The Tactics of the Devil, Then and Now

One of the things we see in this chapter is how the devil works to ruin God’s good creation, as well as some of his tactics in doing so.

The devil is very cunning and he has many tactics to try and lead us astray. Many of us too easily assume that we understand how the devil will deceive us. It’s all too common to practically assume that the devil will attack “from the front”, and not see the many ways he seeks to creep about or undermine us. The devil (and demons) are also thought of in a way of superstition, imagination, and over spiritualization. All of these things fall short of a sober, wise, and right understanding of the tactics of the enemy.

The enemy works harm and misery, and every form of this is something we must see as his work. In the garden, the devil worked a terrible decay into the goodness, healthiness, and peace of God’s creation. To see the workings of the devil, often all we have to look at is what is contrary to what is truly good in spirit and nature.

When it comes to our ideas of how the devil deceives us, we often only think of his work as coming in the form of temptation—the desire for a forbidden thing, like Eve with the forbidden fruit. And certainly this is a very real way temptation works, but that is often all we see of the account in Genesis 3, when there is much more here.

The devil seeks to poison the good ways of God. We see this here with what the devil says to Eve—he twists the command of God into a form God never intended. A form that makes God appear harsh and unreasonable. “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (v1) “What? How unreasonable! How bitter! How miserable the commandments of God are!” The devil uses this tactic today just as much as he has always done—working to make God appear unreasonable, harsh, and causing bitterness.

The challenge for us in seeing what is truly good in nature or sinful in nature, is that we cannot do this on our own. We need God to teach us what is good and what sin looks like. The attack of the enemy with Eve went upon this very place of dependence upon God.

The devil has two common tactics he works today in this place of dependence upon God.

One is that he gets people to feel his twisted commands are the commands of God! He makes people afraid they are disobeying God if they put off his twisted form of the commandments of God, thereby getting people to obey them. This subverts people from actually building upon what is only of God, and actually gets them building upon the enemy’s twisted commands. This is why it is very important for us to understand that nothing about true obedience to God will go contrary to reason and health, goodness, and fairness. God never asks us to abandon our eyes and ears in the name of faith and obedience to Him.The rejection of this very simple truth leads many people into fanaticism and harm in the name of “obeying God”. God’s purpose is always about setting mankind in what is truly good. Rejection of this is one way the devil is able to lead many people into cruelty and harshness, to go against reason and the common sense that God wrote into all of us, and deceive them away from God.

In getting people to act as slaves to such commandments, the devil is able to make people act foolishly, unreasonably, and walk in harm and darkness, and go against what is truly good in nature (light).

All of this leads to the second tactic of the enemy: leading some people to imagine that they do not need God in order to discover what is truly good and wise, because they see the first “group” of people and the darkness they walk in, and so they reject GOD as evil because of what those people profess to do in the name of “God”.

The devil does the ultimate “flipping of the script”, deceiving us. Getting us to walk in what is truly of his nature and is evil, by twisting God’s Word, and he deceives others away from God by casting the devil’s own image upon God’s name. And while some people might escape certain forms of this darkness, such as the religious darkness many fall into, they also are deceived away from their Creator and the only Living God. They do not see how they throw off Life itself, and live by the changing currents of this world, governed only by the current “fashion” of their desires. And they do not see that while they discern certain evils (this is good!), that still this discernment is not the depths of all knowledge of all that is pure, good, and upright. The depths of how to lead a life in honor, meaning, purpose, and goodness, nor does it reveal the knowledge of the one true God to them.

And for many Christians, they escape certain kinds of worldliness, but they are actually brought into a deeper self deception, because they are not truly built upon God, but only in name. It is important for the Christian to understand that the only difference in us is if we are actually living upon God. A pretense to this is nothing but another layer of deception.

The devil is always working against what is good, poisoning us away from it, blinding our minds. And today, these two tactics are his greatest strategies. That is why we must see beyond pretenses of knowledge and learn to truly spiritually discern what is of God and what is actually of the devil. Because the sad truth is that so many of us are satisfied with the appearance of knowledge, rather than seeking the true form of it. We want the image of the scholar, the “Doctor” before our name, but true knowledge is found only in a real plain seeking of it for the purpose of goodness and godly wisdom. These foolish images of ourselves we serve are one of the great ways our sin blinds us away from the true knowledge that would persevere us from the devil and his ways.

