“If it be the devil as an angel of light, when you ask him to shake hands he will offer you his hand, and you will not feel anything: you may therefore detect him.” (D&C 129:8). I’m not sure how many of us will ever have the misfortune to have the devil visit us as an angel of light, but it is a fact that the devil is trying to make deals with us in one form or another every day. And while the temptations may vary for each of us, the end result is pretty much always going to be the same - that we will not feel anything. If Satan tries to deceive us into pursuing hedonic pleasures and unbridled lusts, we will certainly feel a lot of new and exciting things at first. But at the bottom of every vice is a bottomless pit that sucks all of our feelings away from us. And since this is invariably accomplished in a very destructive and harmful way, such that whenever we let our guards down for a second we become bombarded with all of the pain and sorrow of the consequences of our actions, the numbing effect of the vices becomes an end unto itself. Satan and his minions do not have bodies and thus do not have the capacity to feel, and so they want to rob us of our ability to feel. “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: who being past feeling have given themselves over lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” (Ephesians 4:18-19). I am certain that one of the hardest temptations that Jesus Christ ever faced was when He was in the garden of Gethsemane feeling the pains and afflictions of every soul who had ever lived and no doubt Satan presented to Him in that moment of extreme vulnerability the option to just stop feeling. But Christ did not surrender His ability to feel even as He felt an infinite amount of pain and suffering. Christ understood that it is impossible to feel love without also being exposed to the potential to feel pain, and He refused to give up the pain because that would also mean having to give up the love and joy that were inextricably enmeshed with that pain and grief. Let us not allow ourselves to be tricked into shaking hands with the devil, because if we do we will not feel anything, and we were all born into physical bodies on this Earth in large part so that we could feel. Let us not give up our birthright so easily.
