Article October 27, 1923 Issue

"Lead us not into temptation"

STANLEY M. SYDENHAM

When Christ Jesus taught his disciples to pray, Lead us not into temptation, he did not infer that God has any consciousness of evil, but he pointed out one of the steps which must be taken in solving the problem of the belief of life and intelligence in matter. The false claim that evil has power or presence, or is capable of producing certain results, must be recognized, rebuked, and relinquished before the fact of God's allness, and the consequent nothingness of evil, can be understood.

When Jesus was baptized of John the Baptist, it is recorded that a voice from heaven said, 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' Jesus must have recognized then more fully than before the magnitude of sonship with God. God's nature and man's reflection of it must have taken on a new and higher meaning to Jesus at that time. Was not this further unfoldment of Truth to him made possible by reason of the humility he had demonstrated?

Then he ''was led by the Spirit into the wilderness'' and was tempted by the devil. Because of the grandeur of the revelation that had come to him, and its importance to mankind and to himself, Jesus withdrew from the world to contemplate quietly the glorious vision, and by communion with his Father to understand it and make it his own. After he had fasted from material belief, and had fed upon the true bread which comes down from heaven—the spiritual truth of being—for a period defined as forty days, the Bible records how the devil tempted him. God undoubtedly enabled Christ Jesus to maintain his spiritual vision, and he was therefore conscious of the spiritual facts of existence. This enabled him to refuse to yield to any temptation, even to the subtle suggestion that temptation came to him from God. In Hebrews it is said of Jesus that he was ''in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.'' From this we may gather that every suggestion and argument was presented to Jesus in the effort of the carnal mind to induce him to come down from the height of truth to which his vision and understanding had raised him.

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