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النشر الإلكتروني

SERMON XX.

[PREACHED at Glasgow, 26th November 1815.]

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LUKE IV. 1-13.

"And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God. And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence for it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee; and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering, said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season."

VERSE 1.-"And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness." It is worthy of remark that as Jesus in His human nature was tempted in all points like as we are, so He overcame that temptation by the very same power which is in a measure bestowed upon us for combating with temptation. He overcame Himself, and it is out of His fulness that we receive that which enables us to overcome also. He was full of the Holy Ghost in His combat with the great adversary. It was a contest between the power of God's Spirit and of the spirit which worketh in the children of disobedience. The parties in the contest, when

Christ our head was engaged, were the very same with the parties in the contest when we His members are engaged.

Verse 2.-" Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered." There is no doubt that the appellation of "devil" here is restricted to one particular being; and with us it has all the limited signification of a proper name. But the term in the original is descriptive of character-given originally to the prince of the apostate angels, because it characterized him, but also occasionally used in the Bible in its general signification. Thus, if taken in its original meaning, it may be, and actually is in some parts of the Bible, applied to human beings. In its primitive sense, it signifies a false accuser, or a slanderer, or a traducer. (1 Tim. iii. 11; 3 Tim. iii. 3; Tit. ii. 3; John vi. 70.) Satan is another name applied to the prince of the apostate angels. It is also significant of character or state, and means an adversary.

Verse 3.-" And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread." We have, in all probability, very far from a full record of all the wiles and suggestions of the tempter. Christ was tempted forty daysit is thought by the mere instigations which the devil put into His heart; but that he afterwards, at the end of this time, appeared to Him in a visible form, when He was ahungered with long abstinence, and then plied Him with three great and last attempts to seduce Him from His post of entire trust and entire obedience to God.

Verse 4.-" And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God." When Jesus took upon Him human nature, He did so for the express purpose that He should suffer and that He should do as a brother of the species. It is the perfection of His human obedience which renders His example applicable to us; and it is this which qualified Him for being a High Priest for others. He had no sins of His own to atone for. He knew no sin, yet became a sin-offering for us; and it is the purity of His obedience as a man which is imputed for righteousness to them who

believe on Him. Now, had He made use of His miraculous power for the purpose of exempting Himself from those sufferings which were laid upon Him by His Father, this would not only have impaired the perfection of His suffering obedience, but would have made it quite useless to us as an example-for we have not the miraculous power that He had ever in readiness to be exerted in the hour of calamity. It would have been a positive non-compliance with the appointment of His Father; for you will observe that His situation in the remote wilderness, and the consequent hunger which His distance from the supplies of food brought upon Him, was not a thing of His own doing. He was led by the Spirit into His present situation— there He was by the will of God. It was not for Him to do anything, but to wait the issue of God's counsel concerning Him. To work a miracle in order to repair the necessary evil of the situation into which God had brought Him, were to distrust God. The language for Him was, My Father brought me here, and He will carry me in safety out again. The pain He felt from hunger was of God's laying on; and should He endeavour to assuage it by a miracle, this were an advantage to Himself, but no advantage in the way of example, no advantage. to the individuals of that species whose form He put on, and whose infirmities He bore, and whose sufferings He underwent that He might set Himself before them an example that they should walk in His steps. It would have frustrated this purpose entirely, besides being a positive act of dissent from the will of God which brought Him to His present situation, and which laid upon Him all His sufferings. Him all His sufferings. The gift of working miracles belonged to Him as a talent for the use of others, and not as a privilege for the ease or gratification of Himself. There is another remarkable example of His abstaining from the exercise of miraculous power, when it could have served the purpose of delivering Him from His enemies. He could have obtained the assistance of twelve legions to deliver Him from the hands of His murderers; but He forbore-for had He done so, it would have frustrated the purposes of His mission. ample reflects an explanation on the present one.

That exThe senti

ment with which He repelled the instigation of the tempter was a sentiment of trust in God. God brought me here, and He can provide for me here. I am not to step out of my way to save myself from the painfulness of a situation of God's putting me into. I am not to do what is undutiful or untrustful to recover the mischiefs of a state which was brought on by Him, and not by any independent movement of my own human will at all. Here I am by His will; and my confidence is in His wisdom, and in the power of His word, which is able, if He so choose, to keep me alive in the absence of all ordinary means. There is one remarkable peculiarity worthy of all observation in this verse, Christ was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. It was in the fulness of the Spirit that He entered into the contest with the great adversary of men. It was by the armour of the Spirit's suggestion that He was enabled to overcome all the artfulness and all the allurement of the suggestions of the tempter. But still the suggestion with which He combated and overcame, though given Him by the Spirit, was neither more nor less than a quotation from the Bible. This is a fine illustration of the passage where the word of God is called the sword of the Spirit. It may practically be of great use to all of you. Take every practicable and ordinary means for making yourselves acquainted with your Bibles. Store your minds with its sayings and its passages, for they constitute-if I may be allowed the expression-the material armour by which you wrestle with the enemies of your salvation. When tempted, for example, to evil company, it is no doubt the Spirit that will enable you to turn aside from this temptation; but it is not by any visitation of extraordinary light upon the subject of this danger. He may do no more than exercise His office of bringing all things to remembrance, by bringing the single text-" Be not deceived; evil communications corrupt good manners," to bear with powerful efficacy upon your understandings and your fears. This is the general way in which He acts. We have no reason to expect that in any given case He will ever act otherwise. It is presumption to trust in any other kind of illumination than by the words of Scripture being made luminous and impressive to

you; or in any other kind of defence than by the moral influence of the lessons of Scripture upon the choice and conduct of the believer. There is something highly interesting in this introduction of the Bible as the weapon made use of by the Son of God, to carry Him through the contest with the prince and the leader of that mighty rebellion, which seems to have spread so extensively over some higher fields of creation. Let it rebuke our irreverence for the sacred volume-let it chase away the fanaticism of all unscriptural visions and unscriptural inspirations from the religion which we profess, and to which we do injustice if we strip it of the dignity of reason, or graft upon it the weaknesses of a superstitious fancy. Let it teach us, on the one hand, that we do wrong by resting a security on the naked promise of the Spirit to guide and to enlighten us -for the Spirit does so, not against and not without, but with the use of the Bible; and we have no right whatever to expect that He will make use of this instrument in our behalf, if we do not take the prescribed way of using it in our own behalf. Let us be diligent in the exercise of all ordinary means for growing in the knowledge and in the remembrance of it-let it be our daily perusal; and let us never think that we shall be able to overcome temptation with our minds away from the Bible-but that it is when the lessons of the Bible are present to our minds, when we have laid up the word of God in our heart, that we do not offend Him.

But, on the other hand, let us not forget, that though it was by a quotation from the Bible that our great Patron repelled the instigation of our great adversary, He was all the while under the guidance of the Spirit. It was in the fulness of the Holy Ghost that He grappled with the mighty enemy of human salvation. While we read then, let us feel at the same time our dependence on Him who alone can make us understand what we read with a saving and a spiritual discernment; and while we exercise our memory upon what we read, let us feel our dependence at the same time on Him who alone can bring things to our remembrance so as to suit our occasions, and who can give us grace to help us in the time of need by bringing

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