The Food of Man

“It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone.” — MATT. IT. 4.

CHRIST, at the very opening of His work, met the evil spirit in the desert and contended with him. The words which I have just quoted are the answer of the Saviour to one of the attacks of Satan. The tempter said, “If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” And Jesus answered, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Such an answer must have peculiar force and meaning, as it comes from the lips of Christ. He tells Satan that obedience to God is better than bread; that if either is to be given up there cannot be a doubt, there can hardly be a difficulty, about the decision. With one of these two things which He compares together, He had been eternally familiar. The word, the will of God, He had known forever. He had obeyed God in the complete unity of nature which He had with God. We can remember how touchingly His mind ran back a few years later, when He was just upon the brink of His great agony, to this eternal inter course with God: “Now, O Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee be fore the world was.” All that He knew, the richness, the feeding and strengthening power of the word of God. And now He had been made man, and was here upon the earth. With his human flesh He had assumed human necessities which He had never known by His own ex perience before. That hunger, which has so ruled men always, which has made them violate duty, commit great crimes, sacrifice their strongest natural affections; that need of bread, which, working steadily, has developed man into all the progress of civilization, and, working violently and spasmodically, has turned man into a brute; that need of bread, which always lies primary among tho forces that control men’s lives, had taken hold of this new human life of Jesus. It was a real temptation. He was genuinely an hungered. This compulsion of the lower nature has, for the first time perhaps in Him, met the compulsion of the higher nature under which He has wholly lived. Now will He yield? His whole work, our whole hope, hangs upon His decision. There was, there must have been, a real chance of His yielding. But as we look at Him, we see that He will not yield. The old eternal joy of serving God outweighs the new temptation of the senses. It grows clear before Him that the higher life of the spirit is more precious than, is worth any sacrifice of, the lower life of the flesh. He says, “I choose.” The victory is won. “Let me be hungry, but let me not disobey God.”

But we see also, in this reply of Jesus, how thoroughly He had entered into and identified Himself with the humanity which He had assumed. He takes His temptation as a man. He gives His answer as a man. It is not the speech of one bringing a superior nature, clothed in superior strength, and so capable of an exceptional resistance where ordinary manhood must give way. It is not, “I, as God, must have divine sustenance, and so can do without your human food.” It is, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Simply as men, we all, the poorest and the greatest of us all together, need the ‘ife of obedience, and any sacrifice of the flesh is cheap that wins it for us. Here was the second value of the temptation of Christ. It was not only the divine Mediator preparing Himself for His task, and proving the temper of the arms with which He was to fight the battle; it was the highest, the perfect man, becoming conscious of himself, and declaring, in behalf of all humanity, the universal human necessities. “I, as man,” he says, “need more than bread. I must not be satisfied, I am not satisfied, with mere food for the body: I must have truth.” Humanity was tested there. Can it in this supreme specimen of it be satisfied with bread? If it can, then all these dreams, these cravings, these discontents, these importunate demands of men for spiritual things, for truth, for duty, for God, are mere chimeras. If it cannot, if this man, the best of men, says that food is not enough for man, then no man ought to be satisfied so long as he has only the mere nourishment that feeds the body. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” No doubt it all seemed perfectly clear to Jesus. It was almost a truism to Him. Humanity lay perfectly open to His consciousness. Reading Himself, He read man as man never had been read by man before. He said, That is not life which bread alone can feed. Life for man means a spiritual condition which only spiritual forces can supply. Therefore of course, man shall not live by bread alone. It is like saying that a tree cannot live merely upon water. It needs other elements which the rich earth must give. That is its nature.

And one thing more about this assertion by Christ of the higher necessities of man. He does not simply discern them in His own human consciousness. It is noticeable that He also corroborates them out of the past ex perience of men. He not merely sees in Himself that man cannot live at his fullest except in obedience to God; He also discovers in the past that men have found this out and recognized it. For, notice, His reply is a quotation: “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone.” He quotes from the speech which Moses had made to the people of Israel after they had crossed the desert, and when they were just about to enter the promised land. He says, Moses found out there in his desert what I have found here in my wilderness. He wrote it down, and here I find it true. So He appeals to experience. He strengthens his own present consciousness by the assurance that other men have known the same; that it has always been true. As He had said before, It is not something which belongs to me in my exceptional divine nature, but it belongs to all men; so He says now, It is not true only in these special, temporary conditions; it has always been true. The best and most human men have always known it, — that man was soul as well as body, and that he did not really live unless he had not merely bread for the body, but truth and duty, God’s word, for the soul.

