# Between God and Satan by Helmut Thielicke



## IMSojourner (Nov 4, 2006)

This helped me enormously today in my struggle with myself. In the hope that it might also be helpful for others, I am posting it now.

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Between God and Satan by Helmut Thielicke

http://www.religion-online.org/showchap ... =623&C=865

Helmut Thielicke was Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Hamburg. Translated by Rev. C.C. Barber, M.A., D. Phil. Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan (1958, 1960, 1961, 1962). Published in Great Britain by Oliver and Boyd Ltd. Edited for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Chapter 1: Prelude - Bread, Temple Pinnacles, and Shining Lands in the Desert Sands

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he afterwards hungered . . .

1. Vision in the Desert

These words begin a story rich in colour and meaning. Against the background of the desert, mysterious, utterly isolated and infinitely remote, two figures are struggling for a huge stake. Are they gambling or are they involved in a relentless battle in this solitary place? And what is the stake?

We know the reason of the conflict. Here in the midst of the desert far from the world of men, these two are struggling for the earth and for man. And this earth is my world and yours. And this Man -- is you and I. And those in conflict are God?s Son and Satan.

An hour later the conflict is decided. Beaten, discredited and conquered, one of the two figures leaves the field. In a mysterious vision later Jesus sees Satan fall from heaven like lightning (Luke 10.18). The reflection of this lightning flashes on the horizon of the desert, when the devil flees. For he has indeed taken flight, and only for a season (John 12.31; Rev. 20.1, 2, 10) is he permitted to remain in exile and to make the world unsafe (Rev. 12.9; 20.7), that world whose secret prince he is (John 12.31; 14.30; 16.11), and in whose atmosphere (Eph. 2.2), in whose nights (Eph. 6.12; Col. 1.13) and days (2 Cor. 11.14) he hides, and out of which he torments the disciples with rearguard-actions (I Tim. 4.1; 1 Peter 5.8), striving to make their hearts fail, and seeking whom he may devour.

And his opponent in the wilderness? Does he stride from this battlefield as we would expect: with head high and renewed might, crowned as the victor, and bearing a name which henceforth and visibly is to be set above every name (Phil. 2.9) ?

By no means; how different is this victory from those of men! He rises to his feet, and immediately sets forth on his via dolorosa. He, too, goes forth into the world. Once again he will have to contend with the powers of evil which rise against him. He goes through this world, which is a theatre of war and a battlefield between God and Satan. By winning his first victory he has entered this world. Christ will fight for the souls of the men he meets, whether they be publicans or Pharisees, fools or wise men, rich youths or poor men, working-class men or lords of industry, the hungry and thirsty or well-fed and safe -- he will fight for the souls of all these men alike, and he will die for all of them.

Thus does the victor in this fight take his way hence (Matt. 26.46), going straight towards his cross, as though God had forsaken him (Mark 15.34).

Is he not after all really the loser -- a bankrupt king who has gambled away his crown -- as he sets forth on his path from the desert to the cross? Has he not won a Pyrrhic victory? He travels the path beset with pain which leads to the cross, and not the way of glory and triumph which is also the way of God (for how can God?s progress be other than triumphal?).

Perhaps this contest in the desert was after all a drawn game. Perhaps in the long run the dread opponent will prove to have won the victory and regained his power over the world. Is there any man alive in the twentieth century who does not think that all the evidence points in this direction?

But something more happens in the desert when the two go their ways: ?The angels came and ministered unto him? (Matt. 4.11). He must after all have won the victory.

2. The Mystery of Temptation: Man as the god of God

We begin to feel that our own fate depends on the outcome of this struggle between Christ and the devil. And so we will try to pay due heed to what is said to us in the wilderness and to what happens to us. For our destiny is at stake: Jesus Christ who is fighting here is not only ?the mirror of the divine heart? (Martin Luther), but also of the human heart (Phil. 2.7), a mirror of our nakedness and vulnerability and of our poverty and imprisoned state (Matt. 25.35ff). Jesus Christ?s presence in the desert and his temptation hold a message for us: Look, through suffering and conflict the Son of God has become your human brother. For he bears the burden which oppresses you and which does more to shape your destiny than anything else in the world: Jesus suffers temptation with you. He shows you how life can be borne in its most critical and terrible hour -- the hour of temptation. By himself confronting the Evil One, he shows you how to recognise this dangerous crisis in your life and where to seek salvation.

How can temptation be the determining factor -- and the most deadly peril -- of our lives? For temptation is a deadly peril. What other possible interpretation is there of the petition (Matt. 6.13): ?Lead us not into temptation??

To be in temptation means to be constantly in the situation of wanting to be untrue to God. It means being constantly on the point of freeing ourselves from God. It means living constantly in doubt of God: ?How can I fulfil thy commandments, thou uncanny King? Let me go. Do not wise men collapse under this burden, as well as prophets and heroes? How can I change the thought in my heart (Matt. 5.28), thou dreadful searcher of this heart (Mark 2.8) ? I am not even master of my actions and am powerless when they slip out of control! (Rom. 7.19). If thou wert God, thou couldst not command all this, thou couldst not make us black and then demand that we become white! Art thou then God at all? Are God?s commandments really valid (Gen. 3.1) ? Is not this dreadful law the fruit of evil fancies??

