Herbert Berkley
At some point we all crave something late night. Dinner had already left my stomach and I wasn’t ready for bed, so I did what most of us do — I picked up my phone and started looking for food. Not cooking. Not getting up and driving somewhere. Just looking. Scrolling through delivery apps and local spots still open, tapping through images of meals I hadn’t planned on wanting five minutes earlier.
And the images were doing their job. The perfect burger — tall, layered, glistening. A steak dinner plated like it belonged in a magazine. Mediterranean bowls with colors so vivid they almost looked fake. Grilled chicken salads that somehow made lettuce look exciting. You know how it goes. You start checking menus, comparing prices, wondering if the condiments come with it or if they charge extra. You read three reviews. You look at the photos one more time. Your mouth is watering and you haven’t even placed the order yet.
So you order. The four-star place with the pictures that sealed it. And when the bag shows up at your door and you open that container — you’re still thinking about those images. The anticipation is still sitting right there in your chest. But what you’re looking at doesn’t resemble anything you had in mind. The lettuce is wilted. The bread is soggy. The whole thing looks like it was assembled by someone who had already clocked out. Unappetizing. Disappointing. And smaller than you expected.
And since you paid for it, you ate it anyway.
And we should be careful here. Wanting a late meal isn’t sinful. Looking for options to find it isn’t sinful. But how often does what we see — what appeals to us, what catches the eye and waters the mouth — actually turn out the way we expected? It doesn’t. Because the world is a deceptive place. People are deceptive. Marketing is deceptive. And the desires of the flesh are completely deceptive. The wanting isn’t the problem. It’s that what the world puts in front of us to satisfy the wanting almost never delivers what it promises.
This is how sin often works
The writer of Hebrews described what Moses understood when he turned away from Egypt: he chose “rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin” (Hebrews 11:25, ESV). Scripture doesn’t pretend that sin offers nothing. There are pleasures. But they are fleeting — already fading even as they arrive. The advertisement was better than the meal. Moses saw that. Most of us take longer.
James traces the sequence: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14—15, ESV). Those verbs — lured, enticed — are fishing language. Bait on a hook. Something dangled that appeals to the eye, the appetite, the ambition. It looks like life. Follow it to its end, though, and what James says you find is death.
We see the pattern from the beginning. When Eve looked at the forbidden fruit, she “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6, ESV). Appetite, beauty, ambition — the text itself lays out three appeals. John would later name what appear to be these same avenues: “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2:16, ESV). The strategy hasn’t changed. The same lure, the same hook, the same empty plate at the end.
I wish I could say I’ve outgrown the appeal. I haven’t. I know what my particular advertisements look like — the ones that show up when I’m tired, when I feel overlooked, when the day didn’t go the way I needed it to. They’re not dramatic temptations. They’re ordinary ones. And that’s exactly why they work.
The shrewdness of the tempter has never been in offering something obviously dangerous. It’s in concealing the real cost behind something that looks harmless. Paul warned the Corinthians about exactly this: “as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your minds will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3, ESV). Cunning — not force. And Jesus named the source plainly: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44, ESV). No food advertisement shows you the stomachache. No temptation shows you the aftermath — the guilt, the fractured trust, the slow wearing-down of character: “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7, ESV). The old proverb knew it too. “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.” But the next verse finishes the thought: “he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol” (Proverbs 9:17–18, ESV)
The advertisement never mentions the cost. It can’t afford to.
So we need — first, honestly — the humility to admit we are susceptible. Not in theory. In practice. “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12, ESV). We are not above the advertising. And we need the word of God stored up the way the psalmist described — “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11, ESV) — because truth is what exposes a false advertisement for what it is. When the Lord Himself was tempted, He did not negotiate. He answered with “It is written” (Matthew 4:4, 7, 10). Scripture. That was His defense, and it has to be ours.
But the deepest comfort may be this: God offers something that actually is what it claims to be. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23, ESV). There is no gap between what God promises and what He delivers. The life He offers in Christ does not arrive lukewarm and smaller than expected. It is — and Paul strains language to say it — more than we could have imagined: what “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9, ESV).
Sin advertises well. It always has. But the meal never satisfies. And somewhere, right now, the next advertisement is already catching our eye.
The question is whether we’ve tasted enough of what’s real to recognize what isn’t.
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