This was the certainty, then, to which Jesus came in the wilderness; a certainty both from consciousness and from experience. Now, if we can put ourselves into Christ’s position; if we can see, as it were, this certainty growing up in His soul, then we have before us the perfect picture of the opening struggle of every noble life. The life begins in sense. The existence of childhood is all a bondage to the senses. Gradually it emerges, but very slowly, very unconsciously; until at last there comes some test. As we study the Gospels, and think upon human life, it becomes very wonderful, it seems to me, how, in the very order of its circumstances as well as in its drift and spirit, that life of Jesua represents the lives of all men. Just at the outset of our work, to try us whether we are good for our work, God’s Spirit takes us into some solitude, some experience which, whether it be enacted far off in the woods, or in the very centre of a crowded street, makes us realize for the first time that our deepest life is alone, is ours and no other man’s; that we cannot live in our fathers and our mothers; that we must live for ourselves. That is our wilderness, — that first realization of our individuality. In that wilderness, in that first conception of himself as a responsible and solitary being, every young man meets the same devil that the young Jesus met. And the temptation is the same; the assurance given in some form or other that bread is all that a man needs; that everything else is a delusion; that to live a life of physical comfort is the only solid wish for a man’s soul. Perhaps it is a business which he knows is wrong, but sees must be profitable. Perhaps it is the abandonment of those he ought to care for so that he may himself get rich. Perhaps it is the hiding of his sincere convictions in order to keep his place in some social company. Perhaps it is connivance with a wicked man’s sin in order to preserve his favor. Perhaps it is the postponing of charity to some future day when it shall be easier. Perhaps it is a refusal to acknowledge Christ, the Master, out of fear, or because some easy, foolish friendship would be sacrificed. Perhaps it is simply the giving up of ambitions, intellectual or spiritual, for the sake of quiet, unperturbed respectability. These are real struggles. There is no boy who comes into the life which Jesus entered in His Incarnation who does not pass through the door which He passed through, and meet the devil of these questions where He met him. And the answer that every modern young man makes, the victory which he wins, if he does win, must be like Christ’s, too. That double witness, that decree of God written on the two tables of consciousness and experience, must be, and is, what every man appeals to, who, taking his stand before the tempter, says, “No! I will live not for bread alone, but for truth and duty.” He appeals first to consciousness. “Tell me,” he says to his tempter, “here are certain powers in me, powers of studying, thinking, loving, generously suffering. What am I to do with those powers in the life which you want me to live? It cannot be that that is the life which I was meant to live, or these powers would not be in me. Man cannot live by bread alone.” And then he appeals to experience.” Other men, in other days, have lived not for the flesh, but for the spirit, and have left it on record that though they missed of wealth and fame, they knew that so they found their true life. Their history confirms my study of myself. I read my duty in their stories. ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone.” That is the way in which the young man, to-day, here among us, enters by the same two-leaved door into the same victory which

Jesus won years ago upon that dark and dreary hill in Palestine.

I know this seems to he drawing the picture too dramatically. “There was no such trial-moment, no such crisis in my life,” you say. “There has been nothing to compare with that awful mountain and the darkness and the hunger and the present Satan.” But still the same has come to you that came to Christ. The dramatic incidents were not essential then. Jesus might have had all that temptation while he sat in His mother’s house at Nazareth, or while He travelled in the noisy caravan returning from Jerusalem. In either place He might have yielded and given up the work that He had come for. In either place He might have seen the glory of that work, and sui*rendered everything else for the privilege of doing it. If Christ had yielded, can we not picture Him as He descends the mountain? He has tasted bread. His knees are strong. His famished body has received new vigor, but what a weight is on His soul! How He loathes the bread that He has eaten! How beautiful seems the chance that He has cast away! What a terrible defeat! And so one wonders if the men who have given up their chance of usefulness and goodness, merely to live an easy life, do not ache through all their luxury with the sense of their defeat and of all that they have lost. So many of our lives come crawling down the mountain, well-fed and comfortable, despising themselves and envying the poor hungry men who still are doing some of God’s work, and living the lives He gave them. But draw the other picture in your mind. Think of Christ after He has conquered, coming down with His victory won, with His life yet to live indeed, with Ilia work and suffering still before Him, but with the resolution, the principle, of His life established, and there is your man who has chosen right, who from His own consciousness and from the best experience of all best men has learned indeed that it is not by bread alone, but by the word of God, that He must live.

