Satan's Plan

We often talk about how God has a plan for your life. I mean, when we're born in this world, it doesn't seem like what's the plan, you know? It's sort of taken care of. You get older, life gets very confusing after a while, you know? The best age for a male is about 11 years old, 10-11 years old. Life isn't complicated at all. Man, it's as simple as it can be. And then after that, I know girls start showing you attention, and after that it's downhill, right? It's just all messed up.

But God does have a plan for your life. That's why you're here.

We're here. We all have our complicated lives. We all have difficulties. We all have struggles. But we are here because God has called you to be part of a plan that He has for you. And that plan involves Him calling you. It involves the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It involves Him giving you His Spirit, guiding and directing you for a singular purpose.

And that is so that in the future, you will be changed, and you will become an eternal child of God. That's His plan. That's it. Everything else is superfluous to making that happen.

Many things that happen in our lives are not that important in the bigger plan.

But they do play roles in how we develop and how we live within that plan.

And we talk a lot about the plan of God. Well, today I'm talking about something different.

Satan has a plan for you. And what I want to do today is explain the plan he has for you. He has a very definite plan. I mean, he is a rational being, and he's a very powerful being, and he actually knows every one of us. I can't imagine sometimes, I think, why would you be that powerful of a being and pay any attention to us? But he does. And one of the reasons he does is because God's plan is being carried out in your life. And he hates that plan. He has a totally different plan for you, and I don't mean just for humanity. He has a plan for you personally. And what I'm going to do today is go through and show how Satan's plan works. This is what he does. This is what he tries to achieve. And hopefully, as we go through this, you'll be able to see there's times in your lives that he's trying to carry out his plan in your life.

So, let's start in Genesis chapter 3.

Genesis chapter 3.

And we all know the story here, but I want to go through it to bring out very specific points. I mean, Adam and Eve were created by God. This is a reality. We believe it. God created humanity with two, you know, human beings. That's how he started all this. He had him in a perfect place. They had a perfect environment. They knew him personally. God was interacting with them personally. They had nothing to fear. The nature of animals was different. There was nothing that could harm them, and God was telling them how to live. Two human beings just caught up in the the joy and adventure of being alive. You know, suddenly coming alive, suddenly being conscious.

And here you are in this amazing place. Everything has to be discovered. Every smell, every taste, everything you touch, everything you see is a new discovery. They're adults with adult thinking level minds, but they're like children and what they're experiencing.

This grand adventure. And there's nothing bad. There's no evil. There's no depression.

There's no pain. This is the world that they come into, and all they know is God's goodness.

So look at verse 1. So God's goodness was, I'm going to give you some simple instructions. Of all the fruit you see here that I put here in this place that you're at, all of it is good for food except one. Don't eat it. Now, it wasn't like it was magical fruit. The point was, if you're going to learn the difference between good and evil, and this is what humanity had to have, I truly believe that love requires choice. For us to have choice, we had to choose between good and evil. Otherwise, we're just robots. We're just programmed. We're animals. So we have to have a choice to grow into what God wants us to be as His children. We have to have a choice between what is good, which is entirely with God's character, and what is against God's character, which we call evil. They had to have a choice. So, Satan comes into the garden. Satan didn't sneak into the garden.

God didn't say, how did he get in there?

God didn't allow him to come in because He wanted them to be harmed. It's because He wasn't going to expose them to evil. They had to make a choice. He said, here's your choice. Do what I say, and you will have life the way you're supposed to have it. That's my plan. Don't do what I say, and you're going to find life is an absolute mess. He created it. Only He knows how it works, but they had the choice. Satan came in to give them the choice. This is what's very interesting here because He reveals His plan. We're going to keep going back and forth back into Genesis 3 as we go through this to see His plan and how He tries to carry out the same plan.

You know, His tactics are different. His strategy has never changed.

He knows how to manipulate human beings, so His tactics will change, but His strategy has never changed. And we can be aware of that, and it's all laid out here what He does. So the serpent Satan was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made, and He said to the woman, has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden.

Sort of a weird way to ask that, right? You can eat of everything but this.

Well, did God say you can't eat of anything here? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it lest you die. So it's a very simple thing God gives them. It's a very simple test. It's just do what I say, and everything will be okay. Now, I want you to think about them in terms of experience. They are children. As adults, I mean, they had a totally developed brain they could process, but, you know, they just tasted an apple for the first time. And it's not like apples we have today. These were really good apples, okay. They were smelling flowers for the first time.

