from the beginning, and trod until the end, with bleeding but
unreluctant feet, the path of suffering on His road to His throne.

III. The third temptation tempts the worshipping Son to tempt God.
Luke arranges the temptations partly from a consideration of
locality, the desert and the mountain being near each other, and
partly in order to bring out a certain sequence in them. First comes
the appeal to the physical nature, then that to the finer desires of
the mind; and these having been repelled, and the resolve to worship
God having been spoken by Jesus, Luke's third temptation is
addressed to the devout soul, as it looks to the cunning but shallow
eyes of the tempter. Matthew, on the other hand, in accordance with
his point of view, puts the specially Messianic temptation last. The
actual order is as undiscoverable as unimportant. In Luke's order
there is substantially but one change of place--from the solitude of
the wilderness to the Temple. As we have said, the change was
probably not one of the Lord's body, but only of the scenes flashed
before His mind's eye. 'The pinnacle of the Temple' may have been
the summit that looked down into the deep valley where the enormous
stones of the lofty wall still stand, and which must have been at a
dizzy height above the narrow glen on the one side and the Temple
courts on the other. There is immense, suppressed rage and malignity
in the recurrence of the sneer, 'If Thou art the Son of God' and in
the use of Christ's own weapon of defence, the quotation of
Scripture.

What was wrong in the act suggested? There is no reference to the
effect on the beholders, as has often been supposed; and if we are
correct in supposing that the whole temptation was transacted in the
desert, there could be none. But plainly the point of it was the