your road and watching you, and if I am a member of your congregation, I absent myself to see whether you mark my absence, and if I am your minister, I try your love in this small way and that. Shame on us if such be the way in which we bruise the angel of friendship. Let heart meet heart and man meet God, and work with him, and do not put his almightiness to little strains and stresses, which, being interpreted, mean nothing less than an evil heart of unbelief. Work as if you were God, and trust as though you had no power of your own. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, but love him and co-operate with him, and be as much to him as you possibly can.
Take the third answer. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” This is constancy in worship as contrasted with caprice and fickleness.
Thou shalt worship. Take that word in opposition to tempt. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, but thou shalt worship him, give him the heart’s adoration, the spirit’s whole fire of love, without one spark falling otherwhere. Thy religious life should be a concentrated offering, intense as flame. That is what keeps a man right, religiously and theologically. We are not propped up by little clevernesses, mechanical, ecclesiastical, and theological; we are not shored up by some religious mechanism of man’s contrivance; we are only right in proportion as our worship is right. If we live in our ideas and syllogisms, if we secure ourselves behind the covert and defence of our own way of stating theological propositions, the very first thunderstorm that comes will carry us away. I am right only when I rightly pray, I am secure only whilst I truly worship, I am delivered from fear of death and hell only in proportion as my fellowship with the Father is intimate and sweet. Ask me to define myself in words, and I say words seem to be but temptations of controversy, propositions are only so many opportunities of contradiction, but worship, deep as the life, silent as the springs of being, mighty as the urgency of love, that it is, and that only, that keeps a man right amid all this swirl and hurry, tumult and danger, of a probationary life.
How is it with us in prayer? I do not ask how it is with us in the mere fluency of sentences: that is often a temptation and a mockery, or may easily become such; but how is it with the desire of the heart, with the outgoing of the soul, with the supreme and inflexible purpose of the will? Do we love God, wait for him, trust in him, believe every syllable he has spoken, and do we know him, not by some trained act of the intellect, but by an inexplicable and ineffable operation of that sympathetic power of the soul which makes us men? I am afraid lest any of us be living a merely intellectually religious life. There is great danger of hiding ourselves behind verbal statements and trusting to formulated faiths: these are both and all useful in their way, but their way goes but a little distance — the only thing that is invincible is love, the only supreme religion is the sacrifice of the broken heart in complete and affectionate trust in the living God.
Not only must there be this worship, but following it and coming out of it there must be service. Thus the text reads, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” Religion is not a contemplation only, religion is a service; religion is not a folding of the hands together and an upturning of the eyes to measurable heavens, and a silent g8 THESE SAYINGS OF MINE,
expectation of something that shall fall upon our indolence and act upon our industry — religion is activity, service, sacrifice, devotion, whole-hearted consecration of every power of the life to one object, and if we have not attained that height, let us strive after it with sweet modesty and with burning energy. Let our heart go out in that direction. I should have pity upon a poor wounded traveller whose face was set towards his home, though he could not take one step to it. He says by that action of the face, “I want to be at home, I would God I were there. Sickness calls me, want implores me, death beckons me: I cannot go, but I can turn my eyes to the old homestead, and look as if I would be there above all other things on earth.” We take the will for the deed. It is so with God: if we really purpose in our hearts to serve Him, and if we fail in a great majority of the points which constitute that purpose, yet if our desire be intense and high it will be set down as an accomplished fact.
These, then, are the three answers which Jesus Christ delivered to the devil’s temptations. One point before we look at the answers as a whole.
Jesus Christ said, in answer to the devil’s quotation of Scripture, “It is written again.” What is the meaning of that? It is that the Bible is not made to be of one text; the meaning is that you must compare Scripture with Scripture. It is possible to fasten the mind upon one single line, so as to miss the meaning of the whole revelation of the Bible. We have to compare spiritual things with spiritual — it is written here, and it is written there, and the two writings must be brought together in intelligent, critical, and spiritual comparison. It is written and it is written again, and the one passage must be read in the light of the other. You must have the whole Bible, and not an isolated text, to rest upon. There is a biblical spirit as well as a biblical letter. Is it not possible that some of us have fixed our minds upon someone passage of Scripture that is really torturing us with agony we dare not explain to our chosen minister? Whereas, if it could be pointed out, he might be able to say to us, “It is so written there, but it is written again,” and thus the light might come and all the joy of liberty. If there is any man here whose soul is afflicted by one special passage of Scripture, and I can be of any service in showing him other writings which illuminate it, it will be the joy of my life to be of that service to any soul bowed down by such distress.
Looking at the answers as a whole, three things strike me. First of all, they were written answers. This is no matter of ready repartee; this is not a question of the quickness of Christ’s intelligence: this is not an unexpected flash of fire by friction that had not been counted upon — this is quotation; this is rest upon the revealed word; this is an endorsement of all that was written in the then Holy Scriptures. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. You are not called upon to be geniuses in your conflicts with the devil; you are only called upon to know you Bibles well.
