The Last Rites of 'The Devil Made Me Do It'

*And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. — Genesis 3:13

But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. — James 1:14*

It is literally the oldest excuse in the book. Three chapters into Genesis, asked one question, the first woman answers with it, and the first man has already answered with two of his own — the woman did it, and God gave him the woman. Neither excuse is accepted. The sentence falls on all three parties, serpent first, in the order of the blame. The canon's first courtroom rules on day one that the guilt of the instigator does not transfer off the agent.

This essay is about that excuse's expiry. Not its refutation — that was done in Eden — but its statute of limitations: the point past which it cannot even be offered. The text fixes that point at death, with one counter-measure available before it and a narrow, contested space after it in which the living may still act for the dead. And it is about what happens to the excuse when the party it names is removed from the story altogether, which is the season this house believes we are standing in. The devil made you do it. Granted. He is no longer in the room. What are you going to do about it?

Who Has Used It, and Who Has Not

Eve used it. Adam used it twice. And then the record becomes more interesting, because the one man who is usually cited as the apostolic example of the excuse never actually makes it. Paul, in Romans 7, says 'it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me' (7:17, 20). Read in its own sentences that is a diagnosis, not a plea. He opens the passage with 'I am carnal' and closes it with 'O wretched man that I am' — the mechanism named, and the deed owned in the same breath. The nearest Paul comes to blaming the adversary for anything is 1 Thessalonians 2:18, 'Satan hindered us,' which is an obstruction, not an act. Paul is the witness for the living half of this essay precisely because he could name the whole machinery of sin and still not hide behind it.

James removes the serpent from the sentence altogether. 'Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death' (1:14–15). There is no devil in those verses. The drawing-away is the man's own; the conception is his own; the delivery is death. The verbs are obstetric, and the father is never named because the text does not need him. That is the canon's own version of 'the devil did not make you do it,' written by the Lord's brother, and it will be the last word here.

The Statute Runs Out at Death

If sin entered the world as a defiling force, the question is when the defilement stops being answerable. Scripture is not ambiguous. 'It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment' (Hebrews 9:27). The Lord's own phrase for the failure case is exactly the one this essay uses: 'ye shall die in your sins' (John 8:21, 24) — not with your sins removed at the threshold by the fact of dying, but with them, as the condition in which the account is given. 'There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave' (Ecclesiastes 9:10). 'Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed' (Luke 16:26). 'He that is filthy, let him be filthy still' (Revelation 22:11). Death is the statute's terminus. Past it, the excuse is not refuted; it simply cannot be filed.

Before it, there is one counter-measure and the text names it: 'it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul' (Leviticus 17:11); 'without shedding of blood is no remission' (Hebrews 9:22). The blood is not a mechanism that runs on its own — it is applied by confession, 'if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us' (1 John 1:9) — but it is the only counter-measure the record offers, and it is offered to the living.

Hence the object of the game: not to die with sin. And hence the oldest pastoral practices around the threshold, which are older than the Latin rite that named them. The canon's own last rite is James 5:14–15 — 'call for the elders… anointing him with oil… and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him' — intercession at the threshold, inside the covenant. The ancient insistence on timely burial is Deuteronomy 21:23, the body not left overnight, and the book of Tobit is built on a man who risked his life to keep it. The interval those customs guard is the one the rabbis mapped in detail: the soul hovering near the body three days (Genesis Rabbah 100:7), then the mourner's Kaddish for the year that follows, which rests on the teaching that the judgment of the wicked runs twelve months (Eduyot 2:10; Rosh Hashanah 17a). Kaddish is intercession for the dead, said by the ones who remember them. The practice this essay describes has been kept in the synagogue for two thousand years.

