Why is temptation so powerful? – Sword of the Spirit, Part 1

Have you heard of the short story How Much Land Does a Man Need? by famed Russian author Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)? Tolstoy is famous for his mammoth works like Anna Karenina or War and Peace, as well as for his desire to live out Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But How Much Land Does a Man Need is a very short story. James Joyce called it the greatest short story of all time.

In the story Tolstoy tells the tale of a peasant, Pahom, who progressively desires and gets more and more land. Each time he is excited about the new land thinking it will give him the kind of life he yearns for. But as time goes by, even as he does well for himself, each time he gets more land, he soon grows discontent with it. He wants more. Eventually Pahom finds out about some well-landed people who are willing to sell land cheap. One ruble per acre! So he travels to them, bearing gifts to impress them.  They love the gifts, and he says he is interested in purchasing land.  They like him and are willing to sell at the very cheap price he heard about, but they will only sell the land in a most unusual deal.

They give him the opportunity to purchase a parcel of land based on how far he can walk in one day. It is very simple. He has from sunup to sundown to walk as far as he wants, stake out the land, but he must return to his starting point by sundown. Sounds great, right?

There’s a catch. If he does not return to the spot of departure by sundown, he loses his money and the land.  Pahom is delighted!  So off he goes excitedly thinking he is going to get a steal. It should be very easy to get more land than he ever dreamed of.

I think about when I ran marathons around the city of Baltimore. I took me about four hours. You can cover a lot of ground in four hours.  You’re totally exhausted, but you’ve covered a lot of ground.  How broad an area do you think you could cover from sunup to sundown?  Ten square miles?  More? Less?

How do you think Pahom did? Think he went out too far didn’t make it back? Good guess. You’re close, but you’re wrong. He actually made it back. And in time.

Remember that what brought him to this amazing deal was a spirit of discontent that took root in his life.  Because of that, I think you will be surprised to hear the end of the story.

We are all tempted by many things. For Pahom it was more land and the promise of an easy life.  What is it about our inner desire that gives temptation its power?

Is temptation powerful in and of itself? No. Temptation is powerful because of something inside us. Some psychologists call this the empty self. We have an emptiness within us, and we long to fill it. We sometimes have an inner discontent. When we are discontent, it can be exceedingly difficult to defeat temptation.  But God gives us a powerful weapon to fight discontentment and defeat temptation. 

In our current blog series, we have been talking about the battle we all fight against temptation.  To be victorious against the temptation of the world, temptation from Satan, and sometimes temptation from within our own bodies, the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 6:10-20 that we need to put on the full armor of God.  For the most part the armor is defensive, protective.  But this we examine an offensive weapon, what Paul titles, “The Sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”  The Word of God is the powerful weapon to help us fight discontentment and defeat temptation.

In the next post, we’ll learn how.

Photo by Luba Ertel on Unsplash