If satan had to ask to sift Peter, then he would have also had to ask permission of the sovereign God to sift Judas, as well, it seems. Peter endured the pain of his shame and lived to see himself restored when he encountered the Risen Christ. Judas, expecting a different outcome, a political and military victory, was crushed by his shame and did not learn the lessons of Jonah’s rescue or Lazarus coming out of the grave or wait to see the victory. He listened to the condemnation of the enemy and became a scorned vessel of dishonor, in contrast to Peter who surrendered his shame to the loving atonement of Christ.
Consider Adam….and Eve his co-conspirator in sin, her by active engagement with the serpent, him by complicit acquiescence, and both for hiding themselves and their shame from their Creator and for their blame of others instead of owning their disobedience and running to the Father in repentance…. Adam failed to lead Eve through righteous example, being disobedient to God in the process himself and failing to hold neither himself nor her accountable to follow God’s instruction. He neither spoke up in defense of God’s Instructions to the serpent or Eve in the moment nor admonished Eve for her wrong decision. Why? Did Adam test God, viewing Eve as disposable, willing to sacrifice her to death, since that was the stated consequence for eating from the tree of life? Did he, out of curiosity, keep quiet and wait to see the outcome, essentially using her like a king’s cup bearer, to taste and determine whether the food contained dangerous poison? In having failed his responsibility, Adam himself came to bear the representative weight of the fall of God’s perfect, very good creation. His failure in leadership, disobedience, and neglect of protective character for the helper God created to complete him compounded the sin born by Eve. From the one entrusted with much, much was required. In the New Testament Christ is the new “Adam” who sets a new standard of truth, peace, and obedience and through whom all are led back to reconciliation with God and eternal life. Christ loves, sacrifices for, and dies for his Bride, truly a higher standard of love than man. The whole drama was played out in the physical realm, which is an imperfect mirror through which imperfect people view a perfect, loving God. One might well ask if Eve and Adam were sifted,too. And…. Is each of us, again and again, until we are refined into the finest grain offering?
If satan was the first Judas, the betrayer of God, who fomented rebellion in heaven and was cast to earth….was not the unwitting Judas, Jesus’ disciple, one among 12 handpicked and given to Jesus by the Father, also sifted by satan with God’s permission, as well, and can be viewed as a kind of physical anti- Christ? Just as Jesus observed the spirit of satan in Simon Peter and rebuked him, Christ could also have rebuked it in Judas , but instead gave permission to move forward with his plan….. Christ, in the end truly did make his own decision, just as he told his Roman inquisitors in his trial…..and satan realized his own opportunism had been turned against him.
Jesus made perfect love manifest in all his ways through his obedience by being sifted himself….and doing so with perfect response to satan’s opportunistic temptations against him for he is the fulfillment of the will of the Father and the Holy Spirit-filled Incarnate God!
Matthew 4:1: “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
Hebrews 5:8: “Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.”