This past week and a half I've noticed how good Satan truly is...now before you bash me or wish me to hell, I mean how good at his job he truly is. Satan's BIGGEST claim to fame and his BIGGEST success is staying invisible. He lurks in the secrets of your heart, the darkness of the unknown, but yet he lurches out at us without us even having a clue that he's the one attacking.
WHY?!
Well, Satan is the master of deception, the king of lies, the losers of losers, blah blah blah. He is awesome and most capable of staying hidden while being the instigator because that's when he's most potent--the invisible enemy is always lethal. Think about playing your favorite sport or game. Take chess for example. How in the world do you have a shot at winning chess? You anticipate your opponent's next move and you definitely pay attention to his previous ones. If you can't see who you're up against, no better yet, if you FORGET that you're up against someone but yet they're still playing well and hard, you are most definitely going to lose. Fail. Vamoose.
Yesterday, I got a text from someone who was pretty concerned about my brother. This person said that he didn't seem to be doing well at all and that she was concerned for him...crap. I just got out of my last class for the day and just decided to walk the 2 miles home. Anyways, as I decided to walk, I started to just wonder. Wonder why if my brother made that decision to follow Christ just a little over a month ago now, why in the world he would be worse than before. I wasn't necessarily angry--at God anyways--and I wasn't all that sad, I was more at a loss of words and an almost lost sense of hope. I didn't even know what to say or pray to God because I've prayed it all exhaustively before and quite honestly I didn't think it was working...
As I was wrestling through this trying to figure out what in the world I should do or what should happen, etc. I saw it. I had my head down looking at the ground in front of me as I walked and the first thing I saw was, "Do you believe in God?" then 3 cement slabs later, "You can be GOOD without GOD!" I kept walking and literally every other cement slabs for the next 2 minutes alternated these sayings. They were advertisements for the IU Student Atheist group. With each one I was getting ever so angry to the point where I had tears streaming down my face--BAM! It hit me, Satan was attacking me at my very core. He wanted to slap me in the face and I have never been so aware of his attack against my soul than at this very moment.
The next thing I did was the best thing, in my opinion, I could've possibly done. I stopped trying to talk to God about why things weren't getting better for my brother and I started fighting for my brother against Satan--obviously talking to God is always best, but in this case I needed another plan of attack in addition. It was almost like a prayer to Satan but for him to leave well enough alone and to realize that he has been defeated FOREVER. As I did this I started to feel the burden lifted and I kept reminding Satan of how much of a coward he is that he has to fight while hidden, that he already lost my brother's soul so now out of a bitter 2-year old's temper-tantrum he's taking it out on my brother with everything he has. I felt this power well up inside me and I yelled at Satan with everything I had (all this going on while walking home mind you). I told him how pitiful he is that he was not only stripped of his glory when he was thrown out of Heaven, but he had also already lost the biggest fight of his life--this world.
You see, Satan has and will bring down churches and God's people not because they're "bad" people but because he's mad as hell (I was going for the pun ;) and he will do EVERYTHING in his power to drag them down with him. He's already lost the war but we CANNOT let him win these battles. Take Satan down with all you have and not only should you plead with God but you should also fight Satan to the very core. There's two sides to this war, let's not forget our enemy.
With that said, I have one challenge for thought for you and I would LOVE your feedback to the answer:
Is it important for us to forgive Satan just as we would any other person who has wronged us?
Very interesting question at the end there. It got me rooting through the dictionary for the definition of "forgive."
ReplyDeleteForgive: To grant pardon for or remission of; to absolve; to pardon an offense or an offender.
Okay, so what is "Pardon"?
Pardon: kind indulgence; to make courteous allowance for; to release a person from liability for an offense; to excuse
Okay, so what is "excuse"?
Excuse: to overlook; to remove the blame of; to justify
So, therefore, NO, I don't think we should forgive Satan, because that means(according to the dictionary at least) releasing Satan from the blame, overlooking the things he does, justifying the things he does, making allowances for him... and these are all things you were just saying we shouldn't do!
An interesting question this raised in my head was, did God create Satan? Did God create evil? I mean he must have, right? Cause who else would? Well, I know that Satan originated as a "good guy" and then "turned bad"... but God must have created him knowing that this would happen, right? And the bible says that God has power over Satan, that essentially if He "wanted" to He could overcome him (and that eventually he will)... it says that God has sovereignty even over evil and suffering and that God, not Satan, makes the final call..
So maybe GOD is the one we should forgive, for allowing evil to exist this world.
Interesting way to answer that question....it does make a valid point. We definitely shouldn't just overlook what Satan does nor should we make allowances...I don't know though because to me, forgiving someone doesn't necessarily make you justify what that person did nor does it make you just overlook what that person did to you--at least that's never been my experience when I forgave people who have done incredible things to me. Forgiveness definitely isn't easy because you pretty much absorb whatever that person did to you and you move on in a sense. I don't think that if you forgive someone you just say to yourself, "Oh that wasn't a big deal, they didn't really do a whole lot." That's just setting yourself up for a world of hurt!
ReplyDeleteI do kinda think we should forgive Satan though because it does release US from what he's done to us--that in turn releases us from this hate that wells up inside us that often causes us to get so angry that we start to give him control as a result. Forgiveness isn't to release the other person, it's to release yourself.
Here's the thing about Satan: He (Lucifer) was pretty much God's right-hand angel who saw how much power God had, wanted it and desired it sooooo badly that he tried to rise above God in order to be in complete control. As a result, God threw him from heaven and stripped Lucifer of any glory he possessed.
Now, here's some philosophy for you...God didn't create evil. That doesn't seem to make sense, right? I asked this very same question once and this is how it was explained to me. There is no such thing as darkness, there is only the absence of light. Light still exists in darkness even if its 0.000000000000000001%. There is no such thing as complete darkness or black--black is only the absence of white, etc. Evil is the absence of good. It's almost like you can put these things on a little scale bar much like a hue bar for colors. You can keep going down to the very end of the scale where you're taking more and more good away and that's what we perceive as evil. Where there is one phenomenon there is the opposite or antonym of that.
Now, I've also asked this same question about why God would create Satan knowing that Satan would turn out the way he did, etc. and why He doesn't just conquer him now at this very moment. I have no clue why. God seems to do a lot of things that don't really make sense to me, honestly, but there's always some sort of reason--this, I haven't found though. Any thoughts?