Wiles of the Satanic

One of the subjects I’m least interested in, to be frank, are discussions of the satanic. In specific I’m referring to Satan’s role in disrupting the faith continuum of the faithful, tripping those up in deception who’re honestly trying to go about life in resilient ways. At times we become personally involved in devilish struggles making them worthy of discussion, some alarm and necessary rearguard action.

We should know that Satan’s chief attack is on the family. At almost every angle the family is the target of the spiritual battle.

It seems that for every genuine thing that God has created Satan has created a near perfect, though far inferior, copy. Take, for instance, emotion. God created the primary emotion which is very clean e.g. sadness, grief or loneliness for adverse life situations; yet Satan twists these into either denial or anger (or both)—the secondary emotion.

We can see the prevalence of the evil one in the world by the amount of anger and denial represented against that of genuine faithful-for-the-journey primary emotion, which is harder to tolerate for it requires faith, courage and a sound mind (see 2 Timothy 1:7).

(There are a great many schools of thought on the subject of why evils occur, and there are a plethora of disparate views—I’m certain to put the cat amongst the pigeons just for broaching the topic.)

The trouble is, when we take up arms against our oppressor we often don’t know who we’re fighting with. The devil is the king of deception. He waits and at the least warranted or expected moment he strikes—and almost always this is when we’re emotionally confounded; almost unable to respond with any proper capacity. Again, it happens to our relationships more often than any other situation and the effects can be widespread.

Without being overly focused on the presence of Satan in our lives we should remember that the Lord God is both stronger than the devil, and he’s our divine defender—if we recognise the attack and then fight appropriately.

How do we fight? We fight the good fight, of course! It’s the fight of faith putting on the armour of God (Ephesians 6:10-20). When we genuinely ‘put on’ God we go into an eventually victorious battle in his all-sufficient name.

If of all things we resolve to do, we choose to deepen our faith or improve upon our courage, we’d best expect the fight of monumental proportions initially. Satan is massively threatened when we resolve to do these sorts of things. Yet, our mighty God will help us if we ask him. This is precisely why prayer is so practically important.

Let us not underestimate the scope or overestimate the power of Satan.

Even though our whole world can seem to be coming to an end, God flips this over to our advantage the moment we recognise the fact of our being deceived and take up a fresh allegiance with him, our God of hope.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.