In Temptation
“Let no man say ‘when he is tempted
J am tempted of God: for God can
not be tempted with evil, neither
tempteth he any man: but every
man is tempted, when he is drawn
away of his own lust, and etiticed.
Then when lust hath conceived, it
bringeth forth sin: and sin, when
it is finished, bringeth forth
death.” — ST JAMES i. 13-15.
of the highest flights of Milton’s poetry is his story of the encounter between Satan and the porters of the gate of hell:
“Before the gates there sat On either side a formidable shape; The one seem’d woman to the waist, and fair j But ended foul in many a scaly fold, Voluminous and vast; a serpent ann’d With mortal sting; — the other shape, If shape it might be call’d, that shap had none,
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,
For each seem’d either; black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seem’d his head,
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.”
The monster, thus graphically described, advances with horrid strides to bar Satan’s passage. Incensed at its presumption, and fearing no created thing, he prepares, with arms, to force his way. Like two dark clouds charged with thunders, they approach each other — Satan resolved to be out, this grizzly terror resolved to keep him in: —
“And now great deeds
Had been achieved, whereof all hell had rung, Had not the snaky sorceress, that sat Fast by hell-gate, and kept the fatal key, Risen, and, with hideous outcry rush’d between. ‘O father, what intends thy hand,’ she cried, ‘Against thy only son? What fury, O son, Possesses thee to bend that mortal dart Against thy father’s head? ‘”
Having thrown herself between the combatants, and stayed their fury, in a tale which the poet’s fancy has woven out of a passage in the Epistle of St James, this creature, half fair woman, half scaly serpent, proceeds to explain herself. Addressing her words to Satan, she tells him how her name is Sin — and how, at the time of the great revolt in heaven, she sprung, a goddess armed, from his pain-split head — and how, pregnant by him, when cast out of the celestial spheres, and sent to keep watch at the gates of hell, amid parturient pangs she gave birth to a son, who
“Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart, Made to destroy. I fled, and cried out, Death! Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sigh’d From all her caves, and back resounded, Death!”
In this grand fashion John Milton illustrates these weighty sayings, “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”
Now, leaving the poet to soar away, singing on wings sublime, let us descend, and take a practical view of the temptations with which every good man has to contend.
Reflect on the importance of this subject.
An example of “much in little,” the Ten Commandments embrace the whole duty of man. An example also of “much in little,” the Lord’s Prayer, in a few heads, sums up all that we should pray for. It contains but seven petitions; and how large the subject of temptation bulked in our Lord’s eye, and how important therefore it should seem in ours, is to be gathered from the circumstance, that it forms the subject of one of these seven. You may guess the rank and consequence of a man by the society that he moves in, and here the subject of temptation appears in the highest company. It is classed with subjects that engage the intellects of angels, that concern God’s glory, and that are identified both with our present, and with our eternal welfare. If it occupied the same proportion of man’s life, a seventh part of all our thoughts, our cares, and our time, would be given to it — to resisting temptation; avoiding it; fighting it; guarding against the sins it may lead to, as well as mourning and seeking the forgiveness of those it has
led to.
If the temptations that beset and assail us do not occupy such a place in our thoughts and lives — for they give some men no trouble — that admits of an obvious but melancholy explanation. It is not, that the man who is without regrets, anxieties, daily and hourly struggles, is a better man than he wrho has “fightings without and fears within,” It is not that he is holy; never tempted; or that he never yields to temptation. On the contrary, it is because he, unresisting, yields to it. What more pleasant and easy than the motion of a vessel that, gliding down the stream, is borne onwards to the cataract that shall hurl it to destruction? But bring the boat’s head round, and a struggle begins; peace is gone now; she trembles from stem to stern; and by her violent plunges, the waves that break over her bows, and, shaking every timber, threaten to ingulf her, you know the power and presence of a current that had been quietly wafting her on to ruin.
