3-1 Some Practical Implications

Battle For The Mind, Not Blaming Others

We're going to now take a break from the theology, and look at where all this leads in practice. We have spoken of history, of ideas, of theology, of Biblical interpretation. But if we leave all this at the level of mere ideas, lodged merely within some complex brain chemistry beneath our skulls- we will have totally missed the point. These 'ideas' must have real encounter with our whole personalities. I mean that reading the Bible, or this book or that book about the Bible as we ride to work or a few pages each night before sleep takes us... really should and can have a gripping effect upon human personality, upon our entire world-view, taking us far beyond our safe, sleepy little bedtime studies, out into the most fundamental issues of the cosmos, and into the real issues of the dirty lives we humans live out on the face of this spectacularly beautiful planet. The fruit of correct understanding of these issues will in the end be love, and walking humbly with our God. We now want to reflect on what these ideas mean for us in these intensely practical terms. I urge you to take these reflections especially seriously; for I believe there is a huge danger in purely academic study of God's word which doesn't lead to any praxis. For all that he was a Roman Catholic priest, Raimundo Panikkar put it well: "If intellectual activity divorces itself from life, it becomes not only barren and alienating, but also harmful and even criminal [because]... I am convinced that we live in a state of human emergency that does not allow us to entertain ourselves with bagatelles" (1).

The idea is generally held that 'Satan' tries to stop people being righteous, and uses every opportunity to tempt people, but is overcome by spiritual mindedness and quoting Scripture. If Satan is a personal being, exactly why and how would this evil being be scared off, so to speak, by spirituality? Exactly why is this supposedly powerful being somehow driven away by spirituality or encouraged by unspirituality and moral weakness? I see no real answer to those questions. To simply say 'Well, he's like that' only throws the question a stage further back- why is he like that? How did he become like that? Eph. 4:27 says that anger and an unforgiving spirit give a foothold to the devil; 1 Tim. 5:14 warns that young widows will give satan a door of opportunity if they don't remarry. When we are told: "Resist the devil and he will flee from you" (James 4:7), we hardly imagine us wrestling with a literal beast who runs away just because we put up a fight. Putting meaning into those words, seeking to understand what they really mean for us in daily life, it's surely apparent that James speaks of the need to resist sin in our minds, and that very process of resistance will lead to the temptation receding.

These kinds of passages make so much more sense once we understand the real adversary / satan as being our own temptations, our own weak mind. We all know how anger and a hard spirit within our hearts lead us to sin more. We can imagine how for a young widow in the first century world, being single could lead her into a range of temptations. But the psychological processes involved in those temptations would all have been internal to her mind [e.g. sexual unfulfilment, lack of status in society, being childless, economic difficulties etc.]. Not remarrying didn't of itself allow an external devil to lead her to sin; rather the situation she might chose to remain in could precipitate within her a range of internal temptations.

The fact that the Lord Jesus really conquered the devil should mean for us that in our struggles against sin, victory is ultimately certain. If we grasp this, we will battle daily for control of the mind, we will strive to fill our mind with God's word, we will do our daily readings, we will be cynical of our motivations, we will examine ourselves, we will appreciate the latent liability to sin which we and all men have by nature. We won't take the weakness of others towards us so personally; we will see it is their 'devil'. Belief in a personal devil is so popular, because it takes the focus away from our own struggle with our innermost nature and thoughts. Yet whilst we don't believe in a personal devil, we can create the same thing in essence; we can create an external devil such as TV or Catholicism, and feel that our entire spiritual endeavour must be directed to doing battle with these things, rather than focusing on our own desperation . A lack of focus on personal sinfulness and the need for personal cleansing and growth, with the humility this will bring forth, can so easily give place to a focus instead upon something external to us as the real enemy ⁽²⁾. Realizing who ‘the devil’ really is inspires us to more concretely fight against him. Albert Camus in his novel The Rebel develops the theme that “man is never greater than when he is in revolt, when he commits himself totally to the struggle against an unjust power, ready to sacrifice his own life to liberate the oppressed”. Once we have the enemy clearly defined, we can rise up to that same struggle and challenge. Truly, man is never greater when he’s in the one and only true revolt worth making, and sacrificing life for the ultimate cause.