But let us ask now a little more carefully, what it is for which consciousness and the best experience of our race unite in saying that the immediate advantage and pleasure of the senses must be surrendered. Jesus described it to His tempter as “The word of God.” “Not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” And the word of God includes two notions, one of revelation and one of commandment. Whenever God speaks by any of His voices, it is first to tell us some truth which we did not know before, and second to bid us do something which we have not been doing. Every word of God includes these two. Truth and duty are always wedded. There is no truth which has not its corresponding duty. And there is no duty which has not its corresponding truth. We are always separating them. We are always trying to learn truths, as if there were no duties belonging to them, as if the knowing of them would make no difference in the way we lived. That is the reason why our hold on the truths we learn is so weak. And we are always trying to do duties as if there were no truths behind them; as if, that is, they were mere arbitrary things which rested on no principles and had no intelligible reasons. That is the reason why we do our duties so superficially and unrelia bly. When every truth is rounded into its duty, and every duty is deepened into its truth, then we shall have a clearness and consistency and permanence of moral life which we hardly dream of now.

Every word of God, then, is both truth and duty, revelation and commandment. He who takes any new word of God completely gets both a new truth and a new duty. He, then, who lives by every word of God, is a man who is continually seeing new truth and accepting the duties that arise out of it. And it is for this, for the pleasure of seeing truth and doing its attendant duty, that he is willing to give up the pleasures of sense, and even, if need be, to give up the bodily life to which the pleasures of sense belong. As a man keeps or loses his capacity of doing this, of weighing these two against each other, and deciding rightly which is the more precious, he keeps or loses his manhood. The real first question that you want to ask about any new man whom you meet, and whom you desire to measure, is not whether he is rich or poor, fashionable or unfashionable, learned or unlearned, but whether he has kept this capacity; whether if God showed him that something was true and out of that truth there issued some duty for him, he would be able and willing to put his comfort aside, and take the duty and perform it. I think that one of the most interesting things about our relations to our fellow-men is the way in which we feel in them the presence or the absence of this capacity. I do not say that our feeling about them is unerring. Again and again we find ourselves mistaken. But about almost every man whom we know, I think we have some feeling of this sort. To each one we apply this test. Two men are living side by side, in the same comfort, in the same easy business. Every want of each is satisfied completely. How is it that I know about these men that if God were to make known to both of them together the truth that a multitude of His people were being wronged, and the consequent duty were plain to both of them that they ought to brave everything and sacrifice everything to claim their rights for the oppressed, one of them would certainly leave his house and all his luxuries without a moment’s hesitation to go and do this work, and the other would refuse the task, and let the wrongs go on unrighted till the judgment day? Why is it that we feel the difference? Why is it that we cannot help thinking whether every man is living by bread or living by the word of God? It is be cause that is the real fundamental mark of manhood. It is because all other distinctions between man and man are superficial and insignificant. That alone lets us see thoroughly what sort of men they are.

Our judgments of other men, by this or any other standard, are of small account. We come to feel more and more, I think, how utterly unimportant is what we think of our brethren, or what they think of us. It is generally all wrong, or, if right, it is right by accident. But how is it with our judgments of ourselves? Can we ask ourselves what we are living by? If the test came to us, if our superficial anxieties about ourselves were swept aside, so that the only real anxiety which a man has a right to feel about his life were manifest, as a strong wind sweeps the mist out of the mountain valley and lets us see the rock, is there any rock there to see, any real care for truth and righteousness, for the truth that issues in duty and the duty that comes by truth?