This house holds, as conviction, that for the duration of the 120 Jubilees of Genesis 6:3 mankind died and the judgment was deferred — that the dead sleep, in Daniel's word (12:2), and rest before they stand (12:13) — and that the deferred account comes due at the Great White Throne, in the same scene in which earth and heaven flee from the face of the One seated on it (Revelation 20:11). The throne and the rending are one scene in the text, not two. Those not found written in the Lamb's Book of Life go into the lake of fire, which the text calls the second death (20:14). Whether the second death is cessation or conscious perpetuity is a division older than this essay and it is marked here as conviction, not spine: the house reads 'second death,' Malachi's stubble and ashes (4:1–3), 'destroy both soul and body' (Matthew 10:28), 'into smoke shall they consume away' (Psalm 37:20) and Obadiah's 'as though they had not been' (v.16) as cessation, and notes that the 'for ever and ever' of Revelation 20:10 is applied in its own sentence to the devil, the beast, and the false prophet, not to the names absent from the book. The other column — Matthew 25:46 chief among it — is real and the reader may weigh it.

Two Ledgers, and Which One Keeps the Names

It is true that the memory of the wicked is left to rot — 'the name of the wicked shall rot' (Proverbs 10:7), 'the memory of them is forgotten' (Ecclesiastes 9:5), 'whom thou rememberest no more' (Psalm 88:5) — and that with the rotting of the memory the capacity of anyone to intercede for it rots too. No one prays for a name no one knows. And it is true that the fondly remembered, the ones whose legacy was preserved, are the ones for whom remembrance can still be offered in retrospect. But if that were the whole ledger, then the quiet man would be lost by the accident of having no one loud enough to remember him, and the canon refuses that conclusion in so many words.

Consider the blessing of history and preserved knowledge from the other side. The person who never used their talents, who lived in isolation without fellowship, is left with no one to remember them fondly or to see the hidden treasure that others misunderstood or judged wrongly — and the parable is severe with him, because the talent was for use (Matthew 25:24–30). But the pious and quiet servant of all, who sought neither fame nor fortune, who rarely had the spare change for a holiday gift or a round at the pub, is left with few friends on earth and a full account somewhere else. 'Thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly' (Matthew 6:4, 6). The widow's two mites — everything she had, which would not have bought the round — were the largest gift in the treasury that day by the only auditor whose count is final (Mark 12:41–44). 'God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love' (Hebrews 6:10). And the ledger itself is named: 'a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name' (Malachi 3:16) — written before Him, by Him, not by the survivors.

Hence the admonition, which is the hinge verse of this essay: 'judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God' (1 Corinthians 4:5). Read the last clause. The hidden things brought to light at that audit are not only the hidden sins; 'then shall every man have praise of God' means the hidden treasures too — the ones others misjudged. There are two ledgers. Man's remembrance is perishable and perishes with the rememberers; it is the medium in which the living can still act for the dead, and it is urgent for that reason. God's remembrance is the one that keeps the names, and it is not dependent on whether anyone on earth stood a round.

The same verb runs on both ledgers. Zakar, to remember, is a covenant verb in the Hebrew Bible: God remembers Noah in the ark, remembers Abraham for Lot's sake, remembers Rachel. Nehemiah ends his book praying 'remember me, O my God' three times in one chapter. The thief on the cross asks for nothing but to be remembered. Hebrews 11 is what a book of remembrance looks like when it is published — a roll of the dead, kept by the living, with a harlot and a womanizer in it, and no blots.

The Washing Between the Dead and the Living

The word for the failure case is blot. 'Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book' (Exodus 32:33) — which presumes the names start in. 'Let them be blotted out of the book of the living' (Psalm 69:28). And the mirror: 'I will not blot out his name out of the book of life' (Revelation 3:5). The blot is the ledger's own verb for removal, and the question this essay raises is the scope, if any, for intercession by the living to lift a blot from one already dead.

The record gives one image that is almost too exact. In Numbers 16, the plague breaks out in the congregation, and Aaron runs into the midst of it with a censer: 'and he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stayed' (16:48). Intercession, standing on the line between the two columns, stopping the count. That is the posture, and it is a priest's posture, and it is in the Torah.

