Article June 21, 1930 Issue

"Get thee behind me, Satan"

JACOBA G. COOPS

To whom did Christ Jesus, when he was tempted in the wilderness, speak the words recorded in Luke's Gospel, "Get thee behind me, Satan"? Certainly not to a personal devil, as person to person, but to personal sense, falsely claiming intelligence, presence, and power apart from God. This adversary, speaking through our own or others' false mortal thinking, as Jesus stated, is "a liar, and the father of it;" and its only chance of being heard lies in our acceptance of it as true.

Whatever the temptation,—be it a claim of sickness, of sin, or of unhappiness,—error, erroneous mortal belief, always tries to induce us to affirm: I am sick; I am sinful; or, I am unhappy; and only as we are awake to the truth and refuse to accept and echo these lies of personal sense, can we say to them with a conviction born of spiritual understanding, "Get thee behind me, Satan," and so prove their unreality, as did the great Master, who refused to admit the arguments that true riches are to be found in materiality, and that he could worthily use his spiritual power for material ends. After Jesus had silenced these lies, the devil departed, or disappeared into its nothingness; and Jesus thus proved that evil is nothing, no person or thing.

As related in the Bible, Daniel also had to overcome the lies of the devil or evil, hatred and persecution speaking through a deluded king. Many students of the Bible are familiar with the two pictures which show Daniel in the lions' den. In one we see him squarely facing the lions, calm and undisturbed. In the other we see him looking upward, with the lions crouched behind him! He too had spoken with authority to the evil beliefs of hatred and cruelty, and had turned from them, leaving Satan behind; in other words, refusing to regard evil as having power. And not only was Daniel himself released unhurt from the lions' den by his reliance on God's power, but the king was sufficiently enlightened to acknowledge the omnipotence and omnipresence of God, the living God, who "delivereth and rescueth."

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