We should not blame our nature for our moral failures in the way that orthodox Christians blame an external devil. We must hang our head over every sin we commit and every act of righteousness which we omit. In this we will find the basis for a true appreciation of grace, a true motivation for works of humble response, a true flame of praise within us, a realistic basis for a genuine humility. Dorothy Sayers in Begin Here correctly observes: " It is true that man is dominated by his psychological make-up, but only in the sense that an artist is dominated by his material" . We really can achieve some measure of self control; it cannot be that God is angry with us simply because we are human. It cannot be that our nature forces us to sin in a way which we can never counteract. If this were true, the anger of God would have been against His own spotless Son, who fully shared our nature. The Lord shared our nature and yet didn't commit sin, and in this He is our ever beckoning example and inspiration. The question 'What would Jesus do…?' in this or that situation has all the more inspirational power once we accept that the Lord Jesus, tempted just as we are, managed to put the devil to death within Him, triumphing over it in the cross, even though He bore our nature. People parrot off phrases like ''I'm a sinner" , 'going to heaven', 'satan', without the faintest idea what they are really saying. And we can do just the same- we can speak of 'Sin' with no real idea what we ought to feel and understand by this.

The Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier wrote an incisive and brilliant study, Violence et puissance- in English translation, The Violence Within ⁽³⁾. From wide experience of practicing psychotherapy and investigating the causes of various neuroses, Tournier discerned that within each person there is a huge battle between the right and the wrong, good and evil, temptation and resistance to temptation. This battle goes on constantly, over even the most insignificant things- e.g. the choice to take an instant dislike to another person, to get angry and aggressive because we feel a person in a restaurant is somehow laughing at us, etc. Most people on earth wouldn’t agree with the religious / theological conclusions we have reached- that the devil refers not to a ‘fallen Angel’ or supernatural being but rather to our own internal temptations which battle with us, as Peter says, like a roaring lion. Yet in practice, a psychiatric analysis of human beings reveals that indeed, like it or not, the ‘violence within’ is not only very real, but a fundamental part of our moment by moment spiritual experience. Along with Tournier, the French sociologist Claude Levi-Strauss came to the same conclusions, written up in his classic The Savage Mind - a book whose title says it all (4). I mean that our Biblical / theological conclusions about the devil are actually confirmed by psychotherapy and psychiatric analysis of people. Our conclusions are true in practical experience, even if people don't want to accept the way we express them Biblically because they have a tradition of believing that the real problem is the supposed violence from without, supposedly perpetrated by a supernatural 'devil'. And here doctrine comes to have a biting practical relevance- for if we truly perceive and believe that in fact ‘the devil’ and its power has been vanquished in Jesus, if we survey the wondrous cross and see there the power of the devil finally slaughtered in the perfect mind of the Lord Jesus as He hung there, and that ultimate victory of victories shared with us who are in Him… the source, the root cause, of so much neurosis and dysfunction, is revealed to us as powerless. For we who have given in and do give in to temptation, who submit to ‘the violence within’ all too often, who are at times beaten in the fight, have been saved from the power of that defeat by grace and forgiveness, and are counted by the God of all grace as being ‘in Christ’. Thus the whole thing becomes what Frederick Buechner called The Magnificent Defeat. The Lord Jesus was the one who overcame that ‘violence within’ moment by moment, as well as in the more accentuated and obvious scenes of ‘the violence within’ which we see in the wilderness temptations and on the cross. And by grace, we are counted as in Him. No wonder that to achieve this He had to share human nature, to have ‘the violence within’, in order to overcome it. Perfectly and seamlessly, to my mind at least, one true aspect of Biblical interpretation thus leads to another, and becomes the basis for a transformed life in practice. In all this we see the matchless, surpassing beauty of how God works with humanity towards our salvation.

