Knowing Your Enemy (Part 2)
The Bible has much to say about our spiritual enemies: Satan and demon spirits. If God didn’t want us to know about them, He wouldn’t have put the information in His written Word. Today I want to share with you three characteristics about our spiritual enemies. The more we know about them and their tactics from the Word of God, the better prepared we will be as Christians to identify and war against them.
The first characteristic of our spiritual enemies is they disguise themselves. In 2 Corinthians 11:14b the Apostle Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit states, “For Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” He goes on to say in verse 15, “Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness.” Here he is talking about people who will claim to be workers for God but are actually sent by Satan. He disguises himself behind religion. In Acts 16:16-18 we see an account of a lady who had a spirit (demon) of divination. The demon attempted to disguise himself by saying about Paul and his evangelistic team, “These are servants of the most High to show us the way of salvation.” The enemy will try to deceive by sounding “spiritual.” We see later that Paul recognized that this woman was not promoting the Gospel message, but rather it was a demon spirit that was in the woman trying to stir up persecution for Paul and his ministry team.
Satan and demon spirits are the motivating factor behind every cult and false religion on this earth. The new age movement is very popular these days and is very deceptive. They say that there are many roads to God. In other words, all religions lead to God. That is simply not true. In John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by Me.” Of course the individuals in the new age movement deceive people by portraying Christians as being judgmental and intolerant of others. But Isaiah 5:20a says, “Woe unto those who call evil good, and good evil.” You can only obtain salvation through Jesus Christ; that is not a statement of intolerance; that is a statement of Truth!
The second characteristic is found in Genesis 3:1-4. We see that Satan deceives Eve in the Garden of Eden by insinuating doubt about what God told her. After God instructed Adam and Eve that if they ate of a certain tree they would die (spiritually), Satan said to her, “You shall not surely die.” Satan will always challenge God’s authority by trying to plant doubt in your mind.
The last characteristic I want to point out is that Satan and demonic spirits will always misuse or pervert Scripture. When Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, he quoted Scripture to Jesus. But Jesus answered back with Scripture. The enemy will always take Scripture out of context; they pervert Scripture. They never rightly divide the Word of God (2 Timothy 2:15).
We as Christians must gain knowledge of the truth by filling ourselves with the Word of God on a daily basis. As we do that, the darkness and deception of the enemy will be exposed by the light of the truth!
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