They were petting lions for the first time. They were exposed to creation and the wonder of it. And they must have been giddy at times. As they were now being exposed to all this, they had no fear. Nothing was there to give them fear. Say, to give them fear. Satan comes in and he begins to start his process. He begins to reveal his plan. And we see it here in verse 4. Then the servant said to the woman, You will not surely die. So the first thing he says is, God is not giving you all the truth. He plants a seed. The first thing he does is deception, which plants a seed. There has to be a seed of deception for them to suddenly go against God. They have no reasoning process to go against God. Nothing has ever happened to make them not want to follow God. You see what I mean? There's nothing there in them inherently that says, Oh, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to go leave the garden. I wish to kill an animal. They didn't know what that meant at the time.

They have no knowledge of anything except what God is telling them. Now a seed of deception is planted. This is how he starts every plan he does is a seed of deception. Verse 5, For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. He said, God's only told you good. You're only getting half the story here. See, deception is to take truth, twist it, tell a lie in order to motivate the person to do something wrong, to believe the lie. Now, he doesn't force her to do anything here, does he? That's what's interesting. He doesn't force her. He doesn't even give a complicated argument. It's just, how do you know? How long have you known God now?

We don't know how long it was, but you know, it wasn't very long. How long have you known this God who comes and talks to you? He said he created you. Okay, but how do you know he's telling you the truth? Because he knows something. He doesn't deny God exists. He doesn't deny God. It's just that God knows if you do this when he says not to, you will be just like him.

You will know good and evil. Now, that's interesting because that's partly true.

Most of Satan's lies, many of them, have a little bit of truth in them. You will know good and evil is a true statement. They had never known evil before.

How did they know evil was bad? God said it was bad.

It always starts with a deception.

And if nothing else from this sermon is always be looking for a satanic deception to make sure it's not there. I don't mean, you know, you read the Bible, it's not there, but what I mean is, in the world. We live in a world where there's a satanic deception sprinkled in everything, because this isn't God's world. It's sprinkled in everything.

So we have to constantly be looking, say, okay, is this a satanic deception? Now, the way we know it is as we go through the process, you'll see what it produces. The first thing here in Producers, of course, is a doubt. I have a doubt about God. Now, you and I struggle with faith, you know, being able to trust God all the time as part of what it is to be human.

The doubt here isn't, though, God, are you going to help me this time or not help me? Or I don't know. I just need you. I'm lost here. This is a, does God really know what he's talking about?

How did I know I could even trust him? How do I know he's not holding back or hurting me?

And so he tells her a lie. In this lie, this doubt begins to form.

And this doubt grows. She doesn't run to Adam or run off and yell, God, please help me. Let me know. Please answer my question. And this is where Satan's plan takes its really big step because the next step couldn't happen unless she participated. I mean, if she would have just said, you know, it looks like good fruit, but no, God said not to. And she would have walked away and she would have had peace. No break between her relationship with God. She would have had peace. Even though she would have had a struggle with the temptation, there would have been no sin.

And so what happens is that doubt begins to move her in a certain direction.

How do I know I can trust God? So what do I think here? What do I feel here? What makes sense to me?

And we have in verse 6, So when the woman had saw that the tree was good for food, that was pleasant to the eyes, and in a tree desirable to make one wise, she took her the fruit, she ate it, and also gave it to her husband with her, and he ate. And so she went and passed on the same thought processes to her husband. Satan didn't have to do it. She just did it. And they ate the fruit.

Doubt eats away at us. Struggling with faith is one thing. We all struggle with faith. What does God want? Why is God doing this? I don't understand. That's human. You see everybody in the Bible going through that. But this is a doubt that God is good. It's just a doubt that he's good. A doubt that God cares. A doubt that God is that wise. And this doubt begins to trust in yourself.

And that's what's interesting because Satan didn't have to convince her of these things. She perceived it. What happened was because of deception, he told her a lie, he twisted that, you know, the truth around. And because she now doubted God, she decided what was right.

She decided what was right. Remember Satan did say, here, eat the fruit. He didn't pick a piece off and say, here, you eat this. He asked her a question, then told her a lie, and she did the rest. This is where the great danger takes place. In this doubt, we become distracted. We become distracted. We become distracted from God. She didn't go to God.

