The Apostle Peter tells us that Satan prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet. 5:8). Because of this sobering reality, it is critical that God’s people are prepared to recognize Satan’s lies, tricks, and manipulations.

Graciously, God has outlined exactly how Satan works through a process of getting us to see something good/beautiful/alluring, so that we begin to covet it, to the point that we eventually reach out and take the sin that he extends to us.

Study Satan’s methods not only so you can fight against his schemes, but even more so that you can grow in your knowledge, desire, and love for Jesus Christ.
1 But the people of Israel broke faith in regard to the devoted things, for Achan the son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of the devoted things. And the anger of the LORD burned against the people of Israel.

2 Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is near Beth-aven, east of Bethel, and said to them, “Go up and spy out the land.” And the men went up and spied out Ai. 3 And they returned to Joshua and said to him, “Do not have all the people go up, but let about two or three thousand men go up and attack Ai. Do not make the whole people toil up there, for they are few.” 4 So about three thousand men went up there from the people. And they fled before the men of Ai, 5 and the men of Ai killed about thirty-six of their men and chased them before the gate as far as Shebarim and struck them at the descent. And the hearts of the people melted and became as water.

6 Then Joshua tore his clothes and fell to the earth on his face before the ark of the LORD until the evening, he and the elders of Israel. And they put dust on their heads. 7 And Joshua said, “Alas, O Lord GOD, why have you brought this people over the Jordan at all, to give us into the hands of the Amorites, to destroy us? Would that we had been content to dwell beyond the Jordan! 8 O Lord, what can I say, when Israel has turned their backs before their enemies! 9 For the Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land will hear of it and will surround us and cut off our name from the earth. And what will you do for your great name?”

10 The LORD said to Joshua, “Get up! Why have you fallen on your face? 11 Israel has sinnedesire they have transgressed my covenant that I commanded them; they have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen and lied and put them among their own belongings. 12 Therefore the people of Israel cannot stand before their enemies. They turn their backs before their enemies, because they have become devoted for destruction. I will be with you no more, unless you destroy the devoted things from among you. 13 Get up! Consecrate the people and say, ‘Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow; for thus says the LORD, God of Israel, “There are devoted things in your midst, O Israel. You cannot stand before your enemies until you take away the devoted things from among you.” 14 In the morning therefore you shall be brought near by your tribes. And the tribe that the LORD takes by lot shall come near by clans. And the clan that the LORD takes shall come near by households. And the household that the LORD takes shall come near man by man. 15 And he who is taken with the devoted things shall be burned with fire, he and all that he has, because he has transgressed the covenant of the LORD, and because he has done an outrageous thing in Israel.’”

16 So Joshua rose early in the morning and brought Israel near tribe by tribe, and the tribe of Judah was taken. 17 And he brought near the clans of Judah, and the clan of the Zerahites was taken. And he brought near the clan of the Zerahites man by man, and Zabdi was taken. 18 And he brought near his household man by man, and Achan the son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, was taken. 19 Then Joshua said to Achan, “My son, give glory to the LORD God of Israel and give praise to him. And tell me now what you have done; do not hide it from me.” 20 And Achan answered Joshua, “Truly I have sinned against the LORD God of Israel, and this is what I did: 21 when I saw among the spoil a beautiful cloak from Shinar, and 200 shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels, then I coveted them and took them. And see, they are hidden in the earth inside my tent, with the silver underneath.”

22 So Joshua sent messengers, and they ran to the tent; and behold, it was hidden in his tent with the silver underneath. 23 And they took them out of the tent and brought them to Joshua and to all the people of Israel. And they laid them down before the LORD. 24 And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters and his oxen and donkeys and sheep and his tent and all that he had. And they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. 25 And Joshua said, “Why did you bring trouble on us? The LORD brings trouble on you today.” And all Israel stoned him with stones. They burned them with fire and stoned them with stones. 26 And they raised over him a great heap of stones that remains to this day. Then the LORD turned from his burning anger. Therefore, to this day the name of that place is called the Valley of Achor. Joshua 7:1-26, ESV
This is the Word of the Lord.

