Kendrick Lamar‘s award-winning smash-hit “Alright”–from his sprawling 2015 opus To Pimp a Butterfly–became an unofficial Black Lives Matter anthem in the late-2010s, on the strength of the line “And we hate popo/when they kills us dead in the street for sure/I’m at the preacher’s door/My knees gettin’ weak, and my gun might blow/But we gonna be alright…” Although refusing to sugarcoat the reality of the police brutality, viciousness, and abject cruelty under which African-Americans endlessly reside, Lamar ultimately keeps on looping back to a note of hope in the chorus, affirming that “we gonna be alright;” his impulse here is a holy one, for as Moroni also preached, “whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world” (Ether 12:4).

Of course, whoso believes in God also perforce believes in the devil.

For “Alright” is also significant just within the larger song-cycle of To Pimp a Butterfly itself, since it’s the track that introduces the recurring character of Lucy–obviously short for Lucifer–who at the bridge of the song approaches Lamar and tells him, “What you want you, a house? You, a car?/40 acres and a mule? A piano, a guitar?/Anything, see my name is Lucy, I’m your dog…” Generous offers indeed, but Lamar nevertheless recognizes immediately who he’s talking, and so straightway tells himself: “I can see the evil, I can tell it…” Like Moses telling Satan to “deceive me not” in Moses 1, or Christ Himself declaring “get behind me Satan,” Kendrick seeks to follow the example of the righteous ones in resisting the temptations of the devil–yet still he is tempted. (Though in this there is no shame; even Christ was tempted: “Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations” -Luke 22:28).

What is interesting to note here, in fact, is that on the face of it, none of the things that Lucy here offers Kendrick are necessarily bad in and of themselves. I mean, a house? Everyone needs a house, especially in this market. A car? An absolute necessity in our stubbornly anti-public-transit America. 40 acres and a mule? Why, that’s the very thing that the Federal government promised, and should have, given every liberated slave in America back during the Reconstruction–as restitution for the evil crime of slavery, if nothing else–and which failure to deliver on has continued to contribute to the multi-generational poverty of African-Americans down to the present day. Hell, even those few scattered times when Black Americans have somehow managed to miraculously pull themselves up by their own boot-straps–Black Wallstreet; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Bruce’s Beach in California–they saw their self-sufficiency stolen out from them either by eminent domain, or full-bore mob violence (as in the case in Tulsa Race Massacre). Black Americans have repeatedly been denied not only any chance at generational wealth, but have had what little they’ve garnered stolen away from them. So yes, when Lucy offers Lamar “40 acres and a mule,” he is very much offering only what by rights belongs to him.

Which perhaps gets at the heart of why Lamar is so wary of it. When Satan tempted Christ in the wilderness, he was also offering the Savior only that which he was due: bread to eat (man may not live on bread alone, but still we need to eat something); to leap from the pinnacle of the Temple and be saved by angels (He is the Son of God whom the angels owe allegiance, is He not?); and then rule over the world entire (but then, did it not already belong to Him in the first place?). That in fact cuts to the heart of the evil here: the devil is only ever offering what by rights already belongs to you. The devil isn’t being generous or just in the slightest, but in fact the complete opposite: he is trying to buy you off by stealing what you have and then selling it back to you at extortionist prices. The true temptation of Lucifer is whether or not you will accept at his vicious prices that which God has freely offered you.

Curiously, this isn’t the first time Lucifer has appeared in the guise of Lucy to tempt and try a righteous man: in 2007, Jack Harrell published his most peculiar short-story “Calling and Election” in Irreantum journal (later the grand finale of his 2010 collection A Sense of Order and Other Stories). In this strange tale, a humble seminary teacher in Idaho named Jerry Sandgood meets in secret with a mysterious traveling General Authority named Brother Lucy (who even introduces himself as “going to and fro in the earth,” like Satan in Job chapter 1). He is visiting Idaho to arrange for Sandgood’s “Calling and Election to be made sure.” Within LDS ritual, this “Calling and Election” (also sometimes called a “Second Anointing”) is a very rare and esoteric ordinance, one that–despite Joseph Smith’s own desires during the Nauvoo-period that all might partake of it–nowadays only gets performed among a select few high-ranking GAs and their wives under the utmost secrecy. Sandgood, as a dedicated seminary teacher, has long been aware of and desired after this secret ordinance.

What happens next in the story, then, is curious: an array of pornographic images are found stapled around his classroom just before Seminary starts, and it is left ambiguous whether Lucy framed him or if Sandgood put them up himself in a moment of madness. In short order, he is fired, excommunicated, and forced to flee the state to South Dakota after a warrant is put out for his arrest. He also is revealed to have a brain tumor diagnosis, leaving further ambiguous whether or not these trials are all just happening in his head.

Because these are trials for Sandgood indeed. D&C 101:4 declares that we all “must needs be chastened and tried, even as Abraham, who was commanded to offer up his only son,” and it appears the loss of his seminary position and Church membership are the things he has valued the most–and therefore, like Job before him, are what are taken away from him. Also, as in the story of Job, Lucifer himself is the instigator of it, yet in a manner that also appears to fulfill God’s plan to tempt and to try him. Hence, there is a possibility that Brother Lucy may not have been deceiving poor Jerry Sandgood at all when he presented himself as an official representative of Christ’s Church.

Which is arguably the same role that Lucifer plays in the story of Christ Himself: the tempter without whom the Plan of Salvation would not be possible. Brigham Young once said something to the effect that he does not blame Satan in the slightest, since he fulfills his office better than most of us. In both the Kendrick Lamar song and the Jack Harrell story, Brother Lucy offers us what we most rightfully and righteously desire, in order for us to learn for ourselves if we will still accept it from God instead.