Satan's plan is always to get you not to go to God. Understand that. To go to God, we wrestle with God.

We wrestle with God all the time, struggling with trying to understand the greatness of the eternal God in these little brains we have, and we struggle. And that's part of our Christianity. That's part of our growth. She did not. She did not go to God. She became distracted by the deception and the doubt, and that distraction led her to figure it out for herself. And she simply made it up. I just find that so interesting. She did it. She perceived, oh yeah, that does look good. And you know, to be wise like God, that's a good thing.

You know, to be somehow equal with God, that's a good thing. Satan didn't tell her those things. You see, what Satan did at this point was that he had her hear some of his nature.

The only other being, you know, Adam, who was as innocent as she is, the only other conscious being that she had ever interacted with was God. All she heard was good. Once he introduced a different way of thinking, she said, you know, he may be right. And she reasoned it out. And here's the great danger. As long as she was with God, it was God's nature that motivated her. It was God's nature she trusted in. Satan exposed her to his nature, and she began to absorb his nature. And that's why you and I are born into this world so messed up, because we are born into this world with corrupted human nature, which is nothing more than some of the imprint of Satan's nature on us. That's all his. We've absorbed some of his nature. That's his plan all along. God's plan is to make you in his image. Satan's plan is to make you in his image, and you die, and that doesn't bother him a bit. God's plan is to make you in his image so you live forever, and that's what God wants. Satan doesn't care how long you live. It's not in his plan. He can't even give us eternal life. He can't even give us life. Only God can give us life.

And so she absorbed some of his nature. She became somewhat like him, and a lot of negative things happen. But what happens here when you read this, what she saw was good to eat, pleasant to the eyes. It would make her wise. She became now, in her core of her nature, driven by three very wrong motives that come from human nature, in other words, a part of her nature was corrupted. It wasn't evil in itself. We are supposed to experience human life, and there's a lot of good things in human life. A lot of... I mean, we all like to eat. We all like to go see things. We like to do adventures. We like to experience things. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's within God's plan. We're designed to be that way. She opened herself up to unbridled physical experiences. And what are human beings doing today, and have been doing ever since this time?

Basically living lives of unbridled physical experiences. She also opened herself up to selfishness. She ran and gave it to Adam. She wanted him to experience it too, but she already knew something bad had happened. But she ran and gave it to him.

And then it opened her up, and then Adam, of course now he's going through the same process, to pride. The belief that I know how my life is supposed to be. I've been thinking about a sermon, you know, in the United States we talk about self-made men, right? Self-made women.

Is that what we are as Christians? We're supposed to be God-made men, and God-made women. And that sort of flies in the face of the sort of the American dream in some ways. That's what we're supposed to be. So now they become self-made people. They know how to run their lives. They know what's good and evil. And they get to choose everything. And God said, okay.

But they had become totally distracted. Totally distracted. You know, in Colossians 2, Paul here isn't thinking about, at least doesn't seem to be thinking about Genesis when he writes this. He's just writing to a problem in the church in Colossae.

But there is, in another place where he writes about, he was worried that the church was being deceived like Eve. He's telling the New Testament church, I'm afraid you're being set up like Eve was. That you're listening, and the deception is creating a doubt, and then it creates a distraction. You're no longer going to God. You're being distracted into other things.

For her was simply, I'm distracted eating a piece of fruit. Smells good, but you taste good. And besides, there's some power in here that'll make me wise.

I'll be really, really smart if I eat this fruit. In Colossae, he says to the church of Colossae in chapter 2, verse 8, I'm breaking into the middle of a whole thought here, because he's talking about very specific false doctrines that have come into the church. Someday in the future I may go through Colossae to show what they are. But he says, beware, lest anyone cheat you. You could be cheated out of something. He's telling the church, be aware so that you're not cheated. Actually, in the Greek, it can be translated, take you captive, that you're actually captured and controlled by someone. And in most modern translations, it's actually translated, be careful that you're not taken captive here. So he's warning them, something is happening to you that can take you away from God. Capture your mind. Capture your mind.

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit.