Thus temptation gnaws at our hearts. It brings us almost to the point of freeing ourselves from God. We doubt his godhead and begin to remember that we are but human.

Or temptation attacks in a different way, and we say to ourselves: ?How can God send me this or that? (Certainly I understand why he should send me illness. That was indeed wisdom, for I needed it. Did I not need a damper? Did I not need time for reflection? Did I not need to experience pain in order to mature, and to see the face of death, in order to understand life, through which I stormed in ignorance of its abysses and its limitations? Certainly, I stood in need of all this and must regard it as wisely sent. And because suffering, when regarded from this angle, seems to have meaning and purpose, it may, after all, come from a wise and conscious providence; it may come from -- God.?

That is how I think about God. Aided by my intelligence, I make up my mind about him. I know how God ?must? act, in order to be really God. He ?must?, for instance, be wise (wise in a way I can understand). He ?must? act in a way that makes sense and is best for me. He ?must? enrich my life with happiness and perhaps also with suffering (we clever human beings also know something about the uses of suffering!). He ?must? preserve our nation, for our nation knows it is called to a mission in the world, and that God and providence can only exist when this mission reaches fulfillment. God ?must? do all kinds of things if he is to be acclaimed as the true God. God ?must? turn stones into bread. He ?must? be able to leap from the pinnacle of the Temple, if he is to be acclaimed as God. It would appear, therefore, that it is we ourselves who set the conditions which God must satisfy in order that we may proclaim him God. We are God?s masters.

In reality, exactly the opposite is true. The real truth -- which sounds astonishingly simple when expressed ?theoretically? -- is that, contrary to our illusions, God is our Master, and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts and his ways higher than our ways (Isa. 55.8f).

But although we are ready enough to concede this fact in theory, it looks very different when we meet it in everyday life, where our practice is diametrically opposed to our theory and we aspire to be the gods of God. And so we are immediately assailed by fresh doubts. For if we, who claim to be the measure of God, cannot understand his actions, we are tempted to ask: Did God really say this? Did God really do this? No -- if God really existed he would act in a way more in keeping with his divinity!

3. Job: The Torture and the Hourglass of the Tempter

This doubt assails everyone who has to bear the suffering of which we have been speaking until it becomes so unendurable that it seems to us completely senseless.

The tempter struck Job with many plagues; he took away his goods, his servants, his children. He cast him down from the height of a full and pious life (oh! how easy it is to be pious when life is easy) into the horrors of naked and hungry poverty. ?The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord? (Job 1.21). Yes; with the last of his strength Job grasps the meaning of what has befallen him; he hugs to himself the word of God which he reads out of this misfortune and clings to his consolation: ?It is God who speaks here; and He can give and take away. But how could I ever have understood and respected his treatment of me if he had not also taken away, and if he had not struck me down with a bitter blow? In that case he would have remained a pious adornment of my life and his service would have been an edifying cult in my rich house, but only an adornment, the God in the Sunday niche. Certainly, I would have lived honestly, and loved my neighbours and my friends; I would have worked hard and kept on good terms with him. But for all that he would never have been the real lord of my life: he would never have been that uncannily real Lord who can give and take away in ways past finding out, and whose decisions are above our capacity for understanding (Job 42.3). In no case would he have been for me that Lord whose decisions I would have upheld unswervingly as right in all things and in all circumstances. No; he would have been and remained a Lord with whom I would have disputed and quarreled and argued in my heart. (Job 42.4).

Job feels all this when God takes away his dearest possessions and his loved ones. And he holds fast to this pious thought, holds fast to it for a moment longer (even though doubt is already beginning to raise its voice within him) when the tempter comes again and takes away not only his property and his children, but even attempts his life and touches his bone and his flesh Job 2.5), when he touches the apple of his eye and smites him with boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head (Job 2.7).

So he sits in the ashes of his burnt goods and scrapes his smarting, disfigured skin (Job 2.8), and clings fast once more to the voice which resounds in all this: These evil and dreadful things, too, we must receive at his hands, just as we receive good things from him (Job 2.10). Or is it not goodness that we should have to learn through pain that everything -- everything, pleasant and painful alike -- comes to us at the hands and from the heart of God?

But then the stark senselessness of it comes home to him; and he can only think of the ashes and of his boils, his pitying friends and burning pains. And in the background stands the tempter and measures with the hourglass, interested to discover when the limit of endurance -- the human endurance of sufferings -- is reached: the sand runs on; but first Job desires to attain a maturer knowledge of God; he thinks he perceives what God desires to say to him through all the pain he has brought upon him. But the tempter puts on a superior smile. He is going to win the bet. It is clear to him that two things will work in his favour: time and pain.

He knows that the wish to become maturer through suffering can only mean that the victim is prepared to let his sufferings be ?a lesson? to him, just as Job allows himself to be taught by the loss of his possessions that they belong not to him but to God and that God can take them from him, and that consequently God desires to reveal himself as Lord of life and death and property, when he intervenes so painfully in our lives.

