The Lord's Baptism And Temptation

by J.L. Ferguson, Barrhead | Category: The Days Of His Flesh | Feb 1974

As we saw last month, the early unrecorded years of the Lord Jesus at Nazareth had been well pleasing to the Father Doubtless in many respects He had been learning obedience by the things which He suffered. He had performed no miracles in a period of perfect restraint and subjection to the Father's will. These years were spent in the craft of the carpenter. One might have expected Messiah to have come as a shepherd or as a fisherman. But the word carpenter has a root meaning in common with builder (or architect) as in Heb 11:10. So the great original Designer and Builder of the universe had stepped down into time, and in a carpenter's shop in Nazareth was making things and mending broken things for humble village people. What a shop it must have been, and how gentle a ministry as He went around the little homes with the tools which probably Joseph had accumulated for Him! Morning by morning the Lord GOD opened His ear to enable Him to sustain with words the weary of Nazareth. They were great days of deepest condescension, until

That evening, when the Carpenter swept out

The fragrant shavings from the workshop floor,

And placed the tools in order, and shut to,

And barred, for the last time, the humble door,

And going on His way to save the world

Turn's from the labourer's lot for evermore,

I wonder, was He glad?

So He came to Jordan where His kinsman, John, was baptizing. It was a baptism unto repentance and in his profound discernment of human spirits, John dipped only the penitent. It was a baptism by the authority of heaven, it had a place in the will of the Father, it stood related to the message of the kingdom which He preached, it was in the way of righteousness, as Matthew tells in 21:32. Luke points out in 7:29,30 that those who submitted to this baptism justified God in their action; those who declined it rejected for themselves the counsel of God.

As a sinless Man there was no apparent need for the Lord to submit to the rite. John was conscious of this and would have prevented Him. Yet basically the main purpose of his ministry at Jordan was to make manifest to Israel their Messiah (John 1:31) and this was the moment. So the sinless Man, in perfect submission to the Father's will, took His place with the penitent sinners in Jordan. It was a symbolic act, a demonstration of the deeper baptism of His death, His total immersion in the spiritual waters of divine wrath, towards which He had been journeying from before the foundation of the world. For this reason Luke, who by general consent emphasizes the perfect manhood of the Lord, places his genealogy after His baptism. He traces it back through Mary His mother, through Nathan to David, right back to Adam, the Son of God. It required the death of the sinless Man to link men back to God again.

As the Lord Jesus rose from the water, the Father gave His first recorded expression of appreciation of those years of lowly service which would now be directed into a brief public ministry and culminate in the complete acceptance of the Father's will in death. The heavens were opened, the Spirit descended significantly as a gentle dove upon the Lord Jesus, the Father spoke. "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17). It was the first specific New Testament evidence of the Trinity, acting together in a glorious unity, a truth foreshadowed in the Old Testament in several places, as for example Isaiah 48:16. It was the manifestation of Messiah to Israel. It was the anointing of the Servant of Jehovah for His ministry.

The baptism of the Lord Jesus must forever stand as a powerful encouragement to the believer to follow His steps. "A disciple is not above his master, nor a servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord" (Matt. 10:24,25), and as a trenchant condemnation also of all those who for whatever reason decline to testify in immersion to the new life they have found in Him.

Following His baptism the Lord, full of the Holy Spirit, was directed into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil throughout forty days. The temptation is recorded in detail by Matthew and Luke and very briefly by Mark. The order of events varies only slightly in the two main accounts. Matthew's use of "then" and "again" when linking the three final temptations would indicate the order of sequence. Luke follows the moral order of the appeal to the flesh, the eyes and the vainglory of life.

In Matthew, the Spirit led Him into the wilderness; in Mark the expression is more vigorous for the Spirit drove Him there. He was, in the outworking of the Father's will, brought to the arena of the powers of darkness, the perfect Man brought to the supreme testing ground. John makes no reference to the experience for he emphasizes the deity of the Lord rather than His manhood. No Gethsemane weakness, but rather, "the cup which the Father hath given Me, shall

I not drink it?" (John 18:11). But here it is the Man who has been made a little lower than the angels, and one of the mightiest of all the angels, Satan, was coming to meet Him.

The Lord must have gone into the wilderness in the exhilaration of the Father's testimony at Jordan and of the Spirit's anointing there. He was now entering His manhood ministry as the Custodian of the eternal purpose; ready to do the things He saw the Father do, speak the things He heard His Father say. It may be Satan asked to "have Him, as he later did the twelve, that he might first sift Him as wheat. Doubtless exulting in the prospect of bringing down the second Man as he had brought down the first, he came in person to the Lord in the role of the tempter. Four thousand years had passed since Eden, years of cunning experience in the enslaving of the human will by subtle approach and by hostile attack. The garden had become a wilderness. The animals were now wild beasts.