Thus it is with man and temptation, so soon as he is converted. No sooner is peace with God, through Christ, settled, than war is proclaimed; and the man involved in its arduous and life-long struggles. I have seen one that had grown gray in the army, and yet had never been under fire; or seen the serried bayonets glance, but on parade. The Captain of our salvation has no such soldiers; His have given and suffered many wounds; and have all a sore fight of it. This conflict begins with conversion, and if I might borrow an illustration from heathen fables, the infant Hercules has to strangle serpents in his cradle. So soon as a man is new-born, and turns his face heavenward, he has hell to confront and fight with. And, besides the devil and his angels, besides the world and its seductive influences, in passions that he has lodged in his breast, and fed by long indulgence into strength, it may be said that “his enemies are the men of his own house.” And such in number and in power are the temptations with which a good man has to contend, that no Christian will think the language of David extravagant: “They compassed me about; they compassed me about like bees. My soul is among lions; and I lie even among them that are set on fire.” Nay, there are times, and terrible temptations, when, in the language of a psalm, part, and some suppose all, of which our Lord repeated on His cross, he may be ready to cry, “Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round. They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint, my heart is like wax. My strength is dried up like a potsherd: thou hast brought me into the dust of death; for dogs have compassed me. O Lord, my strength, haste thee to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth; hear me from the horns of the unicorns.”
If these figures are appropriate, how formidable are our temptations! It might seem impossible that victory could crown our arms in a war waged against enemies that swarm thick as bees; that are strong as bulls, and fierce as ravening lions. Yet, hear what God says: “Thou shalt tread on the lion and adder, the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under foot;” and hear Paul, as, calmly descending into the vale of death, he goes, singing, like a brave old warrior — “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Hereafter there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day.” Nor is that all — proclaiming equal triumphs through the same grace to others, he adds, “and not to me only, but to all who love his appearing.” Let the good man be assured that his victory over temptation is certain, if he goes about it aright. It turns much on prayer. Thrown into the scale, that decides the battle; drawing on divine strength, that makes little Davids more than a match for giant sins. What devil is there but may be cast out by prayer and fasting?
Yet, prayer is not enough. Like our fathers when they conquered the English at Bannockburn, or the English when they conquered the French at Cressy, we are to rise from our knees; to stand up and fight; to quit us like men; “having done all,” to stand. We are to put on the whole armour of God; and, since we know neither when nor where the adversary may assault us, we are never to put it off. Live and die in harness — using such precautions, as some say Cromwell did against the assassin’s dagger — his dress concealed a shirt of mail: and in the council-chamber, at the banquet, in courts as in camps, he wore that always. To his workshop, the counting-room, the social circle, the market, the place of business, the scenes of his most innocent enjoyments, let a good man go, as the peasant of the East goes to his plough. With larks singing in blue skies above his head, and daisies, bathed in dew springing at his feet, and feathered flocks from sounding shore and noisy woods wheeling round, and feeding in the furrows behind him, our ploughman, void of care, and fearless of danger, whistles at his work; but yonder, where fiery Bedouins scour the land, and bullets whistling from the bush nray suddenly call £he peasant to drop the ox-goad and fly to arms, the sun glances on other iron than the ploughshare — a sword hangs at his thigh, and a gun is slung at his back.
To pray, to fight, are important; but not less important if we would have no man take our crown, and, resisting, overcome temptation, is a right understanding of its springs and sources. The physician is most likely to cure disease who has discovered its seat and nature; while the patient dies in the hands of him who prescribes for the head, when it is the heart that is diseased. To save a ship from sinking, we must find the leak. Temptations, like noxious weeds, are best killed by putting the knife to their root; nor will the stream of our thoughts, and wishes, and desires ever be sanctified till the salt, as at Jericho, is cast in at the spring. Let us see, therefore, where the springs and sources of sin lie.
The source of temptation is not in God.
The apostle St James is clear on this point. He says, “Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with .evil, neither tempteth he any man.”
