The Devil You Say?

WE live in an age of polls. News organizations constantly run the results of polls to judge the public’s position on every issue imaginable and politicians react to the polls. One of the more popular ones these days is the approval poll. No matter where we look we are faced with approval ratings for the Congress, the President, or candidates. The most telling thing about polls is how the data behaves over time. How does the public’s view of things compare to the views of ten years ago, twenty years ago, even a lifetime ago.

Some of the more interesting polls reflect Christian attitudes towards the core beliefs that form basic doctrine. In 2009, a poll conducted by the Barna Group revealed that most American Christians do not believe that Satan is a living creature, but rather is a symbol of evil. Only twenty-six percent of the Christians surveyed believed he is a real living being. The majority of these describe themselves as born again Christians.

This finding is consistent with similar polls run by Harris and others about the beliefs of Americans in general. Whether inside the church or outside, the percentage of people that  does not believe Satan is real remains roughly the same. A comparison of similar polls over time reveals that if anything, the percentage that sees Satan as real is decreasing. This is a very dangerous, but predictable trend.

Scripture is clear on the reality of Satan. It is equally clear about his hatred of God and God’s people. For this reason, his main target is going to be Christians. There is little reason for him to focus on non-Christians; they are already doing his will because by definition they are enemies of God. His best efforts are aimed at those of us who are born again. Peter warns us to be on guard against Satan who “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
He then offers advice: But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world.1 Peter 5:8-9 (NASB)

But what should we be on guard against? What should we resist? The common thinking is that we need to resist the sinful pleasures of the world in varying degrees. If it feels good, it must be sinful is a standard defense. It is also terribly inefficient because like the Maginot Line of pre-World War II in France it points in only one direction and it is rigidly placed. In fact, our resistance to worldly pleasure is one of the tools Satan can use against us.

Satan is a worthy and cunning advisory whose main means of destroying Christians are rooted not in the world, but in our own doctrines and Scriptures. Satan knows Scripture better than most Christians will ever know it and he knows how to bend context and meaning to undo us at every turn. While we focus on the concept of the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other constantly urging us to sin or not to sin, we miss the most obvious reality. There is no angel on the other shoulder. He counsels us to avoid the blatant sin by committing a less obvious one, disguising it as virtue.

We portray Satan with a pitchfork prodding us commit obvious sins when in fact, he works through reason and persuasion to seduce us into sins we do not see. Remember Christ in the desert was not tempted to do things against Scripture, but to make His own fulfillment of Scripture by unscriptural means. This is why we need to be on guard. Satan will use our own spirituality and reasonable argument against us at every turn.

There are three facets to Satan’s attack: deception, delusion, and distraction. Only the first is an attack from the outside. The other two are attacks from within. All three are hard to defend against but with a bit of understanding of Satan himself and with God on our side through prayer, we will see that resistance is not futile.

See the Barna Survey at http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/260-most-american-christians-do-not-believe-that-satan-or-the-holy-spirit-exis

The Unpayable Debt

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. (1 Cor. 6: 19-20, NASB)

For he who was called in the Lord while a slave, is the Lord’s freedman; likewise he who was called while free, is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. Brethren, each one is to remain with God in that condition in which he was called. (1 Cor. 7: 22-24, NASB)

THESE days debt is on everyone’s mind – both the governments and our own personal debts. We have borrowed ourselves beyond are capacity to pay and a generalized resentment has overtaken us because we feel like we are slaves to our creditors. The banks own us. If someone were to come along and offer to pay off all our debts, we might jump at the chance, but we would still recognize that, even with no strings attached, we would always be in our rescuer’s debt. Those who have managed to escape the slavery of debt on their own are still haunted by its memories.

On the spiritual level, every one of us has a debt we cannot pay. It is called sin and the payment is death. But worse, like the accumulating interest on a credit card, there is a further payment beyond the payment of death itself. In our lives, we are saddled by the consequences of our sinful actions. Worse, Death itself is followed by a time of endless suffering, what Scripture describes as “weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.” Then comes the second death.

On our own, there is no amount of good we can do that will offset the sin debt because at heart, “no one who does good, not even one.” (Ps. 53: 3, NASB) Even our hearts cannot be trusted to consider good because “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17: 9, NASB) If we think we can live sinless lives, we only kid ourselves. Our debt accumulates with every passing day.

But our situation isn’t hopeless. There is One who has already paid that debt for us; One who willingly gave up His own life for our salvation. And because He is the only One who could do it, He is the only salvation we have. All we have to do is accept Christ and his sacrifice and the debt of sin is paid – forever.

By accepting that sacrifice we belong to Him just as surely as we would be indebted to anyone who came along and paid our financial debts. Everything comes with a price. We still have to pay some of the interest – there are consequences on earth for things we have done, but Death no longer has a hold on us; the debt of Death itself is paid in full.

But wait! There is more! Not only has Christ paid our debt, He has given us clothing we could never have afforded on our own. He clothes us in His own righteousness so that we can stand before God as free people, no longer slaves to sin. God has adopted us as His own children because of this. We owe everything to Christ.

Unfortunately, there are those who keep trying to pay off the debt through righteous works long after Christ paid it. While Christ expects us to change our lives to model His own, He also expects us to change from within through a changed nature. We cannot do anything of our own will that will compensate for what we have done nor add any value to what Christ has done for us. What we have to do is let Him work within us to “clean up our act” so we no longer have the spending habits that got us into trouble to begin with.

Too often we forget this. We look with contempt rather than compassion on those who are still drowning in sin’s debt when we need to show compassion. Christ died for all though all might not choose to accept his sacrifice for themselves. But unless we show the world the power of Christ’s love, they will never know the choice exists. The world cannot afford for us to forget how and why we became Christians in the first place.