Self-talk

It would be fair to say that the Biblical devil refers to our self-talk- the very opposite of the external devil idea. Jesus pinpointed the crucial importance of self-talk in His parable of the rich fool, who said to himself that he had many goods, and discussed with his own “soul” the need for greater barns etc. (Lk. 12:17-19). If we at least realize that our self-talk is potentially our greatest adversary [‘satan’], then we will find the strength to move towards genuine spiritual mindedness, bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Paul’s wording here suggests that naturally our “every thought” is not obedient to Christ; and this is his way of speaking about ‘the devil’.

Dt. 15:9 has Moses warning Israel: “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart”. The Hebrew for ‘thought’ really means ‘word’- the idea is to ensure that you don’t have a self-talk that says… that because the year of release was coming up soon, therefore you would not lend your brother anything, knowing that you had to forgive him the debt in the year of release. Here we have the OT equivalent of the New Testament ‘devil’. We can control our self-talk, but we must be aware that it takes place. Moses is basically saying: ‘Beware of your own self talk; see how you speak to yourself in unfinished sentences like “The year of release is at hand…”, resulting in you ‘finishing the sentence’ by unkind deeds’.

Perceiving the reality and power of our own self-talk is one outcome of truly comprehending who the devil is. Ps. 36:1 warns: " Sin speaks to the wicked man in his heart" (Heb.). The path of Cain involved reviling what he did not understand (Jude 10,11). He didn't understand, or didn't let himself understand, the principles of sacrifice, and so he reviled his brother and God's commands, he became a true child of the Biblical devil- because he didn't understand.

Our self-talk actually defines where we go in our relationships. If we have a certain ‘self-talk’ opinion of someone and yet speak and act nicely to them, sooner or later we won’t be able to keep up the act any longer. I remember underlining a phrase of Soren Kierkegaard, quite stunned by how intensely true it was, and how much truth is compacted by him into so few words: “An unconscious relationship is more powerful than a conscious one”. This says it all. What you say to yourself about your wife, how you analyze to yourself the actions of your child… this has the real power, far beyond any forms of words and outward behaviour we may show. Yet sadly, this world thinks that how you say things is all important; it’s a running away from the importance and crucial value of the real self within. And it’s yet another reason why self-talk is crucial to true, real living and spiritual development. And this is all an outflow from a clear grasp of the fact that the real satan is the adversary of our own internal thoughts, and not some external devil or some guy who fell off the 99^th floor back in the Garden of Eden.

Sin De-Emphasized

It's commonly understood that human beings frequently practice 'projection' onto others of certain attitudes and behaviours with which they struggle. It seems to me that the Satan concept is a classic case. We've taken all the aspects of God's personality with which we struggle- not least, that He brings evil into our lives; and we've also taken all the aspects of our own personality which we dislike, our sin, our unpleasantness... and projected them onto an external being called Satan. All this is not only a minimizing of our own sin; it's an attempt to remake 'God' into our image of who we think He should be. It's blasphemous, as well as demeaning to Him, and reflects our huge barrier to accepting that we are not God, that we are sinners, and need to work on self-improvement rather than projecting all our weakness away from ourselves and onto something or someone else.

