“Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” (Matthew 4:10). One of the subtlest tricks that Satan uses against us is the idea that we have to defeat him utterly and completely once and for all. It is not enough to overcome this specific temptation if doing so doesn’t at the same time stop all possible future temptations as well. It’s not enough to fix only the small problems we are facing in our own life, but we must fix all of the problems everywhere. We don’t have to accept this argument as valid. The Savior didn’t. He said get thee hence, or in modern terms, get away from here. What He did not say was, I banish thee from the world now and forever. At the time of his temptations when He said those words, It was not part of the Jesus’s personal journey or even of His mission as the Savior of the World to defeat Satan so soundly that he could never tempt Jesus or anyone else ever again. For one thing, removing that opposition would destroy God’s plan for His children. We need to experience temptations so that we can have the ability to choose between good and evil. The best we can hope for in a confrontation with Satan is to be able to say “Get thee hence!” We can tell the devil to go away from us right now as long as we have a full understanding that he isn’t gone for good from the world or from our own lives. If we have to tell Satan to get thee hence fifty times a day, then that’s what we have to do. We can have the desire to clean up the whole world, but if we won’t even start with cleaning up our own room until we have the power to clean up the whole world, then we are succumbing to temptation. We don’t need to fix everything, we just need to focus on the temptation that is right in front of us.
