Didact has three excellent post on the nature of ticket-taking (that is, the nature of the offers that Satan/his agents tempt mankind with). With a combination of ignorance, incredulity, and ‘Christian Materialism’ that I see both online and in real life interactions, it is imperative that anyone, especially Christians, gain at least some understanding of the spiritual battles we face.
Taking the ticket will destroy you
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At some point in your life, someone will give you an opportunity that seems too good to pass up. The cost to you will be small. You will simply have to make a small moral compromise. The reward, on the other hand, will be relatively high.
You tour the world. Women scream your name in ecstasy in the crowd – and in your bed. You’ve never had an easier time getting laid – women literally throw themselves at you. Men regard your fame with envy. You have all the money you could possibly want. Your world is one long crazy haze of playing on stage, drinking backstage, banging groupies on the bus and in the hotel, and shooting up or snorting drugs in truck-stop bathrooms.
Then one day you drive by a church – and the full weight of what you have done comes crashing down upon you. You got everything you wanted. But you feel empty, hollow, and miserable inside. The love and joy that you once held in your heart is gone. In its place is… nothing.
Nothing but pain, loneliness, and a gnawing dread deep in your bowels that people will see you for the Crimson Idol that you really are.
Look how it all started – with one small moral compromise.
A study in ticket sales
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You will encounter temptations like this throughout your life, whether you are some freelancer working out of a coffee shop on your laptop, or the leader of an entire nation. Some oily-looking character with a completely forgettable face and name will come to you and make you an incredibly tempting offer. Your reward will be riches, fame, adoration, and all manner of fancy pants and lollipops.
The price, of course, will eventually be your soul – but you don’t know that yet, or so he assumes.
There is, however, a bit of good news about these sorts of temptations, and it might seem crazy at first, but it is absolutely true:
The Devil’s agents do not pitch tickets to you unless they really need to, because they are at some level deeply desperate.
Think about it for a moment and you will understand why this is so. When Satan tried to tempt Jesus, he was fishing for information, because he simply could not figure out who this weirdbeard Nazarene was, wandering through Galilee and Israel, preaching God’s Word and turning so many thousands against him. Satan needed to figure out who this guy was, to get His measure, and to understand whether this really was the Messiah, the long-prophesied Son of God that would one day destroy him. So he tried to tempt His Hugeness – and failed.
The ticket salesman
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The servants of the Dark One also understand this, at some level. If they fail in their mission to corrupt and enslave, they will themselves be consumed.
Many will scoff at the idea. I do not. The nature of evil is such that it will not tolerate failure. If a servant of the Evil One fails in his mission to corrupt a human and lead him or her off the path of truth and righteousness, that servant will be consumed by his master.
Don’t believe me? Just read The Screwtape Letters by Clive Staples Lewis. You will not find a finer, or funnier, example of what that process of corruption and failure actually looks like – it is literally a how-to manual, written by a Christian, therefore someone who understands that process perfectly as an enemy of it, on how one might try to corrupt a Christian man.
Every Christian can quote and affirm Ephesians 6:21, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens,” sure, but as with a lot of Scripture that’s constantly quoted, a fuller, richer, deeper insight is often found lacking–verses are employed like playing cards in conversation rather than blessed words that describe the world we live in, as well as its players.
So it is with our current anemic grasp on evil, the nature of evil, the subtleties of temptation, and the framing devices and tactics that the wicked use to entrap people. How often and eye-rolling it is when the ready-made cards of “Hanlon’s Razor!” and “It’s all about money!” are laid down to explain away any and all nefarious enterprise .
A similar hand-waving is like this with regards to genuine Good: “Oh clearly they’re doing it for attention, money, or getting people to join their sect. That’s what they all do”. Modern people, even Christians ourselves, can’t fathom that those committed to Wickedness will gladly bleed a certain amount of resources for the cause; be a sort of anti-martyr for their anti-christ.
It’s long past time followers of the Lord Jesus Christ sober up from the brittle maps we’ve made or assented to for ourselves about reality, especially with regards to evil and the wiles of the Devil. It’s one thing to have an unhealthy interest/fear of Satan, it’s quite another to disbelieve that he has any influence in the world and that any offers he makes is off in some clandestine corner of the jungles of the third world and not in this current spiritual instantiation of Babylon we find ourselves in.
But take heart, there is no need for black-pilling despair, for Christ has overcome the ticket-takers and triumphed over the Dragon and the power of death itself.