Where is the man who knows his Bible well? and yet where is there a man in England who has not some portion of the Bible humming in his head, so much so that he thinks he knows it — who when called upon for quotation, round, complete, direct, can give it? What wonder that the devil plays his game successfully with men whose Scripture quotations halt and tremble for very weakness, being uncertain how the words stand, and not knowing whether the point of the sword be the hilt or the hilt the point? Who can fight so, now trying one end and now the other? Let us read the Bible all over again; get it into our hearts as a letter and a spirit — yea, let it dwell in us richly, for as there is but one verb, one number, one light, so there is but one Book — all other books are but broken lights of that. Jesus Christ went directly to the supernatural; he went to revealed truth. It is marvellous that amid all these replies he does not make what we should call an original observation. He quotes, and if you search further into the matter you will find that he quotes — himself.
These answers were not only written, but they were simple. There is no deep metaphysic here, which bewilders the head of poor believers, and makes them giddy with exercises of unwonted intricacy, and calling for unwonted intellectual energy. Great answers are always simple, simplicity being understood as the last result of wisdom — not something shallow and superficial, but as the ultimate result of processes which spread over the whole being of God. The whole movement of civilization is towards simplicity: every now and then Ave startle ourselves by the simplicity of answers which we thought would have been infinitely profound. We had been looking for words six feet long, and lo! all the meaning we wanted was trembling in a word of one syllable, brief and beautiful as a dewdrop when the sun inflames it with tender glory. O, thou groper and seeker after deep things in relation to the kingdom of heaven, thou who dost want to climb up to the skies by some clever staircase of thine own making, know thou that the way is simple in the sense already defined. It expresses God’s eternity, and yet it bows itself down to thy littleness and weakness. “It is written “— be that thine answer. “It is written again” — be that thy further reply. Never go to search for keen retort or flashing repartee within thine own genius: the answer is not in thee, it is in God. Strike no match of thine own wit; pluck thy lightnings from the heavens — they never fail.
Then the answers were not only written and simple, they were authoritative. They are not quoted as conjectures, they are not submitted as suggestions. When a man goes into war, he must not take with him a sword that has to be tried, but one that has been tested and approved. God knows exactly what temptations every one of us has to endure, and he has written down for us the exact answer. If we try any other reply, we shall get a retort from the enemy; but if we accumulate God’s answers, and hurl them at him, he will leave us, and angels will come and minister unto us.
Let us be thankful that in all these answers Jesus Christ has said nothing that we ourselves are not entitled to say. When the devil tells me that I must live by bread alone, I say, “What a liar! I can live in any way God sees fit to appoint. He is not shut up to one way of keeping man’s breath in his nostrils. Thou art a liar! “When the devil says to me, “” Do something rash, just for the purpose of testing whether God does love you; “when the devil says to me, as he did to some magazine writer not long ago, “Now let two hospitals be chosen, and in connection with the one there shall be prayer, and in connection with the other there shall be no prayer, and let us see into which of the hospitals the patients get better sooner” — I say, “O, what folly, what tempting of God, what trap-setting, what small experimenting, what neat ways of forming ourselves into an innumerable jury for the purpose of putting the Almighty to the test.” Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Providence is not a question of balloting, and snare-setting, and testing and tempting; it is a question of trusting, living in and with God, and knowing that an inch is not an ell, and that a part is not the whole.
I am tempted to tempt God. I want him to bless my wheat-fields. I, speaking out of my folly, say to heaven, “God, if thou wouldst give me, a praying man, a great crop, and starve the fields of that profane person over the road, people would begin to think there is a God in heaven — do it.” It is a superficial speech, utterly shallow and narrow, and it is a temptation or unworthy trial of God.
When the devil says to me, “Worship me, and I will give thee the world,” then I am entitled to get angry. There is a keener accent in the last answer, “Get thee hence” — the dog was ordered behind. If we could speak with more emphasis we should get a clearer path for our feet, but if we are “if-you-please”-ing the devil, and asking him to be good enough to get out of the way, if we are saying, “By your leave, Satanic majesty, we will go forward,” do you suppose he will give us his leave that we may advance? I tell you religion has lost its emphasis, religion has fallen down before conventional moods and standards, and has lost that high accentuation which made its speech heard above the hurling storm. Hear the Blessed One, see his flushed face, hear that new tone in his voice — we have not heard it before in these readings, “Get thee hence!” Speak with keener emphasis, with broader meaning — open thy throat to the fulness of its compass, and let thy words shoot out like cannon balls, and God will give thee victory.
“Then the devil leaveth him,” with bowed limbs and shrunken neck, and eyes fastened on the dust, crestfallen, jaw-broken, his head a-swim with a new dizziness, with purpose malignant as hell burning in his heart, but every energy of his being collapsed, made limp, flaccid, his back-bone melted like wax in the fire. He left him. Whether he will return, we shall see as the exposition advances.