The Lord was "in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan" (Mark 1:13). There was evidently an initial period of forty days of continual temptation. The perfect Man did not underestimate the strength of His foe or the gravity of the issues involved These were some of the days of "strong crying and tears He fasted throughout the period, and so deep was His commitment to the Father's will that He appears to have had no sense of hunger Wave after wave of masterly temptation beat on Him as on a Rock of ages and rolled back in confusion. No matter how often the prince of this world came to Him, he found nothing in Him No matter what form the temptation took, He repelled it. "He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Heb. 4:15).

After the forty days, the Devil moved in for his final assault. The whole world lay in his control. As the god of this age he had men and women in bondage to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of life. His injection of original sin in Eden had ensured the inability of every one to resist, in his own strength, temptation in the varied forms in which his world arrangement would present it. But now his might was matched, for here was a new form of manhood, sinless manhood. This was God manifest in the flesh, manifested to bring the Devil's power to nought. They were together in the wilderness, alone. and Satan seemed to sense the hunger of the Lord after the forty days of fasting. He threw in every stratagem he knew.

With all his diabolical skill Satan introduced the first of his three final approaches. He tempted Him on the voice which came to Him at Jordan. "If Thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread" (Matt. 4:3). It was the soft, subtle insinuation and doubt of Eden again, with an additional challenge which would make for a transferred allegiance. But nothing could break the bond of perfect subjection and dependence of the Son in His manhood.

Quoting Deut. 8:3 He replied, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God". There was more to life than bread. His meat was to hear the Father's voice and to do the Father's will, not the dictates of Satan. There was no chink in the Son of Man's armour.

Next the Devil took Him into the holy city and set Him on the pinnacle of the temple. We accept this as a physical happening, as real as the wilderness experience. These temptations were not conjectures in the mind of the Lord Jesus. They were external to Him and physical, in conflict which, of course, was profoundly spiritual. So they stood together on what Alford describes as the portico which "overhung the ravine of Kedron from a dizzy height". In his craftiness the Devil adjusted his approach to the experience he had gained. This time he cunningly wove a partially quoted scripture into his insinuation, doubt and challenge. "If Thou art the Son of God, cast Thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee.... " Here in part at least was one of God's own words which should enable Him to do the Devil's bidding. And what an appeal to vainglory! angels swooping down for His help. Spectacular! Exciting! But once more out flashed the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God ("here the reference is not to the whole Bible as such, but to the individual scripture which the Spirit brings to our remembrance for use in time of need, a prerequisite being the regular storing of the mind with Scripture" - Vine). "Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God". Blessed Son of Man, impervious to the pressures of temptation!

The Devil made one further daring attack. He offered the Son of God all this world had to give in exchange for one act of worship. He had massed vast legions of angels behind him in the day of his fall, when he struck unavailingly at the throne of God in His most excellent glory. But there might never again be for him an opportunity like this present one. Here was God alongside him in human, servant form, hungry, weary, exhausted. So he took the Lord to a high mountain and from its eminence showed Him all the glory of the Roman Empire spread out from the Mediterranean shores, and the glory of the lesser kingdoms also. "All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me". It was his age-long appeal to the pride of life, presented now in its highest, most compelling form. Someone has written of an infinitely lesser experience, "Only give me thy soul, I'll give thee the whole, their glory and wealth to be thine".

But there was not the slightest response in the heart of that weary Man. Maybe there had come to Him that morning in the power of Isaiah 50:4, the word of Psalm 2:8, "Ask of Me, and I will give Thee the nations for Thine inheritance". The glory of kingdoms would be His in His Father's own time. His immediate concern was to maintain unswerving subjection to the Father's will. So in a word of supreme and final control, with ominous forebodings of another day still to come, He summarily dismissed the adversary with the words, "Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve".

So Satan left Him and angels came, honoured to minister to Him in the solitude of the wilderness. He had commenced His ministry hungry but victorious. He would close it later thirsty but still victorious. Between lay the years when He "suffered being tempted" when He "resisted unto blood, striving against sin". No temptation to sin ever came from within, for He was completely sinless. Temptations were presented to Him by forces outwith Himself, and His consequent suffering at the hands of Satan and his followers were very real to Him. In His present priestly work at God's right hand He "still remembers in the skies His tears and griefs and agonies". His sympathetic, understanding help is available to us all when we are on the testing ground. The temptation itself is not sin. The saintliest Christian will be persistently attacked. The sin will come through succumbing. So in all our temptations, and none are so great as in solitude, the superb example of our Leader and Commander in the wilderness comes also alongside us for our help., There are weapons in abundance for our warfare (Eph. 6:10-18) and in the spiritual conflict the wielding of "It is written" still goes on its conquering way.

There is a story told of the venerable Bede at his monastery in north-east England. His companions said to him one day, "Father, we are harassed by many temptations, which appeal to us so often and so strongly that they give us no rest. You seem to live untroubled by these things and we want to know your secret. Don't these temptations which harass our souls ever appeal to you? Do they never come knocking at the door of your heart?" The old saint smiled thoughtfully and replied, "I do know something of the things of which you speak. The temptations that trouble you do come making their appeal to me. But when these temptations knock at the door of my heart, I always answer "This place is occupied and that is the end of it".

J.L. Ferguson, Barrhead | Feb 1974
The Days Of His Flesh