Why Such Lack and Evil?
The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you. — Uncle Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood, C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters
For most of us, the thought of a life without lack is unimaginable because we live in a world so obviously full of lack — lack of kindness, fairness, and compassion, all of which are more precious because they seem so rare.
So much is going wrong all around us: injustice, oppression, natural disasters, broken relationships, perversity, selfishness, pride, and apathy, so much pain that it seems we would need to block it all out and pretend that all is well to have any hope for a semblance of safety and sufficiency. Yet it is not pretense we need, but understanding.
We live in a world under the care of a wholly good God with unlimited power, who lacks nothing and intends only good for His creation.
Why, then, is there so much lack and evil?
What has gone wrong? Many people believe that the source of these problems rests with humanity alone, but we must acknowledge the activity of Satan here. His presence in the world accounts for the seemingly unlimited extent of human wrongdoing that goes far beyond what humanity (made in the image of God) would generate on its own. He has humanity in his grasp through the ideas, beliefs, and bastions of wickedness he has developed throughout history, and he intends to keep them there. He works in the realm of the heart and ideas, in their individual as well as social forms, to control the major structures and processes of human life upon the earth.
The secret to a life without lack is faith in God and in God’s full capacity and willingness to meet all our needs — and more. But what is faith? It is simply an understanding of how things are, wedded to a commitment to live one’s life in light of that understanding.
Part of the problem with our faith today is that we do not truly believe in the reality of the spiritual, either the good side or the evil side.
In our world people maintain their sense of respectability by rejecting everything except what they can see in the natural world. To accept that there is more than that threatens their self-identity as proper, intelligent citizens of the modern world. But the perspective of the modern world is not the perspective of the Bible, and it is from the biblical perspective that I will be addressing the primary source of lack and evil in the world today.
Our understanding of how things are must include belief in the devil and knowledge of his character and intentions. If you know enough about him and understand him, you will find that you can have faith in him too. People who engage in explicit devil worship understand this; they know it to be true. But we who do not worship Satan also need to have faith that he will do exactly what he is intent on doing. You’d better be ready for it.
Do you know where the devil is now? He’s in heaven, engaged in warfare right now. The Bible speaks of three heavens: the heaven of the air around us, the heaven of the angels, and then the heaven of heavens, the place where God himself dwells. According to Paul, Satan’s realm is that first heaven where he is “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2). John also called him “the prince of this world.” (John 12:31; John 14:30; and John 16:11.)
As we see in the story of Job, Satan also occasionally goes into the highest of the heavens into the presence of God. Why would God allow that? God is demonstrating to all the citizens of the heavens that he has an agenda. As we have seen, that agenda involves creating a community of free beings who have the power to act contrary to God and to undergo temptation. Satan is serving God’s purposes on earth as part of that arrangement.
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A Lesson from the Victorious One
When Satan confronted Jesus, he did not pick Him up and throw Him off the pinnacle of the temple. Nor did he turn the stone into a loaf of bread and stuff it in Jesus’ mouth. He did not have the power to do that. He had to appeal to Jesus and then wait for Jesus’ response. What was that response? It was not, “Who do you think you are? Do you know who I am? I am the Son of God, you pip-squeak! Now scram!”
No, Jesus responded with the Word of God.
Rather than speak on His own behalf, He used the Scriptures to respond to Satan. He spoke them directly to him, using the authority of God’s Word to defend Himself against Satan’s attempted deceptions.
All three temptations received the same response:
“It is written. It is written. It is written.”
Satan did not argue back. He simply left Jesus alone — at least temporarily. We are told that after the final temptation in the wilderness “[the devil] departed from Him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). We are not told when, but the implication is that he came back. Indeed, you can be sure that Satan was Jesus’ constant companion during the days of His flesh. He was never very far away.
Satan was fully aware that only Jesus could break his grip on the human world, devoted as it is to power and deceit, and only Jesus could deliver human beings from the mire of sin and evil in which they floundered. He knew Jesus to be the only truly radical person to enter human history, for He would refuse to use evil to defeat evil. He would set alight a new order that does not employ the devices evil persons use to try to secure themselves and get their way.
