Has God any need
whatsoever to probe into what is in his son’s heart? Doesn’t God know his
people inside out? Doesn’t God know, as Psalm 139 says, when I am sitting down
and when I am rising up, whether I am walking or lying down? And to this we
must answer that within the image of the father and his sons this is not so.
The son is free to live or to hate his father. In his love, the father cannot
compel his son. Love has its limits here; limits of which the author of Psalm
139 is also aware. For although the creator knows him and has knitted him
together in his mother’s womb he can end his prayer with a plea that God will
search him and know his heart, ensure that he is on the right path and no, as
his accusers assert, on the path of evil.
The temptation of
Jesus must therefore be seen as including a real possibility that the son will
fail in his obedience toward the father and will put either himself or his
elder brother is the father’s place. This might have occurred in line with the
temptation story’s narrative logic. Had this occurred, the redemption story
would have been different. And we can only guess at how the story would then
have been told, and whether another of the sons, the son who already had
dominion over this world, would have been a suitable protagonist in God’s plan
for the world . . . It is important to bear in mind that the temptation is not
merely a matter of routine. The testing is serious, and the parallel with the
wilderness traditions does not make it directly probable that the new Israel’s
representative should act in any way other than did the old Israel when it was
tested and fell. The hope of a successful outcome scarcely comes from the
wilderness traditions; it comes rather from the tradition which tells of God’s
servant Job, a man who feared God and turned away from evil. (Kirsten Nielsen, Satan
the Prodigal Son? A Family Problem in the Bible [The Biblical Seminar 50; Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1998], 117, 123)
