How does Satan Influence Us?

In the last few weeks, I've given a number of sermons that seem not to be related, but they are, as we've been going through them one by one. The first one was on salvation, why we need salvation, how God is carrying out salvation, and we gave definitions to words, the word salvation, and justification, sanctification, and transformation. Then we talked about unintended consequences. Unintended consequences. How you and I live in a world where we can make decisions with good intentions, and even the decision itself isn't wrong, and have terrible consequences. And so living in a world of unintended consequences, we have to learn wisdom, but we also have to understand the world we live in. The world we live in is not the way God designed it. The next sermon was on what do we need by come out of this world, and we use a term called worldliness. So we just spent time explaining what worldliness is. That Satan is the god of this age, and as the god of this age, the whole world has been influenced by him personally. He's a real being. He was created by God. He rebelled against God, and he has influenced the whole world. The result is that every human being has a corrupted human nature. We are a mixture of good and evil. So every human being can do something that seems very nice, and the next minute do something that's very evil, because we're a mixture of good and evil. We have to come to grips with that. The great influencer on this world is a being who has rebelled against God, who, in this rebellion against God, he wants to influence his creation, and the basis of that was a lie.

The basis, the first lie he told them was, you eat of the forbidden fruit, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. When the truth was, when they disobeyed God and now were willing to define good and evil for themselves, and to choose good and evil, they now experienced good and evil, and they didn't become like God at all. Made in the image of man, or image of God, humanity has become a corrupted image of God, because God gave them the knowledge of good and evil in his relationship, but now they chose it. We will know it just like God, and we will choose just like God, and there you go. That's worldliness. It is the foundational concept. You know, when you strip everything away from all societies, the foundational concept is, I can be like God. I can know good and evil, and I can choose good and evil, as if we can define it. And that concept always leads into chaos and insanity. You and I live in a society where people believe they can define and choose how many genders there are, which is scientifically impossible, and biblically impossible, but it doesn't matter. Once you decide, I can do that, and I can choose it, then if you don't choose it, you're the evil person. But this is the basis of all human societies, and it's the problem with each of us as individuals. So, how does then Satan influence us? How does he do that?

You know, I mean, Satan hasn't possessed everybody. Now, he does have angels with him, called demons, who are angels who followed him in his rebellion, and that's important, too, to understand, because there are real personal beings who have thoughts and emotions. We just don't see them. That doesn't mean they don't exist. We don't hear them, right? All you have to do is look at the world around you, and you see the results. And all you have to do is, honestly, with God's help, look at yourself, and you see the results.

You see the results of Satan's influence. It's there all the time. So, how does he do that? How does he do that? First of all, remember, he's the enemy of God. We had to talk about salvation and that sermon, how we've all become the enemies of God. That's how God looks at humanity. He loves humanity, but you are in a relationship with me as an enemy. That's because Satan is his enemy, literally.

He has a better way than God. He can know the difference between good and evil, and he can choose good and evil. He chooses evil. He thinks it's a better good. He thinks evil is a better good than what God says is good. That's insanity in itself. This is where this always goes. It always ends up, you know, in insanity, the denying of the reality of God.

Let's turn to Ephesians chapter 6, because Satan's relationship with us is very important. He has a relationship with you. He has a design for you, a purpose, a goal. You know, we talk about how God has a purpose for us, a design for us. We were created in His image. Well, Satan has a design for you. Ephesians 6. And he spends his life, his power, his thoughts, his energy on carrying out his design for you and me and for every other human being. Now, these are Paul's introductory words to his writings about the armor of God. You know, we have to protect ourselves. God has to protect us, and He tells us how God protects us to what He calls the spiritual armor.

Because let's read the introductory remarks to that passage. You know, that is a well-known passage. It's read all the time. Verse 10 of Ephesians 6, Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. So there's a positive aspect here. As we go through what we're going to go through today, it's going to be easy to feel overwhelmed, like, wow, we don't have a chance here. But we do. The point is, we've been called to win this through the power of God.

But we do have to understand that salvation, understanding the world we live in, which is just unintended consequences all the time, understanding what worldliness it is that Satan is the God of this age, and that we all have corrupted human nature, and then understanding how He works. How He works. We're just going to touch on some things today, because we could spend the whole rest of the summer just discussing these things. But we want to look at how does He do these things, and how does He try to influence your life, because He wants to. I mean, He knows you personally. That's hard to believe, right? We know God knows us personally.

