Tag Archives: Satan

Day 4: Rebellion’s Results

Lamentations 1:15-18 :

“The Lord has set at nothing all my mighty men within me.
He has called a solemn assembly against me to crush my young men.
The Lord has trodden the virgin daughter of Judah as in a wine press.

“For these things I weep.
My eye, my eye runs down with water,
because the comforter who should refresh my soul is far from me.
My children are desolate,
because the enemy has prevailed.”

Zion spreads out her hands.
There is no one to comfort her.
Yahweh has commanded concerning Jacob,
that those who are around him should be his adversaries.
Jerusalem is among them as an unclean thing.

“Yahweh is righteous,
for I have rebelled against his commandment.
Please hear all you peoples,
and see my sorrow.
My virgins and my young men have gone into captivity.

One of the surprising things about the Law of Moses, to me, was the harsh sentence that God imposed on rebellious children. It makes rebellion a capitol offense. A child that rebels is to be put to death. I will admit that this seemed a bit extreme to me, but now I have come to realize that the reason it seemed extreme was because I failed to see the seriousness of it.

As I consider rebellion’s history, I realize that it was rebellion that got us into this mess in the first place. Satan was one of God’s “children” and he rebelled against God, becoming the originator of sin. He, then, convinced Adam and Eve to rebel against God too. This resulted in the death of the entire human race. If God had killed Satan the moment he rebelled, Adam and Eve would not have sinned. From that point-of-view, killing a rebel is a protection against the spread of rebellion. It’s not healthy for me to go on thinking that rebellion isn’t really that bad. God chooses to correct my thinking and I believe that one way He does that is by giving me this passage from Lamentations.

In this passage, Judah is personified. She is explaining the horror of her circumstances to “all peoples” and that would include you and I at this point. She describes her continual sorrow and explains that her people have been crushed like grapes in a wine press. She explains that she has no one to comfort her and probably the worst thing of all is that she is being opposed by God Himself. Her people have become slaves to foreigners and all of this because she rebelled against God. I think that it is safe to say that rebellion is the main problem we all have. It sums up all sin with one word. God calls us to repent of it and in order to do that, we need to see it for the horror it is. One good thing that came out of Judah’s fall was the fact that you and I can now see more clearly what rebellion will cost us if we continue in it.

Day 3: A Close Look at the Negative

Lamentations 1:10-14 :

The adversary has spread out his hand on all her pleasant things;
for she has seen that the nations have entered into her sanctuary,
concerning whom you commanded that they should not enter into your assembly.

All her people sigh.
They seek bread.
They have given their pleasant things for food to refresh their soul.
“Look, Yahweh, and see,
for I have become despised.”

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look, and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
which is brought on me,
with which Yahweh has afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.

“From on high has he sent fire into my bones,
and it prevails against them.
He has spread a net for my feet.
He has turned me back.
He has made me desolate and I faint all day long.

“The yoke of my transgressions is bound by his hand.
They are knit together.
They have come up on my neck.
He made my strength fail.
The Lord has delivered me into their hands,
against whom I am not able to stand.

I have noticed that my culture has chosen to avoid anything negative. My perception is that this culture believes that there are no sins accept the sin of pointing out sin. Once again, this is irrational because they exempt themselves from their own rule. Passages like these remind us that sin is real, and as a result, the anger of God is justified.

In my culture, anger itself is negative. They must assume that the Christian God is wrong then because in this passage, God is said to have “fierce anger.” Whenever the world thinks that God is wrong, you can bet that the idea came from Satan. I believe that the underlying force behind avoiding negative things is Satan. He knows that the source of all of these negative things is the sin that he introduced into our world. In light of this, let’s consider what God is having us study here.