The direct text for prayer lifting the sin of the already-dead is 2 Maccabees 12:43–45 — Judas Maccabeus sending an offering to Jerusalem for the fallen, 'that they might be delivered from sin' — and it is outside the Protestant canon. Inside it, Paul cites a practice at Corinth without endorsing or condemning it: 'else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?' (1 Corinthians 15:29). He uses it as an argument for resurrection and leaves the practice unexplained; commentators have counted more than forty readings. The Latter-day Saints built a rite on the verse and most of the church calls the rite heresy. This house does not adjudicate the rite. It notes that there is an element of relevance in the verse that the church's shunning has buried with it: not a washing into the church of any man's conception, and not by water at all, but the washing the text elsewhere attributes to the Spirit — 'the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost' (Titus 3:5); 'ye are washed… by the Spirit of our God' (1 Corinthians 6:11). Job rose early to sanctify his children by offering, 'it may be that my sons have sinned' (Job 1:5) — intercession for a sin the intercessor could not see, by one who loved them. That is the shape of the thing. Whether it reaches past the grave is the contested question, and the fence on it is Ezekiel 18:20 ('the soul that sinneth, it shall die… the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him') and the fixed gulf of Luke 16. The house carries the remembrance ledger as spine and the lifting of a blot after death as conviction, and says so.

What every tradition agrees on is the part the argument actually needs. The dead are remembered or forgotten by the living; the remembering is done by people who are themselves running out of time; and when the last rememberer is gone the window closes on earth, whatever remains open in heaven. That is the timely-burial instinct seen from the other side. There is an interval. It is not long. Use it.

When the Lag Goes to Zero

Now the forward edge. This house holds that we are in the transition from faith to fact — that the season is one in which the sealed things are being read (Daniel 12:9) and the appointed times are coming to term. If that is so, then two intervals compress together, and the text describes both.

The first is the interval between death and judgment. For the span of the deferral it was long; the dead slept. In the season of the unveiling it shortens toward nothing. 'He that is unjust, let him be unjust still… and, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be' (Revelation 22:11–12) — the fixing and the recompense in adjacent verses, with no sleep between them. The book of Acts gives a foretaste of what immediacy looks like when the presence is near: Ananias and Sapphira did not wait a year for their audit (5:5, 10), and neither did Herod (12:23). The house carries the compression at conviction; the verses that describe it are spine.

The second interval is the allowance for ignorance, and here the text is explicit that it was always a policy with an expiry. 'The times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world' (Acts 17:30–31). Winked at — and the wink ends because the day is appointed. The standard was graded by knowledge from the beginning: 'he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes' (Luke 12:48). The unbelief of ignorance is tested to a lower standard. But the grade rises with the light: 'if ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth' (John 9:41); 'now they have no cloke for their sin' (John 15:22); 'if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice' (Hebrews 10:26). The cloak is cut to the measure of the darkness. As the darkness goes, so does the cloak.

And the darkness is going, by the text's own forecast. 'Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased' (Daniel 12:4). The word is da'at — the same word as the tree in the garden, the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9, 17) — and the same word in Habakkuk's tide: 'the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea' (2:14). We have lived to see the first clause of Daniel's forecast with our own eyes; the house records it as witness, not as proof of anything. One fence, stated once: a rising tide of information is not the same as received truth — 'ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth' (2 Timothy 3:7) is also in the forecast, and 'knowledge puffeth up' (1 Corinthians 8:1). The tide raises the standard for everyone; it does not lower the water for anyone.

Put the two compressions together and the fence-straddler's position is arithmetic. 'How long halt ye between two opinions?' (1 Kings 18:21) — the text's own word for straddling, asked by Elijah before the fire fell. 'Thou art neither cold nor hot… I will spue thee out of my mouth' (Revelation 3:15–16). With rising knowledge and lowering defilement, the excuse of ignorance wanes, and with it the case for the mercy that sustains a man on the fence. In the end the dead are judged, and the living are found on one side of it or the other. The one still in darkness is not only running out of time. He is running out of excuses, and the two run out together.

The Living, With the Devil Out of the Story

So much for the dead and buried. What of the living?