Well, Satan does too. He's the God of the sake. And He has a purpose for you, a goal that's in His mind better than God's. Put on the whole armor of God, verse 11, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the double. Or you could actually translate that the scheming. In other words, He's actually planning what to do with you, with me. He's planning it. Now, don't get paranoid here, okay?

Satan isn't on your shoulder all the time talking to you, but he has plans for you. He has a world which is shaped as much as he can in his image. He never can get it totally in his image, because the image of God still shows up in human beings.

So there's still some good. But everything we see in this world is dysfunctional. It doesn't work. Anything we come up with doesn't work in the end. It's all because He's creating, trying to create humanity into His image.

He says, verse 12, this is what we have to remember. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Well, that's absolutely… is that out of science fiction or something? No, this is what's happening. In the unseen world around us, God interacts with us, and you and I experience that. And in the unseen world around us, Satan and the demons try to influence us. Once again, they don't possess us. They don't grab control of us. That's not what we're talking about. Influence can come. It's much more subtle than that.

The reason it's so much more subtle, you and I are in this spiritual warfare, and we're actually fighting against ourselves because we all have corrupted human nature, which means every single one of us, to certain degrees, have already developed into us, or had developed into us, the mind of Satan. It's already partly there. We think a little bit like him. We experience emotions a little bit like him. That's what corrupted human nature is. It's a nature that God created that was good as long as it only interacted with good. And then once God, because of free will, we have to have a choice, or free will is meaningless, we had a choice. We chose to believe, Adam and Eve did, and we've all believed it ever since. I get to choose good and evil. I get to define it, and I get to choose it. We talk about culture wars in the United States, and some of it's just politics. But you know, there are a lot of things that we call culture wars that aren't culture wars. They're spiritual. It's a spiritual war between good and evil. I will define good and evil, and I will define and choose what I think is good and evil. So I read an article this week written by a person who has written two or three books on transgenderism, and this person really promotes the chanting of, we're coming for your children, that you see in some of the parades. Yeah, I was going to say riots, but they're not riots, but in my mind it's that bad. Parades. And now he explained what he meant by that, because he's one of the ones that coined that. He says, we're not coming for your straight children, we're coming for your queer children, because there's a whole lot of queer children and transgender children. They just don't know it. So we have to waken everybody up. So we're not coming after your children, but we are, because we have to show them who they are.

That's, that's, we see the evil. Now, what, what leads a person to think that way? He believes in his mind. He knows the difference between good and evil, and he's chosen the good. In other words, he believes the first lie. It is only God who determines good and evil. And we have to choose, but after he determines, you and I don't just know it. But if you eat of the fruit, you disobey God, and now you know good and evil.

They experience good and evil. They never did figure it out, because we can't without God.

It's interesting, in 2 Corinthians, I won't go there, but 2 Corinthians 2, 11, Paul talks about Satan's devices. Now, in English, a device has a couple meanings. The main meaning of device is when we talk about, like, a piece of technology. Well, that device does this, right? It's some kind of a piece of technology or a machine. The second meaning is a plan or a method with a particular aim. That's what this is used in. That English word was used to mean this. It's a plan or a method that has an end point. It has a goal. So Satan's devices. When you look at this word in Greek, it's even more profound, because the Greek word device there literally means a thought that is thought out. That's the dictionary meaning. In other words, it's a thought that is reasoned out so that you understand understanding as part of the meaning. So you now understand the thought and you create a purpose for the thought. In other words, Satan's devices are his thoughts reasoned out and put into action and his thoughts are against us.

We have to be aware of his devices. We have to be aware of his thoughts, how he reasons out those thoughts, and how he has a goal to impose those thoughts on humanity. And which he has done to a certain extent because every human being has corrupt human nature. And some people are pure evil, right? Just they're far on that scale. Others are, you know, different places on that scale, but everybody's corrupted. That's his goal. That's the better way. That's his definition of goodness. So the more you understand this, the more you understand why people have righteous indignation when they're doing something evil and you tell them they're wrong. Because in their being, they believe they're right because they've chosen it. They've defined it and they've chosen it and it's exactly what Satan has taught them. They don't know where it comes from. And you and I still have that same problem ourselves sometimes. We'll define something as right or wrong and then defend it with righteous indignation and then find out, well, no, that's not exactly what God wanted.

