You don’t need me to tell you that stealing a video game from a shop is wrong. It’s obvious isn’t it?

In his heart Bart knows it’s wrong to steal something motivated by greed. But do our views stay so hard and fast if the circumstances change? If we saw someone stealing food to feed their child is it still obvious to us that it’s wrong? If we are out shopping and we thought we saw someone pop something in their pocket, how many people would tell a member of staff?

People can have different opinions about what is right and wrong, we know ourselves that just because something is against the law, doesn’t make it wrong; and similarly so, just because something is legal – doesn’t make it right.

People make mistakes all the time and one school of thought is to blame the devil. The devil made me do it.

Scripture records the existence of the Devil and that he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, as Christians most of us will believe in the existence of evil and of the one who tempts us to do wrong.

Seeing the world in an ongoing conflict between good and evil is a powerful image and a concept that some people take as their lens with which to view the whole world.

Knowing that there is a force at work in the world that tempts us, that tries to steer us off the right path can have very different effects on us. For some people they can easily become obsessed by it, they look for the Devil in every situation.

Problem is, is that we know that life is rarely so cut and dried, if only every moral decision was as premeditated as Bart’s decision to steal from a Department store. We know there are shades of grey in most decisions we are called to make, sometimes the decision may have to be ‘which is the lesser of two evils’?

The certainty that often comes from having such a world view can be very comforting, but it can also produce the opposite effect.

There’s a story of a donkey tied up, equally far away from two piles of food, the rope round the donkey’s neck will let it reach either of them comfortably. The donkey starves to death because it couldn’t work out which pile of food to eat first.  The potential of trying to spot the devil in a situation is that it can end up producing inactivity or inertia. We could become unable to achieve anything because we spent all our time trying to second guess if we’re playing into the hands of the devil.

The other result can be that we end up attributing everything that we don’t like in the world to being satanic in origin; be it gambling, alcohol or Brussels sprouts. It can be all too easy to blame the devil for all that goes wrong in our lives.

Often I find that we can see his effects, but it’s normally when we have the opportunity to see the situation with a little perspective (and unfortunately too, normally hindsight!).

We are complex people; we don’t rehearse what we say in a conversation, it just happens (even if we are minding our P’s & Q’s), it’s hard to go looking for supernatural evil forces while you’re having a chat with friends.

Rather than trying to second guess what Satan is up to, we need to try and focus on what God wants us to do, and that involves opening ourselves up to his influence and trusting that he will lead us down the right path.

Chances are that most of us already do this at certain points, when we are faced with life changes or challenges or when other people’s situations touch our hearts. We open ourselves up to God through our prayers, we pray for the things we hope to change, we pray for the situations we feel are bigger than us and we pray for guidance for the decisions we have to make.

Big decisions, we typically don’t make in a hurry, we don’t buy houses in a flash or decide to start or end a relationship, we usually take our time and we think about such things, here we invite God in to try and guide our decision making process.

But what about the little things, the small things that we don’t think about, we can all invite God in just a little more, think about what he would want us to do in a few more situations. We all still have space to grow; we can all do just a little better.

Within the media it’s far more common for learned atheists to be held up as intellectuals with books and even films decrying faith than it is for people of faith to be held up as rounded fulfilled people.

As we bring this season of sermons inspired by The Simpsons to a close, it’s interesting to note that it is one of the few shows on TV where every single member of the principle case goes to church or is a person of faith, unless a show is set in a church that is almost unheard of. When the show first started I refused to watch it, seeing it as being a cynical show about bad people doing bad things, taking a step back I think I see another hand at work.

Sometimes we have to take a step back to see the presence of or the absence of God in a state of affairs, it has to be our prayer that he becomes involved of more of our situations. 

(Dan Joseph)