on. In the pathway of obedience down
that rough steep came the coveted power of God upon Him.

Three times in His life the Father's voice came, and each time at a
crisis. Now at the plunge into the Jordan waters, which meant brotherhood
with the race, and meant, too, a frostier chill of other waters later on.
At the opening of the Greek door through which led an easy path to a
great following, and away from a cross, when Jesus, with an agony
intensified by the intensified nearing of those crossed logs, turned His
step yet more steadily in the path He had chosen that first Jordan day.
And between these two, on the mountain top, when the whole fabric of the
future beyond the cross hung upon three poor wobbling, spiritually stupid,
mentally untrained Galilean fishermen.

This is the meaning of that step into the Jordan. It was the decisive
start.

The Wilderness: Temptation

<u>The University of Arabia.</u>

The Jordan led to the Wilderness by a straight road. A first step without
slipping leads to the second. Victory opens the way to fresh struggles for
higher victories. The perfect naturalness of Jesus is revealed here, His
human naturalness. He had taken the decisive step into the Jordan waters.
And while absorbed in prayer had become conscious of a new experience. The
Spirit of God came upon Him in unusual measure. The effect of that always
is to awaken to new alertness and vigor every mental power, as well as to
key up every moral resolve. Jesus is _caught_ at once by the grasp, the
grip of this new experience of the wondrous Spirit's control. Keenly alive
to its significance, awakened anew to the part He was to perform, and to a
consciousness of His peculiar relation to God and to man, He becomes
wholly absorbed in this newly intensified world of thought.

Under the Spirit's impulse, He goes off into the solitude of the
wilderness to think. And in this mood of deep absorption, with every
faculty fully awake and every high moral impulse and purpose in full
throb, came the temptation with the recorded climax at the close.

There came an intensifying of all His former consciousness, and
convictions, regarding His own personality and His mission to mankind, as
absorbed from the Hebrew parchments, with the undercurrent, lying away
down, of a tragedy to be met on the way up to the throne.

Jesus was a man of great _intensity_. He could become so absorbed as to be
unconscious of other things. As a boy of