Much of this book is a close look at the negative. Here it teaches us that once we are subject to God’s fierce anger, we suffer greatly. We learn that we end up suffering all day long as we use up our nice things to simply buy food. We watch our strength waste away as we lose to our enemies. We watch as the good is overrun by evil right before our eyes. This reminds us that sin is real and it has real consequences that we will feel. If we avoid the negative, we fail to understand the seriousness of punishment which causes us to not see the seriousness of our sin. Sin is negative but the greatest negative is the fact that Jesus, who was perfect, was tortured to death. If we avoid that negative thing, we will live negatively for eternity in Hell. Let’s not be deceived by our culture. The only way for things to get positive, will be for every one of us to take a close look at the negative.

Day 125: A Crime Against Humanity

Jeremiah 29:24-32

Concerning Shemaiah the Nehelamite you shall speak, saying, “Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘Because you have sent letters in your own name to all the people who are at Jerusalem, and to Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah, the priest, and to all the priests, saying, “Yahweh has made you priest in the place of Jehoiada the priest, that there may be officers in Yahweh’s house, for every man who is crazy, and makes himself a prophet, that you should put him in the stocks and in shackles. Now therefore, why have you not rebuked Jeremiah of Anathoth, who makes himself a prophet to you, because he has sent to us in Babylon, saying, The captivity is long. Build houses, and dwell in them. Plant gardens, and eat their fruit?” ’ ”

Zephaniah the priest read this letter in the hearing of Jeremiah the prophet. Then Yahweh’s word came to Jeremiah, saying, “Send to all of the captives, saying, ‘Yahweh says concerning Shemaiah the Nehelamite: “Because Shemaiah has prophesied to you, and I didn’t send him, and he has caused you to trust in a lie;” therefore Yahweh says, “Behold, I will punish Shemaiah the Nehelamite and his offspring. He will not have a man to dwell among this people. He won’t see the good that I will do to my people,” says Yahweh, “because he has spoken rebellion against Yahweh.” ’ ”

There are many sins that people commit, but there is one sin that Jesus characterized Satan as being the father of. Murder is horrible, but the sin of lying is capable of causing us to commit every other sin quite naturally, including murder. Today, people tend to believe that God is a myth and that molecules-to-man evolution is real. Evolution is a lie and out of it comes almost every imaginable sin. When a person who clams to talk for God, speaks lies to people, it is a very, very serious crime against humanity and this passage shows us the kind of thing it causes.

In this case, Shemaiah took it upon himself to speak for God and started telling priests what they should be doing. He even told them to lock up Jeremiah. By doing that, Shemaiah told the people who would follow him, that Jeremiah was wrong. Worse than that, it made the people think that God was lying and Shemaiah was telling the truth. They were slandering a prophet of God and even suggesting that he should be killed. So you can see that lying leads to slander and murder and because this lie made the people disobey God’s voice, it could have ended up condemning all of mankind to hell. If the people were not to listen to Jeremiah and were to try to oppose Babylon instead, God would have been obligated to destroy them and since the Jews were the only ones able to bring about the Messiah, the whole world would have been lost. So, we can see what is probably Satan’s most powerful tool: the lie.

If you think that Christians are obsessed with the truth, you are right. It is the truth about Jesus that sets people free. Without the truth, real faith would not be possible. In order to save mankind, God must stop those who speak lies in His name. In this case, God made sure that Shemaiah would be removed and have no offspring in Israel. May God continue to impress upon us the importance of the truth and may we continue to share that truth so that many will be saved.

Day 118: The Real Enemy

Jeremiah 27:8-15

“ ‘ “ ‘It will happen that I will punish the nation and the kingdom which will not serve the same Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and that will not put their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon,’ says Yahweh, ‘with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, until I have consumed them by his hand. But as for you, don’t listen to your prophets, to your diviners, to your dreams, to your soothsayers, or to your sorcerers, who speak to you, saying, “You shall not serve the king of Babylon;” for they prophesy a lie to you, to remove you far from your land, so that I would drive you out, and you would perish. But the nation that brings their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serves him, that nation I will let remain in their own land,’ says Yahweh; ‘and they will till it and dwell in it.’ ” ’ ”

I spoke to Zedekiah king of Judah according to all these words, saying, “Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live. Why will you die, you and your people, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence, as Yahweh has spoken concerning the nation that will not serve the king of Babylon? Don’t listen to the words of the prophets who speak to you, saying, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon;’ for they prophesy a lie to you. For I have not sent them,” says Yahweh, “but they prophesy falsely in my name; that I may drive you out, and that you may perish, you, and the prophets who prophesy to you.”

