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- Mar 27, 2011
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Oscarr, you could very well be correct in that Satan could be involved with deceiving people more than I realise, though I tend to think that in spite of the brilliance that mankind can often display, I am more inclined to believe that the stupidity of mankind tends to come to the forefront on more occasions than we would like to think, where this applies both to the Christian and non-Christian.The real deception that comes from the devil is that when a person is seeking for an enhanced experience in God through a deeper infilling of the Holy Spirit, he sends a demon of fear and a lying demon to speak in that person's ear, "Don't seek that experience! You know you can be deceived!" That very thought can well come from a lying demon with the aim of putting the person off coming closer to God and having a deeper experience with Him.
The trouble is, that some are so obsessed with signs and wonders being a deception of the devil, they missed some of the real deceptions that come in more cunning ways.
One deception is to keep a good person so ashamed of his past sins and his lack of victory over his besetting sins that he loses sight of his standing with Christ and therefore the weeds of sin-consciousness grow up to make him unfruitful in the things of God.
Another deception is to cause people to set up websites to expose deception and in so doing seek to destroy the ministries of good men and women because of the small faults they see in them (which we all have). This is a good trick of the devil because he can sow doubts in the minds of people about certain very successful ministries. Isn't it significant that these expose deception sites target only the most successful and effective ministries? The devil doesn't worry about the small guys. He goes for the ones who are winning thousands to Christ.
Still another deception is to send a lying, religious spirit of pride to a church to make them think that they are closer to God and more at the cutting edge of what God is doing in a locality than the other churches. He gets that church so puffed up in pride that they become ineffective in the things of the Spirit and winning people to Christ. What happens to that church is that it becomes a religious club full of self-grandstanding peacocks!
Now, from the Continuist perception of the hardcore-cessationist worldview, where we deem this to be merely a humanist approach to the Gospel, it can be understandable that we see Satan fully supporting this particular worldview and of course why wouldn't he as it certainly undermines and diminishes the Ministry of the Godhead and to his absolute joy it also weakens the relationship between the creation and the Creator but does this necessarily imply that he or one of his minions is speaking directly into the heart of each and every hardcore-cessationist?
If we move away from hardcore-cessationism to that of Evangelical-cessationism, where it seems the majority of non-Continuist Evangelicals currently reside, can we rightfully say that they are being conditioned by demonic forces if they do not fully embrace the Gospel in its entirety? For many Evangelicals who fall within this category, they are usually in this middle ground due to their denominations traditions which can be a major influence on all of us, be it with cessationists or Continuists.
But as I said at the start of my post, you could be right in that maybe Satan and his minions are speaking into the ears of more than I realise, but at this point of time I would fall back to the populist adage "Stupid does what stupid is" and of course none of us, including me, are immune to this very human dilemma.
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