This past week, my wife Susan and I had the privilege of taking care of our 2 ½ year old granddaughter while her parents were out of the country.  I was reminded how often we respond to God as if we are 2 ½ years old.  What I saw play out over and over every day and night was the Eden Syndrome.  You remember the first temptation ever recorded in scripture was the account of the cunning serpent (Satan) and Eve.  His strategy was simple.  Get Eve to doubt the goodness of God and the goodness of his intentions for her.

The moment the serpent said, “Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden,” he began to plant a seed of doubt.  I’m sure his emphasis was on “really,” as if to say, “I know God and it doesn’t surprise me one bit that he would keep all these good things from you.” One of Satan’s primary strategies from the beginning has been to convince us that God keeps many good things from us, the best things, things that would make us happy.  We see the commands of God as restrictions that keep us from being all we could be or that keep is from the happiness we need or deserve.  The truth is that God’s commands are not restrictions, but protections.  They are guardrails are meant to keep us on the road and out of the ditch.  I don’t know about where you live, but in Midland, Texas the most constant road sign we see is “guardrail damage ahead.”  Lots of people apparently need guardrails to keep them from running off the road because they are always under repair.  We all need guardrails sooner or later.

Our granddaughter apparently believes we are withholding the best things life has to offer a two-year-old.  The great battle, of course, was sleep.  Every night we began to give her advance notice that bedtime was coming soon. She would begin to let us know that sleep was her great enemy…as if it were going to be eight hours of excruciating torture.  She would immediately declare “No!” to the whole idea.  When jammies were pulled out, she would begin to plead her case and offer all the reasons she could not go to bed. “I’m hungry!  I’m thirsty! I’m scared! I miss mommy and daddy! There might be a dog in my room! There are elephants in my room! etc.   All these objections were vocalized in a wailing tone that made them hard to decipher.

This battle occurred nightly.  She never won the battle, but still rolled it out night after night.  We knew she desperately needed sleep. We desperately needed her to sleep. She had to get up the next morning for daycare.  She is growing and her body needs rest.  The next day will be a long day. If she doesn’t sleep, she will be miserable for that entire day.  Sleeplessness will compromise her immune system, and so forth.  As we explained all the documented reasons she needed sleep, none of those had any effect on her.

Then there was breakfast. Cranky after a short night’s rest, she had to be coaxed to eat a good breakfast.  So, we offered sausage and eggs to be followed by a blueberry muffin.  She wanted the muffin first.  We insisted she eat the nutritious part first. She wanted to negotiate.  Muffin first!  We knew the muffin would dull her appetite, so we declined.  That battle would ensue.  Eventually, she ate her eggs and got her muffin.  But health was not her concern. Sugar was her morning key to happiness.

So why the nightly tantrums?  Did she think we were holding out on her and that we got out the really cool toys or rolled out the pie and ice cream while she slept, and she didn’t want to miss out?  Has she not lived long enough to project what her future would hold if she didn’t sleep?  Whatever she was thinking, she was clearly not thinking she could trust us to help her maximize her life as a two-year-old. She was not thinking that since we had decades more experience about what makes life good, she could trust our judgment for her. She believed she could simply live in the moment, pursuing what her flesh was demanding, and never experience a negative consequence for doing so. 

Sadly, we often respond to God in the same way.  We see the guardrails he has posted around us as his way of keeping our true source of happiness from us. Satan convinces us that God does not always act out of infinite love and point us to what is always absolutely in our best interest.  All we know is what we are wanting at the moment.  But James warns us about that mindset. He says, “But each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desires and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (Ja.  1:14-15).

Our flesh is a two-year-old demanding its way.  It believes that happiness is found in immediate gratification and Satan whispers all the reasons we should ignore God and go for what we want.  We may know what God says, but something in us believes he is holding out on us…the thing right in front of us holds more blessing than the thing God wants us to wait on.  Satan convinces us that we can grab what we want now without consequence, even when God has told us there is calamity at the end of the road, especially, if you choose to crash through the guardrails.

Here is what I know.  Sometimes I act like a two-year-old as If I can go my own way without consequence. I need to convince myself that I often don’t really know what is in my best interest.  God does know.  He has all w\isdom and perspective. His commands are protections not restrictions.  The abundant life does not come by resisting rest or eating my muffin first.  It comes by trusting God and saying ‘No!” to the lies and temptations of the evil one, who only comes to kill, steal, and destroy.  From time to time, I need to take a lesson from my granddaughter who only knows what she wants in the moment and believes it is the absolute key to her happiness…but she is wrong.

The first level of spiritual warfare is temptation. That will be our first encounter with the enemy.  It will not be a frontal assault but an invitation to find our comfort, our significance, or our provision in sources other than God.   Matthew records the showdown between Jesus and Satan in the 4^th chapter of his gospel.  The text says, “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan” (Mt. 4:1).

