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WHEN LUCIFER LETS YOU WIN

Here’s a Thursday question for you: does the Devil ever lose a round on purpose? Does Satan ever throw a game?

In his colorful book, The Education of a Golfer, the late Sam Snead describes a mysterious guy who showed up at the Greenbrier, a fancy West Virginia golf course where Snead was the resident pro. “Cy” had a lot of money and didn’t mind gambling it away on golf games, and wanted to play the great “Slammin’ Sammy.”

Well, Snead was busy with hotel guests and his work, so he foisted the two-bit gambler off on his assistants. “Cy” claimed to be about a 7-handicap, meaning he shot around 79, 80, 82 most of the time . . . and after a week or so Snead’s flunkies said to him: “Shucks, this is like taking candy from a baby. We give ‘Cy’ two strokes a side, and have beaten him every single time. But now he insists on playing you.”

So finally Cy cornered Snead in the locker room. “Are you ready for a game?” And he was talking about an extremely healthy wager. “Your guys here know about how I play. If you give me FIVE strokes a side” – meaning ten for the 18 holes – “there’s no limit to the bet. You name the price.”

Well, Snead had been taken to the cleaners before, and wasn’t about to be a pigeon again. So he shook his head. “No way,” he said. “I’ll give you three going out, and four coming back – seven altogether – but that’s it.” “Cy” pretended to complain a bit, and Snead was worried that when a hustler agrees to lower handicap terms that quickly, there may well be “a hawk in the chickenyard,” but they shook hands on an astronomical wager, and out they went.

And all at once, this “Cy” was a different golfer. His drives were longer, his irons on the fairway sailed right to the pin, and he was dropping putts right and left. Even in a cold rain with sopping-wet greens, the newcomer carded a red-hot 72 for the day. Fortunately, scrambling like he was playing the final round of the U.S. Open, Snead managed to pull out a 65 – meaning they broke even, and he saved himself that four-figure wager. This “Cy” had purposely lost little bets all week, disguising his true ability as a professional golfer, hoping to score a huge payoff when he finally faced Mr. Big.

Which takes us back to the question: are there ever times when the devil throws a game and actually lets you enjoy some spiritual victories? Knowing, maybe, that victories can lead to complacency and later to permanent defeat?

In our study all this week, we’ve been discovering in God’s Word that Pride is perhaps the central, the core, the most dangerous sin there is. In a classic C. S. Lewis essay from Mere Christianity, he suggests that Pride is the essential vice, the “utmost evil.” It is, he writes, “the complete anti-God state of mind.”

With that on the table, let me ask this: would Lucifer perhaps be willing for us to experience success in every other arena of our spiritual journey . . . as long as he can set us up for an eventual fall to the sin of Pride? If he can get us to be “anti-God” on the final Day of Judgment, he might be perfectly happy if we successfully got over drinking or smoking or golf gambling here and now.

A bit later in this chapter from his book, Lewis proposes that exact scenario.

“Pride can often be used,” he writes, “to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity – that is, by Pride.” And now get this: “THE DEVIL LAUGHS. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride – just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride IS spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

Then he adds a chilling warning that all golfers and Christians should write on their scorecard:

“The devil loves ‘curing’ a small fault by giving you a great one.”

Staying with the sports motif, let me ask: do major-league baseball pitchers ever purposely groove a pitch, allowing the opposition to get a hit? Well, there are times when I think the Dodgers do it as a matter of team policy, but ordinarily . . . no. You try to get outs. But I remember hearing about a hitter whose personal pride drove him to be fiercely competitive at the plate. He would go up to the batter’s box, focused and energized and relentlessly determined to get a base hit. In every game, he was driven to get that first tally in the box score. However, once he had that first hit, that first successful contact with the first-base bag, the intensity subsided. Oh, he still went up to bat for the rest of the game, and sometimes he would get a second or a third hit. But with hit #1 under his belt, the fire in his eyes dimmed.

And someone on an enemy team noticed this. “Man, so-and-so, if he gets one in the first inning, you usually don’t hear much from him the rest of the game,” the statistician snickered. What happened next? The pitching staff quietly let the word go around. If the bases are empty with two outs, and Jones comes up to bat, shoot, let him have a single. Give him a fastball down the middle . . . and get that harmless base hit out of the way. That way, in the ninth inning when the game is on the line, and the bags are loaded, and it’s crucial, we’ll have stolen his competitive juice. True story, and I just wonder if the devil does that to the Christian.

In fact, in another marvelous book by this same writer, C. S. Lewis, many of you know that he tried to imagine himself being the devil – and The Screwtape Letters are the very clever result. Sure enough, the wise old uncle from hell writes to his fledgling nephew, Wormwood, advising him to basically throw a game or two early in the season.

“Your patient has become humble,” he writes. “Have you drawn his attention to this fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride – pride at his own humility – will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt – and so on, through as many stages as you please.”

So friend, we really have to stop and think before we agree to have a game of golf with the devil. What does he truly want? Does he want to win fifty bucks from us? Does he want us to tell lies and cheat and commit adultery and get so drunk we lose our jobs? Well, yes. He enjoys misery of all kinds. He loves to see his subjects in the gutter. But you know, he’s just as happy to see us in church. If we stop drinking, and are proud of it, that’s good too. If we’re faithful to our wives, and watch as someone else gets caught in a scandal, and we think to ourselves, “Whoa, thank God I’m impervious to that particular temptation,” we slide away from Satan’s little net and right into his big one. He’s just as pleased if we’re successfully posing as – and feeling like – leaders in the Christian faith. IF he can quietly – and he’ll gladly take 20 years to work on it – get us to the point where we arrive in the land of settled, resolute Pride. Where we join Lucifer in saying, “I don’t need a heavenly Father. I will not be ruled. I am – in and of myself – all that I need. ‘I’ll do it my way.’”

We mentioned earlier a good warning in Psalm chapter 10, where we’re told not to think to ourselves, “Nothing will shake me.” And over in First Corinthians 10:12, Paul tells us not to get too pleased with ourselves if we begin winning a whole bunch of spiritual golf games in a row.

“If you think you are standing firm,” he writes, “be careful that you don’t fall.” “Take heed lest ye fall” is the familiar King James.

And if you check out the context, we find that Paul has just outlined the sorry experience of the Children of Israel. They were so pleased with themselves out in the wilderness after Moses gave them the Ten Commandments. “Sure we’ll keep them,” they all promised. “You bet. We’re players on the Lord’s team.” Not long after, they got up and danced in a pagan orgy, and twenty-three thousand of them died. And Paul says here: “That story’s in the Bible as a warning. Smooth skiing now doesn’t mean there aren’t moguls up ahead. Stay awake, and stay distrustful of self.”

So friend, don’t get too excited about spiritual base hits and birdies. Keep your eyes wide open. Celebrate Jesus’ victories instead of your own.