Words that are leading you to a way of questioning God. You question God, his validity, his power, his glory, his majesty, his intelligence, his goodness, his right to carry out justice. You question all that, and you question it more and more. He says, according to the tradition of men, in other words, according to the systems that we see throughout the world we live in, once again, there's good things in the world, not every single thing. But we have to accept that Satan sort of has his fingerprints on everything.

As human beings, we've all been influenced. As human beings, we were born into a world where it was already corrupt. Traditions of men. According to the basic principles of the world, so what's happening in Colossae was teachings were coming into the church. He said, this is from the world, and we know who the God of this world is. So it's the same deceptions, and not according to Christ. The more we get distracted into wrong biblical teaching, the less emphasis we have on understanding who Christ is and what God is doing through Christ today. Christ as creator, Christ as savior, Christ as coming king, and Christ as the head of the church. We lose all that, and we get caught up in all kinds of things because we're distracted. I'm going to tell you a story from the Bible about a man who is the ultimate story of deception, doubt, and distraction. Let's see what happened to him. Let's go to 1 Kings 13.

1 Kings 13.

We're going to go ahead and read this story because it's just it's the perfect example of how someone can be trying to follow God and end up being deceived, being filled with doubt, and being distracted. And so no longer following God, not realizing he's no longer following God. And behold a man of God, verse 1, came from Judah to Bethel by the word of the Lord, and Jeroboam stood by the altar to burn incense. So this is the king of Israel at the time. Then he cried out against the altar by the word of the Lord and said, so this is this man of God, O altar, thus is the Lord God. Behold a child, Josiah, by name, shall be born to the house of David, and on you shall he shall sacrifice the priests of the high places who burn incense to on you, and men's bones shall be burned on you.

And he gave a sign that same day, saying, this is the sign which the Lord has spoken, surely the altar shall be split apart, and the ashes on it shall be poured out.

So it came to pass that when King Jeroboam heard the saying of the man of God, who cried out against the altar at Bethel, that he stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, arrest him. Then his hand which he stretched out toward him withered so that he could not pull it back to himself. So let's just think about this a minute.

The king is praying and this false altar, and really it's set up to a false god, and this man of God, we don't even have his name, he comes in and says, this is wrong, this is against God. And the king says, arrest that man, he's going to punish him, and all of a sudden his hand withers. So this is the dramatic thing that's happening, and there's obviously probably a lot of people there, there's priests there, wherever the king goes there's lots of people that go in his attendance and so forth.

So there's a lot of people watching this happen. The altar also was split apart, and the ashes poured out of the altar according to the sign which the man of God had given by the word of the Lord. So God had told him to do this, and God, he went and did it, and this great work was done. Then the king answered and said to the man of God, please entreat the favor of the Lord your God, and pray for me, that my hand shall be restored to me.

So the man of God entreated the Lord, and the king's hand would restore to him, and became as before. Then the king said to the man of God, come home with me and refresh yourself, and I will give you a reward. So come on, and I will feed you, and I will give you a great reward for coming here and representing God.

But the man of God said to the king, if you were to give me half your house, I would not go with you, nor would I eat bread, nor drink water in this place. For so it was commanded me by the word of the Lord, saying, you shall not eat bread, nor drink water, nor return by the same way you came.

So he went another way and did not return by the way he had came to Bethel. He had been instructed by God. He obeyed God to the letter. Great miracles had happened, and now he's returning home, doing exactly what God told him to do. He's not eating, he's not drinking, and he's taking a different way home. He, you know, he has no doubt. There's no deception that's come into his life. There's no doubt.

There's no distraction. He's going home, where he can now pray to God and restore, you know, go back to his lifestyle and eat, eat again, and wait for the next thing God wants him to do. But verse 11, now an old prophet dwelt in Bethel, and his sons came and told him all the works that the man of God had done that day in Bethel.

They also told their father the words which he had spoken to the king. And their father said to them, which way did he go? For his sons had seen which way the man of God had come from Judah, or went to Judah. When he said to his sons, saddle the donkey for me, said they saddled the donkey for him, and he rode on him.

And when he after the man of God and found him sitting under an oak, then he said to him, are you the man of God who came from Judah? And he said, I am. And he said to him, come home with me and eat bread. And he says, I cannot return with you nor go with you, neither can I eat bread or drink water with you in this place.

