The Misdirection Play
Robb Hadley
Fayetteville, AR
7/22/98
The Misdirection Play
The “Stopwatch Bandit” is behind bars. For fourteen years, Patrick Michael Mitchell travelled the country and snatched millions of dollars in precision bank robberies. Mitchell and his gang timed their heists with a stopwatch making sure to get in and out in less than two minutes. Over the last fifteen years, he was responsible for stealing what police can only estimate as “several million dollars.”
Mitchell was caught in a solo bank robbery in Southaven, Mississippi because the local police chief wasn’t fooled by the old misdirection play. According to an Associated Press report, “Mitchell telephoned police and threatened to blow up City Hall, certain this would divert attention while he robbed the bank. The ploy had worked before. ‘There’s only nine banks in the whole town and the police chief sent a police car to every one of them,’ Mitchell said. ‘I was in and out in about 45 seconds. I scooped up the money bags and left, but they were waiting.’”
The Bible teaches that the devil is a master of misdirection. When he went to the desert to tempt Jesus, Satan quoted Scripture. We might be surprised that the devil appealed to God’s word to tempt Christ, but our Lord was familiar with the old misdirection play. He’d seen it before in the Garden of Eden when the old serpent tempted Eve by taking her attention away from the clear command of God and appealing to her lust and her pride. Jesus also knew what happened when the Israelites sent spies into Canaan and Satan took their focus off the land flowing with milk and honey and put it on the formidable “giants” who lived there.
The only time the devil can tempt a Christian is when we let him distract us from that on which we should be focused. Here is how Paul said he accomplished that:
“Forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3.13–14).
When we lose sight of the goal of heaven for us and as many as we can take with us, the devil has distracted us with the old misdirection play.
—ROBB HADLEY
Fayetteville, Ark.
Story in the Tulsa World, August 28, 1995, p Classified-11