The tempter laughs at this pious reaction. ?Yes?, he thinks, ?we will wait for the moment when suffering has "taught" the good Job enough. That won?t take very long. The pious maxims which he utters in his misfortune, and which will be rubbed in again and again, will no longer be heard when his suffering goes on.? Aye, indeed; ?when his suffering continues?. The tempter is a good psychologist; he calculates thus: Job thinks that when he has learnt enough from his suffering (e.g. that God gives and takes away and is the Lord) the suffering will cease, because it will then have fulfilled its function. For if it simply continued, he would not learn anything more and it would no longer have any ?purpose?.

And so the tempter, when he proposes to attack in earnest, allows the suffering to exceed the limits of what a man can regard as reasonable. The moment at which he thinks it must stop because he has learnt enough is precisely the moment at which it does not cease; it goes on senselessly. Time is the most uncanny minister of this prince of darkness. Time saps our resistance. Not because it goes on so long, but because it is so meaningless, and because suffering which goes on and on turns into a grotesquely scornful question: ?What do you say now?? ?Where is now thy God?? (Ps. 43.3). ?Do you still think this suffering is sent by God? What sense do you see in it? How can it still, after all these months and years, "be for your good" ?? ?Are you really still holding on to your piety -- and for how much longer?? ?Curse God and die? (Job 2.9).

Time is one method employed by the dark tempter. As time goes on, suffering appears more and more senseless and senselessness is the strongest argument against God. For what did we say? By our very nature, we and our intelligence (the proclaimer of sense) appoint ourselves the lords and judges of God. In time we cease to see any sense in his actions, let alone any higher purpose behind them. Therefore: Curse God and die!

The methods of the tempter are at once clumsy and subtle.

At bottom he does nothing but play upon man?s natural attitude to God and push it to its furthest extreme. He simply makes use of the qualities of human nature, for by nature man desires to be lord and judge of God. God?s higher thoughts must always correspond -- and even adapt themselves -- to the thoughts of man, which man regards as having meaning. In this the tempter does nothing else but what we saw in Job: he leads man with the aid of time -- i.e. with the aid of longcontinued suffering -- to a point at which man can no longer see any sense in his sufferings, and certainly cannot understand how they can give him maturity and help him on his way. This is the point at which, with diabolic inevitability, his belief in God appears absurd, and he abjures God.

The tempter sees his success with Job. He sees it with the many children of men; he sees it in long wars (how full were the churches at the beginning of the last war and how empty they were at its close!); he sees it in long, incurable, and horrible diseases; he sees it in a cruel, incomprehensible death. The tempter sees all these things, and happily, with a triumphant gesture, strokes the hourglass in which he has imprisoned time.

4. The Doubter from the Beginning

His other method is pain. We all know that from our own experience. Suffering is only educative as long as we are of unclouded mind and retain the power of thought -- i.e. only as long as it serves us ?for reflection?. But this reflection ceases at once when purely physical pain passes a certain limit, the limit beyond which we are completely filled by it, and clench our teeth together convulsively or scream aloud, or wait -- shaken by fear and horror in the hollow of painlessness (which lasts for a second) for the approach of a new wave of agonising pain. And every misfortune and every fight, whether in a theatre of war, or in the course of civilian life at home, or in a hospital or an asylum, is indeed such a pain if it brings us again and again to that limit at which we are ?completely filled?, and lose even the power of questioning.

In such a situation, how can we possibly have edifying thoughts about sense or the lack of it, about the strength and maturity won through pain?

Yes, that is the tempter?s other thesis: that there is a degree of suffering at which one ceases to mature. And this pain is the other arrow in the enemy?s quiver: the pain which loses all meaning through its severity.

And therefore man, eager to bind God to him by his belief in God?s purpose -- i.e. by his belief in himself -- dethrones this God of his, as soon as he himself becomes nothing more than a heap of writhing pain.

Thus man is a doubting and a tempted being from the start. That is bound up with his nature as a man. For he is a fallen and a separated being and no longer the friend of God. He is so no longer, though he does not for an instant admit it even to himself, and invokes God?s name with the passionate fervour of Job, and although clouds of incense surround him like a mist which almost hides the flash of the cherub?s sword barring him from the garden in which he once felt the nearness of God.

So he must needs be a doubter from the very beginning of his journey, as indeed, from his cradle onwards, every single human being must be. He is for ever Job whose belief in God is shattered; for God is not as he believed him to be. His creed was no more than a cunning system of keeping account of a divine ?justice?, with a kind of moral world order which sees to it that it goes well with the pious and badly with the wicked. It was the belief that ?world-history is world-judgment? because a just God holds this world-history in his hand.

But God is not just in the accepted meaning of this belief which is now being tried and tested by being torn asunder. Yes, God is ?unjust?; he puts the pious Job, impoverished and disfigured, in a heap of ashes, where he scrapes his boils. And meanwhile villains prosper, and so do scoundrels and shirkers and thrusters, and the sun of God shines -- with painful ?injustice?on the good and on the evil (Matt. 5.45).

