[AI translation] My Christian Brothers and Sisters!
The whole spiritual life of a Christian man is similar to the life of the soldiers who are fighting the enemy on different fronts. Just as a soldier must be ready at any moment to attack or to repel an attack, so the Christian man must be alert to the fact that at any moment he will have to engage in battle with his ancient enemy, Satan, and all his mighty ones.
The more ground Satan has lost in a man's heart, the more he will seek to regain it, and therefore the more vigorously he will attack. That is why it is precisely the Christian man, the man who loves God, who is attacked again and again by Satan with his thousand temptations.
So why should he tempt, why should he harm, one whom he knows to be separated from him, and therefore no longer his own, for one who is his own anyway, such a man serves him anyway! It is not, therefore, that once I have decided in favour of God, I have once and for all settled my business with Satan, but that I must repeat that once-for-all decision between God and Satan again and again, every time I have to do so.
Have you not noticed, my brother, that you are constantly torn between the pull of two different powers in everything you do, and that you are always faced with the decision to say yes to one and no to the other? Man cannot say no to Satan until he has said yes to God!
You can't say no to both at the same time, or say yes to both at the same time - you can't say yes and no at the same time, because you can't serve two masters at the same time! Who do you say yes to and who do you say no to? That is what your salvation depends on, here and now, and especially where you will spend eternity!
So the problem of temptation is a serious one for all of us. Temptation is different for the young and for the old. It is one thing for the sick and another for the healthy. There is one temptation in war and another in peace. There is one temptation for the learned man and another for the unlearned. But it is everywhere and it is everywhere, and Satan is always inventing new and ever more subtle tricks to get his temptation to come near us!
Jesus was also attacked by the Tempter. His story is instructive not only because it shows us the various forms of temptation, but also because it exposes the temptation itself, the very essence of eternal temptation, and thus teaches us how to defend ourselves against it. Because it is only possible to defend oneself against the recognized danger!
It is the tempter who disturbs the long spiritual silence of Jesus, who has withdrawn into the wilderness, and alerts Jesus, who is absorbed in spiritual things, to the desires and needs of the flesh. We can almost hear him insidiously whispering in his ear (because he says the same thing to us) that he has had enough of praying, think of your health, you can't go completely broke, you don't need to overdo the praying, stop it, take a rest, eat something, you are hungry, tired, exhausted.
Yes, it's good to know that Satan always covets the time you want to spend with God. He wants to disturb our devotions at all costs. There is no sight more terrifying to him than a man sitting in church praying, reading his Bible. He comes between us and God, he makes us think so much, he gives us so much work to do, that we cannot be at peace to meditate and to do God.
How skilfully he does it is shown by the sad result he has already achieved: almost everyone, when I ask him if he has the habit of daily quietness before God, defends himself by saying that he has no time for it. This nervous rush of the big cities is nothing but the beating of Satan's heart in this world, his eternal ambition to disturb the devout quiet of people and families.
Moreover, Satan even makes you believe that you are a hard-working man, conscientious in your great occupation, only to make you realize that he leaves no time or rest for your daily devotions!
Satan, however, is not content with interrupting Jesus' devotions, he wants a much greater result. He says: "if you are the Son of God, tell the stones to turn into loaves." It's as if he's saying: you claim to be the Son of God, why can't God take better care of you, why can't God tolerate your misery, why can't he do a miracle so that at least you don't starve? Your situation, your outward circumstances, your poverty, are really not in keeping with your sonship with God.
So, Satan wants to shake your trust in God in Jesus, he wants to show you that divine providence is not enough, because you are hungry, so try to help yourself in some other way, in some easier way: turn stones into bread.
Examine your soul, my brother, whether your trust in God has not been shaken, for if it has, Satan has a winning hand over you. We fall into the selfish error of measuring the greatness of God's goodness and providence by whether we have everything we need for a comfortable, happy life.
If we don't have it, if we are sick, if we are in danger, if we have to suffer: all at once Satan takes advantage of the situation: well, you trusted in God, why doesn't he help you now? If there is a God, help him now, and if there is not, seek to relieve yourself, with him, arbitrarily.
Many people are not satisfied with the bread that God provides, but want to turn stones into bread. This happens today in that they are not satisfied with what they earn by honest labour, but hope to get a bigger piece of bread from a lottery ticket, a horse race or a card game. He is not satisfied with the food and clothing he gets for his tickets, but he makes a lot of money by using the black market, instead of trusting in the daily bread from God. This is what it means to turn stones into bread.
