When caught between a rock and a hard place, the former smuggler/gambler/scoundrel Lando Calrissian (played by Billy Dee Williams) in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back makes what he thinks is an acceptable, albeit costly, deal with the Evil Empire's enforcer, Darth Vader. Unfortunately for Lando, the colony he administers (Cloud City), and the 'guests' he bargained to save, Princess Leia and Chewbacca, Darth Vader quickly decides to alter the deal. In addition to the original cost of giving Lando's friend, Han Solo, over to a bounty hunter, Vader now demands that Leia and Chewbacca be given to his custody as well. When Lando objects, Vader responds with the infamous line, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." Aside from a chilling moment in a movie masterpiece (Yes, Empire is the best SW movie, although A New Hope is right behind it), this interaction demonstrates an unalterable truth about deals and bargains made with evil: they only get worse.
This is not a new dramatic theme, the playwright Christopher Marlowe said much the same thing in his classic 1592 play, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, wherein the title character makes a literal deal with the devil, only to have it predictably unravel to his final damnation. To the Christian (or Jewish) theologian, the notion that any pact/deal made with an evil entity, or any path laid out that will utilize evil as a means to an end, will inevitably end in one's own corruption and destruction is no surprise at all. What else could the outcome be? The reason for this is simple, rebellion against God only has one outcome: self-destruction.
Proverbs 10:16 New International Version (NIV)
16 The wages of the righteous is life,
but the earnings of the wicked are sin and death.
James 1:15 New International Version (NIV)
Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
Romans 6:16 New International Version (NIV)
16 Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?
Why is there no other outcome? Once again the answer is straightforward: God is the sole source of holiness, goodness, and life. All those who turn from that source, who choose instead to strike out on their own, and who offer God no gratitude or allegiance, will in turn reap the true nature of what that cry for independence has earned. This is not a question of God's mercy, for God has offered salvation to humanity, a way to be redeemed and not perish, but rather a question of reality. Apart from God, there is no life. How could God make it otherwise? And more importantly, God could not do such an act of evil as to make a path 'work out' that leads those he has created away from him.
What is true in the grand scheme, that is the direction and outcome of our lives, is true along the way as well. If we cannot end a journey away from God with anything but self-destruction, nor can we hope to have success when choosing to live against the Law of God between here and there. The standard by which our whole lives are judged (the holiness and righteousness of God), is the same standard by which each episode within those lives are judged. What is true for the whole is true for the parts as well. To make a 'deal with the devil', even if one considers it to be only a short-term deal, is to embrace folly. Deals with evil are always worse than they present themselves to be, and they only go downhill from there, inevitably.
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