For I have been told by the word of the Lord that you shall not eat bread nor drink water there, nor return by going that the way you came. He said, no, I can't. I don't care if you are supposed to be a prophet. I can't come spend the day with you and I can't have a meal with you. Then he said to him, that's what the old prophet told him, I too am a prophet as you are.

And an angel spoke to me by the word of the Lord, saying, bring him back with you to your house, that he may eat bread and drink water. And then there's this little parenthetical statement.

And he was lying to him. We now have deception. I too am a prophet. I'm a prophet of God and I'm telling you, God sent me an angel and said, oh no, he's done his job. So come and receive a, you know, stay at someone's house and you're not on the road sleeping out under the stars and you can get something to eat. Then you can go home. Maybe wash up some. This is a blessing from God for doing what you did.

And an angel told me, I mean, this is an old prophet. He must have been, you know, wiser than a younger man and an angel must have come to him. So you have deception and you have doubt. Oh, maybe God changed his mind about what he told me to do. There's doubt. He's now totally distracted. I am tired. I am hungry. I am very thirsty. It's a long ways home. And this is a man of God, a prophet, and he's just telling me, yes, what you did was right before God, but God wants you now to be rewarded for what you did.

So I went back with him and ate bread in his house and drank water. Now it happened as they ate at the table, the word of the Lord came to the prophet who had brought him back. And he cried out to the man of God who came from Judah saying, Thus says the Lord, because you have disobeyed the word of the Lord and have not kept the commandment, which the Lord your God has commanded you, but came back, ate bread and drank water in the place of which the Lord said, Eat no bread and drink no water.

Your corpse shall not come to the tomb of your fathers. So it was after he had eaten bread and had drunk that he saddled the donkey for him, the prophet whom he had brought back. And when he was gone, a lion met him on the road and killed him, and his corpse was thrown on the road, and the donkey stood by it, and the lion also stood by the corpse. They didn't eat it. This wasn't just some random lying attack because he was hungry.

God killed the man. Why? He had followed Satan's plan.

God's plan was, go do what I tell you to do, come back, I'll reward you, I'll take care of you, everything will be fine. This is a hard thing I'm asking you to do, but go do it. And miracles had happened. He had stood up to the king of Israel. He had come from Judah, stood up to the king of Israel because they were two different nations at the time. And God had done this miracle, split the altar in two, withered the man's hand, and then healed it. He was doing the plan of God. Now all he had to do was go back, and he let someone deceive him, and he became distracted by how he felt, what he was going through, and he followed along. This is one of the greatest sad stories in the Bible. And we don't even know his name. He just called the man of God. This is someone who God knew, who followed God, and yet let himself be deceived, doubted, and distracted. That's all Satan's plan. That's the first three steps of his plan. That's what he's trying to do with this all the time. You think, wow, that must be pretty rare. Let's go to a New Testament verse, Colossians 4.14.

Colossians 4. I'm not a very important verse. You've read it probably a few times in life.

Probably never even heard it in a sermon. Paul writes to the Colossians, Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas greet you.

Luke and Demas were obviously important men in the early church. I mean, Luke was a Greek physician, a Greek doctor, and he wrote more of the New Testament than anybody else. When you take Luke, the book of Luke, and the book of Acts, that's actually more than what Paul wrote.

So this is a very important man. And Demas is mentioned with him, very important man in the work that God is doing through Paul.

Now let's go to 2 Timothy. So this is later in time. I mean, it's later in the Bible, but it's literally later in time. A lot of things took place when Paul wrote to Colossae, and he writes to Timothy. But in 2 Timothy 4, verse 9, he says to Timothy, Be diligent to come to me quickly. So he's writing a letter, of course, 1 Timothy is to a person, and he writes to him and he says, Come to me quickly. I need you, Timothy, to help me out. For Demas has forsaken me, and here's why, having loved this present world and is departed for Thessalonica. Somewhere along the line, Demas got a little piece of deception from Satan. And somewhere along the line, he began to doubt what God was doing in his life and doubt Paul and the work that Paul was doing, because he was important in the work of Paul.

And he became distracted by all the things of the world.

He became distracted by the things he owned. Is it wrong to own things? No. I thought the sermonette pointed that out perfectly. But what we have in this physical life is just that, temporary. It's very temporary. God's plan is a lot bigger than this. It's a lot greater. His plan for you is a lot greater than this. And Demas lost sight of that, so there had to be some deception, some doubt. All we see is distraction.

