Then Jesus was led up into the wilderness by the Spirit, to be tempted by the Devil. And having fasted forty days and forty nights, afterwards He hungered. And coming near to Him, the Tempter said, If You are the Son of God, speak that these stones may become bread. But answering, He said, It has been written: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but on every Word going out of the mouth of God.” Then the Devil takes Him to the holy city, and he set Him on the wing of the temple. And he said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down; for it has been written: “He shall give His angels charge concerning You, and they shall bear You on their hands, lest You strike Your foot against a stone.” Jesus said to him, “Again it has been written: “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” Again the Devil takes Him to a very high mountain, and shows to Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “I will give all these things to You if falling down, You will worship me”. Then Jesus said to him, “Go, Satan! For it has been written: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and you shall serve Him only.'” Then the Devil left Him. And behold! Angels came near and ministered to Him. (Matthew 4:1-11)
Last time we looked at the importance of the idea that God, as He is in Himself, cannot be subject to temptation…
Let no one being tempted say, I am tempted from God. For God is not tempted by evil, and He tempts no one. (James 1:13)
It is inconceivable that there could be anything in God to which the Devil could appeal so as to tempt Him. This then presents a question that needs addressing: for if we hold to the truth that Jesus Christ is God, then how are we to understand what it says here, where clearly the literal sense of the Word speaks of Him being tempted? If we conclude that God can be tempted, then we attribute to Him the finite limitations, frailties and weaknesses common to ordinary human beings. He effectively ceases to be God; for by definition, God as He is in Himself has nothing in common with creation—He is infinite, wholly other.
Spiritual Christianity teaches that God, as He is in Himself is above the comprehension even of the highest angels. No finite being can conceive of anything of the Divine Being as He is in Himself; He is beyond the mental grasp of every human and angelic intellect and so is unapproachable in this respect. But of course, the Divine Love desires to give all that it has to another, and as this Love is received within the limited capacity of finite minds, it becomes clothed with finite qualities. We see this throughout the Word.
In the Old Testament, the One Divine Being presents Himself to the Israelites on mountains, in pillars of cloud and fire, and between the wings of the cherubim that cover the mercy seat in the tabernacle. He is described as riding upon the wings of the wind and bowing the heavens to come down, as if He travels through space and time. We also see God appear as a man and angel before Abraham and Jacob, and in a burning bush to Moses. These are natural ideas, ideas that describe God in finite terms. Yet we know that God possesses nothing of what is finite within Himself, for imperfection, limitation and finite attributes belong to creation, not to the Creator.
So we see that the Word clothes the Divine in finite ideas—which are the only kind of ideas that we can grasp with our limited, finite minds. In doing this, the Word presents the means by which we can build up some idea of God, albeit very limited, giving us something that we can approach. Each person takes those ideas that are compatible with their state or attitude to spiritual things. This is why different people draw different ideas of God from the same Text, and why the same person experiences different ways of reading the Text at different times in their life. Such differences don’t lie in God as He is in Himself, nor are they found in the Word; they are constructed in accordance with the state of the affections and beliefs of the receiving mind.
A person who comes to the Word confirmed in their unbelief will find nothing in it to change their mind; in fact, their experience will most likely confirm their preconceptions. Another person who comes to the Text looking for a God who will support hard, judgmental attitudes tied to a sense of moral or racial superiority will find all they need in the literal sense to support that view, giving expression to religious fundamentalism. One who wants a God to support their pursuit of wealth and power will find plenty to justify a materialistic prosperity gospel. Yet another coming to the Word seeking to become more loving and understanding will be led to see that God is nothing but mercy, compassion, and love.
And while we have been speaking of these different attitudes as different people, we must also remember that all these varied approaches exist within an individual as varying states of mind, according to our moment-to-moment reception of the inflowing Divine life. Those states of mind that seek a God in their own image will find one; those that seek to be recreated in the image and likeness of Divine Love and Wisdom will be led into a fuller, more genuine sense of the true, loving nature of God.