Yes, God is different from this belief; for this belief is belief in a purpose (e.g. in the purpose behind suffering) and God appears suddenly to have no purpose; we do not understand his ways and therefore we ask: Is God really there at all? Does God exist?

This belief is belief in the highest wisdom; and lo -- God is foolishness (I Cor. 1 . 18, 21).

This belief is belief in the glory of God and in his splendour; and lo -- God comes near to us despised and spat on and nailed to the tree of torment.

This belief is belief in miracles (I Cor.1.22); and lo -- God is silent (Matt.12.39) and does not descend from the cross (Matt. 27.40)

This belief is belief in a greatness in and above the world (I Cor. 1.22ff); and lo -- God is small and is an occasion of stumbling (Isa. 8.14).

This belief storms forwards and seizes hold of God?s robe; and lo -- God comes quietly, noticed by no one, through the back door of the world, and lies in the stable of Bethlehem.

This belief is belief in the day; and lo -- God comes by night, and is hidden from the wise and prudent (Matt. 11.25), but the Christmas shepherds -- the ?foolish ones? -- know him (Luke 2.7ff) -- and the demons (Matt. 8.29) and children (Matt. 21.16).

This belief is always, secretly and under cover, a belief in man himself; and lo -- God is God and not this human being.

Therefore this human being and all of us are doubting and tempted beings from the start. For we know that God breaks us to pieces before he raises us up. God drives us with scourges out of the temple of our self-worship and smashes the Babylonian tower of our pride before he becomes our Father. God plunges us into a sea of uncertainty about ourselves and our aimless unrest, before he gives us peace.

And we do not want anything in common with this God. We want a cheaper peace. Therefore we take the wings of the morning and flee unto the uttermost parts of the sea (Ps.139.9), flee into the drunken stupor of forgetting, in which we are no longer aware of the questioning, pursuing God, or of ourselves. We flee into the drunkenness of oblivion which we find in our work, or our daily round, or the anonymity of mass-existence, or alcohol, or sex, or the ceremonial of mass-life, in which, with fanatical enthusiasm, and surrounded by the noise of fanfares, we think we see the godhead above the stadium or the gigantic meeting-hall.

We are doubters from the beginning: we doubt God in the same measure as we believe in ourselves; and we have unbounded belief in ourselves. We believe for example in our immortality (Gen. 3.4), and that means presumably that we believe in our eternity and in the eternity of our race. And therefore we bite jubilantly into the forbidden fruit. Who can forbid us anything? Who has any right to say to us: ?Thus far, and no further!?? Has God that right? Are we not of his race, and do not earth and paradise belong to us?

We believe in our equality with God (Gen. 3.5) and therefore we say with the tempter, with the master of doubting, ?Hath God indeed spoken?? and we doubt God.

The hour of temptation is the hour in which we believe in ourselves, in which we cease to doubt ourselves, and therefore doubt God. That is our hour and the power of darkness (Luke 22.53). Thus does Holy Scripture teach of the breach of man with God.

5. The Yearning to be free of God

It is against the background of this biblical view of things that we must see the story of temptation.

Now we understand why man is tested and tempted from the beginning: because he believes in himself.

And we understand at last the meaning of the words ?man is in temptation?. He is constantly on the point of becoming unfaithful to God and making himself into God; he constantly desires to be free of God.

This wish to be free of God is the deepest yearning of man. It is greater than his yearning for God.

We are actually told that our rejection of God and our desire to be free of him is present in our piety, our yearning for God and even in the cunning use of God?s own words. How the tempter in the wilderness streams with God?s words! Why do the prophets thunder and preach against gods and idols, against cults and fetishes, and against the god ?Nature? and the god ?Fate?? Because all these are comfortable gods; because they are gods of rest and safety; because, being visible, no effort is needed to believe in them; because they affirm what man wants to have affirmed; they are nodding gods, and yes-sayers, and the originators of a pious intoxication which commits us to nothing, and of happy ecstasies. ?Great is Diana of the Ephesians!? (Acts 19.34); ?Hail to the other gods!?; ?Up for the dance round the goldencalf!? (Exod. 32.1ff); ?O Baal hear us!? (1 Kings 18.26); ?Fate, come upon us!?

That is the immense monotone that runs through all the utterances of the people in the Bible: There is no greater yearning in man than to fall away, and for his own ?deep, deep eternity?. That they knew; for that the martyrs among them died. And this monotone resounds again out of the ?Crucify him, crucify him? (Mark 15.13) which merely plays like a short dramatically moving wave above a ground which remains eternally the same.

The mystery of the world is that it hangs thus between God and the Adversary and is always on the point of going over to the Adversary. That is the hour of temptation. It is the hour of Earth, the hour of this age. Therefore God has to die for this world and the cross marks the boundary between eternity and time. God and world stand ?crosswise? to each other. This is the truth, and the images and likenesses of the gods are lies.