We as sinful humans in relationship with a perfect God have a terrible tendency to justify, rationalize and minimize our sin. This is the very essence of the Biblical 'devil'- a false accuser of God, effectively a 'slanderer' of Him, somewhere within our psyche and self-perceptions. So many times we justify sin in the heat of the moment, only later to realize the extent of our self-deception. If we say that we have not sinned, we make God a liar (1 Jn. 1:10); if we don't believe Him, we likewise "make him a liar", we slander or falsely accuse Him (1 Jn. 5:10). We may recoil at this language. But it is so- to deny our sinfulness, to disbelieve what God says about it, is to slander God. We not only do this within our own mind, self-perceptions and psyche. We do this in a more formal and rational manner when we twist Bible teaching in order to somehow minimize sin. And this is what has happened with the steady progression of human thought about sin and the devil. I am not saying that God's intention is that we should feel ourselves as miserable sinners who incite God's wrath constantly; positively, an awareness of our sin is the basis for the joy and marvel at God's grace, that energy to serve Him and love Him through thick and thin, which so many Christians privately admit that they lack.

Take the Biblical account of Adam and Eve's sin. The Jewish apocryphal Book of Enoch was instrumental in forging the Jewish misunderstanding of satan as a personal being. This book shifts the blame for sin from humanity to a Satan-figure called Azazel: "The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin" (1 Enoch 9:6; 10:8). There is a subtle but significant difference between this and the Biblical record in Gen. 6:11- which states that the earth became corrupt before God because of human sin. The Biblical record makes no attempt to pass the blame for this onto any other being- humanity was punished because they sinned. It would in any case be surely unethical for God to punish humanity because of what Azazel did.

The account of Adam and Eve has has been slowly re-interpreted by Christian dogma, initially under such Jewish influence, to mean that the real villain was the devil who supposedly used the snake, or turned into a snake, in order to deceive Eve; and the way of putting it right is to cheer on Christ in Heaven as He does battle with this terrible 'devil'. But as we've stressed so many times, the Bible speaks of the snake as a snake, one "of the beasts of the field" which God created (Gen. 3:1). The ideas of satan, devil, lucifer, fallen angels, rebellion in Heaven- simply don't occur in the Genesis record. The real issue is that by one man sin entered into the world, and so death and the curse pass upon us all, for we have all likewise sinned (Rom. 5:12). Neil Forsyth points out how Milton's Paradise Lost minimizes Eve's sin. The huge presence of satan as it were excuses her fall. And Milton makes out that she simply bought in to satan's suggestion she could become a goddess: "In Book 9, Satan appeals to Eve's desire to be like a goddess to make the heroic attempt to rise above her lot, and [Milton] ignores the point of her act in the Christian epic- simple disobedience" (5). The point is that if we were in Adam and Eve's position, as we are daily in essence, we would have made, and we do make, just the same bad choice as they did. This is why the record of Adam's sin is alluded to throughout Scripture as being the prototype of the experience we all go through whenever we sin. Thus Jezebel's provocation of Ahab to sin is presented in the same terms as that of Adam and Eve; Israel "like Adam have transgressed the covenant" (Hos. 6:7). John speaks of how we are tempted by "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life" (1 Jn. 2:16), alluding to the very things which were Adam and Eve's temptation in Eden. Paul sensed that as the serpent deceived Eve by his subtlty, so the minds of the Corinthian Christians were being deceived by false reasoning (2 Cor. 11:3 = Gen. 3:13). The sinner chooses or accepts the words of the "tongue of the subtle" (Job 15:5- the same word is used about the serpent in Gen. 3:1). The frequent command: "You shall not covet" (Ex. 20:17 etc.) uses the same Hebrew word translated "desire" when we read of how Eve "desired" the fruit (Gen. 3:6); yet Israel "desired" the wrong fruit (Is. 1:29). In all these allusions [and they exist in almost every chapter of the Bible] we are being shown how human sin is a repetition in essence of that of our first parents. The insistent emphasis is that we should rise above and not be like them. And yet this call for personal effort and struggle with ourselves in order to overcome sin is muted and misplaced by all the stress upon a supposed devil tempting Eve, pushing the blame onto him, and thereby de-emphasizing our role in overcoming sin within ourselves. And so we see so many loud-mouthed condemners of the devil totally not 'getting it' about the need for personal self-control and spiritual mindedness in daily life and private character.