Satan's devices, remember, are his thoughts reasoned into a plan. And that plan is to help us become created in his image.

We're creating God's image. His desire is to create us into his image. He is, that's why he's called the God of this age.

He's created a total counterfeit of what God does. Total counterfeit in which he's going to be God. He's going to understand good and evil. He's going to choose good and evil and he's going to teach all of us, all of humanity, to be like him in his grand diversity and his grandness of different religions. I mean, in his grandness of different, even, even we get to choose right and wrong. So we can do evil things because we get to choose it.

Now, let's look at a couple of his devices. And then we'll look at how he manipulates us through these devices. And there's a whole lot of devices he uses. I'm just going to pick two. One is, he tells lies that distorts reality. It distorts it. God determines reality. He made it, right? God created reality. He distorts it. If you disobey God, you will not die. God said, reality is, if you disobey me, it'll put in motion the deterioration of your body and of your mind, and you will die. That's what God said. That's reality.

And now, here it is, all these thousands of years later, and now, scientists are trying to figure out how to use robotics and AI, transport a person's brain into a robotic body, and they can live forever. The same lie through technology. You can live forever in this corrupted state, which just builds you better. You can run faster. You can see better. Oh, wait a minute. That was the six million dollar man. Anybody old enough to remember the show, The Six Million Dollar Man? There's a few. Okay. It'll build you into a better man. I always couldn't figure out how he could run that fast and his heart not explode. Because he could run so fast. He could outrun a car. How does his heart and lungs not explode? Even as a kid, because as a little kid, I'm thinking, nah, that doesn't work. Okay. But this is the idea. We rebuild you according to the lie through science, the construction of a new person, and we just put you in a new body.

It's the same lie. He distorts reality.

Remember, that's really, we always say the first lie is, you shall not die, but it's not. That's the second. It's sort of connected to the first lie. That's the basis of everything he does. Now, what's interesting, when you look at the New Testament, it talks about that there is an evil counterfeit gospel. In 2 Corinthians, Paul says that Satan even has ministers that appear as ministers of light. In 1 Timothy, Paul says he has doctrines, he has teachings that had come into the church, that had actually come into the church. They were fighting satanic doctrines. In other words, he even has a false Christianity. He has a counterfeit of everything. And we forget this, 1 Corinthians 10, because this is something we need to remember.

Because in his idea of religious inclusiveness is not what God says. That God says, there's one God, one Lord Jesus Christ, one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ.

He says, this is how I will be worshipped. And today, one of the great tenets of Christianity is you can worship God however is in your heart. And of course, everybody accepts things like Christmas, Easter. I mean, we don't even talk about those things anymore, right? And yet, that's still a big basis in the Christianity of the world we live in. But even they admit, most of the really good Catholic and Protestant scholars know that Christmas and Easter, and Halloween especially, don't come from the Bible. There are things that were brought in later in the second and third, especially the third and fourth centuries. And it came from pagan ideas. A lot of it came from Greek philosophy mixed with just pagan customs of the day. And they forget what Paul says in 1 Corinthians talking about pagan religions.

Rather, the things with the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to have fellowship with demons. If you have studied Hinduism, if you have studied Buddhism, if you've studied the religions, the small religions all over the world, a British journalist just discovered deep in the mountains of Syria an entire tribe that worships Baal. The god you see in the Old Testament? And they claim to be the last remnant of the true Israelites, that the true Israelites worship Baal because they weren't monotheistic, they were polytheistic. And, you know, the true Israelites got deceived that there was this one god, and they're the true Israelites, the last true Israelites, living in a village in the mountains in Syria. And he went in and interviewed him, and they worshiped Baal. They have statues to Baal and everything, just like in the Old Testament. All over the world there are thousands of pagan religions. Most of the world, including Catholicism, is pagan. And many of the things that have come into Protestantism are pagan. And Paul says, pagan religions are the worship of demons. There's a real power sometimes. There's a real power to Hinduism at times. But that power is not from God.

So the idea that all religions lead to the same god, which Hinduism would agree with that, Buddhism would agree with that, just in a different way. But Christians now believe in that. They're forgetting something. This is the lie. This is the twist. See? This is what Satan does. He distorts reality so that one god is worshiped through many gods, which is what the worship of saints really is, the worship of many gods. He says in verse 21, you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the Lord's table and the table of demons. He says you can't do both. You can't be both. But we live in a world that keeps saying, you must be both. So he distorts reality, especially when it comes to religion. But eventually it comes down to everything is distorted. Another thing he does, one of his devices, is that he puts evil suggestions in our minds. Now, once again, you're not possessed.