But God is fighting for us all. It is completely incomprehensible, but it is the case: God loves us. We cannot conquer him, for we are only flesh and blood (Matt. 16.17; 1 Cor.15.50); but he wrestles for us so sorely that the forehead of Jesus Christ is wet with sweat and blood (Luke 22.44).

But we should entirely misinterpret this fight of God for our souls (which the Bible proclaims to us) if we took it to mean that we are the fighters, wrestling, like Faust, for God -- that we are the God-seekers (Jer. 17.5). We could not seek God at all, if he had not already found us; we could not love him, if he had not first loved us (1 John 4.10, 19).

No, we are not the heroes in this fight. We are the battlefield rather than the heroes or the army. The fight is for us, for we are fleeing. We live in the hour of temptation. We live in a world which has a lord (John 12.31; 2 Cor. 4.4). We live ?at the point of departure?.

It is into this depth that Jesus has come to us. It is here that the dayspring from on high has visited us (Luke 1.78). Here in the desert he has endured this bitter fate with us.

This completes the background. Now we turn our attention to the two figures in the foreground -- Jesus and the tempter.

Jesus Christ came to us to suffer temptation, to suffer our fate with regard to God, and to become our brother. Let us go to him in the desert to see what he had to endure, and how he had to fight, so as thus to become our brother. Here we shall learn who we are and how it stands with this our world. The Bible always proceeds like this: how low we have fallen becomes clear to us in the effort God has had to make in order to help us. The theologians say: ?In the lowest depths it is made plain, not in the Law, but in the Gospel.?

The same thing happens here: who I am, who we human beings are, is made clear to us in the fact that Jesus must live through our life at its lowest point, that he has to be tempted in the same way as we are tempted (Heb. 4.15). Here, too, we learn who we are from the greatness of the effort which Jesus made and the suffering which he passed through for us by taking our place.

The desert is our world; the tempter is our tempter; the forty days and nights are our time, and we are Jesus, for here he stands in our stead. Who are we then, O God, who are we?

6. Led by the Spirit into the Wilderness

And Jesus was led into the wilderness by the spirit that he might be tempted of the devil.

We hear similar things of Moses; he was with the Lord forty days and forty nights and ate no bread and drank no water (Exod. 34.28). There he wrote the tables of the covenant. And amidst this solitude God spoke to him face to face, as a man speaks to his friend (Exod. 33.11). In this solitude something takes place on God?s side. It is the hour of the nearness of God.

The man of God, Elijah (according to the Scripture), is also strengthened by God in his temptedness, his despair and emptiness, and goes forty days and forty nights, sustained by divine food, to the mount of God. The Lord appears there to this tired, worn-out, tempted man. And he has -- contrary to expectation -- not the form of a wild storm and the powers of nature in irruption; no, he appears in the surprising form of a still, small murmur of the wind (I Kings 19.12). He is different, quite different from what the prophet hoped.

Like all the people of the Bible before him -- and this is probably not unintentional, and is again the background of the event in the wilderness -- Jesus, too, is now led into the stillness of the forty days and nights, to a tremendous encounter. But before he meets God, and before the angels come to minister to him, and before the joy of heaven shines upon him, he must first meet the ?Other One? and stand fast.

No other person has ever seen the ?Other One? thus, so dreadfully near, so unmistakably real -- not Moses nor Elijah nor any man. And yet he stands behind us all, and is the secret prince of this world. But precisely because he is thus the prince of our world, we ourselves stand here with Jesus in the desert, and know that our own fate is at stake.

It seems to me very important that the tempter meets the Lord in the solitude of the desert. It is an unimaginable solitude, and not only are human beings absent -- companions, parents, friends and strangers. Things too are absent; no traffic flows round him; no landscape holds his attention; there is nothing which he can inspect with interest; he cannot work; there is no entertainment for him. There is nothing at all, not even food and drink. Only the sand and the desert are round him.

And it is precisely here that he is tempted, where he cannot be distracted, led astray, or fascinated by anything. Could the tempter not have seized upon a more favourable moment? Why did he not choose the hour when the people desired to make him king (John 6. 15) ? Or when he hung on the cross and had the opportunity to descend (Mark 15.32)? Or when he stood before Pilate and knew, in the moment of extremest stress, that he could call more than twelve legions of angels to the rescue (Matt. 26.53) ? Were not those hours of greater temptability? Were there not here stimuli, exciting chances, and fascinating glimpses into dreamlike possibilities? And yet the tempter comes here in the wilderness, into the greatest of all solitudes, in an hour which does not lie, like the others, at the dangerous zenith of life.

It seems to me that precisely this solitude needs to be meditated on. In it appears the mystery of temptation. It is not merely a painted scene, a theatrical background created by the biblical narrator. No, ?the Holy Ghost leads Jesus into the wilderness?. We must meditate on what this solitude may mean. How should the Spirit of God do something ?without meaning??

7. The Babylonian Heart

What goes on in us when we are tempted?

