from heaven (John i. 32-34), indicate that the word came to Jesus alone, and was his summons to undertake the work of setting up that kingdom to which he had just pledged his loyalty.  The expression “My beloved Son” had clear Messianic significance for Jesus’ contemporaries (comp.  Mark xiv. 62), and the message can have signified for him nothing less than a Messianic call.  It implied more than that child-relation to God which was the fundamental fact in his religious life from the beginning:  it had an official meaning.

89.  For Jesus the sense of being God’s child was normally human, and in his ministry he invited all men to a similar consciousness of sonship.  Yet his early years must have brought to him a realization that he was different from his fellows.  That in him which made a confession at the baptism unnatural and which led to John’s word, “I have need to be baptized by thee,” was ready to echo assent when God said, “Thou art my Son.”  He accepted the call and the new office and mission which it implied, and he must have recognized that it was for this moment that all the past of his life had been making preparation.

90.  The gift of the Spirit to Jesus, which furnished to John the proof that the Greater One had appeared, was not an arbitrary sign.  The old prophetic thought (Isa. xi. 2; xlii. 1; lxi. 1) as well as a later popular expectation (Ps. of Sol. xvii. 42) provided for such an anointing of the Messiah; and in the actual conduct of his life Jesus was constantly under the leading of this Spirit (see Matt. xii. 28 and John iii. 34).  The temptation which followed the baptism, and in which he faced the difficulties in his new task, was the first result of the Spirit’s control.  Its later influence is not so clearly marked in the gospels, but they imply that as the older servants of God were guided and strengthened by him, so his Son also was aided,—­with this difference, however, that he possessed completely the heavenly gift (John iii. 34).  Jesus’ uniform confession of dependence on God confirms this teaching of the gift of the divine Spirit; and his uniform consciousness of complete power and authority confirms the testimony that he had the Spirit “without measure.”

91.  The temptation to which the Spirit “drove” Jesus after his baptism gives proof that the call to assume the Messianic office came to him unexpectedly; for the three temptations with which his long struggle ended were echoes of the voice which he had heard at the Jordan, and subtle insinuations of doubt of its meaning.  Some withdrawal to contemplate the significance of his appointment to a Messianic work was a mental and spiritual necessity.  As has often been said, if the gospels had not recorded the temptation, we should have had to assume one.  Jesus being the man he was, could not have thought that his call was a summons to an entire change in his ideals and his thoughts about God and duty.  Yet he must have been conscious of the wide differences