as a later popular
expectation (Ps. of Sol. xvii. 42) provided for such an anointing of the
Messiah; and in the actual conduct of his life Jesus was constantly under
the leading of this Spirit (see Matt. xii. 28 and John iii. 34). The
temptation which followed the baptism, and in which he faced the
difficulties in his new task, was the first result of the Spirit's
control. Its later influence is not so clearly marked in the gospels, but
they imply that as the older servants of God were guided and strengthened
by him, so his Son also was aided,--with this difference, however, that he
possessed completely the heavenly gift (John iii. 34). Jesus' uniform
confession of dependence on God confirms this teaching of the gift of the
divine Spirit; and his uniform consciousness of complete power and
authority confirms the testimony that he had the Spirit "without measure."

91. The temptation to which the Spirit "drove" Jesus after his baptism
gives proof that the call to assume the Messianic office came to him
unexpectedly; for the three temptations with which his long struggle ended
were echoes of the voice which he had heard at the Jordan, and subtle
insinuations of doubt of its meaning. Some withdrawal to contemplate the
significance of his appointment to a Messianic work was a mental and
spiritual necessity. As has often been said, if the gospels had not
recorded the temptation, we should have had to assume one. Jesus being the
man he was, could not have thought that his call was a summons to an
entire change in his ideals and his thoughts about God and duty. Yet he
must have been conscious of the wide differences between his conceptions
of God's kingdom and the popular expectation. Those differences, by the
measure of the definiteness of the popular thought and the ardor of the
popular hope, were the proof of the difficulty of his task. The call meant
that the Messiah could be such as he was; it meant that the kingdom could
be and must be a dominion of God primarily in the hearts of men and
consequently in their world; it meant that his work must be religious
rather than political, and gracious rather than judicial. These essentials
of the work which he could do contradicted at nearly every point the
expectations of his people. How could he succeed in the face of such
opposition? His long meditation during forty days doubtless showed him the
difficulty of his task in all its baldness, yet it did not shake his
certainty that