“Pray always, that you may come off conqueror; yea, that you may conquer Satan, and that you may escape the hands of the servants of Satan that do uphold his work.” (D&C 10:5). It is interesting that in the same breath that the Lord promises that we may conquer Satan, He also explains that we will do this not by defeating Satan’s servants but escaping from Satan and his minions. How do we “conquer” Satan by fleeing from him? Isn’t running away the opposite of conquering? Well, for starters, we know that we should “never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it” (George Bernard Shaw). If we try to fight Satan and his hordes, Satan wins regardless of the outcome of the battle. The world says that peace can only be achieved when one side of a conflict establishes itself through violence as the superior force. But the peace that Christ offers is to escape the fight entirely. We conquer Satan by not allowing ourselves to be drawn into the fight in the first place. Satan’s name means “adversary”, and if we refuse to be drawn into a confrontation, then Satan has no ability to be adversarial and thus no power over us. In the Book of Mormon, when Lehonti and his armies escaped from Amalackiah, they were conquering him by robbing all of his evil machinations of any momentum that they might have had. He could not pursue his plans of domination without them, and as long as they abandoned the low ground and retreated up into the mountains and away from his influence, they were winning. But as soon as Lehonti allowed himself to be flattered into fighting in a battle that he was guaranteed to win, it was at that moment that he stopped trying to escape when he lost the war. All of us would like to think that we are strong enough to endure this or that temptation, that we are clever enough to see through any lies or flatteries that the devil may have prepared for us. But such thoughts are some of Satan’s most powerful tools. He wants us to walk into what seems like a poorly laid and ultimately ineffective trap and prove how strong and brilliant and resilient we are. And then maybe we go and fight him again the next time and win again. He is willing to lose to us a thousand times, just so long as on that thousand and first time, when we are weary or distracted or hopeless or helpless, we finally lose. Christ doesn’t want us fighting against Satan because it only makes us and him miserable, only he likes it. Christ would much rather have us escape from Satan and abandon the low ground and avoid the fight altogether and, since he’s an oppositional force with nothing to oppose, he has no power over us. That is how we conquer him and his influence over us.