Failing to recognize what the devil’s tactics are in our day, many people busy themselves with battles that ended hundreds of years ago, or that never existed at all… The devil loves to get believers to waste themselves in running around fighting imaginary battles and building towers of their own ideas, oversimplifications, ambitions, images, and pride, blinding them from the true attack. All of this is done from the sin in us, the sinful desire to FEEL we are safe and wise, rather than seeking the true substance of these things.

So often we can hardly get at the true nature of these actual things because we are collectively all too convinced that we understand truth and goodness on our own. The first group cannot hear correction because they are convinced they obey God, not seeing how their obedience is immature, naive, born of prejudices, filled with self and pride, harmful, and darkness, contrary to the true Spirit of God. “And Jesus said to them, ‘I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?’” (Luke 6:9) They have fallen into the very same error of the Jewish people in Christ’s day who could not hear correction because they assumed that being “Jews” meant they were right. And this is exactly what so many believe is true of Christians today.

The second group cannot hear the great goodness and wisdom of God because the devil blinds the minds of these people with the bitterness and misery done in God’s name. They deny their equal responsibility to know God rightly, and turn their backs on God, failing to see how dark and sinful this is as well. They refuse to hear a right rebuke upon this point, to be shown that their discernment and goodness is only a fraction of all that is truly needed, and that none of us are truly wise without truly seeking the Living God.

Being Lost and Being Found

As mentioned before, the devil’s attack in the garden was directly at the foundation of our lives. All of us are meant to live upon God just as we physically live upon the earth He created. What the devil did in the fall was attack the vital connection of each individual human with God, our “gravity” and foundation.

God’s commandments are not just about doing or not doing this or that, they are what we set our lives upon. Commandments are like the ground beneath our feet. This is why Jesus talks about how we must do what He tells us in order to truly build upon Him (Lk 6:46-49). This is how our lives work spiritually. Everything we believe, obey, follow, and fear is what we set our lives upon.

In the Garden, the devil began to set Eve upon something other than God. She didn’t realize that what she feared, obeyed, and followed was setting her on an entirely different foundation. Over and over God is trying to show mankind how we are dependent upon God for all life, not just the physical creation, but the spiritual. As God made the earth, trees, air, water, and food, so we are just as dependent upon Him for these spiritually.

Our nature is that we are designed to live upon God, but we can attempt to live upon other things. This is where the fall of mankind happened. Since mankind lived upon the words of another, built upon another, mankind became lost. And the only way to be saved from this lostness is to be built again upon God.

We all experience what it is to be lost. It is probably quite different for all of us. These are some of the effects that I have seen in my own life and in observing the lives of others: We don’t really know how to guide our own lives. We know we need to guide them into something meaningful and important, but we don’t know how. We feel this restless hunger for something “more” but have no idea how to find it. We live under the guidance of ambition and “our dreams”. We have a kind of spirituality and morality but it’s sporadic and doesn’t reach the full measure of what real goodness truly requires. We certainly feel we are wise, but we cannot see how foolish our ways really are. We do not see how vain we are, and how worthless our ways can be. We cannot hear correction very easily, and if we do, we often only run in despair about ourselves. We live by the law of self — whatever is to my personal advantage. And we cannot even see how easily we wrong others, in ways we always feel are justifiable in our own eyes. We are full of strife and contention, and do not really know how to live at peace. We may want peace, but we don’t build it. These are just a few examples of many.

Living upon God is meant to tie us back into the great Vine we are meant to live upon. This is what the Lord teaches us about abiding in Him. Everything that is broken in our being lost is broken in our believing, our valuing, our following, our obeying, etc. We are putting all of these upon places other than God, and we “reap” what we sow ourselves upon.

Many people feel jealousy over their own lives and souls, yet at the same time, we so easily give our lives over to false foundations. We take up some dream or plan, and we give ourselves over to it. Again, many people are jealous over their lives, to have them mean something, but they do not see that God is the only place they can put their souls and be safe.

Ironically, we give our souls so easily to false “gods” while being so jealous and guarded against the true God. This is greatly unhelped by all the false ways people preach in God’s name. Yet at the same time, we see God’s call to come and place our souls upon Him, to build upon Him, as only a burden and chore, and not as goodness and life, the place our souls belong.

