Living off a half-printed dollar bill

Imagine someone hands you a dollar bill as payment for a dozen eggs. You then notice only one side is prined, the other is blank. You then complain that's not a valid note and hear that the printed side should be enough to pay for the dozen eggs. You complain again that the bill has only one side, and the buyer rebukes you that in such case it should be worth half a dozen. Would you accept those arguments? Of course not.

Jesus repeatedly calls the devil the "prince of this world" ("Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out.": John 12:31, "I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me": John 14:30, "And about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned": John 16:11). In fact, when He was tempted the devil said "I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to". Also, in John 5:19 we read "the whole world is under the control of the evil one". This idea goes even deeper, when we read for example in the Assumption of Moses, an ancient Jewish text, on how the devil demanded from the Archangel Michael the dead body of Moses, with the argument that because a dead body no longer has a soul and is made of matter, therefore belongs to him. This story is confirmed in Jude 1:9, which reads "But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses"

The world is a full dollar bill: one one side a loving father doing His best to keep us happy, and on the other a hating beast doing his best to make us miserable. Problem is that the beast, as we've seen, owns this world, so that means absolutely everything we ask from that father, He has to get from that beast. Of course, that means a constant battle, much like the one between Jesus and Satan mentioned above.

And that battle becomes much worse when that beast has a valid argument that we are his property too. For that is what we become with time through our faults: slaves of Satan. So, imagine you are a father and want to give your child an Xbox, but that child is in prison because of a proven crime. You'd have to go through the prison's red tape in order to hand over that Xbox, and even then your child would not be able to use it as there are no electrical plugs in prison cells. Thus, the only way to give your child an Xbox is paying whatever debt he committed as to get him out of jail, and hope he will not do that crime again and end up back.

That's what confession does: it pays those debts so we can come out of the prison Satan puts us into, and thus be able to receive (and enjoy too!) whatever our loving father has for us. However, we refuse to accept the reality of Satan in our lives. We prefer to live off a fantasy that there is only a loving God and that absolutely everything that happens is because of him. So, if something bad happens, it is because he does not really love us, he failed to protect us, he is not as powerful as we thought, etc.

For that is how we live our lives: thinking that a half-printed currency is enough to cover for our expenses. Worse, when we see it does not, we think that it should cover at least half of them, and we ask from our father half of what we really need, thinking he has no real intention, no real power, no real will, no real love, etc

Let's stop being mediocre and living in a fantasy land, and accept the harsh facts that there is someone out there who hates us and owns us, making our loving father's work of making us happy very complicated. So let's learn to feel sorry for the stuff we did, so we rid ourselves of that beast's yoke and enjoy the happy life that our dad in heaven has for us