Satan's Role in Our Trials - Evangelical Caucus/Devotional

“Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world” (1 Peter 5:8-9).

All of Satan’s involvement in our sufferings and trials is under God’s control, which means our success against him is also in God’s sovereign hands.

During the past twenty-five years, there has been a tremendous upsurge of interest in the occult, Satan worship, and evil supernatural influences. Such unwise fascination has had an impact on the church and led to an overemphasis on spiritual warfare in some circles. But such unbiblical emphases give us an unbalanced perspective on the role Satan plays in our trials and persecutions.

On the other hand, 1 Peter 5:8-9 places Satan’s activities in the proper context. Peter urges us to watch our surroundings and be alert to possible temptations. But as we do, we can be encouraged that Jesus Christ has already defeated Satan, and therefore the evil one can have no long-term victories in our lives (1 John 4:4).

Peter goes on to admonish us that we need to resist Satan, which simply means we must “stand up against” him with our spiritual feet solidly planted on the objective truth of the Word (see also James 4:7). The Devil is a liar and a deceiver, and the surest way to deflect his onslaughts is with the infallible, revealed truth of Scripture.

In the biblical accounts of Satan’s participation in the trials, persecutions, or sufferings of God’s servants, God is always the one in control (see Job 1:1—2:8; Matt. 4:1-11). Therefore, our responsibility as we prepare for possible satanic attacks is to recall that our own grand strategies of spiritual warfare, however relentless and innovative they might be, will not provide the vigilance Peter speaks of. Paul gives us a further example of the right kind of preparation when he describes the essence of spiritual warfare as “taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). If we heed the implications of those words, there’s really nothing else we need to have or do in combating the Devil.

Ask God to give you a biblical, balanced approach to dealing with Satan and his many subtle temptations.

And He will.

Satan's day is coming.

Revelation 20:7-10 And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

I cannot wait for the end of all this evil. I know it's going to be rough on many, but that cannot be helped. It's going to happen anyways. But the sooner it's over, the better, IMO.

You and I are born with a brain which is the part of our body that makes decisions.

It is a learning machine. It learns what things or actions are good or bad based based on experience.

And the goodness or badness is judged by our self interest. We’re all a after advancing our self interest, ie, “the pursuit of happiness” as each one defines it for ourselves.

So, regarding my tag line - I’ve learned through experience and observation that some people advance their interest at the expense of yours by guilting you. And that lesson has caused me to be wary of such manipulation for my own interest, hence the tagine.

Do you agree?

Now each one of us is endowed (born) with unique bodies and brains, thus we all process experiences in somewhat different ways and come to different conclusions. There are a lot of similarities but also differences.

We’re kinda like slightly different CPUs with imperfect logic. The imperfect logic is due to our emotional nature.

I find this “model” consistent with the realities of the world that I see and experience.

What do you think?

I’m happy to engage you in this, but please realize that I have no intention of being adversarial.

We are born with brains that store an immense amount of information based on our experiences. If I’m only doing what my experiences have programmed me to do, then how can truth as an absolute exist? You would have your truth and I would have mine. If absolute truth doesn’t exist, aren’t you saying that the statement that absolute truth doesn’t exist is absolute truth?
If free will is an illusion, then how can anyone be held accountable for their actions? Aren’t they just doing what they’ve been programmed to do? Why have prisons or the death penalty or political parties?
Without free will, love doesn’t exist.
Without free will, hate doesn’t exist.
My experience can cause me to either approve or disapprove of someone’s actions or even their person, but I have to choose to love or hate someone.
People have chosen to love or hate another person completely contrary to their own self interest. This is much deeper than a “computer program” that only promotes self.

Your tagline tells me “Do not let them make you “care” !”
If free will is an illusion, then how can I do that? Won’t I just respond with my programmed reaction? I would have to choose to let them make me care or choose to not let them make me care.

Life, Liberty and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

Humans (and animals as well) are like a heat seeking missile. But instead of seeking heat we’re built and programmed to seek HAPPINESS. So we are single minded Happiness seeking missiles. Every decision and action each one of us takes is because we think that it will make us happier (or less unhappy) in the long run (and for some the long run can extend into an afterlife).

There isn’t a single definition of happiness that applies to everyone. Each one of us gets to determine what we THINK will make us happy. And that determination is made by our rational and emotional brain that WE WERE BORN WITH and that might have changed as we grow up. WE HAD NO CONTROL OVER THAT, we didn’t get to choose.

Though each one of us has our own sense of what makes us happy, certain needs like, hunger, thirst, shelter, etc. we all share and want to satisfy. Others higher in the Maslow Pyramid tend to be more personal and are dictated by our “hardware” and what we have learned over the years.

We are made up with physical and emotional sensors that define our “state of happiness” at any point in time.

Now if we happen to find ourselves in a state of relative “unhappiness”, what do we do? Well we try to pinpoint what’s making us unhappy. Maybe you’re hungry. if so, your brains starts to go to work to solve that problem. If you’re a baby you instinctively (preprogrammed) start crying and suddenly food appears. So you learn a valuable “cause and effect” relationship that might come in handy next time you’re hungry. Once you learn to talk, and you’re hungry, your mom may have a talk with you and tell if you hungry you should ask her and not cry and maybe to teach you that lesson she wont give you food until you ask for it. So another lesson in cause and effect is learned. As we grow older more and more of these cause and effect “realities” (how the world works) are learned.

So in essence what we are is a happiness seeking, cause and effect pattern recognition machine. We store in our brains thousands of cause and effects data points and put them to use when similar situations arise. But sometime we also experiment with new ones.

So whenever we decide on a course of action to pursue happiness (which is a constant), ie, EXERCISE OUR WILL, what we’re doing is searching our memory bank for past situations similar to what we’re facing in the present and determine what course of action caused a desirable effect and judge whether that might work in today’s circumstances. If we decide it would than we “WILL” ourselves to do the same, if not we may try something else, even something totally new. All of this deciding is done using the “hardware” we were given at birth, over which we had no control.

Now, not all of us were given hardware that are as rational as what I just described. Many of us tend to rely more on emotions than rationality. In which case, if hungry, an emotional person unconcerned about consequences may just walk into a grocery store and steal what he wants and run away.

Bottom line is this. Free will implies that we are not dependent on the “hardware” we were given. That anyone of us, regardless of hardware is free to make any choice and is not bound by his makeup.

As I showed above, people use the brain they were given to arrive at the choices they make, based either on rationality or emotions. There’s nothing else for us to use, unless you fabricate some nonexistent, undetectable, figment of imaginations.

I’ve gone long enough (too long). But if you apply this model to the questions you asked me you will find the answer. If not I’ll answer them in another post.

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