The work of Jesus is to bring us out of this brokenness into true life in Him. The difficulty here is how much the devil hinders the way of this, and blinds people’s mind away from the truth, even among Christians.

As said before, a presence to these things means nothing, and yet what we have today is so many people singing songs and shouting about how they were blind but now they see, when in reality, they don’t see.

Part of the difficulty in this is the devilish lie that comes in and says these people aren’t believers, that they were never saved. This does so much harm among Christians.

In reality, learning God, life in God, obedience in God, understanding all His ways, the reason for things, the wisdom of what is good and right; learning spiritual discernment of what is truly of the Spirit of God and what is of the world and the devil—all of these things take a great amount of time and work to be accomplished. And what we have in our days is so many believers running around professing the work to be “finished” in them when they have hardly begun.

They think that this is them “glorifying God”, and indeed, the devil deceives them. Because they go out and show forth their own foolishness and sin, professing it in God’s name.

It is so important for us to understand that the only way we can truly glorify Christ is to actually be changed. And to not be ashamed or afraid to sit down, and be silent, for as long as it takes to be actually changed.

This “in-between” does not mean we are not saved, it does not mean we are not Christians—the devil’s lies and terrors—this is the process of what it means to come into the ways of God and learn of Him.

So much of our sin and foolishness today is how easily the devil gets us to go out and make fools of ourselves in Christ’s name. Saying that refusing to do this is being ashamed of Him… To make us speak of being lost and now found, of being light and salt, when we haven’t truly developed these in our own lives.

Part of this is because of our own sins. Our blindness to how much we are meant to walk in as believers. Our failure to “make every effort” (2 Pet 1:5-8). That we are either actually building on the Lord, or we still aren’t.

True religion is being found, it is coming into the real substance of light and salt, and these things are not cheap or free. All of this is made available to us in Christ, but we have to labor after them daily if we are to truly have them.

The devil works to blind the mind of Christians away from this true path of life found in God. How does he do this? By corrupting our beliefs about God, and causing us to abide in things that are not actually of Christ. What we believe is what we set our lives upon, and the devil works hard to ensure that our beliefs about Christ are not as they should be. We, like Eve, do not see the trajectory these beliefs take us. And the fruit of our ways is most evident, yet we refuse to blush and see our shame.

Some of the beliefs that corrupt us are wrong ideas of grace. Thinking that salvation is simply a removal of our accountability for our sins, when salvation is about this bringing us back to the foundation of life, and building us there. That in this work, we are preserved. In coming back into obedience to God, in following Christ, in turning from sin, our lives are saved from worthlessness and vanity, darkness and blindness, as well as we are made worthy of the heaven above, which is a home for all who truly walk in what is righteous. The sin in us is hating this well reasoned way of God. We do not see how in deepest self love, we reject the just judgment of God upon us, and call this “grace”.

In this, we also reject the call to obedience, seeing all commandments of God as “optional” or legalistic, failing to see how we are delighting in lawlessness, and deceived away and rejecting the very path to righteousness which is the means of life for us!

These are the tantalizing lies of the devil that too many eat! It agrees with the sinful desires in them, and they are blind to how they are choosing these things from the sinful heart in them, not from some obedience to God (as they assume). Part of the very lies they eat are that a Christian cannot be deceived! Thinking that this is promised in Christ. Yet just like Eve, God is always setting before all of us choices. We must choose the good way. We must choose obedience to God. Or, we can choose to believe things that agree with our sinful desires.

All of this has the outcome in us of what we have chosen. We are vain and blind, still full of self, ignorant of God and His ways, and yet very ready to speak and preach. All of this the devil uses to make a great mess in God’s name.

All of this is because we are not actually building upon God. We are refusing the work of doing so! We don’t want to be bothered with a real obedience and call to righteousness, and so we put it off, blind to just how costly this is. Our obedience to God is the very means of our life: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, in that I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His statutes, and His judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you go to possess.” (Deut 30:15-16)

Building Upon Man, Not Christ

One important thing we must discuss in talking about building upon God is the tactic the devil uses to get us to build upon man’s ideas of God, rather than God Himself.

We talk of being jealous over our own souls, how the worldly person can so easily give themselves to worthless things, and yet this is just as true with believers. We too easily give ourselves over to the ideas of men about God, failing to see how this is merely giving ourselves to some philosophy of man, and we let our lives be wholly guided and decided by them. We should have a far greater caution and resistance to such things.

