How does God outwit Satan's wiles?

Question: How does God defeat Satan and outwit his wiles in tempting His saints? (p. 102)

God accomplishes His own, gracious, ends for the good and comfort of His people out of the very temptations Satan intends to ruin them. God wounds the devil's head with the devil's own sword! Example: Joseph's brothers helped fulfil Joseph's dream by trying to get rid of him.

1. Satan aims to defile the Christian's conscience and disfigure the image of God within. But God uses the temptations to sin into the black soap with which God washes His saints white.
   
   
   
   1. God uses Satan's temptations to one sin as a preventive against another. E.g., Paul's thorn in the flesh to prevent his pride. By allowing the devil to tempt a soul to blasphemy or atheism, the internal trouble of spirit drives the Christian to humble duty.
      
   
   
   2. God purges out the sin Satan tempts us to, even through the temptation. Peter had said, "Though everyone else should be offended with Christ, I never will be!" After his fall, he did not again make such a claim. But he did become an undaunted confessor of Christ and the gospel. When we fall, we discover the prevailing corruption within us, so that the temptation stirs us up to drive out the malady. Paul would not have taken such pains to buffet his body (1 Cor. 9:27) if he had not found Satan knocking at that door.
      
   
   
   3. God uses the temptations to advance the whole work of grace in the heart. One spot causes the whole garment to be washed. In Ps. 51, David, overcome with one sin, renews his repentance for all. This trait distinguishes a true convert from a hypocrite. Judas cried about his treason, but there was not a word about his thievery and hypocrisy.
      
   
   
   
   


2. (p. 109) By tempting one saint, Satan works on those around him. He encourages others to sin by the example of the one. And he discourages them to live holy lives by his fall. Here God fools him again.
   
   
   
   1. When a real Christian sees the fall of another, it causes him to look more carefully to his own ways. When we see Moses provoked to anger, how we're driven to keep watch over our own unruly heart! The wicked may be hardened by a man's sin, but the sincere have their fomality and self-security purged.
      
   
   
   2. Are you in doubt about your own salvation? God uses the sin of others to comfort you in your own faith. David's sin was awful, yet he found mercy. Peter fell horribly, but he's in heaven. Don't despair! Call on God for mercy who has pardoned the same sin in others.
      
   
   
   3. God's design in allowing Satan to trounce some of his saints by temptation, is to train them up to give help to their fellow-brethren who are going through the same things. Mere knowledge of the Scriptures is insufficient to train a man to comfort another who struggles against temptation. Even Christ was perfected through suffering. None will handle poor souls so gently as those who remember the smart of their own heart-sorrows. None are so skilful in applying the comforts of the Word to wounded consciences as those who have lain bleeding themselves. The saints' experiences lead them to a powerful treatment made of the scorpion's own flesh--which they through Christ have slain--and that has the virtue above all other to expel the venom of Satan's temptations from the heart.