The Shrewd Deceiver
BETRAYAL
“But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3).
In all our brief consideration of Satan and sin we certainly do not want to give the impression that we are not responsible for our sinful choices. The Bible tirelessly connects sin with Satan, not to take the responsibility off our shoulders but to remind us of the nature of our evil – it is satanic; it is anti-God, anti-holiness and anti-life.
Satan’s agenda is driven by his ceaseless and rabid hatred of God and he means to seduce us into betraying the Holy Father. John Milton pictures him spying on the humans in the garden and taking delight and pleasure from their innocence and joy that he says just melts him. He even feels sorry for them, says he is not really their foe and wishes he was not going to do what he has determined to do. Still, whatever it might cost the humans, he purposes to ease his spleen on God by hurting what God loves and he means to grieve God by using those God dearly loves. In other words, humans are tools and nothing more. Satan makes it clear it is God he is raging against and not humans. So, though he says he is not their foe and that he is sorry they will lose so much, he means to use them against God by making a pact of mutual friendship with them and give them hell instead of Paradise (midway through Book IV).
To you whom I could pity thus forlorn,
Though I unpitied. League with you I seek,
And mutual amity, so strait, so close…
Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two…
Thank him who puts me, loath, to this revenge
On you, who wrong me not, for him who wronged.
And for all his evil he blames God. He would not want to conquer this new world or rob the humans of their innocence and bring them eternal loss if God had not forced him to do it. We find Milton’s point here especially revealing. He has God’s arch enemy refusing to take the blame. Though he earlier talks his hellish followers into a frenzied rage against God, swearing that they will do no good but only harm and will even work harm out of all the good that is – despite all that impenitent swearing he claims the higher moral ground and blames God for the whole calamitous result. And because that is his nature, it is his agenda to lead the humans in the same path – blame everyone else. Especially blame God.
Harry Emerson Fosdick asked us to take another look at a well-known text. Speaking of Jesus it says, “he set his face steadfastly toward Jerusalem.” We usually think about what that meant for Jesus but Fosdick wanted us to think about what it meant for Jerusalem. It was not only a moment of crisis for Jesus when He got to Jerusalem; it was a moment of crisis for Jerusalem when Jesus got there. What would they do with Him when He forced them to make a choice? Something similar happens if we turn the cry of dereliction around and put it in God’s mouth. In truth, Jesus represented not only humans before God but God before humans. In Jesus Christ humanity could look at the world of judgment their sins had brought down on them and in agony ask their Holy Father why He had forsaken them. But there, looking down at them from the cross, is their God who asks them in return, “My children, my children, why have you forsaken me?”
Astonishing truth: that God was prepared to spill His blood to purchase our good-will while the Dragon with hissing lies talked us into notions of godhood, of self-reliance and self-actualization. With arrogance and insolent ignorance we told God we had had enough of Him and would take care of ourselves. “Freedom” tasted so good but it was a shameful freedom and a destructive liberty. Hugh R. Mackintosh, brilliant Scots theologian and preacher, preached a sermon he called “Love’s Refusal”. In Exodus 21 Israel was told to let the fellow-Israelite slave go free in the seventh year. Many of them must have eagerly counted the days but there were times when the one who came as a slave (due to debt or some such thing) learned to love the master and to develop ties in that home; ties he did not want to break. So he would refuse the freedom saying, “I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free.”
At this Mackintosh responds, “Freedom is good and Christ gives it abundantly; but freedom without Christ, freedom rather to put Christ away is evil through and through. Freedom is sweet, but what are all its joys if to taste them we must leave our best friend behind? Whatever we must renounce is as nothing to that which we have found in Him.”
The freedom offered by the sinister one could only be gained by base ingratitude, by a thankless and stupid heart that was blinded by corrupt and corrupting visions of false grandeur. It is foolishness, of course, to pity God for He does not need our pity, but isn’t it legitimate to see His brazen rejection as the foulest kind of treachery? Had He been a tyrant, had He tormented and narrowed us, had His treatment of us made us rue the day He made us – if any of that had been true would we not now look back on our rebellion and think of it with pride? But it wasn’t a brave insurrection, it was mean treachery. It wasn’t a gallant assault against an arrogant and harsh deity it was an arrogant, self-serving and stupid desertion.
Betrayal is so hard to take. You only have to read the story of Absalom’s treatment of his father David to sense the ugliness and shudder at it. Perhaps you came across the painful story some years ago of the woman who married an ex-con and loved him devotedly. A few years later he was accused of a very serious crime he did not commit but as a result of poor defense work he was sentenced to something like thirty years without parole. His wife was assured that if they had the money to get a top-notch lawyer he could get a retrial and be released. She took on extra jobs, scrubbed floors in office buildings at night, took in laundry, kept up her day job and lived on too little. Some years later, exhausted, looking much older and very thin she had enough money to get the lawyer. She hired him, they got the case reopened, he was set free and a few months later he went off with a younger and prettier woman. Betrayal is so hard to take.
Psalm 41 tells a sad story. The psalmist is ill, worn out with the struggle against the affliction and what is worse he has not treated God right. His enemies watch him in the throes of his agony and pretend to care. When they come to visit it is really to see how quickly he is sinking so that they can go and spread their good news about his bad news and to insinuate evil about him. Naturally that filled him with pain but what hurt him most was this (41:9), “Even my closest friend, whom I trusted, he who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.” There it is. And if the sufferer is King David, insult has been added to injury when the hero of the nation, the one to whom they owe so much, is despised. Lord Byron, poor man, who knew what it was to turn to ruin by turning from God had this to say:
So the struck eagle, stretch’d upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View’d his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing’d the shaft that quivered in his heart.
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel;
While the same plumage that had warmed his nest
Drank the last lifedrop of his bleeding breast.
Whatever mystery there is hidden in Christ’s cry to God, “Why have you forsaken me?” there is mystery too when He turns His eyes on us and, speaking for God, wants to know from us, “Why have you forsaken me?” Can you explain it?
It is God who comes to our rescue, saving us from our sins (Matthew 1:21). He is not our enemy; He is our redeemer. He and Satan are on opposite sides. It is Satan who would condemn the world and we are told expressly that it is God who sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3:16-17). It did not seem to matter to God that it was sinners He came to save; in truth, it was precisely because we were sinners and He knew it that He came to save us. It did not seem to matter to Him that we did not want Him – He wanted us. It did not seem to matter what we felt about Him; what mattered was what He felt about us. It did not seem to matter that we did not want to be saved or that we wanted Him out of our lives; He wanted to save us and to enter our lives.
You might think God would have more respect for Himself. You might think He would prize His honor more highly than to come looking for a race that has treated Him so blasphemously. Has He no shame? Is that why we forsook Him? Because He loved us too much? It is from that God that Satan works to cut us off.