Distraction. Exactly what Satan did to Eve is what he's trying to do to all of us all the time.

And so Demas, we never know what really happened to him. He sort of disappears. You sort of hope he repented and was back involved in the church again and maybe even service in the church.

But all Paul says to Timothy, please come. Demas has left me because he's going into the world.

He's going into the world.

Once those first three things happen, deception, doubt, distraction, you start to see what it causes. Now this is real important that we see this. Let's go back to Genesis that we understand here this is the next step because it is the mind of Satan. We all are deceived from time to time. We all are deceived from time to time. We all get confused. We all have doubt from time to time.

We all can get distracted from time to time. That's why I give this sermon. It's not just because, oh look how this has happened. It's because we go through that. Satan's trying to do his plan in your life, in my life, every day. And he uses the same strategy, just different tactics. Because what may distract you doesn't distract somebody else. The doubt he plants in you may be different than the doubt he plants in somebody else. So it's different tactics, same strategy.

And this is when you know when something really is starting to happen. And that's in Genesis 3. And let's go to verse 7.

So they ate the fruit. Then the eyes of both of them were opened.

Open to what? Good and evil. And they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. Clear back to the time of Augustine in the 400s, who still considered the greatest one to the greatest Christian writers of all time. He took just the mean that basically sex is evil. Sex is bad. That's not the point. The point is the sexual relationship when the husband and wife was created by God to be good. Something had happened to them.

They had never been embarrassed before. Right? They didn't have any embarrassment before.

Now they have it. That is the result of God. That is the result of Satan. They now have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They experienced both good and evil.

They are being flooded with emotions they don't even understand. Anger.

Competition. I mean, there's issues happening between them. They don't even understand. There's issues happening between them and God they don't even understand.

Because what happens once we get so distracted that we're not looking to God, we're looking for other solutions? Once that happens, every relationship in your life begins to be damaged in one way or the other. Except for those you can find to support you. Right? And if they don't support you, then that relationship is damaged. Everything is damaged. Of course, Adam and Eve didn't have any way to go to. Right? He couldn't have gone out with the guys and she couldn't go out with the girls. All they had was each other. But this is what happens next. Conflict and division in relationships. That's what happens next. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves in the presence of the Lord God among the trees in the garden. They literally began to hide from God. Instead of when confronted with the deception saying, let me check this with God. Right? That's not... neither of them did that.

Now, instead of running to God, which they could have done any time, even after they ate the fruit, they could have run to God. But they did not. They're hiding from God. They're feeling guilt. They've never felt guilt before. They're experiencing fear. They had never had fear before.

This is the result. You and I live in a world of... an internal world of totally dysfunctioned emotions much of the time. That's not because we were made that way. It's because we were born in Satan's world. That's why it's that way. And God says, okay, my plan is to help you work through that and change you so that's all gone. That confusion is gone in the resurrection. The internal mental and emotional confusion we experience is gone in the resurrection. This is the healing process. The healing process is now as we're learning to reject Satan's plan and accept God's plan.

And so this is what God is doing in our lives every day.

I mean, the thing about being totally innocent as an adult, and suddenly everything inside you changes. The trauma must have been unbelievable.

Satan's not even around, right? Or at least he's not saying anything more to them.

He just said, my plan works. God, look what I did. I messed them up for you.

Having no idea the guy that already knew this was going to happen, he already had a plan to fix it. His plan was already there to fix it.

So then the Lord God, verse 9, called to Adam and said to him, where are you? This is the biggest...

He didn't know where he was. I've read, quote unquote, Christian scholars who say, God is limited. He didn't know where they were. Well, you never had children and played hide and seek.

As you hear them giggling, hiding behind a chair that you can see them underneath, you know, the legs of the chair, right?

You... Yeah, I know where you are, but we'll play the game. Where are you? And he said, I heard your voice in the garden. I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

Now this isn't just physically naked. This is, I mean, mentally. He's naked. He's suddenly exposed and he doesn't even understand himself. He doesn't understand Eve. He doesn't understand anything.

And he's hiding from God because something's terribly wrong with him. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I've commanded that you should not eat?

And of course he says, well, the woman gave it to me. You know, well, yes, but no.

Okay?