We can best make this clear to ourselves by quite simple and ordinary forms of temptation, as for instance by the fact that we are tempted to lie, to steal, to be vain, to be pretentious, or to commit adultery. First -- it seems -- there is always an opportunity which attracts and entices us, which?tempts? us. ?Opportunity makes thieves? says folk-wisdom, tersely and correctly. The Bible tells us the same by throwing a sharply penetrating light on the temptation of Adam and Eve. There is an unusually marked opportunity for sinning there; for in the midst of the garden stands a tree of whose fruits one may not eat (Gen. 2.17; 3.3). It is beset with the dangerous lure of mystery. And its mystery is a continual alluring call to the eternal and untamable urge in man to uncover every mystery. It is a call to that curiosity which inspires science and technology, which conquers the earth (Gen. 1.26), and in its deepest depths strives to disturb and ?clear up? the mystery of the Most High.

Nevertheless it was not the apple, with its alluring mystery, that ?was guilty? of the Fall. Who else was guilty of it but Adam and Eve themselves? Man and not the apple was dangerous in that paradisal hour. His avid desire to be like God, his measureless hunger for equality with God, which was not content with mere likeness, and with being formed ?in the image of God?, brought catastrophe.

The serpent was not dangerous, nor was the apple; there was no danger at all from outside; he himself was his own danger. His Promethean heart that exploded was the charge of dynamite. That which comes ?from without? does not make man unclean; it does not touch him, or touches him at most like a tangent, and somehow does not belong to him (Matt. 15.11ff). But what flows out of his heart, out of himself, can cause him to die and depart from grace. ?For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, thefts, false witness, blasphemy? (Matt. 15.19)

Then the serpent and the apple have only a little piece of work to do; the apple has nothing to do but smile a little at this over-full, thrusting heart, and let its own bright charms sway to and fro in the morning breeze, in order to be a last and ultimate cause of stumbling for this heart, already ripe for its wanton theft.

And the serpent has only to drop a little poison into his heart and so start a chemical process by which the image of this heart becomes visible and clear, just as the image on a photographic plate develops, although it was ?there? before.

Here we see the secret of temptation; the tempter is already enthroned in our hearts and rouses us to murder and theft (Mark 7.21-3). And the opportunity, which makes thieves, and every other external element, are mere auxiliaries and reinforcing manoeuvres for his power -- but not this power itself.

This we experience again and again in ourselves; when for the sake of our professional career we are tempted to deny a conviction; when we lie, or become dumb dogs when we ought to speak; when we are tempted to remove or to wish removed from our path one who is more able than we; when we ?look upon a woman to lust after her?, when all this rises up in our hearts, to become in the next moment a horrible deed, crime, or mean action -- then perhaps we succeed, in defiance (yes, in defiance!) of our impulse, in dominating the greed and mastering the temptation. Then perhaps we tame ourselves and perform, instead of the evil deed already crouching for the leap, what the traditional language of the Church calls ?a good work?. And so it may happen that from all this something is produced, i.e. a ?work?, in which we cannot perceive the struggle, the temptation, and the horrible abyss over which it hung, and into which it nearly plunged.

But who could boast of these ?works?? Who of all those who stand in face of the law of God, and that means before his eyes, could ever forget that in them lay hidden this potential capacity for abysmal evil -- this feverish readiness, as of a mysterious beast crouching ready to spring, and raising its head in fearsome fashion; who could forget that he was a murderer, in being angry with his brother (Matt. 5.21ff); that he was an adulterer, in that he looked upon a woman to lust after her (Matt. 5.27ff); that he swore falsely in that he said more than yea, yea, or nay, nay (Matt. 5.33ff) ? The secret of temptation lies within ourselves, in the thoughts of our hearts. It lies in the fact that we are ?temptable?.

8. The Moral Sortie out of Babylon

This alone is the reason why so-called good works cannot help us. Perhaps it really is the case that with the help of these good works we overcame our temptation; perhaps we really do help a poor epileptic, when we would rather have hated and despised him for his repulsive fits and his impaired intellectual condition. Perhaps we do pull ourselves up at the last moment and remind ourselves that it is Christ who meets us even in this beggar?s garb, and that his painful cross is erected over this poor life also. Perhaps we do help him now, lay a hand on his head and speak kindly to him. But have we, in so doing, overcome the temptation itself? Have we filled up the abyss which we saw yawning within our heart in the moment of temptation, when we were ready for murder and lying and euthanasia? Woe to him who thinks thus! It would be a deceitful and prideful illusion to think that this ?good work? killed temptation, that it could justify us, and that we might boast before him who knows the heart, and whom not one of the surgings or beats of this heart escapes (1 Cor. 1.29; 2 Cor. 9.4; Eph. 2.9). This man should be told that his good work, with all its dazzling goodness, is, among other things, just a camouflage for his heart; that he hides his evil heart from himself and others -- and from God himself -- by means of good works. But inwardly he is full of all defilement, full of hypocrisy and evil-doing (Matt. 23.27f).

That is the curse of those who wish to justify themselves by works. They overcome temptation with the great bravery of Pharisees -- and yet remain tempted, remain men in whom the abyss yawns and the wound bleeds and the chain with which they are fettered rattles. No man can leap over his own shadow.