In the mountains of the Black Forest an extraordinary appearance is occasionally seen. With the sun just rising at your back, you look across the valley on the curtain of mist that, hung from the skies, falls in rolling folds on the opposite hill; and there, wearing a faint halo round his head, stands the giant spectre of the mountains — a colossal form of vast proportions, looking as if, at one bound, he could leap from hill to hill, and tearing up oaks and rocks, hurl them at the head of his enemies. The terror of superstitious peasants, the origin of many a wild, unearthly legend, this is a mere vision — a shadow without substance. It has no reality. Observed to bend or stand erect, to move a limb or arm after him, to repeat every motion of the spectator, it is nothing more than his own form, immensely magnified; and projected on the cloud, like the pictures of a magic lantern on its screen. Such pictures on the mind’s fancy were the pagan deities; the object of the heathen’s worship, whether Baal, or Jupiter, or Venus, or Mars, or Bacchus, being but a projection of the man himself on the field of fancy, with the faculties and passions of humanity all immensely magnified. A strange mixture, like himself, of vices and of virtues, they illustrate the words of God, Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thou art; and thus formed, these gods were tempted with evil, and with evil tempted men.
Importing this idea of heathenism, or perhaps misunderstanding the Scriptures, where God, according to an Eastern idiom, is said to do what in fact He but permits to be done — as when it is said that He “hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” it appears that in the days of the apostle St James, some accused God of sin; alleging, in excuse of their sins, that they were tempted of Him. We shrink with horror from such an idea. “Their rock is not as our Rock.” Time casts its stains on the purest snow, and the sun shines not undimmed by spots; but we bow in the dust before God, as a being of ineffable purity and infinite holiness. More shocked than if we heard some foul crime imputed to parents we venerate and love, we recoil from the thought that He before whom angels stand veiled and in whose eyes even the heavens are not clean, could either be Himself tempted to commit sin, or could tempt any to commit it.
Yet what many would not directly, they indirectly lay at God’s door — in the attempt to excuse themselves, accusing Him. Look, for example, at Adam’s answer to the question, Hast thou eaten of the tree? Summoned from his hiding-place, standing beside the blushing partner of his guilt, overwhelmed by strange terrors, trembling in every limb, the prey of anguish and remorse, had his tongue, cleaving to the roof of his mouth, refused to do its office, we should not have been astonished. But he replies; and his answer betrays cunning rather than confusion. How mean and dastardly, how base and selfish and hateful, has sin made this once noble creature! How are the mighty fallen! See him trying to turn over on his poor wife the whole vengeance of an angry God! He attempts to save himself, and leave her to bear the brunt of it; hers is the guilt; she is the temptress. Hear him: “The woman, she gave me and I did eat.” Nor is that all; nor “the front of his offending.” More, and worse still, he divides the blame between her and God. It is not simply, “the woman gave me and I did eat,” but “the woman that thou gavest me, she gave me, and I did eat;” a serpent in my bosom, I got her from thee; the circumstances in which thou didst place me, more than my own fault, are answerable for my sin. “The woman that tJiou gavest me!” What was this but a covert way of accusing God; a bold insinuation that God, not he, was to blame for the Fall; an excuse, that, like all our apologies for sin, adds insult to injury; and but aggravates the offence?
I do not fancy any are so bold and bad as of deliberate intent to lay the guilt of their crimes on God. Yet what else, in fact, do they, who make a scapegoat of their circumstances — attributing their sins to constitutional temperament, or to the headlong power of their passions, or to the difficulties of their position, or to the suddenness or the strength of their trials? These apologies, whether offered to men, or used to allay guilty fears, and quiet an uneasy conscience, throw the blame of sin on Providence; and to throw the blame of it on Providence, is to throw it upon God. Excuses such as these but add to our guilt. They may now satisfy, or rather stupify our conscience, but they shall stand us in no stead at the bar of Him who neither tempts nor is tempted. He has left us without excuse. Assured that God will not suffer any, that seek Him, to be tempted above that they are able to bear, but will with the temptation also make a way of escape, we are without excuse; but not without a remedy. Blessed be God! the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin.
The source of temptation is in ourselves.
“Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.”