But you don't see Satan, but he's there. His thoughts, his emotions, are in, they're in our atmosphere. I mean, God's spirit's around us, right? God's spirit's in this room, not only in individuals, it's here in the room. Well, Satan, wherever he goes, he's not on the present, but he and the demons have thoughts and emotions, and we can experience that, not as, you know, possession, but as influence, as influence. That doesn't mean every bad thought you get is from Satan. You already have corrupt human nature. So between our nature and just the society we live in, we get bad thoughts from watching television. We get bad thoughts from all kinds of places, from the person we're talking to, and they give us a bad thought, or we have a bad thought because of the conversation. So we can't blame everything on Satan anymore. He's the instigator, but now it's just everywhere. It's every place. Everything is touched by that at one point or another. Now, once again, I had to mention last time, that means that doesn't mean all of us have to run around in some kind of paranoia, because, oh no, Satan's here. Satan's there. He's always here, someplace. Demons are always someplace, but we are protected, and we are also supposed to interact with the world. We're not supposed to go live in a cave someplace and wait for the return of Jesus Christ. In fact, we're told not to do that. So we interact with the world. We interact with other people.

We're supposed to show them what a true follower of God is like. And it's nice when you can say, I understand because, guess what? I am corrupt human nature also, but I am being transformed. I'm being saved and transformed. So I understand. We can say that.

Acts 5. Just an interesting example here. Acts 5. Because of how Luke writes this. Acts 5 verse 1.

A certain man named Edinias was to fire his wife, sold a possession. Now what was happening here is people had stayed after the pouring out of God's Spirit on Pentecost, and people were just flooding into the church. People who had seen Jesus are now saying, yes, we understand what's happening. He has been resurrected. We see this miracle of his Spirit being poured out, God's Spirit being poured out. And so they didn't leave. They were in Jerusalem for the holy day, and they stayed. And they couldn't even feed all of them. You know, so they had this social crisis among the Christians because the church had grown so much and people didn't go back home. They were staying there in Jerusalem. And so some of the people were selling some of their properties, some of their goods, and giving that money to the church. Barnabas did it and became famous because it was so much money. They called him Barnabas the son of encouragement because he was giving so much. So what happened? They sell a possession. And he kept back part of the proceeds, his wife also being aware of it, and brought a certain part of it and laid it at the apostles' feet. But Peter said, Ananias, listen, what he says here, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the price of the land for yourself? He said, Satan influenced you. Some suggestion came in and you grabbed hold of it. You know what? We can become really famous in the church, maybe get ordained into some kind of office here by giving all this stuff, but you know what we'll do? We'll just keep back half of it or whatever for us. Of course, Peter says, while it remained, was it not your own? After it was sold, was it not in your own control? He said, you could have done with your mind. You could have kept all of it if you wanted to. No one was going to condemn you for this, but there's this big show because Satan has influenced you. But here's what's interesting with the next statement says.

He says, why have you conceived this thing in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God. He did the original sin. Look, we can do good here, but we'll determine what's good and evil and we'll lie, keep part of it, but we're doing good. A lie becomes part of it, which is what Satan always does. The suggestion was there, but the important thing is that you conceived it. In other words, the thought came in and he didn't say, that's wrong. We can't do that.

He thought about it and remember what Satan's devices are? It's a thought, reasoned out, and put into a plan. He did just like Satan did, but God doesn't blame Satan for this. He puts blame on him and that he influenced him, but it was Ananias's fault that he took the thought of Satan, reasoned it out, and put it into a plan and did evil, and he kills the man. We think of God killing Sodom and Gomorrah. Here we have two Christians that God killed because they were carrying out the very thoughts of how Satan thinks.

They were being made into the image of Satan. They were doing the way he thinks. So we have to understand he can influence us. He can't make us do anything. Look what James says in James 1. James 1. Verse 13.

