In the temptation of the Lord Jesus in the wilderness, Luke departs from the order of fact and gives us the moral sequence. He puts them in the order of magnitude and rises from the natural trial to the worldly one, and then to the religious temptation.
The old man has to be judged, denied, treated as vile, but the body is even now made the temple of the Holy Spirit. Adam, before he fell, had body, soul and spirit, but directly he fell, he acquired self-will —the loving to have his own way. This is a thing we should always treat as evil and judge ourselves if in any way we allow it to act. What can give a man such power against it as Christ known thus in full delivering grace? Like the captured sword of Goliath, of weapons “there is none like that.” If I am dead and risen with Christ, where is the old man? It does not exist in the sight of God; therefore we are not to allow it in the sight of men.
The prime thought of worldly religion is correcting the flesh and improving the world. The mind finds greater glory in itself by ascetic efforts. Neglect of the body may be at the same time a puffing up of the flesh. It was a heathenish idea, the foster child of philosophy. They willingly believed that the soul was holy if not the body, some contending that the soul came from God and the body from the devil. This was productive of frightful evil, to the destruction of all morality. Is there not an answer in Christ to all these wanderings of the human mind? Receiving the truth in Him, you get that which defeats the object of Satan, but the Holy Spirit alone, if I may so say, makes it to be truth in us. May it be received in the love of it, that thus there may be abundant fruit of righteousness by Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.
W. Kelly r