I know with what a rebuke such questions come to all of us. I know how they uncover the shallowness and selfishness in which we live. As we ask them of our selves, and look around upon the world, it seems some times as if it all were hopeless; as if everybody was living by bread alone, and nobody by the word of God, which we saw meant truth and duty. But on this as on all subjects connected with the actual condition of man kind, I hold that despair and misanthropy are no less false in fact, and are even more mischievous as a philosophy, than the other extreme of optimism. While we do see men slaves to their senses, sacrificing the true to the easier false, and duty to the immediate expediency, there is, and every man ought to know for his encouragement that there is, a deep and constant witness in human history of man’s undying capacity for the higher life. We must not lose sight of it. The temptation of Jesus was, as I think we saw, not a splendid, solitary victory of divinity over human conditions. It was the assertion of the possible victory that waits for every man who, like Christ, has in him the power of divinity. Jesus found in His human consciousness the original purpose of human life. He brought it out clearly. He said, It is not the divine prerogative alone. Here it is in man, — the power to live, not for comfort but for truth and duty. Here it is in this humanity of mine, along with all else that is truly human, all my tastes and propensities, all my aches and pains. Here it is in me, and, lo! other men have found it in themselves. “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone.”

And men, all the more clearly since Jesus showed it there, are always finding in their own consciousness, and In the prolonged consciousness of their race which we call experience or history, this same higher capacity oc higher necessity of man. They find it in their own consciousness. What do we make of every strong young man’s discontent with the actual conditions of things be fore he settles down into the limited contentment, the sense that things are about as good as they are likely to be, which makes up the dull remainder of his life? Question yourself and see how there is something in you which rebels when the lower expediency of any action is set before you as its sufficient justification, how some thing rises up in you and tells you that there is a higher expediency, and makes you want to sweep away the worldly maxims which you cannot confute, but which you know are false. Sometimes there comes in all of us a strong, deep craving to give up this endless, complicated search after what it is safe or proper or fashionable to believe, and just to seek what is true; and to get rid of these thousand artificial standards of what a man is expected to do, and, come of it what will, simply do what is right: and when we are simply asking, “What is right?” the answer always comes. Sometimes the buried giant, conscience, stirs under the mountain, and shakes all the villages and vineyards which we have planted on its sides. And then we are merely finding in our selves, in our humanity, what Jesus found in His when, with the devil drawing Him away, He put His hand down to the depths of the nature which He had assumed, and took out from under all the accumulated rubbish of low and artificial needs the original, essential intention of man’s life, which had been lying there ever since the day when God made man in His image.

One cannot be a misanthrope or a sceptic about this. There always is this deeper power in man, and men are always finding it there. I think we are amazed not at the rarity, but rather at the abundance, of the power of martyrdom. When a great cause breaks out in war, and needs its champions, how wonderful it is to us, with our low notions of humanity, to see the land with its furrows full of the deserted plows from which the men have run to go and die for principle, and save their country. How wonderfully frequent are the stories that we hear of men giving their lives to do their duty. The exception is where the engineer of the railroad train which is rushing into certain ruin deserts his post; not where he stands still and calm, and is found with the iron clenched in his dead hand. No doubt, if he had time to think of it at all, he would be surprised at himself in the terrible instant when his quick resolve was made. He reaches down through the ordinary standards of his life, and takes up the deepest one of all, and says, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God; and the word of God which is my duty now says, Stand and die; and so I cannot live except by dying.” And in spite of all the men who are sacrificing their convictions to their interests, there are thousands of men who might be at the head of things, and rich and famous, if they would only give up what they think is true for bread. Oh, it is very common! Men find in their own nature necessities which they must submit to, and they do submit to them. We can hear in their submission, though it makes them very poor, something of that same trumpet-like triumph and exaltation which I think we always feel in those words from the lips of the sick and hungry Jesus, “Not by bread alone, but by the word of God.”

And what a man finds in his own consciousness, he is strengthened by being able also to recognize in the whole history of his race. “It is written” long ago, this which he is doing now. He is only tracing over with his blood the unfaded characters which other men have written in theirs. It is not a mere whim of his, this conviction that it is better to serve God than to eat bread. It is the corporate conviction of mankind. That is a very mysterious support, but it is a real one. It plants the weak tree of your will or mine into the rich soil of humanity. Do not lose that strength. Do not so misread history that it shall seem to you when you try to do right as if you were the first man that ever tried it. Put yourself with your weak little struggle into the company of all the strugglers in all time. Recognize in your little fight against your avarice, or your untruthfulness, or your laziness, only one skirmish in that battle whose field covers the earth, and whose clamor rises and falls from age to age, but never wholly dies. See in the perpetual struggle of good and evil that the impulse after good is eternal, and the higher needs are always asserting their necessity. In their persistent assertion read the prophecy of their final success and take courage.

