Anointed," it is easy for us to see why they thought of Him as having had a preexistent life with God, and why they so readily recognized Him as the Son of God. The nature of the kingdom which Christ announced was, however, very different from that which His contemporaries expected. They looked for one who would make Jerusalem a new Rome; He labored to establish a kingdom of truth. They longed to conquer the world and wreak vengeance on their enemies; He taught the conquest of one's own spirit and the forgiveness of enemies. They longed to rule the world; He taught them to serve the world. They dreamed of a kingdom of force; He established a kingdom of love. The Messianic conception prepared the way for the work of Christ, but He so transformed it that it has become an ideal, first of Spiritual life with God, and then of a human society in which all shall recognize that they are brethren because all look upon God as Father. * CHAPTER VIII. CHRIST, THE CAPTAIN OF SALVA TION. "He Himself hath suffered being tempted. Heb. ii, 18. "Where now with pain thou treadest, trod The whitest of the saints of God! To show thee where their feet were set, How Christ transformed the current views of the Messiah and the Messianic kingdom will come more clearly to our view, if we study carefully the narrative of His temptation. His inner nature we cannot fully comprehend. We do not understand fully the inner life of the great geniuses of our race, much less can we hope to understand all the workings of His mind. The Gospels make it clear, however, that He had not only a human body, but a human mind. He grew in wisdom as well as in stature.1 This implies that at first He was not conscious of His exalted mission as the Messiah. 1 Luke ii, 52. Without doubt He was conscious of God's fatherhood as no other had ever been, for He felt as a mere boy the duty and the delight of being occupied with the things of His Father. 1 But at the time of His baptism an illumination, unique even for Him, convinced Him that He was none other than the long expected Messiah. The voice which said to His heart, "Thou art my beloved Son," was the divine assurance of the Messianic calling. Conscious as He had long been of the spiritual significance of the Fatherhood of God and of the higher aspects of relationship with Him, conscious too of the marvellous nature and role which the Messiah was expected to possess, He retired to the wilderness to think over His lofty opportunities and responsibilities. Lifted at first above the notice of ordinary necessities, His exalted meditations were at last interrupted by the rude demands of hunger. This seems to have brought about a crisis in His thought. Could the Messiah hunger? His reign, the Jews believed, was to be inaugurated by a 1 Luke ii, 49. great feast. Could the heavenly Being, who was popularly believed to have had such an exalted and glorious career before God from the beginning, really be subject to the laws of the physical life as ordinary mortals were? If He were really the Son of God should not supernatural power enable Him to put away at once the clamorous demands of this earthly nature? No! was His reply; it is far more important to obey God's will than to escape from the sufferings and the limitations which He has appointed! Messiahship means, not exemption from the common lot of men, but the ability to take up that lot and do God's appointed work in it; not selfish ease, but unselfish service. Thus He put aside one of the temptations which the prevailing Messianic expectations brought to Him. But this was only the beginning. If He could not use the power which men expected the Messiah to possess for His own ease, was He really to be the king for whom they were looking? 1 He could not help knowing how gladly His countrymen, groaning 1 Luke, I believe, gives the temptations in their true order. as they were under the hated yoke of Rome, would rally to His standard, were He but to proclaim Himself their heaven-sent deliverer. Worldly power and magnificence, the glory and the adulation which accompany empire, for one brief moment tempted even Him; then He put them resolutely aside. He had not lived those thirty years of unique communion with the Father without knowing that the real service of God was not thus performed. The real kingdom of God he knew to be in the hearts of men; the real conquest of men by God must be not a conquest of arms, but of love; the weapons of the war must be the implements of loving service, not the deadly arms of martial force; accordingly the alluring vision of the popularly expected empire was calmly dismissed, and the way of toilsome self-sacrifice and of the cross was deliberately chosen. One other temptation, however, came to Him. Were all these fervid descriptions of the Messiah's supernatural nature to have no outward fulfilment? Might He not at least make some external display at Jerusasalem before the eyes of assembled thousands |