Here the secret of temptation becomes quite plain; it is not thrown into us from without by apples and serpents and ?opportunities?, as a torch is thrown into a temple; no, we ourselves are the tempted, and are always in temptation, even before the opportunity arises.

9. The Mirage of the Heart

For this reason we cannot run away from temptation, but can only pray that God will not lead us into temptation; for we cannot flee from it by fleeing into ?good works?, in order to put ourselves right with God by such ?works of the Law? (Rom. 3.20, 28; Gal. 2.16), and so clear our account with him. That is impossible, because wherever and however far we flee, we take ourselves with us -- we remain the tempted, those who are on the point of deserting, the unprotected frontier.

And as a result we cannot flee from temptation by fleeing opportunities for sin; it is of no use to forsake the so sinfully fair world in the foolish belief that the world with its temptations is out there, and not rather within us, in our own Babylonian heart:

And all man?s Babylons strive but to impart 
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.

It is of no use to flee from the world so that this world of temptation does not cause a disturbance in our breast, in that remote cloister, which we are pleased to regard as the rock of refuge on that flight.

No, there is no solitude and no desert into which we can flee to escape temptation; the world is where we are, and our heart is nothing else but the microcosm of this world. Therefore the lusting and the tempting and the attracting and the alluring always go with us (Gal. 5.17; Jas. 1.14).

It is good to be clear about this. For only thus do we realise that in all stories of temptation you and I are the theme, not the wicked world outside or the ?evil scoundrels? (Prov. 1.10), or the serpents and apples. No, it means you and me when there is talk of temptation; it is our corporeal flesh that lusts against the Spirit (Gal. 5.17). It is our ?right eye? that offends us, and our hand that tempts us (Matt.5.29).

The point I wish to emphasise here is that this is the great implication of the fact that Jesus is solitary and apart, that he had to go into the desert to be tempted.

Here in the desert is the unmistakably solitary confrontation of God?s Son with the tempter. Here all misunderstandings are excluded; there is no question of temptation being something external and accidental, as if it were a bit of the world and a bit of besotting tinsel. Where could there be found in all the sand, in all the silent endlessness, something which could entice and infatuate the Son of Man?

No, misunderstandings of that kind are here impossible.

10. The Horror of Solitude

It is the man in him that is tempted here ?like unto us? (Heb. 4.I5). It is the man who is hungry and sees mountains of bread which would still his anguish; but where would there be real bread in this desert which might lead him astray? It is the man in him who sees the pinnacle of the Temple and a fantastic prospect opened to his ambition; but how in this desert could the real Temple be seen whose pinnacle might have led him astray? No, lurking ambition, the thought in his own heart, produces that image; the way of temptation goes from within outwards, not vice versa, and the Temple is a projection. It is the human being in him that hungers and thirsts to be a Lord and God of this world; already he stands on a high mountain and sees the glorious land and hears the promise that all this shall belong to him, if. . . But where is there in this desert a real mountain from which he could look down, and where in this desolate wilderness are those shining lands to be seen? No, here the lurking, crouching, tigerish hunger for an infinite kingdom, for boundless power and stupefying splendour, the secret thought of the heart, still in process of being conceived and not yet definitely formulated, paints the picture of incredible possibilities -- a mad mirage of the heart.

Yes, the human being in him feels desire and is tempted. The man in him lusts, amid the joyless environment. Therefore all misunderstandings are here excluded. Therefore it is clear where temptation lies; it does not lurk without, but is within; it is not in front of us and has no open visor, but comes from behind and stands at our back. It is not some external Satan who stands between God and us; we ourselves stand between God and us, since the evil one ?possessed? us, just as the man in Christ stands here between him and God.

And do not we human beings know this only too well ourselves? Did not the rich young man know it, too (Mark 10.17ff) ? In the last resort it was not his riches but he himself that stood between God and him; for he allowed himself to be possessed by riches. It was he himself who could not possess riches, as though he did not possess them (1 Cor.7.30), and who was frightened to death when he was told to sell all that he had. Not his riches, but his having sold himself to riches was the weak spot (Matt. 6.24). Thus, too, Mammon is not the real wall which divides God and us, but we ourselves are that fiery zone in which we are possessed by those false lords -- slaves who have sold ourselves and are enslaved by the urge to be emperor and king and God. It is not the Tower of Babel that divides us from God: that is only a parable, a parable of our will to be separated from God, projected into the external world. It is this will which builds the tower.

11. The Vulnerable Point

Only the fact that we ourselves are the tempted and the wounded can explain why we all (and particularly we modern folk) have such a vast fear of being alone. We know that we stand here confronted by ourselves. We must look into our own eye, and is there anyone we fear more than ourselves? It is no longer possible to push away all the decisive elements in our lives and all that puts guilt on us. We say: ?The woman thou gavest me . . . ? She did this thing (Gen. 3.12) No, it was you yourself. ?The serpent beguiled me and I did eat? (Gen. 3.13). No, you beguiled yourself. ?The Fate in my breast or the cosmically determined Fate out there did it?, thus the tragedians cry. No, it was you, and you alone. ?It was the character that thou gavest me.? (Here ?character? is to be understood always as something existing outside me, something detachable from me, something which overpowered me) -- thus cries the accused, pleading diminished responsibility, mitigating circumstances.