One week ago, Payton Manning became the oldest quarterback in NFL history to win a Superbowl championship. Previously the record was set by 38-year-old John Elway when he led the Denver Broncos to a victory. Last week a 39-year-old, which if you are doing the calculation that is about 347 in football player years. A 39-year-old led a Superbowl team to a championship. How did he do this? That’s remarkable. He was also facing a 26-year-old, in case you are curious, so someone in his prime and in the height of his career, yet Manning won.

How did Payton Manning do this? It wasn’t that he was the most athletic on the field, but he did it through what a lot of sports commentators call obsessive film study. Payton Manning is sort of a freak in the way that he is able to vividly, photographically remember every defense he has ever faced in his entire life.

In fact, a couple of years ago when the Denver Broncos played the Seattle Seahawks in the Superbowl, Payton Manning was also very old at the time. They ran an article in the New York Post talking about how that year he called his coach form Tennessee to say, “Hey in 1996 we played Old Miss and we ran this play. Can you find that film, digitize the video and send it to me? I need it for a game this weekend.” That’s twenty years after and he can remember vividly individual plays and defensive alignments all that time.

It’s because not of his athleticism but because he has studied his opponent so well that he knows better than his opponent what his opponent is doing. Also, he had the really great defense that Denver has. Through that he was able to win a championship for the Denver Broncos this past week.

Why am I telling you this? In Joshua seven we have the ability to do, not film study, but text study. In this passage we are given an insight into the way that our enemy works, into the way that Satan works. I don’t typically when I preach zero in on one verse in a larger chapter like this, but we’re going to do this this week because it is so practical and valuable.

Look with me again at verse twenty-one. If you have a hard time remember who Achan is it might be helpful to remember what a Sunday school teacher told me a long time ago; just remember that “Achan stole the bacon”. It wasn’t bacon and it wasn’t really good and tasty; it was actually really bad. So “Achan stole the bacon” and when he’s telling about what he did at the end of this passage, look at what he says in verse twenty-one. I want you to notice four words, which I will emphasize.
21 when I saw among the spoil a beautiful cloak from Shinar, and 200 shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels, then I coveted them and took them. And see, they are hidden in the earth inside my tent, with the silver underneath.” Joshua 7:21, ESV
Now this is, in a nutshell, a very worked out Biblical theology of how Satan tempts us. If we are ever going to have any kind of lasting victory over our sin, by the power of the Holy Spirit working in our lives, we need to see this, dissect it, analyze it and understand what is happening here. These words appear in an earlier story, all the way back in Genesis three in the original fall of Adam and Eve into sin.

I hope that you have a handout (they are available on the website). In Genesis 3:6, we notice that the woman “saw”, which same word as Joshua 7:21, she saw that the tree was good for food. Also, that the tree was to be “desired”. This word for desired, chamad, it’s the word that generally means desire in Hebrew. For example, it’s used in Psalm 19 to talk about how the Psalmist desires the law and the statues of the Lord. So, it can be desiring a good thing. But it’s also the tenth commandment, “You shall not desire/covet”.

The tree was to be desired to make one wise. Finally, in verse six she reached out and took, laqach, and ate and she also gave some to her husband and he ate.

Same pattern, seeing what was good, desired or coveted, then taking. I want to analyze this and break this down. This is such a helpful thing because once we understand the schemes that the enemy is bringing against us, we stand such a better chance to actually standing against temptation and obeying God in our lives.

So, the way we are going to look at this, we are actually going to look backwards. We are going to start at the end of this process, the taking. The taking of sin. This is actually reaching out your hands, either literally or figuratively, to take what is not yours. The final act of sin that we usually think about when we think about sin.
Take
What we see from this when we are doing our text study this morning, the first thing we need to recognize is that we cannot fight sin merely by managing our behavior. Here’s what often happens when we talk about holding people accountable for sins. Typically, we are talking about this very last part of our sins. We are saying, how do I keep myself from actually taking the sin?

