13 The Crucible of God

FOR THIRTY LONG years had Jehovah's Elect Servant been trained for His service; the sword had been sharpened, the shaft polished. At Jordan's banks the last finishing touches had been given, and the Divine Instrument was ready for the appointed task. Yet one thing remained. The final examination must be made lest any hidden flaw should be there, only to appear at some later stage and cause disaster. There must be no question of failure when the salvation of the world was at stake.

       The Holy Ghost therefore drove Christ out into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. John the Baptist had roused all Israel to meet Messiah: the crowds were gathered by the banks of Jordan to hear His voice and do His bidding. The young men spoke of a successful revolt against the Romans; the old men remembered the valour of the Maccabees, and dreamt of David.

       But the Spirit of God took Jesus out of all this human excitement that there, in the silence of the desert, His Father might see the secrets of His Son's heart laid bare before Him under the knife of the great Adversary. He who had watched the struggles of Job, Joseph. Jeremiah and Ezekiel must now Himself be tried to the uttermost that in all things He might have the pre-eminence, even in severe temptation.

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       The stage was well set; the instruments of torture prepared. The body was worn down with lack of food, the mind strained to the uttermost with the threat of wild beasts by day and night. The very solitude of the desert weighed on His mind as He thought of the multitudes by Jordan. There, there was work to be done: there, there was honour to be gained. But here there was nothing but sand and scrub, the hooting of owls and the jackal's cry. How could a man save Israel here in the wilderness? Was this the life for the Son of God? Why, Herod's son had more to look forward to than He. Thirty years had left Him with an excellent knowledge of carpentry, a perfect understanding of the Scriptures, an empty purse and the tolerance of a family and village too dull to realise that God had been living in their midst and sharing in their life. He had attempted nothing, moved nobody: He had no followers, had aroused no hopes. The great things spoken of Him in His babyhood had thus far failed to materialise, and time had washed expectation out of every heart. He had no form nor comeliness; there was nothing in His physical make-up to arouse enthusiasm. And here He was week after week in this inhospitable desert, the target of temptation from every quarter, apparently useless to God and man. He was no prophet like Samuel or Elijah, no warrior like Gideon or Jephthah, there was no dead lion or bear to look back upon to justify the expectation of slaying a Goliath—in fact there was nothing but the life of a blameless carpenter, a voice from Heaven and the Scriptures.

       And into this well-prepared arena strode the great Slanderer himself, bright, shining and apparently prosperous. The conflict was joined, the struggle began ...

       'If Thou be the Son of God' ... so had the voice from Heaven asserted but a few days ago; but how ridiculous it sounded now! How could He in His one robe, half-starving, and without a follower, be the Son of God? Surely this

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shining being was a Son of God in his splendour, his power and his liberty. No one had ever called Jesus the Son of God since Gabriel had announced it years ago, and Zacharias and Elizabeth and Simeon and the shepherds had echoed the cry. But that was long ago and all who had heard the story had agreed that a mistake had been made somewhere. This was the son of the carpenter, royal if you please but thoroughly human and, if the truth be told, not much of a prince. How well He knew the common opinion, and here was this glorious angelic being ramming it home!

       But there steals into His mind the memory of a whole company of people, the Chosen of God, who had also been led into a wilderness, and found nothing to slake their thirst but water, or satisfy their hunger but manna. This was one of His Father's ways, designed to drive home the great lesson that the spirit was more important than the flesh, and the Bible more necessary than the dinner table. He would learn that lesson well, that in the days to come He would never question His Father's love, when food was short and beds hard to come by, and money non-existent!

       What was this? 'Command these stones that they be made bread' ... ah, but the power with which He had been but lately entrusted was for the blessing of others, not Himself. If He once descended to use it to help Himself He would end up as Gehazi, a leper, or a Solomon better housed than His God. The time would come when He would make loaves by the thousand, but they would be eaten by others, not Himself. Twice would He show that the Son of Man could make bread in the wilderness, but not thrice. How vile was this insinuation that His Father was not looking after Him properly; His soul was well fed and full of meat. He understood well His Father's ways, as had Moses. His body? All in good time the Angels would feed Him as they had Elijah: but in the meantime He had more important matters in hand; there was a world to be saved,

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a Father to be pleased. If Moses and Daniel had known what it was to go without food, if Israel's armies had lived on the shortest of commons for forty years, could not the Son of God put up with a little deprivation, if His duty called for it?

       'Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God'. It was His adversary who was starving, not Himself! It was Satan whose soul had died from lack of food for all his splendid appearance. So might one admire the magnificent appearance of Caesar's latest charioteer or favourite gladiator, only to discover in conversation the filth of a sewer and the poverty of an illiterate. While Satan spoke of bread Jesus thought of rivers of sparkling water which should flow from the belly of His friends; while Satan mocked at obscurity Jesus was thinking of the day when He should be the cynosure of every eye, the terror of His enemies. So did the Scriptures arm the Son of God against the Slanderer of God!

       What a struggle it had cost the lad Jesus eighteen years ago to leave Jerusalem, the City of His Father, and go back to Nazareth, that hateful village, none will ever know. Every year His heart was stabbed afresh as the Passover came round and He entered and left that sacred Temple as any ordinary nobody, caught up in the thoughtless crowd, that saw no deeper than the outside of ritual and nationalism. Never had His Father enabled Him to remain behind in the learned Rabbi's society, never had a door opened to Him to join the select company of those who, like Simeon and Anna, gave themselves to the God of Israel and spake often of His Name. It seemed heart-breaking, incredible; He had lived in the wilderness of Nazareth with nothing but manna to eat.

