Temptation and Its Beneficial Effects

Nowhere is the true significance of temptation more clearly seen than in the historic forty days in the wilderness by Jesus. We watch that tremendous scene, the last Adam, the Word made flesh, come to fight and win the battle that the first Adam lost. We see Him with His human instincts, passions and powers, true Man in Spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Jesus understood the concept: I AM a spirit, I HAVE a soul, and I LIVE IN a body. We see this Man complete in manhood’s powers, forty days “tempted of the devil.”

Temptation had started before then, of course. We catch a previous glimpse of it when by a subtle solicitation through the channel of His enlarged and illumined spirit, the young lad of twelve might have been led away by the devil in disguise to follow the trail of false favor in place of filial obedience to His parents.

But now He was a Man in the fullness of His power, and the only Man in history to whom those tremendous words had been or could be spoken, but a few hours before: “You are My Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Knowing Himself to be anointed by God’s Spirit to fulfill the greatest commission ever given to man; to be the world’s Savior, to be the Man of Destiny whose Name had been on the inspired lips of sage and prophet since the world began, the longed for Messiah. But there was still one thing needed: a firm and final choice of free will, a voluntary self-dedication of every power of spirit, soul and body to this one end. And for that the devil was necessary!

Man cannot really know his nature fixed Godward except by his refusal to fix it devilward. So Jesus met Satan in that deserted place.

After forty days, He was weak and hungry in body. And then the suggestion was stabbed home to Him: “Your new powers over nature. Use them. Make bread.” In a moment, the battle was joined. Was His body to be master or servant? Was He to move at its dictates, or was it to move at the dictates of the Father who controlled Him? Jesus said, “No!” But a mere “no” would leave the nagging temptation unrelieved. So He followed up this powerless negative with a triumphant positive that swallows up the negative: “Man lives by every Word of God.” This was BODY victory. It was settled. From then on, His body was an instrument for God’s glory – His appetites were the natural means by which it could be kept in working order.

Next came the temptation of the soul. In the soul repose all the vast powers of the personality – to think, to will, to feel. All the mighty achievements of man, in art, in science, in literature, in action, flow from the soul. The genius, the leader, the inventor, the discoverer, have all great souls. And none so great as the human Jesus. Satan knew this; for to only one Man has he offered complete world dominion and promised Him the attainment of His objective. The devil showed Him “all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time”; said to Him “all these will I give You.” The condition? That He commit Himself into the hands of “the prince of this world” (as He later calls Satan), absorb the spirit that is in the world, and act according to “the wisdom of this world”.

In other words, all the powers of that greatest of human personalities, mental, emotional, volitional, would become the vehicle of world dictatorship, based on the age-old methods of conquest and compulsion, the only technique of government known to man and the spirit that works in the ungodly man.

The alternative? The worship and service of God; and that meant the subordination of these same soul-powers to the ways of His Spirit, to the carrying out of an alternative technique of ultimate world dominion which was in the wildest sense improbable and fantastic, and as totally removed from the way of the natural man as light from darkness. This was SOUL victory. This was the material from which the plan of the ages took its shape in Him.

Yet, spirit is deeper than soul. It is the essence of a man – “I AM a spirit”. It is that which expresses itself through soul and body. It is the center of my being where, as a Christian, Jesus Christ dwells in union (Galatians 2:20). And if body and soul must be fixed in God through the stabilizing processes of temptation, so also must the spirit.

So Satan sought to reach the spirit of the Savior, when he could not touch body or soul. Let’s see Him descend through the air upheld by supernatural power. Let them flock around Him as the miracle worker. Let them all see who He is: the Son of God in Spirit with power. The masses will be at His feet.

The alternative? To give Himself to show forth the Father in His human spirit. To point to the Father within Him so that thought, word and action will be controlled from His spirit – not of the visible Jesus, but of the invisible Father.

Thus, on the pinnacle of the temple that final battle of the spirit was fought and won. Satan’s weapon of temptation was turned to his own confusion and made the means of confirming the Son as the Servant of the Father. The high road to man’s salvation was now opened. The body was not for self-indulgence, nor the soul for self-aggrandizement, nor the spirit for self-worship – the forty days confirmed in His own consciousness and declared before heaven in spirit, soul and body, to be the Son of God with power, His Father’s willing Servant and the world’s Savior.
Only once more had such a battle to be fought; shorter, sharper, even fiercer, in three hours of bloody sweat; this time to gather strength by conflict and conquest to be the offering for the sin of the world.

The Lord’s prayer says, “…lead us not into temptation…”. Jesus is saying, “Father, I know that You do not lead us into temptation Yourself, but when Satan does, You will deliver us” – the Lord’s prayer continues, “…but deliver us from evil [the Evil One].”

From this perfect insight into temptation, we learn that temptations met and mastered are the only high road to stabilization of character and spiritual progress. We do not meet the pull of the carnal with an ineffective “No” (the “thou shalt not” of the law), which leaves the conflict unresolved, or at best gives victory only by the skin of the teeth. But we meet it with the positive alternative of the gospel, that “Christ has delivered us from the curse of the law”; the ringing declaration that “I am crucified with Christ – yet not I – but Christ lives in me.”

[Back to Home]