That’s a wrong view of Biblical theology for two reasons. The first reason is this, there are two outcomes if we simply try to manage behavior in our lives. The first option that will happen is probably you will fail to manage your behavior. I have tried to go on a diet in the past and I said I’m not going to eat that or that or that. Typically, I get hungry, typically I see the ice cream and I want to cheat just a little bit. Finally, I see that I am cheating so badly or that I’m so deprived in my soul of this good, good food that finally I just take this altogether and say I’m going back to the way that I was eating. Things weren’t really that bad so let’s go back into my sin of gluttony.

Either you will fail by cheating or simply giving up all together, or there’s another option, but let me tell you why you will fail. What’s happened at this point at the end of this process is that essentially you have a freight train of your desires that is running down the track at sixty miles an hour and you’ve set up a little barrier of wood that says, “Caution, please stop.”

You’re expecting that little barrier to be able to bring all of your desires to a grinding halt on a dime. That’s not how you were built to work. That’s what Satan tries to get you to do so that you will fail again and again. We cannot simply mange our behavior, it has to start before that. Typically, you are going to fail, that’s the first way that this will work out.

The second way that this will work out is that you may succeed at managing your behavior. So, you’ve won the battle, but by doing so you will lose the war. There were a group of people in history that were better than any others in history at managing behavior. Their names were the Pharisees. Jesus talked a lot about the Pharisees because as good as the Pharisees were, Jesus saw so many flaws in what they were doing.

He actually told a parable in Luke 18 about the Pharisees and the tax collector. He says there are two men, one is the Pharisee who is perfect at managing his behavior and the other is the tax collector who is filled with sin that you can see in his life. These two men went up into the temple to pray.
10 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”Luke 18:10-14
If you simply try to manage your behavior and that’s all you are taking into account, you will either fail completely or you will win the battle but lose the war. We can’t manage sin at the level of just behavior.
Desire
So, let’s take a step backwards. If it’s not about managing behavior, if that’s not how Satan gets us, take a step backwards. The previous word in this series is to desire or covet. Fighting sin, as we look at this word, means that primarily we must manage desires, not behaviors. We have to look at managing our desires.

Here’s what happens. The reason that sin looks so enticing to you is because Satan is a parasite. A parasite is some creature that latches on to a legitimate thing and sucks the life out of it until it is dead. What Satan does is he finds very legitimate godly, God given desires that you have. Things that are very good for you to desire and that God wants you to desire. Then Satan, like a parasite, attaches something else to that desire and says that if you want this really good thing, I’ll give it to you, just take this sin and you will have it.

As our desire grows, as we feel like we are deprived of whatever that good desire is more and more and more, then we are willing to cross at that point any boundary whatsoever. That freight train of our desires is running sixty miles per hour down the track to the point where we are willing to take that because we think that’s where we are going to get that desire that God created us to want.

Look at this sheet I handed out. At the bottom I gave you sample temptation schemes, if you are a football person this is like the Dime or the Nickel or something like that. If you’re not a football person just ignore what I just said. I’ve broken this out in the sin that we take on the far-left side. The sin that we reach out to take is on the left side. In the middle category I’ve laid out a few desires that Satan parasitically latches to.

If you look at that middle category, all of those things are good godly desires. You were created to have security; the Garden of Eden was the safest place that the world has ever seen because God dwelt there. You were created to have control.

Some of you struggle with issues of control, understand that is a Godly thing that has been twisted and perverted. We were created to exercise dominion, to reign as God’s vice-regents on this earth, but Satan twisted that.

You were created to desire justice, comfort and pleasure. God promises that at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. God created pleasure and it’s a good thing.

You were created to have riches; do you know how we know this? Two reasons, Joshua 8:2, Achan was a fool for taking riches that God has claimed for himself in Jericho. Why? If he had simply waited for the next battle God was planning on giving the people all the spoil from Ai. He said take all the silver, gold, and livestock at Ai, it was all theirs.

But Achan couldn’t wait that long. You and I stand to inherit all of the riches and glory that we have in Christ. God wants to make you rich, but in his own way, in his own timing, for his own purposes. You are created to have dignity and self-sufficiency. God doesn’t’ want you to be a leach. God wants you to be productive in society.