       But now in a flash He finds Himself upon that commanding minaret of the Temple from which He can survey the

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whole scene beneath Him. Gone the scrub, the sand, the loneliness. Here He was in the pulsating centre of the national life where all the important people lived and worked. Here was the High Priest's home; there Herod's palace. There was the abode of Nicodemus, and beneath His feet His Father's House. If He could but impress them with some display of miraculous power He would find Himself a national hero, the fulfilment of all their age-long hopes.

       'Cast yourself down. It will be quite safe if you are your Father's Son as you claim to be. There is Scripture to support you: "His Angels will bear Thee up lest Thou dash Thy foot against a stone". Here is your chance to make a grand entrance, an unforgettable debut. Israel has had other great leaders enabled by God to do marvellous things, which have accredited them to the nation. Moses held back the Red Sea; Joshua, Jordan. Barak defeated Sisera, Hezekiah saw Sennacherib discomfited. But this! This is unique! No one has ever done such a thing before. You will have the long desire of Your heart to enter Jerusalem granted in the most striking possible way. No one will henceforth be able to doubt that You are God's Son: You will be universally accepted.

       'As a matter of fact, You won't doubt it yourself any more. You have waited a long time in obscurity; if I may say so, Your Father hasn't done much for You so far. Have You yet achieved anything except the ability to carve a pretty tenon? Strike out, Man, bring Your Father to the point: let Him know that You are straining at the leash, and want to be off upon Your life's mission. You're getting on, thirty years old aren't You—much older than Samuel or David. Let Him know that You are grown up now, and tired of playing about; force His hand: He daren't let You down.'

       But the shaft had been too well polished to fly aside.

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Here was One who came to do Another's will, to be perfectly obedient. If His Father wanted Him to be in a wilderness He would stay, and all the temptations in the world would not lure Him out. As for His lack of achievement, the time was soon coming when Palestine would ring with the accounts of His compassionate and powerful acts of deliverance. But never should any story of self-advertisement or personal aggrandisement be told. For here was One who came to seek another's glory, not His own. And so as with Ezekiel the vision faded, the scene changed, and He was back again amid the scrub and the sand, the owls and the jackals.

       Yet, though twice baffled in his endeavour to corrupt the Son of God, the Arch-Tempter had one more attack to make upon His loyalty to His Father. It was all very well to offer to make Him King over Israel and the whole earth. But was not the price asked excessive? Solomon had been raised to the throne of Israel, but he had arrived there in the normal way, through inheritance and living in the palace, and becoming accustomed to the respect and grandeur due to the heir to the throne. But this road, through poverty, rejection and crucifixion, was absurd. Satan had never asked such things of anyone to whom he had handed over the kingdoms of this world. He had given them to Pharoah, to Nebuchadnezzar, to Alexander and Caesar, and the only payment he had ever asked was that they should acknowledge him as their Master, and walk in his ways. If Jesus would do the same He too should reap the same reward ...

       But Satan had nothing to offer that Jesus wanted. Jesus desired the love, not the fear, of His subjects. He desired to please His Father, not Himself. He cared nothing for thrones and pomp and circumstance, but would rather gird Himself with a towel, and wash His subject's feet. He would ride into His capital on a colt's back—not surrounded

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by chariots and soldiers and weapons of war. And so, baffled, the tempter retired for a season and left the Son of God triumphant on the field.

       Triumphant, yes; but also exhausted with the long conflict, so that He who was God yet needed the ministry of Angels to succour Him.

       For it was as Man that He had overcome the Devil, that He might learn to be a faithful High Priest to those who would be in similar need of rescue on the battlefields of life. It is not only the Christian who is to be 'strong in the Lord and in the Power of His Might', but also the Christ. Twice again, on the Mount of Transfiguration and in the Garden of Gethsemane, would He need and receive the supernatural strengthening which only God can give, and without which no one can overcome. We must continually remind ourselves that, although Our Lord was God, He was God emptied of His Divine advantages; He was God living as a Man. Yet, though He was a Man, He was a Man Who believed that He was God manifest in the flesh with all the disadvantages of the flesh, a Man who like ourselves had to live by faith in the Word of God, in which He found His past, present and future graphically depicted; a Man open to pain, sorrow, weakness and even death. He died with Psalm 22 upon His lips, and arose upon the strength of the second Psalm.

       There lay in His well-stocked heart the perfect programme of His Father's plan, sent down from Heaven through the Prophets, though now dusty with the disuse and misunderstanding of the centuries. The Son of God looked forward to the Salvation not only of a nation, but of a world; to a happiness not of a lifetime but for Ages of Ages. That handful of obscure Galileans! Nay, they were going to join His Family, and be responsible with Him for the safety of the whole Creation. Galileans indeed! They were the beginning of a new Race of Sons of God, whom

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He would one day call His Brethren, or even His Bride.

       And so, upheld by His Father's hand to the end, He passed through the Grave and the Resurrection, once more to take His place at His Father's right hand, the struggle over, the battle won!

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