Gods Sabbath

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E NTERING INTO G OD ’ S S ABBATH R EST

During this time of terrible suffering and mental anguish, Christ sought refuge in prayer, but no matter how earnestly and persistently He directed His petitions to His Father, no answer came back. Every witness of sight and circumstance declared that His Father had forgotten and abandoned Him to the power of the evil one and inevitable death. This was a terrible experience for Christ. To all appearances, despite the promise implicit in the declaration at the Jordan that Jesus was His beloved Son, God was not acting as a Father towards Him. It is both a father’s duty and desire to feed his child and protect him from enemies, but God was seemingly un concerned. He had directed Jesus to enter the wilderness where there was nothing to eat and where He knew that Satan would attack His Son, yet He provided no food and left Christ to fight the battle with no visible evidence of support from Him. If an earthly father treated his child in this fashion, he would be regarded by society as an unfit parent, and if the child were underage, he would be taken from him by court order. But despite appearances to the contrary, God was not acting in an unfatherly manner towards Jesus. The requirements of the great controversy, not His paternal instincts, determined what God had to do. Christ had made a solemn covenant with the Al mighty that He would gain the victory which so many fail to achieve, by demonstrating that irrespective of pressure to do oth erwise, we are to live by God’s Word alone (see Deuteronomy 8:3). If the heavenly Father had surrounded Christ with His visi ble Presence and satisfied His physical needs, Satan would not have been able to bring the full pressure of temptation to bear upon Him. Jesus would thus have been prevented from gaining the vital victory necessary to ensure that the evil one is ulti mately defeated. On the other hand, Satan was determined that Christ would follow in his footsteps. If he could lead the Saviour to do this, he would acquire the most convincing argument possible to justify his own wrong course of action. To succeed, he must destroy the Satan’s Temptations