As a young boy, I was dragged to church by my mother to the regular Sunday sessions at the Catholic Church.  While living in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, I regularly attended CCD, a religious training class.  In 1976 when we moved to Rocky River Ohio, I was transferred to a Catholic grade school where I took religious classes.  The transfer to St. Angela Merici grade school spurned in me an interest in Jesus and the teachings of the Bible.  One day out of interest I broke out the Bible and began reading the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  After reading the text I was impressed with the intelligence and insights of Christ as they applied to the world.  Christ's position was clear, he defended Mosaic Law while simultaneously forwarding the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  At the time I tried to follow this rule and for the most part it actually worked.

Nevertheless, despite my belief in the message of Christ and the wisdom in the New Testament and Mosaic Law, I still wondered what Jesus' conception of God was and how it applied to the world and civilization.  Jesus had rejected Satan's offer of power and glory in the world, but what exactly was it that the Evil-One was offering and why did Jesus reject it?  The answer semed to lie in the simple statement, "God is Good."  But what was the "good" and how did Jesus define it?

Since the time of Moses the Jews of the ancient world followed the 10 Commandments.  They were supposedly given by God to Moses in the desert of the Sinai.  To me they seemed rational.  They go as follows:

1. I am the Lord your God, You shall have no other gods before me

2. You shall not make for yourself an idol

3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of you God

4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy 

5. Honor your father and mother

6. You shall not murder

7. You shall not committ adultery

8. You shall not steal

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor

10. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife not anything that your neighbor possesses

According to the New Testament, Jesus beleived that these laws were fair.  His dispute, as he put it, was not so much with the law but the teachers of the law, the Sadducces and the Pharisees who he saw as hypocrites and collaboraters with Roman occupiers.  In addition, Jesus makes the argument that all of the Commandments can be summarized by the Golden Rule.  He also said that the greatest Commandment is to "Love your God above all else."  This raises the question of who and what God is.  If we presume that the rules in the Ten Commandments are fair and that the rules are applied uniformly to all, then God appears to be a benevolent ruler.

Now mind you as I grew older these ideas stuck in my head, but at some point I realized the complexities of modern society.  I started to read the books of Sigmund Freud and delved into the conception of freedom and nature.  Freud argued that freedom in nature (or the jungle) was greater than freedom in civilization.  The reason that there had to be prohibitions in society and policiing was because people wanted to do those kinds of things that were prohibited (see Moses and Monotheism).  People wanted to covet, steal, even kill and not suffer any consequences, thus civilization placed restriction on the freedom of people.  The advantage of civilization was that it provided legal protections--i.e., a person's  property and life were protected.  In a state of nature (or the jungle if you prefer) there were advantages.  A person could do whatever they pleased, but there were drawbacks; nature was dangerous.  If one could steal, kill, etc., then one could be stolen from and/or killed.  Civilization had disadvantages; it wasn't as free as nature, but there were advantages, and despite restriction, there was more safety.

The question for me when reading Freud was how did this relate to Christ and his conception of God.  Well, the answer was clear.  For Christ, God was fair God of fair rules--benevolent.  Christ's God accepted both the advantages and disadvantages of civilization, the restrictions placed on doing evil, or benefiting from evil acts.  To Christ, God was good; he was an honest cop.  When God punished someone for disobeying the commandments then that was a manifestation of Justice, and thus the laws represented the "good."

The Devil, on the other hand, well he wanted all the advantages of nature (stealing, killing, coveting) and all the advantages of civilization (legal protections).  He wanted to have his cake and eat it too.  He wanted to "break all the rules" without suffering any of the consequences for it.  He wanted to steal but not get stolen from, kill but not get killed, etc.  The Devil was a representation of arbitrary power and rule, above all law and restriction.

It is for this reason that Christ rejected the Devil's offer in the desert, because the the Devil was a dishonest advocate of arbitray and tyrranical rule.  In light of the evil nature of the world of his day, Christ concluded that the true ruler of world was the Devil and not God and that the world was largely an evil place.  Mind you Christ lived under Roman occupation and was not a citizen but rather part of a conquered people (the Jews), so we can see why he thought this way.  Rome at the time was ruled by an Emperor with arbitrary power who sought to be worshipped as a god.  Christ, in all probablility, regarded the Emperor as an agent of arbitrary power or as Satan himself.

Now for the rest of mankind, the situation was different.  No one person was as perfect as God nor as tyrannical as Satan.  Most people were somewhere in between, occasionally sinning, some more than others.  Jesus, however, knew the truth that if all people followed the Commandments more closely tht it would solve a number of world problems.  For example, if all people obeyed the prohibition against killing, it would put and end to war.  It is for this reason that he is known as the "Prince of Peace."

If people volutarily followed the Commandments this would reduce the need for punishment and policing.  Thus for Jesus, following the Commandments made people more spiritual, or more properly said, the followers of God.  It is for this reason that he said that those who believed in him could become the sons and daughters of God---quite literally, the children of God.  But Jesus was a pragamatist.  He knew there were unfair things about the world forwarded by the agents of evil (unfair rules, laws and restrictions), and that temptation was everywhere, therefore he advocated for the forgiveness of sins.  Jesus rejected Satan's offer of power and glory because he did not want to become an agent of arbitrary rule, injustice, or the employee of a dishonest tyrant.  Jesus, Christianity's first whistleblower.