If you apply a magnet to the end of a needle that courses freely on its pivot, the needle, affected by a strange attraction, approaches as if it loved it. Reverse the order, apply the magnet now to the opposite end — to the other pole, and the needle shrinks away, trembling, as if it did not love, but hated it. So it is with temptation. One man rushes into the arms of vice; another recoils from them with horror. Joseph starts back, saying, How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God? What is loved by one, is loathsome in another’s eyes; and according as the nature it addresses is holy or unholy, temptation attracts or repels; gives pain or pleasure; is loved or hated. It is our corrupt and evil passions that give its power to temptation. These are the combustibles it fires; the quick and fiery powder, that a spark which a dewdrop had quenched, flashes into an explosion.
In their visits to our world, the angels were exposed to temptation; but what harm did they suffer? None. Amidst widespread contagion, they never were infected; nor, as people import the plague from other countries, did they take sin away with them on their return to heaven, and spread the deadly pestilence in that sinless land. Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? True; yet angels suffered nothing from coming in contact with sinners; but passed among them as unstained as the sunbeam of their heavens through the murky air of our smoky cities. Like a flower that, brought from breezy hill or open moor, pines away amid the pent-up and poisoned atmosphere of our towns, Lot’s graces were blighted by his residence in Sodom; it corrupted him, but not his heavenly visitors. True, it may be said that, since our unhappy fall, the stay of angels in our world has been brief, and that sin had no time to affect their constitution — that the leaven had no time to work. But time is of no account in their case; nor would
s
OF rag^C^s
•W T tr la «r it be in ours if the Fall had not furnished occasion to cry, How is the gold become dim; how is the most fine gold changed? Pure gold may remain in the fire a thousand years without loss of substance; without contracting a single stain, or losing an atom of its weight. The fire that turns the oak into ashes, marble into dust, iron into rust, has no power to destroy, or even injure, a metal that shines but the brighter for the glowing flames. Gold is therefore called, in the language of metallurgy, a pet feet metal; and were we perfect — perfect in holiness — the only effect of life’s fiery trials would be, not to burn up, but to brighten the features of God’s image. Thus I believe no angel ever descended on our world, but he returned to his native heavens to abhor sin more; to hate it with a more perfect hatred; and with deeper, holier feelings to sing, as he resumed his place in the shining ranks, and joined his fellows in their song — Holy, holy, holy, art thou, Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and art to come!
Look at our Lord’s case! How clearly it shows that temptation, however much to be dreaded by us, is harmless, unless where it finds corruption — that the seed dies, unless it falls on a congenial soil! He lived among temptations for more than thirty successive years. For more than thirty years His holy manhood was in the fire; and He came out of it without stain or sin. The Lamb of God, without spot or blemish, holy, harmless, undefiled, He was among, and yet separate from, sinners. A remarkable phenomenon this! one sinless among the sinful; pure amid pollution; a faultless man, in whose chaste and placid bosom temptation never kindled a wish, a thought, a fancy that might not be exposed to the eyes both of God and man. He himself explains the wonder — “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.”
Who, therefore, would keep out of sin, should give his chief attention to the state of his heart; ever praying writh David — Create in me, O God, a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me! Not that a good man will overlook the influence of external circumstances, the temptations of his position, or the character of his companions; not that we are ever to rush into temptation — naked into the battle; or enter it without fear and trembling till we are perfect in holiness. Stand in awe, and sin not. We cannot be too careful to keep out of the reach of sin; not to stand in the way of sinners; not to breathe pestilential air. Bathe not in the brightest waters where sharks are playing! By prayer, by self-denial, by, as St Paul did, keeping the body under, give sin no hold of you. Imitate yon ancient wrestler, who, laying aside his robes and ornaments, and all the bravery of his attire, steps naked into the arena — limbs and body shining with slippery oil; closing with an antagonist, whose hands, slipping on the unctuous limbs, catch no firm hold, he heaves him up to hurl him in the dust, and bear off the palm — honour won, less by his power than by his wise precaution. If prevention is better than cure, precaution is better than power; therefore ought a good man ever to watch and pray that he enter not into temptation; his prayer, that which our Lord has taught us, Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
Our corrupt nature, acted on by temptation, is the source of sin.