This is what happens when you find yourself in constant conflict with everybody, people in the world. I mean, there's lots of conflict you can't hide from. I mean, conflict is normal. It's not supposed to be normal, but it is. But when you find yourself just immersed in conflict with people in the church, with your spouse, with the, you know, your family, with your friends, with everybody at work, you're just constantly sort of an edge and angry and bitter and in conflict. That's not God's plan.

I mean, how many times we read the New Testament and talk about peace and long suffering and unity and all these words that have to mean something, and yet we find ourselves many times not in that state at all. Why? Because Satan's working his plan. That's why. He's doing things to us. And we're so, we have deception, doubt, and distraction. So much that we're not paying attention to God. We're not seeking God. When we're in these states of Satan's, Satan's not deliberately, by the way, possessing you. He's not like, you know, oh, I'm a special target in Satan's. No! This is just what happens being born in this world and being born with Satan's nature, a part of it in us, and being human beings in the world. This is what is normal for human beings. It's not supposed to be normal, and that's what we have to recognize. God shows us what's normal without Satan around. And He says, choose this, and His plan is to work us through this step by step by step until we are changed when Christ comes. And all this doesn't matter. All the internal issues we deal with, the sin we deal with, it will all be gone. It will be gone. That's the promise. Now is learning how to be prepared and how to change and how to have sin removed from us. We can't... Remember, I said there were three things that happens, and one is we get driven by unbridled physical experiences. Two is selfishness and three is pride. When we are driven by any of those three things and controlled by those things, Satan's plan is being played out in us. God's plan is those things are overcome.

That's God's plan, that those things be overcome. And it's a daily battle. You're not going to wake up one morning and say, oh good, wow. You know, I have no desires for unbridled physical experiences. I have no desire for selfishness, and I have no desire. I have no pride at all. If you wake up and tell yourself that, you're in trouble. That's pride. Because we're not there. None of us are there.

But Satan's plan is to keep us there. The last point I want to make is the result of Satan's plan. I originally had, you know, all these scriptures and how we could go to fight all this, and then I realized, oh, I'd have to speak for three hours. So I took that out and said, let's just look at the plan, okay? Let's just lay out the plan, and you can think through what that means. And you can think through what does that mean in your life? How you struggle.

And how it means, too, to look and see where God is carrying out His plan. This isn't just negative. It should help us be able to see, oh, this is happening. That's God's plan. This is happening. That's God's plan. This other thing's happening. That's not part of God's plan.

That's somebody else's plan. See, we like to think we have control of everything, and we're in an existential war between good and evil.

That's what we're involved in. You just don't know it until you're called.

We're in that existential war as God's plan is carried out in us, and Satan tries to get us not to go there. So Genesis 3, 14.

Well, this is sort of verse 12. Then the man said, The woman whom you gave it to me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, What have you done? The woman said, Well, the serpent has seen me, and I ate. So then the Lord, God curses Satan, but we have the first gospel message in verse 15. This is the first gospel message in the entire Bible. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. In other words, there eventually will be someone come from a woman. He becomes sort of the mother of humanity. There will become a mother or a child from a woman that will fight and defeat Satan.

And it will be a war. Verse C, or the end of that verse, it's a war.

Then to the woman, he says, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception, and pain you shall bring for children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. In other words, your bodies are going to deteriorate now, and little things, or what used to be a little thing like having a child, which she didn't even know what that meant yet, is going to get really hard. I mean, all of us are physically, none of us are physically what we're supposed to be. We weren't designed to live in the world we live in, and we're all messed up. I mean, I just reached 70 this week, and I read in the scripture where, man, if you read 70, you're a blessed man. Well, that's not too comforting, you know.

So we look at the world we live in, and we come to a conclusion we weren't supposed to hurt like this. It wasn't supposed to be this hard. And he tells Eve, I'm going to save the world through someone that's going to come from one of your generations, you know. Your children way down the line, but life's going to be hard for you, and there's going to be stress between you and your husband. There was never supposed to be marital problems that wasn't part of God's plan. It is part of Satan's plan. The destruction of the family and the destruction of marriage is always part of his plan, and he'll do everything he can to destroy marriage and family, because that represents what God is doing, and he's creating a family.

That represents God's plan, and how he was going to keep reproducing human beings that would become his children. That's his plan. What an amazing thing. Yes, I made you male and female, and you're going to get married, and you're going to produce children, and those children are going to be mine.

