Significance of the Test
When Christ bore the test of temptation upon the point of appetite
He did not stand in beautiful Eden, as did Adam, with the light and
love of God seen in everything His eye rested upon; but He was in a
barren, desolate wilderness, surrounded with wild beasts. Everything
around Him was repulsive. With these surroundings, He fasted forty
days and forty nights, “and in those days he did eat nothing.” He was
emaciated through long fasting and felt the keenest sense of hunger.
His visage was indeed marred more than the sons of men.
Christ thus entered upon His life of conflict to overcome the mighty
foe, in bearing the very test which Adam failed to endure, that through
successful conflict He might break the power of Satan and redeem the
race from the disgrace of the fall.
All was lost when Adam yielded to the power of appetite. The
Redeemer, in whom both the human and the divine were united, stood
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in Adam’s place and endured a terrible fast of nearly six weeks. The
length of this fast is the strongest evidence of the great sinfulness of
debased appetite and the power it has upon the human family.
The humanity of Christ reached to the very depths of human
wretchedness and identified itself with the weaknesses and necessities
of fallen man, while His divine nature grasped the Eternal. His work
in bearing the guilt of man’s transgression was not to give him license
to continue to violate the law of God; for transgression made man
a debtor to the law, and Christ Himself was paying this debt by His
own suffering. The trials and sufferings of Christ were to impress man
with a sense of his great sin in breaking the law of God, and to bring
him to repentance and obedience to that law, and through obedience to
acceptance with God. He would impute His righteousness to man and
so raise him in moral value with God that his efforts to keep the divine
law would be acceptable. Christ’s work was to reconcile man to God
through His human nature, and God to man through His divine nature.
As soon as the long fast of Christ commenced, Satan was at hand
with his temptations. He came to Christ enshrouded in light, claiming
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