Let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. Now, there's other places where it says we are tempted or tested by God. A test by God is different than what Satan does. A test by God is to help us grow. You know, it's like going in to take the math test at school to see how much you've actually learned, right? There is no attempt to make you lie, cheat, steal, right? So if you're cheating on the test, that wasn't the intent of the test. The intent of the test was to find out what you know, so you can know what you know, and so that the teacher can help you. So we are tested by God to strengthen us, to grow, to find out what we know, and to turn to God for help. He says, he's using the word here to mean to actually influence you to sin. The purpose is to influence you to sin, to be created in the image of Satan. He says, but each one is tempted when he's drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Now it's very interesting because he goes on and explains how that works, and that is an interesting process. How it works, how there's something that comes into our mind, and we're sort of drawn to it, we're enticed by it. Even though part of us might be saying, nah, that's not right, the corrupt part of our nature is sort of drawn towards it. So we'll find a way to sort of be there, to sort of do it.

Because we're conceiving, we're taking a thought of Satan, the way he thinks, and because we have a corrupted human nature, we're doing exactly what he does. We reason that thought out and create a plan so that we get to determine what's good and evil, and we get to choose what's good and evil. And so we're doing it all the time. So now let's look at a few ways. Once again, we're just touching on this today. A few ways that Satan's suggestions can manipulate us. There's a whole lot of ways. I just picked a few.

One is, when we refuse to forgive others. See, some of these are very subtle. I mean, we all can say, well, we understand. He puts thoughts in our minds that cheat so we can make more money. He puts thoughts in our minds that work on the Sabbath so we can won't lose our jobs. He puts a thought in our mind that we can be attracted to someone other than our husband and wife. Yeah, he does that. And we have a pull sometimes to do those things because we start dealing with our own corrupt human nature.

But there are other ways. They're so much more subtle. Someone mistreats you. They are wrong. And, you know, maybe you can't fix what happened, but you have this bitterness, this hatred that develops in you because of what they did. Satan believes he was treated wrong. Now, in some cases, we're really treated wrong. In Satan's case, he was never treated wrong. But he believes it. He believes God treated him wrong. And he's bitter about it.

Look at 2 Corinthians 2. What happened here in 1 Corinthians, there's a man who is committing adultery with his stepmother. And Paul says, you have to put that man out of the church until he repents. And so they put him out of the church. Now it appears he wanted to come back and nobody wanted him back. Paul is saying, well, if he truly repented and he's, you know, stopped it, removed himself from the situation, repented before God and changed, then he needs to be brought back. And there were some people having trouble with that. So in 2 Corinthians 2, let me get to 2 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians 2, and verse 6, to give you the context, he says, this punishment, which was inflicted by the majority, is sufficient for such a man. He had told the whole church to put him out in the first 1 Corinthians. Everybody, the whole group, say, you can't come here. I mean, if someone today was committing a sin like that, I'd go and say, you can't come here until you repent. And if they repent, we're supposed to welcome them back.

He says, so that on the contrary, you ought rather to forgive and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one is swallowed up with too much sorrow. Where is he supposed to go now? He's turned back to God, and all he has is the church and the world. And we're going to say, okay, you've got to stay in the world. Tough. Yet, I can see why people in the church were saying, wait, wait, we're cleaning this church up. We don't want him here because they had a lot of sexual problems in Corinth. Now, notice verse 11. This is why they need to forgive. He says, once we refuse to forgive a truly repented person, and that takes different forms. I mean, sometimes a person is, they repent and they're forgiven, but the relationship can't be reformed. That happens sometimes. It just can't. The Bible talks about that in a few places, but that means you don't have bitterness and hatred. You just don't have that. So, what we have here is, he said, if we don't do that, we know Satan's thought process.

Satan's thought process is, I decide good and evil. That person committed evil. I know that. They are forgiven. God says that is good. If they are forgiven, that is good. But I can't forgive them. God may forgive them, but I can't. So, I will hate that person the rest of their life. He says, now you know his devices, his thought, his reasoning, the plan. I will never forgive. So, you can never forget. So, you're always being eaten alive inside by what the other person did. So, he says, that's one of Satan's devices. That's a whole lot more subtle, right, than being tempted to break, you know, work on the Sabbath and then saying, no, I can't do that. And if you fire me, I guess I just have to be fired, but I can't work on the Sabbath. This is a whole lot more subtle than that. Because the other person was wrong. The other person sinned.

And yet, we're supposed to actually forgive. It's a device, Paul said, of Satan. It's one of his thoughts. You cannot forgive.

