The Devil in the Desert Speaks the Gospel Truth

The story of sin and salvation is the story of the two ways we become as God

Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men opens with theologizing by Sheriff Tom Bell, a character portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in the Coen Brothers’s film of the novel, “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him.  I know he’s real.  I have seen his work.” No Country for Old Men reads like a chase story but it’s really an eschatological allegory; that is, it’s about a creation that has been turned upside down, where truth is lost and life is worthless. Reading the horrific stories in the newspaper and seeing the senseless violence on his police beat, Sheriff Bell— the old man of the story’s title— no longer recognizes the country in which he was raised.

The fact frightens him.

The Oscar-wining screenplay omits the scene which closes the novel— and makes it intelligible. Sheriff Bell is at the supper table with his wife and observes, “she told me she’d been readin St. John. The Revelations.  Any time I get to talkin about how things are she’ll find somethin in the bible so I asked her if Revelations had anything to say about the shape things was takin and she said she’d let me know.” But before she comes back to him, Sheriff Bell reasons his way from the depraved, hopeless condition of humanity to his own biblical judgment. He says, ““I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train.”

In the first three chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul famously argues that the creation itself is a two-sided apocalypse.

Creation reveals God’s gratuity.

Creation discloses our depravity.

Creation not only is a revelation of the Love that is God, creation is an ongoing, possibly ever-increasing, unveiling of human sin. This is why, at the beginning of his letter, Paul speaks of creation as already suffering the wrath of God. Only through the faith of Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, is the story of Sin unwound and retold, writes Paul (3.22-25).

Another way of putting Paul’s point: the Devil was right.

“You shall be as gods,” insisted the serpent to Eve in Eden.

And he was right. We shall become as God.

As the apostle writes in another epistle, “For our sake, God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”  To become the righteousness of God is to become as Christ, the Son of God. As St. Athanasius puts it in On the Incarnation, a maxim that makes its way into the catechism, “For the Son of God became man so that man might become God.”