“Lust, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin.”
The woman died because she ate of the tree: and she ate of the tree because she lusted after its fruit. In doing so, in the first instance, she toyed with temptation — a thing more dangerous than to play with fire-arms. With an overweening confidence in herself, she thought, perhaps, as many do, that she might venture a certain way; and, stopping at her own pleasure, draw up — though in circumstances where poor reason is like the driver pulling at the reins, when the coach, at the heels of maddened and mastersome horses, is whirling to an upset half-way down hill. Confidence in one’s self, giving presence of mind, is sometimes of advantage; but never in those spiritual conflicts where strength is weakness; and, as leading us to fly from danger to the arms of God, weakness is found to be strength.
The fatal mistake, which our mother committed, lay in not taking alarm at the first sign of evil, and in the first bad, wrong thought, the nascent desire for a forbidden pleasure, crushing sin in the egg — putting her foot on the spark; like Job, who made a covenant with his eyes, shutting hers to the tempting colour of the fruit; stopping her ears to the talk of the cunning devil; flying, as if she had seen the serpent in its own proper shape, with crest erect, and burning eyes, and form coiled to spring — flying with terror from the scene, calling her husband Adam, calling God himself from heaven to her help.
Beware, therefore, of evil in the buddings of desire! Whoever allow themselves to indulge in evil imaginations or thoughts, are preparing themselves to commit the crimes they fancy. Desires are the seed of deeds. Working in the dark, and all the more dangerous that their progress, like a miner’s, is silent and unseen, they sap the walls of virtue; and thus the man of God is overthrown by temptations that otherwise had broken on him, as breaks the mountain billow on a front of rock. May not the bad thoughts and fancies, that do their work secretly and unsuspected within the recesses of the heart, account for those sudden falls and sins on the part of such good men as David, that neither they, nor others, would have ever dreamt of? The mischief is due less to the temptation than to what preceded it — and prepared for it. You are walking, for example, through a forest. Across your path, and on the ground lies, stretched out in death, a mighty tree, tall and strong — fit mast to carry a cloud of canvas, and bear unbent the strain of tempests. You put your foot lightly on it; and how great your surprise when, breaking through the bark, it sinks deep into the body of the tree — a result much less owing to the pressure of your foot, than to the poisonous fungi and foul, crawling insects that had attacked its core. They have left the outer rind uninjured — but hollowed out its heart. Take care your heart is not hollowed out; and nothing left you but the crust and shell of an empty profession. Keep thy heart, therefore, with all diligence. Give it your chief and most anxious attention. Guard most sedulously, and cultivate most prayerfully that part of you where the true man lives; and which, unseen by any but God, neither incurs the blame, nor wins the applauses of men. It is in its inner chamber — remote from the public eye, that sins, and also noble deeds, are born: there, the play of life is rehearsed; and that performed in fancy which is afterwards acted before a thousand eyes; there, God or Satan sits enthroned; there, lie the deep, hidden fountains of good or evil; there, visited by angels, or haunted by demons, is a little heaven or a little hell. Be sure you keep it for God. Be thy body His temple, and thy heart the secret shrine, where the light of the Shechinah burns, and the holy law is preserved, and good angels spread their wings over the blood-besprinkled seat of mercy, and the spirit of man, all alone, like the solitary High Priest within the veil, holds closest intercourse with God. Holiest of temples! see that nothing enter or find lodgment there that can hurt or defile.
The fruit of sin is death.