Everything rested upon Satan’s defeat of Jesus. If Satan could prove that it was impossible for a flesh-and-blood human to do the will of God, he would have defeated God’s great project that began with Creation. He would have shown that the idea of creating an even more glorious universe by bringing God’s church to fullness was impossible, a divine pipe dream. And perhaps — just perhaps, for it’s hard to read Satan’s mind — he thought tricking Jesus would give him a few more millennia before he met his final destiny. Whatever he thought, he was sorely disappointed by Jesus, who later told His disciples in the Upper Room just before His arrest in Gethsemane, that
the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me. — John 14:30
The Battle Plan in the Garden
How Satan wanted to find something in Him! He wanted to be able to get inside Jesus’ mind in the same way he got inside Eve’s mind. That is what the Garden of Gethsemane was about; it was the final struggle between Satan and Jesus. From the beginning of Jesus’ earthly life, Satan had tried to destroy or deflect Him. And in the final hours before the Cross, Satan tried to break Jesus down by pressuring Him with the hopelessness, in human terms, of what Jesus was attempting. Satan’s aim was to prevent the redemptive act of crucifixion — the one thing that would open the doors to deliver humanity from the grasp of evil by demonstrating the power of good over evil — and he brought all his demonic power to bear upon Jesus.1
Jesus’ will was invincible, but the victory was not without a great struggle. Indeed, He sweated great drops of blood from withstanding Satan’s effort to turn Him away from the Cross. We sometimes see Jesus portrayed in the Garden of Gethsemane as cowering in the face of upcoming death, begging God to allow Him to live, and unable to do anything about what would be done to Him. He is depicted, in short, as a pathetic victim. But in light of who He was — and is — we would err badly if we were to accept this interpretation. There is no indication anywhere in the Scriptures that Jesus was afraid to suffer and die. He was not trying to avoid the Cross. He was overcoming Satan. Once this was accomplished and the way to the Cross was clear, Jesus was as serene as anyone you can imagine.
With humanity under his direction, Satan used people to torture Jesus. His goal was either to see Jesus die in the beating or to provoke Jesus into asserting His miraculous powers against those who were harming Him. In either case, Jesus’ progression toward the Cross, and the radical act of redemption in world history, would be prevented, and Satan would continue his rule. But to Satan’s chagrin, Jesus Himself was in charge of the events and people involved in the story. He had “set His face” toward this goal — like a football player who sees the whole field and anticipates every move — to achieve His end of blowing open a carefully prepared but tiny cultural enclave of redemption and stepping upon the stage of world history (Luke 9:51). As He said at a crucial turning point in His career:
I, when I am lifted up from the earth [in crucifixion], will draw all people to Myself. — John 12:32 NRSV
We need to see clearly the profound wisdom of His chosen path toward his goal. This was the Trinity’s winning strategy to break down the rule of Satan, and with its accomplishment Jesus stands quietly at the center of the contemporary world, as He Himself predicted.
The events of Christ’s death and resurrection demonstrated to His followers and other observers that what Jesus said about the Kingdom and its availability was and is true. To live through and beyond torture and the Cross in resurrection life shows the presence of God among men. Knowledge of this presence and the unfailing availability of God to those who trust Him led Jesus to say all the beautiful things that we wistfully acknowledge but hardly believe to be true: all those things about birds and flowers being in the care of God, and about how
we need never be anxious or afraid, no matter what comes, even crucifixion.
Jesus’ basic idea about this world — with all its evil, pushed to the limit in what He went through going toward and nailed upon the Cross — is that this world is a perfectly good and safe place for anyone to be, no matter the circumstances, if they have placed their lives in the hands of Jesus and His Father. In such a world we never have to do what we know to be wrong, and we never need be afraid. Jesus practiced what He preached, even as He was tortured and killed. And multitudes of His followers have chosen to do the same.
1. Editor’s Note: This section includes ideas further explored by Dallas in his “The Craftiness of Christ,” from Jorge Gracia, ed., Mel Gibson’s “Passion” and Philosophy: The Cross, the Questions, the Controversy (Chicago: Open Court Publishers, 2004).
Excerpted with permission from Life Without Lack by Dallas Willard, copyright Willard Family Trust.
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Your Turn
We all live in a world of lack, a world of loss, a world of oppression and suffering. It’s not supposed to be this way, but since Satan rules this world (for now), it is our reality. Are you dwelling in that lack, as is so easy to do, or are you planting your feet in faith in God and in His full capacity and willingness to meet all our needs — and much more? Come share with us on our blog. We want to hear from you! ~ Devotionals Daily
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