Evil never rests. For protection, turn to Christ.

Our family spent 3 years up in Sewanee, Tennessee.  It is a famously beautiful place.  The woods are pretty, with a wide variety of flowering trees. This time of year the daffodils are lighting up the woods with bright yellow blossoms that told us spring was on its way.

It also has beautiful birds; neon yellow gold finches and bright blue ones, too. We had bluebirds, several types of woodpeckers and we had a family of about a dozen cardinals that were the brightest scarlet red I’ve ever seen.  And our favorites were the hummingbirds.

So, naturally, we wanted to see more of them, so we went out and got some nice bird feeders – thistle seed for the finches, hummingbird feeders, regular birdseed for the rest.  We knew we had a lot of squirrels in the neighborhood, big squirrels, so when we bought the bird feeders, we got the “squirrel proof” ones.  Yeah.  Right. That’s when the trouble started.

I assume those squirrel-proof bird feeders were designed by highly trained and qualified engineers, each doing his or her level best, but those squirrels beat every one of them.  They couldn’t figure out the biggest one, so instead they just dive-bombed it so it would scatter the seed on the ground.  They liked the regular bird seed, the thistle seed for the finches, and they even liked the sugar water for the hummingbirds.

So I went and got some poles to hang the feeders on instead of the trees. Someone suggested I grease the poles with Vaseline.  I did. That was no help.  It was funny, but they’d just climb as high as they could, slide down, and do it again and again until the Vaseline was gone.

So I decided to try training the squirrels.  I figured that if I could convince them to associate these feeders with danger, they’d stay away from them. I waited around the corner of the house one day with the kid’s t-ball bat - one of those foam ones – and when a big squirrel was on the feeder, I threw it and WHAM it hit the feeder so hard it had to have given him a heart attack. Three minutes later he was back up there. 

Someone told me about squirrel guards you could put on the pole, but of course they were sold out. I finally figured out that if I made a cone out of metal flashing to block the poles, and positioned the feeders away from the trees, we’d be o.k.  So I did it, and it worked.

Now the real fun began. We could enjoy the birds and we could sit and watch these squirrels try to figure a way to beat those cones.  Once the squirrels lined up, 5 or 6 of them, along a branch near and high above the feeder.  They kept running from spot to spot.  Eventually each would, in turn, dive for the feeder.  Again and again and again until one made it.  Once one made it, then they all could do it.  Until I moved the feeder another foot away.

It was then that I realized what was happening.

You see, it wasn’t that the squirrels were smarter than me.  They certainly weren’t smarter than the engineers who had designed the squirrel-proof feeders. But the squirrels had all day, every day, to work on the problem.  They never rested until they found a way.

That’s the way evil works, too.  Evil never rests. It will attack any and every way it can, always at hand to slip into any weakness we might have.  It will attack our family, even our children.  It is always ready to chop at the very roots of our faith, always ready to turn our strengths against us. 

In this Gospel passage we see the devil doing just that.  He’s always doing that. According to Matthew, Mark and Luke the very first thing that happens to Jesus after his baptism is that he gets led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The first thing Jesus does is take on evil.

The devil takes three beautiful things and tries to twist each of them into a trap for Jesus. Each of them ties back to temptations Israel faced in the wilderness with Moses and failed to resist. And each of these areas are basic to human needs.

Jesus is hungry, famished, so the devil tempts him with one of the basic needs of life: food.  It’s a simple thing.  Food is good.  Come on, you can do it!  Just turn these stones to bread!  Do that and you can feed yourself.  Keep doing it and you could feed the world. Israel faced hunger in the wilderness, too, and God provided manna, then quail.

He takes him to the height of the temple and confronts Jesus to test his father’s protection.  Come on, prove it!  He’s promised to protect you.  Just try it!

Then he shows him all the kingdoms in their glory.  There’s a beauty in this world of the things that humanity can do.  It ought to be good, and you can have it all.

But in each case Jesus keeps his eye on the ball.  Where Israel, God’s people, have failed, he wins. He is able to recognize the evil in the devil’s schemes and deftly steps away from them by one simple rule – nothing bumps him from his Father’s will. Nothing.

Now do you suppose Satan took his lumps and slipped away, never to be heard from again?  No.  Luke’s Gospel tells us he went away until “a fitting time.”  And actually as we look at the gospels, we realize that sin was lurking at every turn in Jesus’ ministry.  He didn’t have any cracks.  He didn’t fail. We do.

What’s the answer?  How can we get through this life with that constant tempter nipping at our heels and undermining or twisting every good thing into a snare for us?  Here are 3 suggestions:

1.   Follow Jesus’ example and keep our eye on the ball.  When we see or hear or feel something we know is not right, we have two simple questions to ask:  does it honor my love for God and my neighbor?

2.  Actively seek Christ’s protection, help and guidance.  He promised to be with us, so it’s not as though you are alone.  Lean on him daily.

3.  Remember that in the long run this war against sin is won already.  We may lose a battle from day to day.  We may not see any sense in the world around us.  We may go through periods of time where we don’t feel any victory at all.  Thank God our salvation is not based upon our feelings.  It is based upon him; his faithfulness; his gift of faith to us that won’t let us go. Where we fail, he wins.

Jesus says, simply, “Believe in God, believe also in me.”  Repent, turn back to him. He’s got us.

AMEN