Another one is in James 3. James 3 is huge here. James packs so much in these couple of sentences. But these are the ways he manipulates us.

You know, with suggestions. With the way the world is designed around us. James 3. Verse Let's go to verse 14. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. So he's saying here that we're driven by envy. Envy is when you want something that somebody else has. That you believe they don't deserve it, but you do. And you're going to get it. Self-serving is just selfishness. Everything we do in our lives are for ourselves. That's how most people live life, to a certain degree. Now, every once in a while you find a truly giving person.

You know, a person... When I was in the hospital with COVID, there were nurses. They were some of the most giving people I've ever met. They were giving people.

That part of their nature was good. I don't know anything about the rest of their nature, but I know it's a mixture, right? But I could see the good there.

But so much of life is just selfishness. What we do is for ourselves, not for others. So if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. If we're driven by envy and selfishness, we will lie against the truth and we will be proud. We'll be proud of it. We deserve it.

And so we'll treat other people terrible. This happens in families all the time. But notice 15. This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual. I understand that. It's part of us who we are as human beings. But he says it's demonic. This is how demons think. We're back to devices. How does Satan and the demons think? Though they're filled with envy and selfishness. So when we're filled with envy and selfishness, that's what we're being fed through suggestion. It's what society is feeding us because Satan's the god of this world. And it's what part of our human nature still wants to be because it's still corrupted in some ways. But understand where it actually comes from. God never designed an envious, self-seeking person. Adam and Eve were not designed as envious and selfish.

They became envious and selfish. So where does that come from? It didn't come from God. This is the war we're fighting. The war we're fighting is deep inside ourselves. But understand, it is principalities. It is powers. There's a spiritual warfare going on, and you and I are in the middle of it. And God is saying, I made you in my image. I love you. I planned out salvation. I want to transform you. Satan puts us in a world of unintended consequences. He has made everything around us somewhat toxic. Even the best things can be toxic. Even the best things can be used for evil. And then he's constantly trying to manipulate us to just thoughts and emotions and feelings that are just around us because he and the demons are out there. It's not that. We don't have to be paranoid. We just have to recognize that sometimes we'll have a thought or an emotion that'll draw us to do something, and we have to wonder where is that coming from and why am I attracted? Well, because we're humans. And because someone's trying to make us in his image, not God's. It's a basic core lie.

And this is very subtle. He goes on, he says, for where envy and self-seeking exists, confusion and every evil thing are there. He says this is the results. When you are envious and self-seeking, you don't expect the results of confusion and evil. And he says that is the result of envy and selfishness. And you and I live in a confused world. You and I are confused. If you're never confused, I'd be a little worried because the spiritual battle you're in is going to cause confusion. So if you're not ever confused, maybe you need to pray a little more.

God, help me to see your way. Help me to understand your way and help me to see the way of the God of this age. So yes, like we talked about Lot last time, how he struggled in the world that he lived in. And he'd become tainted by it some. But he struggled. He's commended for his struggle to live in the world that he lived in. And yet he didn't become this negative... Here's another thing Satan can do. Oh, this is a... I'll cover this sometime too. Satan can actually make us hate... He'll use our hate of the world, of what's happening, to make us bitter people. In other words, he'll actually take the righteousness that we're trying to learn and make us bitter because... I've met people that their whole lives are just filled with nothing but hatred and negativism. All they see is the evil every place. And they never see good. And they say, don't you ever see God anyplace?

God's still here. He hasn't gone anyplace, but they never see it.

They never see it. And so they just can't wait till Jesus comes back and fries everybody, you know. Just kills everybody. And they say, ah... That's not sure... That's not exactly how we're supposed to look at this. He comes back to save everybody. And unfortunately, he has to kill people to do it. But that's not his purpose. I'm coming back to kill people. No, he's coming back to save people, but he knows what human nature under Satan's direction will do. And he has to kill an army that comes against him.

That's not his purpose. That's Satan's purpose. So confusion. When your life is filled with confusion, which for most of us is quite often, when it's filled with confusion, you have to stop and step back and say, why? Since God isn't the author of confusion, what's happening to me? And part of it's just the world, right? Part of it's just life around us is so confusing. It dumps confusion and distractions on us all the time. That's the image of Satan. He's about as confused as anybody could ever be. But in his mind, he's quite clear. But I never know what his endgame is because I think it's just to either destroy us or make us animals, one or the other. I think that's what he wants to do. I'm glad I don't know his endgame. You know, I don't want to know how he thinks too much. And so this is one of the ways.

