Sunday, May 08, 2016
If you were the devil and wanted to
deceive the entire world, how would you approach such a challenge?
One brilliant strategy would be to
convince people that you’re not really there—that you don’t even exist. And the
best way to do that would be to get them to believe that the only source of
information that reveals who you are, along with your motives and methods, is
little more than a collection of fables that have nothing to do with their
lives.
We have seen exactly that. Starting
several centuries ago, and prompted by the theories of men such as Charles
Darwin—who came up with a way to explain creation without the Creator—many people
began directly challenging the authority and inspiration of the Bible. They
began to ridicule, as mere myth and superstition, the existence of a spirit
world, long accepted without question by those who believed the Bible.
In the world’s leading universities
skeptics challenged the validity and accuracy of the Bible, and materialist
reasoning under the guise of science—rejecting anything that cannot be detected
by the physical senses—became the order of the day. Generations of leaders were
taught to discard anything that could not be measured by scientific methods.
Then came two world wars. Two
successive generations saw their fathers, husbands and sons lost on bloody
battlefields in far-flung corners of the world, with neither war resulting in a
lasting peace. Civilian casualties, too, were appalling, with tens of millions
of lives snuffed out. Numbed by such brutal mass destruction of lives and
property, many lost their belief in God, thinking that an all-powerful Supreme
Being would never allow such carnage and suffering.
Thus, in only a few generations,
belief in an almighty, all-loving God and trust in the Bible as His revelation
to mankind were shattered.
In our modern world, although many
people still claim to believe in God, few take their stated belief seriously
enough to let it guide their lives. The Bible is consistently one of the
world’s best-selling books, yet it is one of the least read and least
understood. Most people think the Bible and the spirit world have nothing to do
with them and their lives.
Although religion should provide an
understanding of God and the spirit world, it is too often only yet another
source of confusion and disagreement. For example, Christianity is the
professed religion of approximately a third of the world’s population and is
the largest single religion. But it is splintered into thousands of sects and
denominations, many of them claiming to represent the true teachings of the
Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Never in human history, of course,
have professing Christians comprised a majority of the world’s population. Most
people during the last two millennia have followed a bewildering array of
deities, gurus and religious teachers. Some have believed in God, others in
various good and evil spirits or no God and spirit world at all.
Obviously these incompatible and
often opposite beliefs cannot all be right. God is not the author of confusion
(1 Corinthians 14:33). The effect of so much religious confusion and division
is exactly what one would expect from a being whose aim is to “deceive the
whole world” (Revelation 12:9). Many people do not believe in the devil at all,
and many of those who do aren’t sure what they should believe, since so many
religious teachings are confused and contradictory.
Most people are deeply sincere in
their beliefs. But since the beliefs of so many professing Christians
contradict the beliefs of other professing Christians, they cannot all be
right. Many of them are sincere, but sincerely wrong. They, along with the rest
of the world, have been deceived. So what are the implications to professing
Christians of Satan’s deception and its resulting confusion?
The Lord challenged people in His
day who were sincere yet deluded: “Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not
do the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46).
He cautioned His followers to be
aware of religious deception. “Take heed that no one deceives you”, He warned
(Matthew 24:4). He prophesied that religious leaders would arise who would
claim to represent Him but in fact they would be impostors who would “deceive
many” (Matthew 24:5).
Rather than a source of information
and understanding about the great malevolent spirit that is the enemy of
mankind, religion has actually been one of the major tools the devil has used
to deceive people!
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