To assist us in understanding the extent of our sin, let me ask those who believe in a personal devil: Could or would we sin if the devil didn't exist? If not, then surely we suffer and are punished unfairly for our sins? If we would, then to what extent is the devil responsible for our sins as so often claimed, seeing we would sin anyway? Biblically, logically and practically the problem remains with us, and we simply can't palm it off onto any personal devil. Likewise the real victory and achievement of Jesus was against sin, in the control of His natural tendency, never sinning, never omitting to perform any act of righteousness- and thereby He opened the way for our ultimate victory against sin and all its consequences. But men like Origen presented Christ's whole mission as being a struggle against a personal devil. He repeatedly identified death with the devil, rather than facing up to the repeated Bible teaching that we die because of sin, and not because of a personal devil (Rom. 5:12,21; 6:16,23; 7:13; 8:2; 1 Cor. 15:56; James 1:15).

The 'Miracle plays' of the Middle Ages frequently presented Satan and demons as beings whom the audience could safely ridicule, laugh at and rejoice in their fall before the might of Christ. But what that approach failed to get across was that the real battle is not on a stage, not out in the cosmos- but in the human heart. And the question arises: Why, on a psychological level, did Dante and others revel in presenting Satan as so utterly grotesque? I would argue that they did this because they recognized the existence of awful and radical evil / sin, and eagerly transferred it to someone or something outside of ourselves. People eagerly looked at the pictures, watched the plays... because it somehow reassured them that the awfulness of sin and evil could be externalized. Deep and honest self-examination reveals that more than anything else, we are in denial as to the greatness of our sin.

For a long time I was unwilling to give myself wholly to this idea that sin is solely rooted in the individual human heart. I would've gone along with Jeffrey Russell's comment that: "It is true that there is evil in each of us, but adding together even large numbers of individual evils does not enable anyone to explain an Auschwitz" (6). Like you, I surveyed the evil and radical sin in the world, and intuitively felt there must be something beyond individual humanity at work. Why [along with so many others] did I have that impression, and why was it so strong and so intuitive? Because I simply didn't want to face up to what Paul calls 'the exceeding sinfulness of sin' (Rom. 7:13). Paul speaks in that passage of how even in his life, God had had to reveal this to him, how sin had to be revealed as sin to him. That process goes on in each of us. Instead of thinking that sin is an occasional "whoopsy", we come to see that it really is the radical issue which the Bible presents it as. And no longer do we labour under the impression that there must surely be some source of sin / evil beyond humanity which infects our world. The example of Auschwitz quoted above is personally significant for me. Living in Eastern Europe, I visited Auschwitz four times over a period of 16 years. It was only on the fourth visit that I came to disagree with J.B. Russell's comment. Quite simply- we radically, seriously, majorly and above all dangerously under-estimate the power of human sin, and the colossal influence for evil which our sinful actions, thoughts and decisions can have upon others. My intuitive desire to find some bigger source of evil to explain the Holocaust is probably typical of the struggle we all have to not only minimalize our own sin, but also the sin of humanity and other people. This, perhaps, is why grappling with the issues of sin and radical evil as we are in this book- is simply not popular. There seems to be the idea that because these things cannot be investigated by science, therefore they shouldn't be seriously investigated at all. But I submit that's just the same old psychological desire to shift the focus from ourselves and the gravity of human sin. The 'Devil' remains an unexamined assumption in much of Christianity, and in most societies and religions. The presence of unexamined assumptions in our lives and hearts, as well as in societies, ought to be a red flag. Why, in this age of apparently fearless examination, eager toplling of paradigms, deconstruction of just about everything, rigorous research, trashing of tradition, brutal testing of assumptions... does the Devil idea remain an unexamined assumption? I suggest it's because to reject that tradition of a personal Satan [for that's all it is- tradition] and get down to living out the Biblical position on the Devil demands just too much. It's hard to accept all negative experience in life as ultimately allowed and even sent by a loving God, it's humiliating to realize we're only tiny children, whose view of good and evil isn't fully that of our Father; and it's the call of a lifetime to recognize that our own personal, natural passions and desires are in fact the great satan / adversary.

