If you have enemies who want to see your total destruction, it’s best to know who they are. The Church teaches us that we have three primary enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil. These three enemies often work together toward one singular goal: the ruin of the human soul through the temptation to sin.
There are several ways we can improve our ability to resist temptation. Prayer and the sacraments help us to develop our spiritual muscles. The more we are plugged into God’s grace, the more strength we will have in resisting our enemies. Calling upon God, Our Lady, and the saints in the midst of temptation is an incredibly powerful response as well. The more often we give in to temptation, the more susceptible we become to future temptations. This is why the sacrament of Confession is so important because it gives us a clean slate and reunites us with the grace of God in a powerful way.
We are also blessed with the example of Christ battling temptation in Scripture. In Matthew 4, we see the three enemies at play in the narrative of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Our Lord had been fasting and praying in the wilderness for 40 days when the devil approaches him. You’ll recall that the devil challenges Jesus three times.
The first temptation is one of the flesh, “If you really are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matthew 4:3). But Jesus responds, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God”. In this response, Jesus reiterates to us that matters of the soul are of more importance than those of the body.
Our three enemies are constantly striving to get us to fall into the seven deadly sins. Gluttony, sloth, and lust are often tied to temptations of the flesh. Temptations to commit these sins ultimately are trying to get us to accept the lie that gratifying the flesh is more important than gratifying God. The devil knew that Jesus had the capacity to turn the stones into bread, but more importantly he knew that Jesus was extremely hungry from fasting.
Temptations to sin often come at times such as these. The enemies are not foolish in their tactics. They know that when you are tired, hungry, and weak, you are more susceptible to their tricks and gimmicks. St. Ignatius, in his rules for discernment, describes the evil one as an enemy who walks around the city walls seeking the weakest point of defense as his place of attack. This proves the importance of planning.
In military training, you are taught the importance of creating strong defensive positions. You must create contingency plans to fall back on in case you begin losing ground. The same is true in our spiritual life. It’s not a question of if temptation will come but rather when temptation will come. As Jesus tells us in the Gospel that if one knows when a thief is coming to rob and steal, they wouldn’t allow the thief to enter. The good thing about our spiritual enemies is that we often know when they come the strongest, which is when we are the weakest. We must have backup plans for those times.
The second temptation of the devil is one of power and pride as the devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and challenges the Lord to throw himself down, for it is written in Scripture that the angels will protect him from injury. He is instigating Christ to put God to the test, asserting his power over God rather than submitting himself to God.
This is a great example for us. The temptation to make ourselves God or to make gods of other things is a violation of the first commandment, so it is critical that Christ demonstrates to us how to fight against such an idea. Whatever sits at the top of your hierarchy could be called your God. This is the person, place, or thing that you would sacrifice all else to.
Sometimes we may be tempted to make sports our god as we let games take priority over our Sunday mass obligation. We may make work our god as we allow work to take time away from our Vocation as husbands, wives, fathers, or mothers. And worse yet, we may make ourselves into our own god, prioritizing our personal beliefs over the teaching of the Church. When we usurp the role of the Body of Christ by making ourselves the final judge on moral matters, we can find ourselves asserting our free will onto God rather than submitting ourselves to the One who created us.
Pride lies at the root of all temptation and sin, especially mortal sin, because it requires us to place ourselves above God in order to knowingly commit a grave evil. To accept the trade-off of breaking our relationship with God for whatever earthly reward or pleasure we see in the sin is by definition a violation of the first commandment: we shall not have strange gods before the one, true God.
This is why this second temptation is a go-to move of the devil, for it creates re-enactments of what he himself did. The devil is known for those infamous words, “Non-Serviam”, or “I will not serve”. In Paradise Lost by John Milton, the devil says that “it is better to reign in hell than to serve in Heaven”. To say to ourselves, it is better to have it my way in hell than to submit myself to God in heaven is the lie we accept whenever we commit a mortal sin.
The third temptation is focused on envy. Envy is described as “a deplorable state in which one is basically telling God that he did a poor job arranging the gifts and the goods of His creation” (catholic.com). The devil tells Jesus to bow down to worship him in exchange for power over all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus responds with “Begone Satan!” and reiterates to him that we shall not serve anyone but the Lord our God.
We often trade God for so much less than power over all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus’ example shows us that no matter how much you are offered, nothing is worth trading your soul. He states this again more plainly later in the Gospels when He asks, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeits His soul?”
Through greed, we trade our relationship with God for the material things in this world. Through wrath, we trade our relationship with God for our emotional satisfaction. One of the most common and misunderstood ways that we give up our relationship with God is through the sin of sloth.
Sloth is one of the most misunderstood sins. It wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation that this sin started to be associated with physical laziness. The Church Fathers, “sloth was being so busy that one didn’t make time for what was truly important”. In our age of busyness, we all find ourselves half-bragging and half-complaining about how full our schedule is. Making time for spiritual growth often gets bumped to the bottom of our priorities, if it makes the list at all.
Sloth is so dangerous because, unlike many other sins that lead to a clear need for repentance, it often leads to a lukewarmness and mediocrity in the spiritual life. Sloth keeps us doing the bare minimum, whatever we define that to be. Some will justify their lack of mass attendance by their commitment to trying to be “a good person”. We have an incredible ability to explain the causes of our mediocrity.
Lent is meant to be a time of combatting sloth. We are called to give up those things that prevent us from spending much-needed time with God in prayer. The Lord wants us to be more devoted to the Sacraments so that His grace can be more active in our lives. The great truth that we must accept is that any sacrifice made in order to grow in our relationship with God is really no sacrifice at all. It’s a trade-off that always results in a total gain in our quality of life, both in this life and in the next.
Prayer is at the core of our ability to resist temptation. Prayer gives us the opportunity to reflect on the past and to plan for the future. It gives us the grace to have clarity on the things that led to our past sins and failures and the strength to prevent them from happening again. As we make our way through Lent, let us pray for the grace to stand firm against the tactics of our enemies so that we may grow closer to becoming the person God created us to be.
