A reality-check for Satan

 This week's verses are Matthew 4:8-11:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their grandeur. And he said to him, “I will give you all these things if you throw yourself to the ground and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go away, Satan! For it is written: ‘You are to worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’” Then the devil left him, and angels came and began ministering to his needs.

 These verses come at the end of the devil's temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. It is the devil's most awful and twisted temptation. The devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and in return the only thing Jesus would have to do is worship him. He is trying to turn the world upside down.

It's sneaky because Jesus was already going to receive the power and the glory, at great cost to himself. But here the devil offers him what we would consider to be a reasonable shortcut. "It's going to be ours anyway, but why should we wait and make people suffer if we can get the same thing quicker and cleaner by just going along with this other plan?" What Satan is offering Jesus is Christianity without the cross and a religion where God is at the mercy of his creation.

But this is the devil's best trick. He offers something that we can already get for ourselves, at a cost that seems cheap, but it will ruin us if we take it. He even plays on our good motives to make us do evil. And the price he asks is for us to forsake our God and serve something else in His place: Idols made of glass or precious metal, paper contracts, fleshy humans, or some alternate spirituality that promises a cheaper faster connection to the divine.

We fall for this stuff all the time. We throw ourselves into administrative programs in our churches and neglect caring for one another. We make "worship" a fancy show without any adoration for God. We sink ourselves years-deep into our careers, or our studies, only to neglect our families and our health and our religion. We place our trust in a political candidate or party, our hope in our sport team winning the championship, and our faith in the credentials we earned, and those things become like our God.

Jesus counters this madness the correct way. He resists by doing two things:

Thing one: He tells the devil to go away. All this time the devil has been trying to be the one in charge, but Jesus proves who has authority by telling him to leave. Jesus can make the devil obey His will, but the devil cannot do the same to Jesus. Jesus is Lord. The devil is a pretender.

Thing two: He proclaims the truth. We are to worship God only, and not anyone or anything else. Truth resets the narrative when lies have tangled things up. Jesus says it out loud.

We worship so many things before we worship the true God. Patriotism, sports, our own morality, celebrities, education, beauty, can all be false gods. We push God away for all of them. We show who we give authority in our lives by who we listen to and imitate and whose name is on our clothes.

Take inventory: what influences your life? Who gets to tell you what to do? Where do you find value? Is Satan welcome to negotiate with you for your obedience to God? Does your life speak truth in how you live it?

Tell the devil to go away and do what you can to proclaim God's truth.