The Devil Made You Do It?

 “The Devil made you do it!  Are you sure about that?”  I posted that statement and question on Facebook yesterday, and then added, “Life is so much easier when the Devil gets the credit . . . but then there is that Other problem.”

One friend, understandably, identified the “Other” problem as being “me,” by which she meant all of us.  We are a big problem when it comes to temptation and sin.  Like it or not, we bear responsibility for our actions and our reactions.  I sometimes wonder about God’s wisdom in giving us free choice, but I have no doubt that God did so.

But that wasn’t the “Other problem” I had in mind.  Jesus is the other problem.  Were it not for him, you and I could blame our own sin and all the ills in the world on the Devil.  There is a lot of evidence that the Devil deserves the credit for all that is ill and evil in our lives and world.  God certainly can’t be seen as responsible for such.  So, if God is not behind the evil, surely the Devil is.

I like blaming the Devil for all that I do wrong.  It removes responsibility from me and from those I love.  It allows me to fall back and use the Apostle Paul’s lament: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19, ESV).  Whew!  I’m in good company—Paul’s and yours.  Well, I may be in good company, but I still have the Jesus-problem.

After forty days of fasting and prayer, Jesus did battle with the Devil . . . and won!  I know.  I know.  He was Jesus.  Yes, he was Jesus, but do you recall who Scripture tells us that Jesus was?  He was the Son of God in flesh and blood and limited by that flesh-and-blood as are each of us.  He beat the Devil not because he was the Son of God, but because he was a faithful son of God.  He spent enough time with the Father to recognize the Devil when he showed up and to be able to distinguish God’s ways from the Devil’s ways.  Jesus did that as the flesh and blood man he was.  That’s the problem.  We would prefer that Jesus’ power to resist the Devil be a special divine power available only to him.  

We love to hold Jesus up as the perfect example of the kind of persons we should be.  Well, let’s be consistent.  Jesus’ example says that the Devil’s power to lure us away from God’s will is limited to the power we grant to the Devil.  Jesus’ power to resist the Devil was not a special divine power.  It was the power that comes to one who spends ample time in relationship with the living God . . . one who spends so much time that the line between good and evil is always clear.

The problem may well be our fear that, if we were to follow Jesus’ example, we might miss out on something.  We will . . . the hell of being outside God’s will.