Exhortation, August 31

The exhortation for August 31:

The essence of original sin, and of every sin, is to trust Satan’s word above God’s word. Satan’s word comes to us in many forms, but in essence every word of Satan is a slander against God. We succomb to temptation when we begin to believe the slander.

Remember the story of Adam: He was placed in the garden and given all possible blessings, including access to the Tree of Life. The one restriction was that Adam could not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And Satan’s temptation accused God of keeping Adam from the tree of knowledge because God was jealous of His own position, and wanted to keep Adam from becoming His rival. God said to Adam, “You are my beloved Son; I give you the whole world for your domain.” But Satan comes along and says, “God doesn’t really want what’s best for you. He wants only what’s best for Himself.” Adam’s original sin occurred when he believed this lie from the father of lies.

The same temptation comes to us in a thousand forms from pop culture. Every seduction of pop culture — whether it’s monetary, or sexual, or a seduction to sheer excitement — implicitly tells us that God is withholding something good, something genuinely important and exciting, something that will bring genuine happiness from those who walk in His ways. This is the lie of Satan, “If you will transgress God’s law here and there, you’ll find what real living is all about; if you taste this and touch that, your eyes will be open and you will be as God.” It’s the same old temptation, and the same old slander.

Even our piety gets tangled up with Satan’s lies, and here the lie often comes clothed in a quotation from Scripture. According to Luke’s account, Satan’s supported his third and final temptation of Jesus with a quotation from Psalm 91: “He will give His angels charge concerning you, to guard you.” So, the temptation became a conflict between rival readings of the Bible. As Doug Wilson continually emphasizes, we need to repent of our virtues as much as our vices. Scripture says that you are totally depraved, without any good thing in you. That’s true. But our Father also says that all our sins have been cleansed by the blood of His Son and are being purged by the working of the Spirit. Are you a sinner? If you deny it, you are believing a lie. Are you cast out of God’s presence because of your sin? If you believe that, you are believing a lie of Satan. Don’t use your Calvinist convictions about depravity to undermine your Calvinist convictions about grace.

The only way to combat Satan’s lies and slanders is with the Scriptures, with the living word of God. Jesus’ temptation is a once-for-all event, but since we are disciples of Jesus we should be like our Master and fight like our Master. And that means knowing the Bible and how to deploy it in battle. Scripture must live in us richly if we are going to be successful in combatting temptation. If you are tempted to anxiety about money, meditate on the words of Jesus: “Consider the birds of the air, that they do not sow neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?” If you combat sexual temptation, respond with the words of Paul: “Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin a man commits is outside his body, but the man who sins sexually sins against his own body.” If you are tempted to grumble and complain, remember Paul’s warning that grumbling is a capital crime: “do not grumble, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.”

Above all, the answer to Satan’s slander is the gospel, the whole revelation of God in Christ. The Father has given his only Son to die for you: Will He withhold any good thing from us? Will he not also with Jesus freely give us all things?