The Deception of Perception . . . the Sifting (Job 1; Luke 22; Gen. 3)

When I was teaching at LSA, my seniors read C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters each spring and struggled through the hard questions it makes the reader face. Chief among them is the existence of THE devil and his minions, devils or demons, in this world and their abilities to interfere with our lives. In Letter VII, “Uncle” Screwtape mentions humankind’s perception of Satan:

I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you. (32)

“Keep ‘em laughing,” is the idea here. If they don’t truly believe that Satan is real, if he’s ajoke, that there is no Adversary stirring mayhem and tempting humans, then when bad things happen, they might just turn on God and blame Him for allowing or causing such horrors to occur in their lives. This deception of perception about the Adversary keeps people laughing at the idea of a devil in our midst; however, when tragedies occur (and they will), believing in a being who requests (and receives) permission from God to sift people to see if they will turn to the Truth or away from it is no laughing matter. It is far too real and becomes a crux of belief. 

There are three instances in particular in the Bible that make me think of this kind of “sifting.” One is in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve faced and succumbed to the serpent’s subtle sifting, the temptations that offered knowing good and evil as God knows it without any consequences for disobeying His direct commands (Gen. 3:1-7). The Adversary (Satan) entered the Garden and offered options. Human contentment often flees when something different or “better” looking enters the picture, but in the sifting of temptation there is always a choice involved: Will I believe God or will I believe the lie? Adam and Eve in believing the lie of the Adversary in the Garden sought to be shrewd but found themselves nude, uncovered before the God who knows all and sees all laid bare in His sight, and the consequences reached far beyond anything they could have even begun to comprehend. God told them if they disobeyed there would be consequences, but they chose to disbelieve the warning. And here we are today . . . 

There is no record that Satan asked to sift Eve in particular (and Adam by association), but based on the record of the conversation between the Adversary and God in the book of Job, the reader may infer that permission was also given to sift the two in the Garden. In Job, God asks Satan from where he had come and he answers that he has come “from roaming about on the earth and walking around on it” (Job. 1:7). God’s immediate response to his comment is another question: “Have you considered my servant Job?” (v. 8), who is upright and fears God and turns away from evil. In Job, the reader sees an example of God’s providential hand in Satan’s siftings. God allows Satan to begin sifting by removing his “hedge” from around Job that has protected his house and all his possessions, all he has. The limit God places on Satan is Job’s life. 

When Job falls to his face in reverent worship before God after losing everything in his life but his wife (who, let’s just face it, isn’t a plus at the time, struggling with her own bitterness and loss . . . come to think of it, maybe Satan didn’t ask to sift her maybe because there was no need . . .), Satan appears before God again, and God states that Job has stood firm even though Satan has “incited” God against him to ruin him without cause (2:3). Again, the evil comes from Satan, not God. God had confidence in Job’s blameless integrity and belief in the One who upheld him and offers him to Satan as an example of human faith. The familiar story shows God allowing Satan to up the ante in his next attack by removing the protection on Job’s person, only sparing his life itself (2:6).

Being “smote with sore boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (v. 7) and being reduced to sitting in a pile of ashes scraping sores with a potsherd (v. 8) after losing all you have and all your children and being left with a bitter wife who wants you to curse God and die? That’s a sifting beyond any comprehension I have. Yet Job did not sin or blame God “with his lips” (v. 10); instead when his friends “pile on,” Job curses only the day of his birth (3:1).

Not only does the account of Job lend to the idea of the sifting that occurs in those who believe in God and His power to uphold, the NT accounts of Peter’s sifting show the reality that this life is subject to testing by the Adversary. My husband referenced this sifting of Peter yesterday in his sermon, making me automatically think of sifting when I began reading in Job today in my quiet time. Luke 22:31-32 shows Jesus telling Peter that Satan has DEMANDED (the word meaning to ask, require, or demand) PERMISSION “to sift you like wheat.” The word sift from Webster’s 1828 Dictionary means the following:

SIFT, verb transitive

1. To separate by a sieve, as the fine part of a substance from the coarse; as, to sift meal; to sift powder; to sift sand or lime.

2. To separate; to part.

3. To examine minutely or critically; to scrutinize. Let the principles of the party be thoroughly sifted. We have sifted your objections.

Taking the coarse and making it fine, separating, parting, examining minutely for flaws . . . none of this is pleasant when applied to the human experience. To take Peter’s pride, his insecurities, his comfort, his fear, his expectations, his reliances, this weak parts and to put them to the test would involve at the minimum some serious discomfort, but at the worst serious pain and seeming failure. BUT GOD!

Jesus tells Peter BEFORE he is test that He has prayed for him that his faith wouldn’t fail, and that he should strengthen his brothers once he has turned again. Catch that? He WOULD turn again. Hebrews 12:11 says this: “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness." Without the failures that came in Peter’s time of testing, the great sifting he endured, his peace, his trust in God, his ability to comfort the other disciples and even today’s believers alongside them would not exist. I wouldn’t wish that sifting on anyone . . . but then again, I would. I can’t imagine living without the comfort of Peter’s writing as one who knows, who understands. Just as Peter couldn’t imagine living without the comfort of the ONE who knew and understood sifting before He spoke of it to Him (Matt. 4:1-11). 

In His commentary on the book of Job Matthew Henry speaks of Satan’s answer to God when questioned about his whereabouts. Henry says his answer might have been given in pride (as if he owns the earth and its inhabitants), in fretfulness and discontent (as he could find no rest in his outcast wanderings, or in carefulness (searching for a chance to work his mischief on earth). Any or all of those options should inspire us, not to fear Satan, but to fear God, to be sober and alert, to be vigilant in watching for attacks on our soul through attacks on our minds and spirits (in what we believe), our physical person (in the loss of health), our physical attachments (through the loss of loved ones), or our emotional needs (because of our desire for comfort and strengthening). The testing of our faith, the sifting, will come. The question is, will we expect it, be prepared for it (strengthened by our time spent with God in His word, in prayer, in fellowship with other believers), believe God is sovereign, and walk it out faithfully.