  Recently it has been shown that despite previous claims the cosmological
constant affects light bending. In the present article we study light bending
and the advance of Mercury's perihelion in the context of the Newtonian limit
of Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime employing the special relativistic
equivalence of mass and energy. In both cases, up to a constant factor, we find
the same results as in the full general relativistic treatment of the same
phenomena. These approximate and intuitive arguments demonstrate clearly what
effects should have been expected from the presence of $\Lambda$ in the general
relativistic treatment of these phenomena.
