“Consider the wonderful promise of v. 7. Submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. But if we have superficial views of the nature of our relationships, and the nature of our conflicts, and the nature of our desires, then we can apply this verse until we turn blue, and the devil will not flee at all. He will just sit there leering at you. And he will make comments and suggestions to you from time to time, because he likes to watch you twitch.”
Almost Gone Already
“Come now, ye big movers and shakers—you don’t know that your entire life is a little wisp of fog by the side of the road at seven a.m. that will be gone in forty-five minutes, as soon as the sun gets over the trees.”
Every Time You Let Go of the Wheel
“The spirit in us veers toward envy, like the front end of a car that needs to be aligned.”
The Devil in Disguise
“The devil is a moralist. The devil is self-righteous. The devil is an angel of light. The name Lucifer means light-bearer. Who could be against that? The devil is censorious. The devil disapproves of us and likes it when we disapprove of one another. The devil is a Pharisee. The devil is the accuser of the brethren, accusing them day and night before the throne (Rev. 12:10). And this means we should be far more concerned than we usually are about the danger of becoming like the devil. It is easier than it looks because it is far nobler than it sounds.”
One of the Great Miracles
“Remember the perfections of Jesus, and marvel at this crowning perfection—the fact that He was not totally exasperated all the time, in every conversation He ever had.”
What Makes Satan’s Factories Hum
“Preaching a propitiatory sacrifice is something that disrupts the way of the world. It unhinges how the world works. It gets in the way; it jams the signal. It cuts of the power that makes all the machinery in Satan’s factories hum so nicely.”
Going On All the Time
“This is the kind of thing have when you have two men, the best of friends, calling in love with the same girl. It happens when you have twin brothers wanting the favor or blessing of their father or the rule of the city. It happens when one church is enormously blessed where the other church across town ‘should have been.’”
The Way of the Old World
“Mimetic rivalry and conflict have taken root in that society as the ultimate contagion, and the hostility ratchets steadily upward. The ‘old way’ of dealing with this was to allow the crowd to spontaneously choose a victim, in whose guilt they had to absolutely believe. They killed or exile this person in a spasm of righteousness, and the cathartic effect takes effect. Peace is restored. It is fitting that one man die for the sake of the people, as one operator of this system once put it.”
VIrgins and Volcanoes
“We are living two millennia after Jesus died. Victimage still goes on, certainly, but not the robust way it did back when respectable people could still throw virgins into volcanoes” ().
And It Does Too
“One time many years ago, I went to a football game with my father. We entered the dome, where all the fans were whooping and hollering and carrying on, and my dad looked around—with a true instinct for this kind of thing—and said, ‘Well, it beats a public hanging.’”