Pleasure, love, comfort, wisdom; all of these things are good things and Satan takes those and hijacks them. He latches like a parasite to them so that we think that in order to get the good things, we have to believe that what he says about the bad things is true. That by taking the sin we will get what he holds out to us as a very good desire.

What this means as we manage our desire. Fighting sin is about managing desire, not behavior. What this means is that we have to uncouple these desires from the sin that Satan offers us as a fulfillment of this desire.

The strategy that I use, whenever I’m genuinely tempted, when it feels really, really strong, I look at what I’m doing and say out loud, “that is death.” What I am trying to address to myself, because I don’t believe it in my heart at that moment, is that not only will that temptation not give me what I’m really looking for, but it will lead me straight down the track, off the cliff into death. So, I say it out loud, “that is death”, that will not give me what I’m looking for.

But you probably know that it’s not enough just to say that’s a bad thing and I don’t want it. You and I were created to have our desires go somewhere. We have this raging locomotive that’s going to trek down some track, either God’s or Satan’s. So, it’s not enough just to uncouple the temptation from the godly desire that we want. We have to also recognize that God wants to give us this good and godly thing, not through the temptation that Satan is offering us, but through Jesus.

Fighting temptation means to seek to cultivate a desire for Christ. Preaching to yourself that whatever you want, whether it’s love, comfort, control, security, any of these things, you don’t find it in what Satan offers you. You find it in Jesus. You want security? Jesus is the warrior coming to protect us. You want control? Jesus will come to reign as king. You want pleasure? Jesus has promised that you will one day be your bridegroom and he’s going to take you to a wedding feast that is going to last for all of eternity. All of these things we find in Christ. He wants to give them to us, just not in the way that Satan wants us to take them.

Augustine, a church father wrote, “There is really only one virtue in life that you need to seek to do, which is to love what ought to be loved.” Cultivate desire for what is worthy of your desire, it’s not in the garbage that Satan offers you that is death, it’s in Jesus.

So, if fighting sin isn’t about managing behavior. If fighting sin means managing our desire, then the natural question is, how do we manage our desire? How do we cultivate the right desires while putting to death the wrong desires?
See
This gets us back to the first two words in this. Notice that both Achan and Eve “see” something that is good or beautiful. This is where Satan starts, he gets our eyes, either the eyes in our eye sockets or the eyes of our hearts, to look at something and to desire something.

He gets us to start focusing in on that thing, that illegitimate thing. When we start to look on it, that’s when he starts to cultivate the covetousness. As that covetousness grows, we start to think that only way that we can have those God given desires is by having that thing that we have been looking at and meditating upon in our hearts.

The way to manage your desires is first don’t feed the beast. If you’ve been to a zoo and it says don’t feed the wild animals. Stop feeding your temptations by the things that you look at. Sometimes this means lustful looks. A lot of times lust doesn’t happen at the very end of things, a lot of times it’s the extra glances. As long as you allow yourself to do that and call those things innocent, you will never be able to break that sin.

It’s also bitterness. Do you struggle with bitterness? Is it because in your head you are playing again and again the video of what happened to you in the past? It’s good that you desire justice, God desires justice. However as long as you fixate on that event and you see that and start to think about how you can get even, Satan is going to take that wrong thing and attach it to your desire for justice. So that at the end of the day you think that the only way to get justice is to get even and you will reach out and take the sin.

This is so practical for me. When I recognized that I had to stop looking at things, either with my eyes or my heart, that changed the game. This is a Biblical theology text study of how Satan works in our lives. You’ve probably heard that you’ve got to memorize Bible verses in the moment of temptation and that’s good. That’s how Jesus defeated temptation; he quotes scripture to the desire. But once you get to the end of that process, it’s too late a lot of times. The freight train of your desires is running out of control. What is more effective is on that front end.

