From Luke 4:5-7……the satan’s second temptation of Jesus:
5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 If you worship me, it will all be yours.”
The authority and splendor of the satan is nothing more than the common carnival-ware things of life that shine temporarily in the world of the flesh. The enemy may have the power to offer the world’s best but, even at that, at its best, lofty stature and material treasure are still only temporary and will be overthrown, will rust away and will be eaten by moths, and eventually will be no more. Such counterfeit currency of the flesh may hold appeal for those in and of the world, but it has no value in the Kingdom of God which is where Christ came from, what He brought with him, and what He established among His disciples who become the embodiment of the Kingdom of God alongside the world of the flesh, though not of it.
Jesus, bearing the fullness of the Holy Spirit, is the treasurer and giver of the ultimate timeless original eternal authority and splendor of the Kingdom of God. I can imagine Christ, had He chosen to tip His hand saying essentially the same thing to the satan He said to the woman at the well,”If you knew who it was to whom you speak, you would be asking Me for the original and eternal authority and splendor.”
Oh, but it was the satan’s treachery and lies that sought to steal those treasures from God in His Kingdom that resulted in the satan having nothing more than the counterfeits in and of the world of the flesh to entertain himself with until God is ready to reveal that the Kingdom of God has overwhelmed and taken him and his worthless trinkets captive, destroying the very things the satan thought he could peddle to a human, like Jesus or any of us.
There was a night when, much to my dismay, even my horror, I contemplated evil of such magnitude that I managed to miss the target of righteousness altogether- the vertical dimension of relationship with God, the horizontal dimension of relationship with others, and even the personal dimension of self awareness of my own heart. My husband’s mother lived with us after she became widowed. She had become the caregiver to her older brother, a WWII veteran who fought in N. Africa, never married, and had developed a number of health issues, including multiple strokes. We had built a home to accommodate their needs as well as our own family’s. As his health declined he became more and more troubled and troublesome, irascible, mean in his treatment of his sister and generally just a very difficult person to deal with. One particularly difficult night he was restless, yelling, thrashing about, and cursing. My Mother in law was exhausted with trying to pacify him. I sent her to bed and sat with him for several hours. I read to him, sang hymns, tried to calm him and coax him to sleep. Eventually he did fall asleep, but I was so exhausted Then that I couldn’t sleep. I was sitting in the little sunroom next to his bedroom with my Bible open in my lap. I had been reading in John 6. I was sitting there pondering how exhausted we all were with his sleeplessness, noise, ill temper and the strain of constant caregiving. The thought crossed my mind, “It would be easy to go in there, put a pillow over his head and smother him.” That thought startled me. I looked down to the Bible and a verse seemed to light up on the page and leap out to me…it was John 6:43, Jesus said to them, “Do not murder.” That’s what I saw on the page that night immediately after that thought occurred. I closed the Bible, shaken by the thought and shaken also, but thankful too, for God’s prompt response. The next morning I picked up my Bible and went to John 6 again and read down the page. There was the verse that had drawn me back from the brink. The verse did not actually say, “Do not murder” which is what I had seen with weary eyes in a state of exhaustion and exasperation with the circumstances. What it actually said was, “Do not murmur”…..Other translations render that verse, “Do not complain. Do not grumble. Do not mutter bitterly under your breath.” In that moment I realized that my attitude was an assault against our uncle’s spirit, the thought itself, entertained and embraced is itself tantamount to murder.
In Matthew 5:20-22 we read Jesus’ words, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” The word “raca” is Arabic and is a term of reproach used by the Jews of Jesus’ day. It means “worthless.” The word is sometimes translated as “fool” or “useless” and even rendered “cursed” or “empty headed” . It is derived from a word that means “to spit”. Using this word in anger against someone places one on dangerous ground according to Jesus. And that wasn’t the only time that Jesus’ compared what we might think of as a lessor evil to its more vile and aggressive, direct, greater evil. He said that lusting in one’s heart, with one’s covetous eyes, is the equivalent of adultery itself.
From Jesus’ perspective…..the spirit of rebellion, playing with the notion of a temptation in one’s mind is the same thing in that it will inevitably lead to the sin itself that is being contemplated if you roll it around in your head for very long. We are enjoined to “take all such thoughts captive” at the moment they begin, to flee from evil….before idle pondering becomes curiosity and develops into fascination, advances to obsession, matures into oppression, and traps us in our own web of listening to a lie, then lying to ourselves, then to others, and eventually to God.
Alexander Solzinitzen, a Russian dissident, in his Nobel Prize winning book, The Gulag Archipelago, “…..Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”
Or as the prophet reminds us in Jeremiah 17:9-10
“The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can figure out. But I, God, search the heart and examine the mind. I get to the heart of the human. I get to the root of things. I treat them as they really are, not as they pretend to be.” We can excuse ourselves anyway that we like by saying that we are good people, that we have kept the letter of the law….but if, in our minds, and ultimately perhaps in our hearts, as well, we are violating the spirit of the law, we are just as guilty.
Thank God that Christ himself experienced such temptation through an assault on his mind. He showed us where it comes from, how to thwart it, taking thoughts that arise from satan’s deceptive voice captive and casting them away by the power of the Word of God in our heart and voice. The Word of God hidden in one’s heart is a breastplate of righteousness that guards one’s heart against thoughts that come at us uninvited and unrestrained. The Word as it rises from the heart to the lips is a sharp and ready sword to defeat the Enemy who seeks to steal our spirit, kill our soul, and who has the power to destroy our body
The Enemy watches for “an opportune moment”. When we are emotionally unguarded and intellectually unaware of his tactics, we may be more vulnerable than we can ever know in advance. We are not to be naive of spiritual realities, or uneducated of mind, or unguarded of heart, or unprepared of will, or untrained in the Word.