In those temptations, Satan was simply trying to draw Jesus outside of God’s will.  The first temptation was about food. In essence, he was saying, “If you really are the Son of God, do your thing.  Don’t wait on God’s provision but turn these stones into bread.  Does he not care that you’re hungry? Take matters into your own hands and provide for yourself.” 

The second temptation was about calling out God to keep his promise of protection.  “Throw yourself off the temple wall and prove you are the Son of God and that he loves you.” In other words, make a demand on his goodness on your terms.  Again, Satan is tempting Jesus to take matters into his own hands rather than to be led by God.

Finally, Satan offered Jesus a shortcut to fulfill his life’s purpose. He took Jesus upon a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world.  The destiny of Jesus is to rule over all the earth and Satan offered him that destiny without suffering.  All he had to do was bow down and worship Satan.  He offered him a crown without a cross. 

Satan tempts us all to take things into our own hands…to run ahead of God and decide what is best for us, rather than waiting on him. He tempts us to make demands on God by deciding how and when his promise should be answered in our lives.  If he doesn’t meet our expectations (demands), we take offense.  He tempts us to take shortcuts in fulfilling our destiny.  We enter into relationships without prayer and marriage without wisdom. We manipulate circumstances to get what we want before we are ready to steward the blessing or the promotion. 

In each of these temptations, Satan is whispering that God is taking too long or that he can’t be counted on. He tempts us to take control, manage things ourselves.  If God has promised it,  then grab it now…there is no need to wait. Yet the mark of Jesus’ ministry was to do only what he saw the Father doing and say only what he heard the Father saying. He waited on the Father’s provision and timing and trusted him in those decisions.

When we give in to the temptation, we are coming into agreement with Satan, just as Adam and Eve agreed in the garden.  To do so gives the enemy a legal right to afflict us, torment us, or oppress us because our actions accuse God.  We usually start our spiritual warfare when we feel the torment or oppression, but we should recognize it begins with the temptations and cut it off there.

Here is the thing.  Satan rarely offers us things that are clearly sinful.  Often they are good things, but the sin is in our choice to get those things apart from God, his direction, or his timing.  Adam and Eve saw that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a source of wisdom…which God wants us to seek.  But they sought wisdom from another source other than their creator. We sometimes become like children who know they have an inheritance waiting for them but choose to steal it from their father or demand it rather than waiting on his timing and his judgement about what is best for them.  The “Prodigal Son” comes to mind (Lk. 15).

Jesus cut off the temptation attack in two ways.  First of all, he was absolutely convinced of his Father’s love and that his Father’s directions were to be trusted at all times for the best possible outcomes.  In other words, he trusted God to be good to him and to do so at the right time.  Secondly, he had stored up the Father’s Word in his heart so that he could draw from that storehouse to inform his decisions when temptation came his way

The Word of God is the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17). When we engage the enemy, we should do so with the sword.  Satan is always seeking a legal reason to afflict us.  Revelation calls him “the accuser of the brethren, who accuses us before our God day and night.”  When we declare the Word of God, obey it, and stand on it, we establish that we are law keepers rather than law breakers.  It disarms the enemy in the courts of heaven and keeps him at bay.  After Jesus invoked the Word of God three times, Satan abandoned his assault.  That does not mean he won’t come back, but he left Jesus for a season waiting for another time when he might find Jesus vulnerable.

We need to understand that resisting temptation is our first and foremost strategy in spiritual warfare. Renewing our mind daily by meditating on the Word is essential.  We cannot wield God’s sword if we do not have it in our heart and mind.   Being quick to acknowledge sin, confess it, and repent of it, is also essential.  It is persistent, unrepented sin that most often opens the door for Satan to get a foothold.  It is also imperative that we monitor our own thought life so that we may make every thought submit to Jesus.  It is our recurring thoughts and the enemy’s rationalizations for choosing to step outside of the will of God that we must diligently guard against. 

One other important strategy for proactively keeping the enemy outside the walls is to find out more about our family line.  It is amazing how many of us have little to no history on our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents.  Satan often gains access to believers through their bloodlines. Remember,  Exodus 20 declares that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation.  The guilt is not passed down but the consequences are passed down which may include curses that have been incurred due to unrepented sin in the bloodline.  Many bloodlines are stained with adultery, molestation, witchcraft, violence, racism, and so forth.  These issues need to be discovered, if possible, and then renounced and repented of on behalf of our ancestors to keep Satan from using them against us and our children.  The holidays might be a great time to ask about family history…the good, the bad and the ugly.

Again, many times we don’t engage in spiritual warfare until the enemy is pummelling us.  It is much better to realize we must always stay on a war footing with the enemy and detect when he us trying to draw us out of God’s will in our thoughts or actions. The man who taught me the most about deliverance always said, “It is better to realize that someone is trying to break into your house than to realize he is already inside.”  Proactive prevention is the best strategy for spiritual warfare.  We don’t need to be paranoid, but we do need to be wise.  Ask the Holy Spirit to alert you to Satan’s attempted intrusions and keep the doors locked and the lights on.