In consciousness and in experience man finds the witness of his higher nature. But consciousness and experience both of them are weak in all of us. Here is where the revelation of Christ comes in. Christ is both the revealer of a man’s life to himself, and the revealer of the world’s life to all of us. When I thoroughly apprehend the story of the Gospels, I can see what my own nature means in its mysterious movements, and I can discover forces which have been at work in all the history sf mankind to which I have before been blind. As I become His servant, the necessity of doing right and knowing truth comes out from my own consciousness and declares itself. As I see in Him the ruler of history, all history becomes luminous with this struggle of the better power in man to get the upper hand. This makes clear what perhaps you have doubted about as I have spoken to you this morning. I have seemed to point to man’s consciousness and to human history as the revealers of man’s capacity for truth and duty. “Is it not Christ,” you say, “who alone can bring or show us any good?”

Yes indeed and always that is true. But it is by His touch laid upon our own natures and the world’s experience that he sends His light to us. It is He who gives them all their voice. Mere stammerers and whisperers before, it has been by Him that they have learned to speak and give men their incitement and hope.

Ah, here is the true secret. It is when Christ is in you that the highest motives become practically powerful upon your life. We think of Christ as the liberator. To many souls it is His most attractive character. But we do need to know what the character of the liberation which He brings us is. It is not simply that as we lie chained upon the ground He comes and breaks our chains, and lets us lie there still, bound down by the torpor which our chained condition has created in us, slaves to our own inability to rise. That is not the glorious redemption. That is a purely negative freedom. What Christ desires to do for you is something far nobler and more divine than that. He wants to awaken your dead conscience and to quicken into life and invitation the apparentlydead and depressing experience around you, so that you shall feel in yourself the response to higher motives, and recognize in all history the loftier and more spiritual possibility of man. If He could do that for you, then there would be real liberation. You would no longer be the slave of sensible things, not because you had learned to despise them, not because you thought your business, or your home, or your social pleasure contemptible or wicked, but because you had seen the joy of higher things, — truth, God, charity, character, heaven, — and the channel of affection was clear between them and your soul. That is true liberty. It does not cast the lower things away. As Christ said to Satan, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” He shall live by bread, but not by bread alone. The lower wants are recognized. The things that supplied them are not thrown away, but they are used no longer to enslave and bind, but simply to sustain and steady the life which moves now under spiritual impulse; as the ship which has cast loose from its bondage to the shore and goes with wind and steam exultantly out to sea still carries some of that shore for ballast in its hold. That is the relation which the spiritual man still holds to the things of the senses. The man in Christ makes the world serve no longer as dock, but as ballast; no longer as confinement, but as balance for the new life which he lives.

There is great meaning in the words that Jesus was continually using to describe the work that He did for men’s souls. He brought them into “the kingdom of God.” The whole burden of His preaching was to establish the kingdom of God. The purpose of the new birth I for which He labored was to make men subjects of the kingdom of God. Is it not clear what it means? The kingdom of God for any soul is that condition, anywhere in the universe, where God is that soul’s king, where it seeks and obeys the highest, where it loves truth and duty more than comfort and luxury. Have you entered into the kingdom of God? Oh, how much that means. Has any love of God taken possession of you so that you want to do His will above all things, and try to do it all the time? Has Christ brought you there? If He has, how great and new and glorious the life of the kingdom seems. No wonder that He said you must be born again before you could enter there. How poor life seems out side that kingdom! How beautiful and glorious inside its gates!

If I tried to tell you how Christ brings us there, I should repeat to you once more the old, familiar story. He comes and lives and dies for us. He touches us with gratitude. He sets before our softened lives His life. He makes us see the beauty of holiness, and the strength of the spiritual life in Him. He transfers His life to us through the open channel of faith, and so we come to live as He lives, by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. How old the story is, but how endlessly fresh and true to him whose own career it describes.

In this world we must be either conquerors or slaves. We know what it is to be the world’s slaves, but what it is to be its conquerors through Christ, that no man knows entirely. We come to know it more and more as the long struggle and fight go on. We shall know it perfectly only when the liberated spirit casts the flesh away and goes to live with the God by whom it has lived so long.