Therefore the unredeemed man fears solitude, because there is nothing that he can appeal to here; he is confronted with himself as with a kind of mysterious ?double?, and there is nothing else but a great silence. Yes, he can only enter this solitude holding a cross in front of him, just as medieval man warded off the demonic powers with the crucifix.

This is the mystery of solitude, that here man stands at the point of his fatal temptation and gazes at himself out of a thousand mirrors, like one imprisoned in a ?Hall of Mirrors?.

It is for this reason that the student flees from his ?digs?, and turns into the anonymous stroller of the High Street, and creeps away into caf?s; he is afraid of himself.

It is for this reason that the week-end tourist, travelling by himself, takes his portable radio with him; the little box gives him the illusion that he is not alone.

It is for this reason that we -- particularly we Christians, the more tempted we are -- flee into our work, into the stupefying turmoil, into pleasure and lust, but at any rate into something. And has this flight not already become part of a programme in our public life, throughout this century and in all civilised lands? Isn?t everything organised, even our freedom? Is there not everywhere a crowd waiting, into which we can plunge intoxicated, enraptured, orgiastic, raving, self-forgetting, abandoning everything, in a fashion only possible in the crowd, which carries one and lets one sink like an immense wave, and so makes one happy --immeasurably happy?

And is this twentieth century style of life not a dreadful token that we have lost grace -- that we do not dare to be alone, but flee from the face of God, that might fall upon us and seize hold upon our identity? Thus we flee into the motley turmoil, flee into the onrushing programme of our work-days and holidays, flee into everything into which we can sink, with which we can excuse and ?justify? ourselves, just as Adam did: Look -- the spirit of the age to which I was subjected; look at the crowd in whose flow I drifted with no will of my own, . . . look, look, look, . . .

That is the point: we cannot endure solitude because our relation to God is out of order. In the hour of solitude it becomes clear that there is nothing between heaven and earth to which we could appeal. And therefore we do not let this last solitude, in which Jesus stands here in our stead, ever break upon us, but prevent this by all means in our power. We never allow it to reach this point, just as we never allow ourselves to come face to face with God the Creator, but always fly to the non-dangerous gods, exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal men or birds or animals or reptiles (Rom. 1.18ff). But at bottom and secretly man knows -- in the company of these his gods -- that there is a God who has known us (1 Cor. 13.12) and who is a consuming fire; man knows this even when he actively avoids exposing himself to God. And at bottom and secretly he knows, too, how perilous is this last solitude, this confronting of oneself alone and being handed over to God naked and alone, even though by nature we never expose ourselves to that solitude, but prudently and timidly stay in the company of others.

Does not the deepest mystery of the fear of death lie here too ? The decisive characteristic of death is the fact that it brings the hour of greatest solitude. Men and things are left behind. King and beggar, rich man and Lazarus are quite alone. It is like falling off a ladder. We grasp at a rung, but suddenly find that all the rungs have gone, and we grasp at the empty air. There is no cheque-book which we could flourish in the face of our creditors. And the crowd into which we plunged remains behind, beyond our reach. And the spirit of the age (how it carried us along, and how little we knew where we ended and it began!), the spirit of the age broods over waters from which we have long, long ago departed, and which now carry us no longer. That is the profoundest solitude, and therefore do we fear death. For now God will have us, even if we have him not. And for that reason even poetry veils this death and hedges it about with conciliatory illusions, and dreams of a transition to another form of this life, with new hiding-places and battlefields and barricades, new crowds and spirits and intoxicating cups.

12. Jesus our Fate

Thus, then, we fear solitude and death, because there we are faced with the hour when we are alone with our guilt and are called upon to pass judgment on ourselves. And therefore death and solitude can only be borne -- without illusions -- if the grace of God supports our life and he is our Saviour who has trodden death and hell and all their powers beneath his feet. Only thus can we go into the wilderness; only thus can we confront ourselves, as the Son of God does here: by letting the Word fight for us (Matt.4.7, 10) and not our flesh and blood (Matt. 16.17); and that means, in the last resort, by letting God fight for us, because we may have him for our friend and be at peace with him. Death, where is thy sting (1 Cor.15.55)? God is here, Christ is here (Rom. 8.33ff).

Thus we understand why Christ was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to suffer temptation as we do. We fear solitude, which is always solitude before the eyes of God, for here the truth of our lives bursts open unrestrained. It is this bursting open of human abysses (and that means of the abysses between God and man) that Christ endures here in our stead.

Jesus lives out our life in its most mysterious part, in its solitude, before us, as our example. Therefore there is now not one point in our life, not even the most diabolical or most tediously ordinary, at which we could still be lonely if we have Jesus for our Lord. He is our brother in temptation and solitude, he is man ?like unto us?; he has brought God down into this solitude, and has defeated the tempter. He is brother and Lord. Therefore we will go with him into the wilderness and pass with him through the stages of his temptation and his deathly solitude, as pious pilgrims kneel at the stations of his passion.

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