‘Get Behind Me Satan’ is the fifth studio album by American alternative rock band The White Stripes, released on June 7, 2005, on V2 Records. It is also, more famously, the sentiment expressed by Jesus after hearing the disciple Peter’s firmly expressed belief in the idea that being tortured and killed was certainly nowhere in God’s wonderful plan for his life. The expression is subsequently better unpacked by the words which follow it. Here is a decent rendering of those words: “…You are dangerous to me. You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.” Here we see the entirety of the conflict between flesh and spirit placed in a nutshell and given for us to absorb and digest, and it hurts! The moment when we realize this pain is the moment when we must begin to make the real, actual choices that will form us into the person we will become. We can choose to align with destiny, or we can remain quiet and desperate as best we know how, clinging for dear life to the comforts that seem real, until we become a mutated monstrosity of everything humanity was never supposed to be.
If you are ever not quite sure of what you’re supposed to do, look at your situation through the lens of self-sacrificial love, and the truth should become blindingly clear.