And we're all going to share in that.

We get to share in the process of God creating new children. That's amazing!

That's a plan. That's a thought process that's just beyond me.

And so marriage and family must be destroyed. Abortion is loved by Satan. Every destroyed marriage is loved by Satan. Every child is abandoned. He loves that.

Every child is abused. He loves that, because he wants to destroy humanity from being able to be the eternal children of God.

It's his plan. And God says, now look what's going to happen. Verse 17 says to Adam, Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded, you saying you should not eat of it, curses the ground for your sake. He says, you don't understand. I'm controlling the earth. Now God still controls the earth some.

You know, the laws of nature that he's put in place still work.

But you know, Adam and Eve, food would have been easy to get, to harvest, to grow.

I can't even grow grass in my yard.

Right?

He says, curses the ground for your sake, and toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.

But thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return. He says, this life's now going to be hard.

God was going to take care of things. There would have been no tornadoes in the garden.

There would have been no tsunamis or earthquakes destroying the garden.

That's part of God saying, okay, I'm not going to govern everything anymore.

You know, He's still holding together, but He's not governing everything. He's letting us live in it, and He's letting Satan try to carry out Satan's plan.

And eventually we all die. Wow, that's a downer, right? Well, it would be except for verse 15.

When we get into the New Testament, where verse 15 is explained, that Christ came to give us eternal life, and to release God's plan into our lives, oh, otherwise we're just trapped in this mess. And we're not trapped in the mess. That's the point.

But we're in a mess. We keep trying to shape the world into what will make us happy, and you can't.

We get some happiness. We have some control, right? We have some control.

In our own neighborhood a couple weeks ago, we're driving on from church. There's smoke pouring out of what looks like our neighborhood. And my wife goes, oh, no. She was in a fire when she was a teenager. A house burned down. She saved the children. She was a babysitter. She got the children out just in time. She's told me that story many times, but watching a house burn down in a matter of minutes, I realized how fast that happens. It was a house just burned up. Fortunately, the people got out.

We can't control it, can we?

We can't control what happens this afternoon.

But what we have is the assurance that God says, you stay in my plan, and this works out.

That's the assurance.

And it's really worth it. Satan's plan is, let me fill you with doubt.

Like, first of all, deceiving you. The doubt, and the distraction, and the division, and then destruction and chaos. His way always leads to destruction and chaos.

In the midst of Satan's world of destruction and chaos, we can have peace. We can have a view of the future. We can get up every morning and still say, today's worth living. And physical things are good that God made, as long as we use it properly. We can get up every morning and look at life and say, you know what? This is worth living because I know what God's doing. And the doubts I have, He will fix. I don't have the answers to everything, but He will fix it. We believe that. And there's peace, long suffering, gentleness, mercy, faith, right? All those things become part of who we are, and that's all part of God's plan. The more we immerse ourselves in Satan's plan, I tell you, I... Who would I vote for today to be president of the United States?

I mean, if... Nobody... I mean, if I was just out in the world... I don't know, Chris, I don't know if I was out in the world. I'm sure I'd be voting for somebody because I'd be bought into one of different viewpoints, right?

I love the United States of America, and being born here is one of the greatest blessings I've ever received. It's better than any place you could live in history, but it is not the kingdom of God.

It is not the kingdom of God. And it too shall pass. This too shall pass when Satan is no longer the God of this world, and God will create a whole new government. And that I find comforting, because as much as I love being here, this is a mess. But it always has been a mess. Just read. Go read the biography of John Adams that was written a couple years ago by McCulloch. And you realize, oh my, it was a mess from the very beginning.

It's always been a mess. The few we have, it's God's plan. So, when you are overwhelmed, because Satan's plan is affecting your life, which it affects our lives every day, I want you to do something. I want you to go to God, and I want you to pray this to Him. Psalm 139. Go to God, and literally pray this to God in sincerity. Search me, O God. This is verse 23.

Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my anxieties. Know what I struggle with. Understand the world I live in. I don't even understand.

It's crazy. And see if there's any wicked way in me.

Make sure I'm not deceived. Please, God, make sure I'm not deceived. Help me not to have any doubts or distractions. And lead me in the way everlasting. Go to God and ask Him to continue to carry out His plan in your life.