The popular view of the Devil also de-emphasizes the victory of Jesus against sin. It wasn't merely a George-and-the-dragon style heroic conflict between a man and a beast. We are saved because the Lord Jesus put to death in His mind every sinful impulse, and then gave His life for us, so that we in our turn could be freed from the power of sin and death. Heb. 2:14 labours the point that it was exactly because Jesus had our nature that He could destroy the devil. And it was His death that destroyed the devil. These Biblical facts make little sense in a theology that claims that Jesus and the devil are in cosmic conflict, which is fought out to the bitter end, until Jesus emerged triumphant and killed the devil. Heb. 2:14 and the entire New Testament makes the point that sin / the devil was destroyed by the death of Jesus. It wasn't as if He was locked in mortal combat with the devil until He killed the devil. Jesus died and it was that death which killed the devil. This makes no sense in the context of the idea of cosmic conflict between Jesus and the devil. It was because He had our nature that the devil was destroyed- and simply possessing human nature would be of no relevance if the victory of Jesus was merely against a literal personal being.

The de-emphasis of sin by the personal Satan theory also results in a devaluing of human salvation and the personal wonder of it. Grace means little on a personal level for any of us, if our salvation was really an abstract transaction which occurred somewhere out in the cosmos between God and Satan. The Biblical picture is so much more personally gripping- salvation was achieved by a man, Jesus the Son of God, here on this earth, on a stake just outside Jerusalem. He died in love for us, for the forgiveness of our personal sins, rather than to provide some payment to a cosmic creature called Satan. The essential failure is not of the cosmos- it is the failure in our human response to God's love and grace.

Demonization Of Others

I've noted throughout these studies that there's a huge attraction to the idea that we here on earth are somehow on the side of God and Jesus, who are engaged in a cosmic conflict with the devil in Heaven. It empowers us to assume that anyone against us on earth must therefore be somehow 'of the devil', and we are made to feel that any aggression towards them or description of them in satanic terms is somehow legitimate. The craze of witch hunting in the Middle Ages claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people- it was a kind of psychological epidemic that spread throughout society. People assumed that whenever a disaster occurred, or someone fell sick, this was the work of satan- and therefore anyone felt to be somehow against the sufferers was held to be 'of satan'. Cross eyed old ladies, anyone who looked or thought differently to the crowd, therefore became a target for attack. "This belief generally assumed a very contagious character, spreading like an epidemic in the particular district in which the incidents happened" (7). What for me is significant in all this is how eager humanity is to believe in a personal satan. It enables us to take out our anger, our dysfunctions, our gut dislikes of others- in the name of God, in the name of participating in a battle against satan in which we nobly take the side of Jesus. Here is the danger of the idea. The real, Biblical understanding of Satan is so different, and calls us to personal self control, self-examination, awareness of our weakness and Christ's strength- and this, in turn, affects our attitude to others. Rather than witch hunting and demonizing, we become understanding of human weakness and sensitive to the human condition, ever seeking to share the colossal victory of the Lord Jesus with others.

Notes

(1) Raimundo Panikkar, Worship And Secular Man (London: Darton, Longman &. Todd, 1973), vi.

(2) These thoughts are well developed in David Levin, Legalism And Faith (21),Tidings, 9/2000 p. 329.

(3) Paul Tournier, The Violence Within, translated by Edwin Hudson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).

(4) Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1961).

(5) Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) p. 7.

(6) J.B. Russell, The Prince Of Darkness: Radical Evil And The Power Of Good In History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) p. 275.

(7) F.G. Jannaway, Satan's Biography (London: Maranatha, 1900) p. 12.