.(, What man is he that desireth life, and loveth many days? The Psalmist answers his own question, and in the ordinary course of Providence what rule so good as his to attain longevity, and fall at mellow autumn like a shock of corn in its season? There is more truth in his answer, though it be summed up in a single sentence, than in whole volumes on medicine and the art of preserving, or restoring health. What man, desiring life, and loving many days, would, where rosy infants play with hoary locks, see his children, and his children’s children? Let him, says David, depart from evil and do good. In the ruddy cheek, and robust form, and elastic step, and bounding health, and iron frame, and the long, light-hearted, laughing, singing, happy years — the green old age which the early and continued practice of Christian virtues so often insures — we have still some links, some lingering vestiges of the old marriage tie between a sinless and an endless life. Death has passed on all men, because all have sinned. And looking only at temporal death, see how vice hurries multitudes into the grave — shortening their days, and rudely shaking out the sands of life. Some four or five years, on an average, darkly closes the life of such as seduced become seducers; and prowl our streets, like night wolves, ravening for their prey. So perishes many a sweet flower that a villain’s hand did pluck; and, when it had lost its blooming attractions, flung on the street to be trodden under foot as the veriest, vilest weed. Is not the cup where the wine conceals a serpent, and the vile dregs are shame, and sorrow, and disease, offered to the drunkard’s lips by a grisly hand? Immorality wrecks more fortunes than adversity; and bad habits make more bankrupts than bad trade. Vice supplies the greedy grave with more victims than war — more of our countrymen, directly or indirectly, year by year, perish by the bottle than fell in Britain’s greatest and bloodiest battle; more cruel than old Time, she plucks the scythe from his hands, and, with rapid step and long sweep, mowing down the fairest flowers of the grass, she cuts short the life of thousands he had spared for years. Time “slays his thousands,” but Vice her “tens of thousands,” Many do not live out half their days. Even when their sun does not go down at noon, and life’s lamp, not blown, is left to burn out, how true of many are the words of the Naamathite — “His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall be down with him in the dust.” While godliness is profitable for all things, having the promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come, in the horrid diseases, and in the many grim shapes of death which follow the steps of vice, and form the train both of Bacchus and of the Paphian queen, God brands sin with the stamp of His high displeasure.
But here death does not carry our thoughts only to the grave, but beyond the grave — into eternity — down into the pit. It is a sad and awful thing to see one struggling in the arms of death; to watch the light of life sinking in its socket, till, sometimes with a dying flash, it expires; to gaze on the pale, silent, solemn, lifeless corpse; to hear the mould, from sexton’s shovel, rattle hollow on the coffin; and when his spade has smoothed the grassy turf, and uncovered mourners have paid farewell honours to the dead, to leave a loved one to moulder away into the dust of death. Yet faith in Jesus can stand these trials. Soaring to the heavens where the spirit has fled, anticipating the hour when graves shall heave, and rending tombs shall open for mortal to spring into immortality, faith can go through the last parting as friends, standing on the shore, wave hands and handkerchiefs to the emigrants they are to follow in the next ship; and rejoin ere long in a better land. But where there is no true faith in Christ, and peace has never been made with God through the blood of His cross, sins are finished in a more dreadful death — the second death — eternal death
—in those doleful regions where the dying never die. “Rest for the weary;” “There is no sorrow there;” these revival hymns are sung of another land. Here is no rest for the weary; the eye never closes; no sleep brings sweet forgetfulness; no hope ever whispers, It will soon be over; but despair, with stony horror in her face, shakes her snaky locks, and, gnashing her teeth, mutters, It will never be over — never!
Looking at death under this aspect, on the brink of the “horrible pit,” I almost cease to wonder that God gave up His Son to save us — there is something so dreadful in that doom. The reasonableness, as well as love of the Cross, is nowhere seen so well as by the light of these lurid gleams; and where are seen so well the unreasonableness, the folly, the mad insanity of all who put away God’s mercy, and day by day neglect this great salvation? Strong in the goodness of his cause, with his back to the throne of God, and his foot planted on the rock of truth, a man can stand against the world; who is supported by a Father’s hand, can stand erect beneath any load of sorrow; who has made his calling and election sure, can stand unmoved by the approach of death, and even urge him to hasten his tardy steps — with the eager voice and outstretched arms of a lover, crying, Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly! But who shall be able to stand, and hear this doom pronounced on his downcast head, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels? From that fate, Jesus died, and is now willing — now waits to save you. Haste to the refuge! Flee to His arms from the wrath to come!