As you start to realize that you are looking at something, that’s when it helps to start memorizing those Bible verses, to turn in prayer to God. To look at Jesus, to recognize that is not going to give me what I want, Jesus offers me what I want. I was created to love and adore and gaze upon the glory of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ in the face of Jesus, the glory of God is revealed. We are commanded to look at Jesus with our hearts.

Instead of feeding the temptation by looking at it, by allowing things to continue playing in our mind, the Bible teaches us to look at Jesus instead. Don’t manage your behavior, you will lose the battle and probably the war as well. Instead mange your desires, but finally figure out what it is that you were looking at that is feeding those desires for temptations.
Conclusion
1. I perhaps have been speaking in such a way that if you just recognize this enough, if you just understand this well enough that you will be good to go. Look, I’m 31, so I’m not quite as old as Payton Manning. I don’t care how much film I’ve watched into my life, if you plugged me into the Superbowl last week it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight. I would have been demolished. I don’t care how much knowledge about football I have.

You need actually transformed abilities. You need transformed strength. You need a changed and renewed heart. What that means is that you need the Holy Spirit. If you don’t know Jesus, you actually need to be born again. The Bible says in order for you to take out that hard heart of stone that thinks that there is only one way to get what you want and it’s my say, which is really Satan’s way.

Instead you need a soft heart of flesh that God will give you by the renewing of your mind and heart through the gospel to say, “God I don’t know what I’m doing. All I know is that I need to follow Jesus because he will take me to the place that I need to go, and he is worth it. He is my priceless treasure.” You need to be regenerated.

For those of you who have been born again, the way for you to win this battle is not again just through intellectually knowing more things, it’s through prayer. This only happens through prayer. This only happens as you engage with God and say, “God I need to see this, I need to recognize this, I need to switch the tracks that the train of my desires are running on to the track that Jesus wants to lead me into glory on. But God I can’t do that, I am weak, I need you to lead me in this by your Holy Spirit.” You need the power of the Holy Spirit in the gospel.

2. You need to understand that it is critical for you to be doing this. This is not optional in the Christian life. Your sin drags down everyone else. Sin is not a private personal thing that is just in your life. My sin affects you and your sin affects me. We are bound to each other in responsibility to fight our sins personally so that we don’t bring down everyone else.

When one man, Achan, does this and God says that because of this, in verse twelve, he had devoted the entire nation of Israel to destruction. The entire nation was scheduled for extermination unless they got rid of the sinful thing in their midst.

At the end when they are executing Achan Joshua asks him in verse twenty-five, “Why did you bring trouble on us?” I mean they are stoning him, and the rest of Israel is going to walk away from this. They didn’t’ say why did you bring onto yourself? Rather they ask why did you bring trouble upon us? Why did you drag us down through your sin? We have to individually fight our sins.

3. Here’s the thing, God will one day expose and destroy your sin one way or another. You may think that this is simply something that you can avoid this. But at the end of the day, one way or another, God will expose and destroy your sin.

We look at this passage and we see this stoning and we say that’s the mean, angry, cruel God. That’s the God of the Old Testament. He’s a much kinder, gentler God in the New Testament. In fact, in the New Testament we see the greatest outpouring of God’s wrath in the entire Bible. It’s put on the head of Jesus Christ who drinks down the cup of the wrath of the nations for you. He drinks it to the dregs for you.

God didn’t sidestep your sin. This is still the reality for those who do not look to Jesus in faith. For those who do, your sin has been taking and absorbed and dealt with and exhausted through Christ. This is the gospel. You don’t have to undergo this. You don’t have to stand under this judgement, Jesus did it in your place.

So, brothers and sisters, fight sin, fight it! There will come a day if you allow this stuff to linger where you won’t want Jesus at all anymore. Let God’s Spirit prompt you today to confession and repentance so that you can look to Jesus through faith and be washed white as snow.

Pray with me.

Gracious Heavenly Father, we confess that we are weak. We have no ability in and of ourselves to fight sin. God, we need your Spirit, pour out your Spirit. God give us faith to turn away from our sin. To recognize that it is a lie that is killing us, so that we can have life in Christ. We pray this in the name of your son our savior, who was devoted to destruction and who underwent trouble for us. Amen.