That was the Father's will satan knew; that Jesus Christ had yielded Himself unreservedly to the Father to carry out that will satan also knew. His satanic desire, his devilish determination, was to keep the Son of Man from doing the Father's will if possible. The slightest shadow of questioning regarding His Father's goodness would be doubt: failure to keep the holy law of God even in one point would be disobedience: the merest deflection of desire toward self-will would be disloyalty, and God's second Man, His last Adam, would have been disqualified for becoming the world's Saviour and the Head of a race of holy, heavenly men and women. That He would be tempted by satan from the center to the circumference of His life, yea, that His Father must even permit such temptation would be easily understood even if Scripture did not state it so plainly.
Hebrews 4:15, "For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."
Hebrews 2:18, "For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted."
Hebrews 2:10, "For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings."
To qualify as the Saviour of men and the Head of a race of redeemed men the Man Christ Jesus must be a victor over humanity's temptations one by one.
Throughout the thirty years of private life as a child, a boy and a young man, He had no doubt been tempted over and over again to doubt the Father's goodness, to disobey the Father's goodness, to disobey the Father's law and to be disloyal to the Father's will. In the home, at the carpenter's bench, in the manifold contacts of community life He met a daily assault in the common temptations of man. That He came through these years of obscurity with His manhood unsullied and unstained is amply attested by the Father's voice speaking those words of unqualified approval at His baptism. "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." As a Man Jesus had lived in private a life not only of absolute sinlessness but one that was wholly obedient to the will of God.
He emerged from private into public life and engaged upon His three years of public ministry. He publicly proclaimed Himself as the Messiah. But before He did this an event of tremendous significance occurred. At the Jordan Jesus was baptized by John. This was His first act of identification with humanity's sin, it was the preliminary step in becoming the sinner's Substitute.
Crowds of people were thronging to John to be baptized, confessing their sins. Jesus came to be baptized. He had no sin to confess and He had no disobedience to God's law to repent of. But there on the banks of the Jordan God's second Man publicly acknowledged and accepted His responsibility as the world's Saviour by thus identifying Himself with the world's sin. The last Adam through His baptism committed Himself to bear all the consequences of a broken law on the part of sinners. At His baptism the Man Christ Jesus began to be numbered with the transgressors and the work of personal substitution which ended at Calvary was commenced.
Immediately after His baptism His public ministry began and we read, "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." As a man Jesus had met the manifold testing through the daily temptations incidental to private life and in them all had come forth Victor. But now as the Son of Man He is to have the decisive test of His whole life in a personal conflict with the devil himself. Man's salvation does not consist in deliverance from temptation but in deliverance from the possession and power of the tempter. The utter defeat and destruction of the devil himself was part of Christ's work as Saviour. Jesus Christ was committed to the salvation of mankind from sin in toto;this necessitated His going back to the very origin of sin in man and confronting and conquering its instigator. To such a task and to such a test "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness."
In this wilderness conflict the God-Man is there not alone as a man but as the Son of Man, not only as an individual but as the Representative of mankind. satan is there not only as a personal enemy of "the seed o the woman" but as the avowed foe of God and of the human race. The enmity prophesied in Eden is having there a concrete fulfillment: the conflict foretold, which has gone on in secret for centuries and which has its manifest fulfillment on Calvary, is brought out into the open and crystallized into actual combat here in the wilderness. The devil is no longer allowed to cover his identity through impersonation but is exposed as the devil and his purposes are openly revealed. There in the wilderness the spoiler of the human race faces the Saviour of the human race in a decisive and terrible conflict. It will be proven here for all ages to come who is the vanquished and who the Victor.
satan had tempted Adam with the one purpose of gaining sovereignty over him and securing his worship. He had tempted God's first man in the garden of Eden at the one point where he could be disobedient and had met marked success. He had come forth victor. Adam had made a personal choice against the choice of God. He had acted independently of God and by so doing had stepped outside of God's will into self-will.
~Ruth Paxson~
(continued with # 5)
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