d in His Messianic mission. This fact Satan
knew full well. Many men have sold themselves to the devil for a kingdom
and for less, aye, even for a few paltry pence.

The effrontery of his offer was of itself diabolical. Christ, the
Creator of heaven and earth, tabernacled as He then was in mortal flesh,
may not have remembered His preexistent state, nor the part He had taken
in the great council of the Gods,[302] while Satan, an unembodied
spirit--he the disinherited, the rebellious and rejected son--seeking to
tempt the Being through whom the world was created by promising Him part
of what was wholly His, still may have had, as indeed he may yet have, a
remembrance of those primeval scenes. In that distant past, antedating
the creation of the earth, Satan, then Lucifer, a son of the morning,
had been rejected; and the Firstborn Son had been chosen. Now that the
Chosen One was subject to the trials incident to mortality, Satan
thought to thwart the divine purpose by making the Son of God subject to
himself. He who had been vanquished by Michael and his hosts and cast
down as a defeated rebel, asked the embodied Jehovah to worship him.
"Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan for it is written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then
the devil leaveth him, and behold, angels came and ministered unto
him."[303]

It is not to be supposed that Christ's victorious emergence from the
dark clouds of the three specified temptations exempted Him from further
assaults by Satan, or insured Him against later trials of faith, trust,
and endurance. Luke closes his account of the temptations following the
forty-day fast as follows: "And when the devil had ended all the
temptation, he departed from him for a season."[304] This victory over
the devil and his wiles, this triumph over the cravings of the flesh,
the harassing doubts of the mind, the suggested reaching out for fame
and material wealth, were great but not final successes in the struggle
between Jesus, the embodied God, and Satan, the fallen angel of light.
That Christ was subject to temptation during the period of His
association with the apostles He expressly affirmed.[305] That His
temptations extended even to the agony in Gethsemane will appear as we
proceed with this study. It is not given to the rest of us, nor was it
given to Jesus, to meet the foe, to fight and overcome in a single
encounter, once for all time. The strife bet