And there's a couple other I have down. I'll do just one more. And that is, he always influences us to always want the hidden fruit, the forbidden fruit. If we could just find the forbidden fruit. And this is the concept behind, I must know secret knowledge. I must know secret knowledge.

I've met people that understand enormous biblical knowledge, but they get to the place they must know things other people don't, because their sense of superiority comes from that. And that sense of superiority that I'm better than others because I know more drives them to know more and more things. So they get to the place where they seem to know things nobody else knows.

And they don't realize it's bizarre. I literally sat down with the man. I won't tell you what he believed. This was years ago. And he told me what he believed. I asked him a few questions to make sure I understood. And I said, you do realize that if what you're saying is true, you're the only person on the earth that understands that. Now, I thought that would be a shock. Instead, he looked at his wife and said, see, I told you so. One of his ideas were women were born with God's spirit, and men were demons God had given a second chance to.

And finally, I looked at him and I said, okay, well, I'm not going to go through the Bible and tear this apart. I'm just going to tell you something and we'll have to decide where we go. I said, you may be a demon, but I am not. And he just stared at me and said, I guess I can't come back to church, can't I? I said, no, you can't. And that ended the conversation.

He thought he was a demon. He may have had one there the way he was thinking. So once he decided I wasn't a demon, he couldn't come to church anymore, which I was glad. But it was this constant search for new truth, new truth, new truth, till he didn't even understand the truth of the Bible anymore. He'd been in the church for decades. And his total viewpoint of the Bible was so perverted. He was the only person on the earth who believed what he believed in his construct of what the Bible was. And he thought he was so special.

The forbidden fruit, that's still something, and that can come down to even physical things, the forbidden fruit of sex, the forbidden fruit of money, of power, that forbidden fruit out there that we go after. He still tries to get us to do that. And it's still the same lie. Now, once again, before you become too discouraged, let's go back to James. We'll end here in James 1. We read a couple verses, and I just want to complete this now with reading it in context. Okay? James 1, verse 12, Blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he has been approved, in other words, when he's done this, when God has said, okay, you did the test and you did well, you know, you passed the test. Or, okay, you didn't pass the test, so I'm going to work with you more, so next time you take the test, you'll pass the test. He will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love him. This is God's plan for your life.

His thoughts reasoned out and put into a plan is this, the exact opposite of Satan's. Let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. And when desire is conceived, it gives birth to sin. And sin in his fullness is full grown, it brings forth death. That is the unintended consequences of all our sins. We all die. God told him, we've been trying to get out of that death thing for all these thousands of years, and now with technology, they're starting to think they can conquer it. I mean, they keep giving us drugs, and a lot of times it's not making us live longer, maybe a little longer, we're just miserable because we're living longer, because all the drugs. But why? Why? He says every, verse 17, good gift and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. Of his own will he brought us forth. By his own will he has chosen to work with you now, to bring you out of the influence of the God of this age, that we might be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. So we can be the first fruits in the kingdom of God. So, I just want to end with, okay, there's something positive here, okay, the reason we have to understand this is because we're in a different endgame. We're in God's endgame. We're not in Satan's endgame anymore, although we still fight it. We still struggle with it. We still get confused by it. Yeah, we do. That's part of the process. So, where are we now? We've looked at this, how it just touched upon. I had other things I thought I'd cover, but I knew I was going to run out of time. Well, you know, some of his devices and the subtle ways he uses his devices. But these devices always end up creating some kind of emotion, and it's the battle that's in our thoughts and emotions that conversion takes place. So next time, we're going to look at the heart, which is more than just what you feel. Unfortunately, we talk about the heart in English or in America. Usually that means, well, that's how you feel. It means more than that in Hebrew. In Hebrew, your heart is your innermost thoughts, it's your motivations, and it's your emotions. It's all these things together. So next time, which will be in two weeks, because we're going to cover it as both the sermon and the Bible study, where we're going to have some discussion during the Bible study of this, we're going to discuss how the human mind works in relationship to thoughts and emotions, and how you and I can use the Bible as a tool to help us deal with these issues of God influencing us through the power of His Holy Spirit, and Satan influencing us through the weakness of his mind.