All this is nothing less than a shaking of trust in God, or in other words, a total triumph of Satan! This is exactly what Satan wanted! I wonder if it worked for you! Why didn't you resist the devil and make him run away from you?! Or did you resist: do you have complete trust in God, that God will take care of you, your family, our nation, our country, our soldiers?
Don't let Satan shake that trust in God! Only a people who have absolute trust in God's providence can weather the storm! God did not forget His Son during the forty days of famine - He will not forget us either, if our trust in Him is not shaken!
When Satan saw that Jesus was using a biblical Word to ward off temptation, he tried to use the same weapon against Jesus. "If thou be the Son of God, submit thyself: for it is written, He shall command His angels concerning thee, and they shall bear thee in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."
As if to say, never mind any danger, boldly declare that you are the Messiah, defy the anger and jealousy of the chief priests, mock Pilate's soldiers, refuse to pay tribute to Caesar, if you are the Son of God, your heavenly Father must stand by you in every peril anyway!
By rejecting this temptation, Jesus is declaring that He will only avail Himself of God's wonderful saving grace in situations where God wants to save Him - that is, He does not want to force divine help, He does not want to abuse divine power, He wants to renounce the use of divine protection in any situation that would not be according to God's plan. He does not want to tempt God!
Satan will not spare us from this temptation. We, too, sometimes want to dictate to God how He should watch over us. We make a plan for our lives, we forge and arrange the chariot of our lives according to our own design, and then we ask God to pull it. We expect the Lord to put his divine power at our disposal to take care of our troubles. We mess up our lives and expect Him to run to us all at once, like a mother runs to a little child and picks him up when he has fallen. "Do not tempt your Lord your God," Jesus says to the Tempter.
Examine your prayers, the things you used to ask of the Lord. Most prayers go unanswered because we cannot submit our will to God's will, our thoughts to God's thoughts, because our prayers lack the spirit that Jesus warned us to pray: your will be done on earth as it is in heaven!
I cannot determine and mark for God how and when to show His power, I have no right to expect anything from Him. As soon as I am bound to act for Him, I tempt Him! I cannot impose my will on God. I can count on His help, and we can entrust ourselves to it, but we cannot impute His help to Him!
After two unsuccessful attempts, Satan tries a third time to tempt Christ. We read that "he showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory." We know well that there is no mountain on earth so high as to offer such a panorama, so he is casting some satanic miracle before Jesus' eyes.
But Satan always does this: he conjures up a deceptive rainbow, a mirage, so that the soul is amazed! Unfortunately, almost everyone realizes too late that the Satanic promise was a deceptive deception!
Satan's greatest desire is that man should give him the honour that is due to God alone, he wants to take God's place at all costs. This he has already thoroughly succeeded in doing. Have you not noticed how many positions of authority and control he has occupied where God should have had a place?!
The most important question now is, who sits on the throne of your heart, who your children obey, who your family serves, who you allow to have a say in your work? The most dangerous thing here is that Satan is content to have one serve God in appearance and him in heart!
Have you ever thought that Jesus can be betrayed with a glance, a wave of the hand, a concession of principle, a compromise? Some things a hair's breadth of concession is a betrayal of Christ! Either you are a whole man on God's side - or you are all Satan's. No other case is possible. God has a total claim on you, He wants to share your heart with no one.
Jesus answered all Satan's attacks with, "It is written." He took a divine Word from his soul and clung to it. He held it up to Him like a shield. You cannot defend yourself against temptations without the power of God's Word.
A man alienated from the Bible is unarmed and at the mercy of his greatest enemy. The apostle Paul says of the gospel of God that it is the power of God unto salvation to every believer. God communicates His power, His might, to us through His Word, He pours it into us through His Word.
It is from this Word that I learn that Jesus Christ not only conquered the tempter in His life, but by His death and resurrection Satan became for me a defeated enemy. It is written that Jesus Christ came to destroy the works of the devil in you and for you (cf. 1 John 3:8).
Only those who hear this word of God, this Word of God, can say no to Satan and say yes to God. What good can his family, his nation expect from one who has said yes to Satan? It is not only your own salvation or damnation, but the happiness or misery of a family, a people, a nation, that depends on whom you personally say yes or no to!
Our lives are always a series of renewed choices. In the midst of these decisions, if you feel tempted by a power that exceeds your strength, think immediately of the even greater power of divine grace!
Amen.
Date: 14 February 1943.