Natural reasoning regarding spiritual and Divine things of the Word leads to projecting finite attributes onto the Lord as He is in Himself. This is something that a spiritual understanding of the Word helps us avoid. Spiritual Christianity teaches that the Word’s clothing of God in finite attributes is an appearance of truth which appeals to the sensual or natural thinking our minds are locked into before our spiritual faculties are opened. The need to present things in this way is seen in Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus in the Gospel of John. Here Jesus uses imagery related to the natural birth of a human being to describe the spiritual process of regeneration by saying that a man must be born again. Nicodemus struggles to get a sense of what He is saying to him and in the end Jesus makes this telling statement, which applies to every person seeking truth…
If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? (John 3:12)
The way Truth initially presents itself in its literal reading is in the form of a story filled with imagery drawn from natural human experiences of life in the natural world. This provides relatable material that aligns with our natural ideas and affections from which a rudimentary natural idea of God can be formed. If we are willing to take this and make changes in our life, the Lord leads us into a deeper, more spiritual understanding of the Word. But this progression only occurs as a person looks to the Word to examine their patterns of thinking and feeling in the light of its truths. As they begin to use the Word to see the things in themselves that are opposed to the kingdom of heaven, their understanding of the Word opens and transforms. Its stories describe their own inner processes and offer what is needed to navigate their spiritual life.
The Divine Life is presented in the Gospels in the person of Jesus Christ, and just as we dealt with the finite terms attributed to God in the Old Testament, the same principle must be applied to the New Testament. In other words, what we have presented in the person of Jesus Christ is a finite representation of the One and only God, the Divine Being, the Creator and Sustainer of all that exists. In the person of Jesus Christ, we have God presented in a form that we can grasp with our minds and so approach and love. This must be the case, because we know that God as He is in Himself cannot be limited by finite attributes otherwise He wouldn’t be God. If we don’t see this, then, when we read the Scriptures we end up either attributing human frailty and weakness to God or rejecting God in Jesus Christ altogether.
Jesus said that no one comes to the Father except through Him—that He is the only way to the Father. Essentially, what He is saying is that without a finite representation of the Father (which He is, as He Himself alluded to when He said, “I and my Father are One”), we have no way of connecting with God. This is why the Word states that there is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved.
Through holding to the idea that the life of Jesus is a representation of the operation of Divine Love and Wisdom in the human mind, we avoid thinking sensually about the Divine and can see that the presentation of God being tempted in the person of Jesus Christ is an appearance of truth. God is not able to be tempted; but what is constantly being tempted or tried is our finite understanding of God—which is, the Lord within us.
We all carry an idea of God, of truth. If we are serious about spiritual life and are making an effort to live from spiritual principles and teachings, then we will see that life constantly challenges our commitment to live from such principles rather than self-interest. It is in these challenges that we discover what temptation, spiritually understood, is really all about. The purpose of temptation is a very positive thing from a spiritual perspective, as it is a process designed to strengthen our commitment to live from spiritual principles as the basis for our life.
The spiritual principles or truths that we have acquired from the Word are actually the Lord with us. No finite being has or can ever have a perfect understanding of truth, because the perspectives that we carry are constantly influenced by self-love and self-interest. It is this self-love that tries or tempts the truths in our minds. These truths or spiritual principles are not from us; they are from the Lord, and so are the Lord with us. The challenges that arise from the love of self, which seeks to undermine them, are what is understood in Spiritual Christianity as the Devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness. So with this in mind, let us look at the first of these temptations…
And coming near to Him, the Tempter said, If You are the Son of God, speak that these stones may become bread. But answering, He said, It has been written: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but on every Word going out of the mouth of God.”
This first temptation offered by the Tempter, by the self-absorbed sense of self or proprium, appeals to a state of hunger. Hunger, spiritually speaking, is a state in which there is a felt recognition of something lacking and a desire to fill that space. The temptation offered by this self-loving proprium is to rely on our habitual ways of understanding the world to feed this hunger, rather than relying on the Word. If we reflect on our inner processes, we see that this temptation confronts us every day as we try to live from spiritual principles. Whenever we drift from those principles, we gravitate back into old habits of being that give ground to the Tempter.
