The Jordan led to the Wilderness by a straight road.  A first step without slipping leads to the second.  Victory opens the way to fresh struggles for higher victories.  The perfect naturalness of Jesus is revealed here, His human naturalness.  He had taken the decisive step into the Jordan waters.  And while absorbed in prayer had become conscious of a new experience.  The Spirit of God came upon Him in unusual measure.  The effect of that always is to awaken to new alertness and vigor every mental power, as well as to key up every moral resolve.  Jesus is caught at once by the grasp, the grip of this new experience of the wondrous Spirit’s control.  Keenly alive to its significance, awakened anew to the part He was to perform, and to a consciousness of His peculiar relation to God and to man, He becomes wholly absorbed in this newly intensified world of thought.

Under the Spirit’s impulse, He goes off into the solitude of the wilderness to think.  And in this mood of deep absorption, with every faculty fully awake and every high moral impulse and purpose in full throb, came the temptation with the recorded climax at the close.

There came an intensifying of all His former consciousness, and convictions, regarding His own personality and His mission to mankind, as absorbed from the Hebrew parchments, with the undercurrent, lying away down, of a tragedy to be met on the way up to the throne.

Jesus was a man of great intensity.  He could become so absorbed as to be unconscious of other things.  As a boy of twelve, when first He caught fire, He was so taken up with the flood of thoughts poured into His mind by the temple visit, that for three days and two nights He remained away from His parents, simply absorbed in the world of thought awakened by that visit.  He could remain forty days in the wilderness without being conscious of hunger.  The impress of that forty days mentally remain with Him during the remainder of His human life.  Intensity is possible only to strong mentality.  The child’s mind, the undisciplined mind, the mind weakened by sickness or fatigue goes quickly from one thing to another.  The finest mental discipline is revealed in the greatest intensity, while yet all the faculties remain at normal, not heated, nor disturbed by the discoloration of heat.

He withdrew into the wilderness to think and pray.  He wanted to get away from man that He might realize God.  With the near flaming footlights shut out, He could see clearly the quiet upper lights, His sure guides.  These forty days gave Him the true perspective.  Things worked into proportion.  He never lost this wilderness perspective.  The wilderness means to Him alone with God, the false perspective, the flaming of near lights, the noise of men’s shuffling feet all gone.  And when He went out among men for work, that wilderness atmosphere went with Him.  And when the crowds thickened, and work piled up, and dangers intensified, off He would go for a fresh bit of improvised wilderness.