In this passage, God continues His communication with the non-Israeli nations that were to be affected by the Babylonian takeover. Once again what we have is a very simple and clear message. If the people will surrender, they will get to remain in their own land and continue to do business there. Jeremiah tells them not to listen to the false prophets.

To the king of Judah, Jeremiah said that he should obey God’s word so that he doesn’t suffer with other nations that don’t listen. When you think about it, it would be a bigger tragedy for Israel to not hear the words of their own prophet than it would be for those nations that don’t usually listen to Israel’s God. The sad thing is that Israel wasn’t going to listen. Also, notice that Jeremiah tells the king of Judah to not listen to the false prophets.

Something that caught my attention in this passage is that God was warning them all to not listen to the false prophets because they were saying false things in order to get them to sin and to force God to drive them out of their land. I believe that from the context of what we read here, that the prophets themselves were not doing it for this reason. In fact, we read that if these nations were to listen to the false prophets and not obey Jeremiah’s word, even the false prophets would end up dying and being driven out. I seriously doubt that the false prophets were doing it so that they could die, so that leads us to a question. Who was doing this so that God would destroy both Jew and Gentile and their nations? The answer is pretty obvious. Satan and his powers were behind what the false prophets were saying. Jesus told us that Satan is the father of liars. We also know from other parts of the Bible that Satan deceives people and they in turn deceive others. This demonstrates the fact that Satan isn’t a friend of any human. He doesn’t care if you are a Jew or a Gentile. He’d just as soon see you dead. What we see here is that God is trying to save all of mankind. Even when we don’t understand why God works the way He does, we can rest assured that He cares and knows what He is doing. We need to have faith and simply do what He says.

Masking God

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It was brought to my attention that some satanic rituals involve wearing a mask and standing six feet apart (source at 43:55). It was also brought to my attention that there isn’t any scientific evidence that standing six feet apart reduces the spread of small viruses like SarsCov2. These are a just a few of the poorly linked “facts” that formed the basis for the policies that began to control our lives in 2020.

I have already written about the fact that universal masking is wrong. Since then, it was brought to my attention that mask mandates also do another thing. They cover the face of a creature that was made in the image of God Himself. Doing a thing like this may have ramifications that we can’t fully know. Even though there are times that God allows the sick to be masked, as I mentioned in the other article, only the outwardly sick with specific kinds of disease are to be masked and only below the nose.

You might argue that it isn’t the physical face that God finds most important, but that’s not the point. Even if the physical is only a symbol of the spiritual, it must remain symbolic. In other words, if it is a symbol of what is good spiritually, it is wrong to harm the symbol just as it is wrong to harm the real thing. Jesus’ face is mentioned as being connected to the glory of God and He is our example. (See: 2 Corinthians 4:6)

When you study the Bible, you quickly come to the conclusion that doing things that God doesn’t like have consequences. Some of those consequences are immediate and some of them don’t happen until after you die, but under no condition will any man get away with anything that goes against God. (see Numbers 32:23)

The Bible also tells us that God has an enemy. Satan has been trying to mess God up since God exposed Satan for his attempt to take over. As Christians, we know that this is the real battle on earth today. It may look political, but it’s much more than that. It makes sense that Satan would cause those under his control, like Biden, the CDC and Dr. Fauci, to create an environment that condemns mankind. Satan has used this method before to destroy men. Man may have another purpose, but is he often used by Satan to do what God hates.

It is a Christian’s responsibility to promote God and His image. We are to teach our children the same. Besides the fact that the masks are a symbol of servitude to other men, which is wrong for a Christian (see 1 Corinthians 7:23), it also represents something that covers the face of God. This is evil and must be stopped before our culture faces the inevitable consequences.