The temptation begins with the command to speak: speak that these stones may become bread. To speak is to give expression to thought, and it is the process by which an inner belief is activated and assigned power.
Stones in the Word symbolise hard, objective facts or literal truths stored in the memory. In a positive sense, stone can represent the permanent nature of universal truths, like the Ten Commandments written on tablets of stone. Conversely, people being ‘stoned to death’ represents the destructive impact of false ideas on our lives. False perspectives can beat us down spiritually with negative self-talk, false guilt, and self-incrimination, doing as much damage to the spirit as a barrage of stones inflicts on the body.
In this passage, the stones represent false ideas because it is the Tempter, the proprium based in self-love, that is offering them. The “facts” and “truths” of this sense of self are the conclusions drawn from sensual thinking, which directly contradict the core spiritual teaching that all life flows in from the Lord. Instead, the natural mind lives and acts from the belief that it is an independent, autonomous agent and the source of its own life. It sees no need to examine its feelings and thoughts in the light of what the Word teaches, nor any need for shunning thoughts that counter the kingdom of heaven. It feels good and fed when these false beliefs—these false stones—are lived from and given expression in speech and action.
So this is a process in which the native sense of self attempts to make what is false (the stones) appear good, using it as bread to nourish and satisfy our hunger for connection with the Lord. Except, in the place of the Lord, the ‘self’ is made the God that we worship and connect with.
Jesus’s response, as the Word, embodies the only defense available to us:
…It has been written: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but on every Word going out of the mouth of God.”
Our ability to resist the thoughts and rationalisations that flow from self-love comes entirely from the Word. Without spiritual principles, we are left only with self-intelligence—which will always lead us in a self-endorsing loop of ownership, accusation, self-righteousness, and justification, before returning to guilt and condemnation again. True spiritual life (what is genuinely human within us) is only sustained and fed when our natural, default way of thinking and feeling is brought under the authority of the Word.
This inner dynamic between our self-intelligence and the Word is precisely the conflict between our rational and natural minds described in the doctrines of Spiritual Christianity:
But one is scarcely able to describe these matters to the ordinary mind because the majority do not know that every person possesses an internal, a rational, and a natural, and that these three are quite distinct and separate from one another, so distinct in fact that one can be at variance with another. That is to say, the rational, which is called the rational man, can be at variance with the natural, which is the natural man; indeed the rational man is able to see and perceive evil that is in the natural, and if it is a genuine rational, is able to correct it, see 1904. Before these two have been joined together man is unable to be whole or to experience the serenity of peace, since the one is in conflict with the other. For the angels present with a person govern his rational, while the evil spirits present with him govern his natural — and this gives rise to conflict.
If in this conflict the rational prevails, the natural is placed in subjection, and the man is thus endowed with conscience; but if the natural prevails, he is not able to receive any conscience at all. If the rational prevails, his natural becomes as though it too was rational; but if the natural prevails, the rational becomes as though it too was natural. In addition, if the rational prevails, angels draw nearer to that person, implanting within him charity, a celestial quality which comes through the angels from the Lord; and at the same time the evil spirits move some distance away from him. But if the natural prevails, the angels move further away, that is, more towards his interiors, and the evil spirits draw nearer to the rational, constantly attack it, and fill the lower parts of his mind with forms of hatred, revenge, deceit, and the like. If the rational prevails, the man enters into the serenity of peace, and in the next life into the peace of heaven; but if the natural prevails, though during his lifetime he seems to experience serenity, he enters in the next life into the unrest and torment of hell.
From these considerations one may know the nature of a person’s state so far as his rational and so far as his natural are concerned. There is nothing else that can bring him blessing and happiness except the conformity of his natural to the rational when both are joined together. This is achieved solely by means of charity; and charity originates wholly in the Lord.
(Arcana Coelestia 2183 {2-4})