The house's companion exhibits read the binding of Revelation 20:1–3 and the purge of Zechariah 13:2 — 'I will cause the unclean spirit to pass out of the land' — as the removal of the serpent and the clearing of the demonic realms from the story, a removal this essay takes as its premise and marks, as the exhibits do, at conviction. What is left when the instigator is gone is not a blank. It is free will, with two things added that the first pair in the garden did not have.

The first is space. 'I gave her space to repent' (Revelation 2:21) — the phrase is the Lord's own, and 2 Peter 3:9 gives the reason for every delay in the story: longsuffering, 'not willing that any should perish.' The second is context. Job never learned what the reader of Job 1 knows; the living, once the defilement is cleared, are handed the first chapter. And context is the thing that turns injury into provision in the canon's own example: 'ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good' (Genesis 50:20), said by the brother who was sold, to the brothers who sold him, at the end of the story when the whole shape could be seen. Lemons into lemonade is a patriarch's line. It requires the end of the story to be in view, and the house holds that it is.

Which leaves the excuse with nowhere to go. The serpent is out of the story; the blame that was refused in Eden cannot be filed in a room the defendant has left. What remains is the verse with no devil in it — 'every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust' — and the prophet's question, which was never addressed to the adversary: 'Cast away from you all your transgressions… for why will ye die? …I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye' (Ezekiel 18:31–32). Turn yourselves. The verb has one subject.

The devil made you do it. Fine. He has been read his sentence, and it is not yours. You are still here, in the interval, with the blood available and the window open and the tide coming in. The excuse has had its last rites. What are you going to do about it?

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Sources and tiers, in the discipline of the house. SPINE — the texts as cited: Genesis 3:12–13 (two excuses and one from Eve; sentence on all three); Romans 7:14–25 and 1 Thessalonians 2:18 (Paul names the mechanism and owns the deed); James 1:14–15 (no devil in the verse); Hebrews 9:27; John 8:21, 24; Ecclesiastes 9:10; Luke 16:26; Revelation 22:11; Leviticus 17:11; Hebrews 9:22; 1 John 1:9; James 5:14–15; Deuteronomy 21:23; Daniel 12:2, 13; Revelation 20:11–15; Proverbs 10:7; Ecclesiastes 9:5; Psalm 88:5; Matthew 25:24–30; Matthew 6:4, 6; Mark 12:41–44; Hebrews 6:10; Malachi 3:16; 1 Corinthians 4:5; Exodus 32:32–33; Psalm 69:28; Revelation 3:5; Numbers 16:46–48; Job 1:5; Titus 3:5; 1 Corinthians 6:11; Ezekiel 18:20, 31–32; Revelation 22:11–12; Acts 5:5, 10 and 12:23; Acts 17:30–31; Luke 12:47–48; John 9:41; John 15:22; Hebrews 10:26; Daniel 12:4 (da'at, with Genesis 2:9, 17 and Habakkuk 2:14); 2 Timothy 3:7; 1 Corinthians 8:1; 1 Kings 18:21; Revelation 3:15–16; Revelation 2:21; 2 Peter 3:9; Genesis 50:20. SCAFFOLD — the burial and mourning interval as kept in the tradition: Tobit; Genesis Rabbah 100:7 (three days); Eduyot 2:10 and Rosh Hashanah 17a (twelve months); the mourner's Kaddish; the Latin last rites as a later naming of James 5; 2 Maccabees 12:43–45 (direct, and outside the Protestant canon); 1 Corinthians 15:29 (cited by Paul, unexplained, contested). CONVICTION — the author's readings: the 120 Jubilees of Genesis 6:3 as the span of the deferral; judgment deferred to the Great White Throne, with the throne and the rending one scene; the second death as cessation (the opposing column, Matthew 25:46 chief among it, acknowledged); the lifting of a blot after death by the remembrance of the living; the compression of the death-to-judgment interval and of the ignorance allowance in the season of the unveiling; the removal of the serpent and the purge of the realms as present premise, carried from the companion exhibits. WITNESS — the increase of knowledge in the present generation, as observed, proving nothing. Every date in this house stands under Mark 13:32. Consistent-with is never proven-by.