The enemy works a great deal of spiritual pressure along these lines, to make a person feel like they are resisting God, disobeying God, being rebellious, and sinful if they feel a desire to resist these things. And therefore many Christians give themselves over to be led by men, they follow the traditions and doctrines of men, not seeing just how truly dangerous this is.

Every person in the world is setting themself upon something to live by, and we are too easily enthralled by some philosophy. We set up pillars of ideologies and they are as gods to us. We do this without fear, failing to see how this leads to an outcome of vanity. Yet the Christian is not exempt from this. We can have our own little systems of philosophy in our religion, easily building upon these instead of truly abiding in Christ.

The devil works much harm in the church in this very place. He gets people to not truly build upon God, to be truly abiding in Him, but to imagine they are abiding in Him when they are really abiding in the mind of men about God.

We must understand that God makes no promise to us if we walk in this. The promises of God are made to us if we abide in Christ and follow Him. This is why we must very carefully check that we are truly abiding in Christ Himself, and not merely the traditions about Christ or doctrines of men.

When we are not truly abiding in Christ, the evidence is in the fruit we produce. The great truth we need to learn and accept is that it is not simply that the seed of Christ is pure and good, but it equally matters how we receive that seed.

The assumption in the church today is that being a Christian means we are automatically on a path to what is good and right, failing to see that all along the way we are choosing what to believe and do, even as Christians, and the outcome of our lives will be based upon this. When the fruit is bad in us, the Lord teaches us how this is a sign of the sin and error in us that still needs to be corrected.

One of the great examples the Lord gives of this is in the parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15). In this parable Jesus shows us that the seed is good and true seed, but that this doesn’t mean its reception is always good.

Many are loud and profess “glory” for God, who do not endure the important work of His discipline and obedience to Him. They do not develop a right root in themselves because they do not endure the Lord’s chastisement of them, correcting their errors and sin, but endlessly justify themselves (Job 32:2); and they also do not bear up under the labor of true obedience to Him. The outcome is that they have no real substance in them that can endure the true heat of the day, the true reality of life.

Others do not take the seed as they should, they are far more busy with the care and pleasures of life. They are spiritually lazy, or they are running around in passions and works that are not truly of the Lord (but done in His name). These have a fruit that never reaches maturity. It is bitter and undeveloped.

In all of this we see that the seed of God is good, but the reception of it might not be. That people can receive the seed in sinful ways, and it’s not as simple as some fully rejecting the seed and some fully receiving it. The Lord shows us that it matters so greatly how we receive the seed of Jesus, and what ground we choose to be, that bears good fruit “As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.” (Luke 8:15)

The devil works to blind Christians away from this great purpose in Christ by causing them to believe the lie that because God is true, because the Gospel is true, somehow this just makes them “true” when they become Christians. To believe they can never really go astray, to believe everything in their lives is divinely ordained and all has a promised outcome for good, when all of these things depend upon a right reception of Christ in our lives.

And part of this is ensuring that we are truly building upon the ground of Christ, and not some false ground. The secret of many people’s hearts is that they are not truly willing to do the work of being built on Christ, and so they compromise with the commandments of men. Believing these to be some easier ledge to live upon and feel they are still right with God. They do not do the hard work to sincerely know Christ for themselves, but they live upon the faith and “understanding” of others, blind to how childish and weak this makes them.

It is because so many abide in the doctrines of men, and not truly in God Himself, that the fruit of our ways is so much foolishness, oversimplification, half truths, and blindness. So many boast of “God” and profess His light and greatness to be over them, but this light and salt is only with those who truly abide in Christ Himself.

The sad truth is that many people serve these commandments of men because they have rejected the true work of righteousness. Because they refuse to be slaves to Christ and His holy law (Tit 2:11-14) they become slaves to these inferior “gods” of man made commandments and the fruit of them.

Part of God’s warning in Deuteronomy 4 to Israel for their disobedience was, “And the LORD will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the LORD will drive you. And there you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.” (v27-28)

When we refuse to serve God and walk in a right obedience to Him, often the outcome is that we serve false gods, and are made to reap the fruits of sowing to what is lifeless and false.

The truth for many people today is that they desire to serve their prejudices, pride, and twisted “understandings” instead of truly only seeking to know God and obey Him. The proof of this is in the fruit of their ways. Their fruit proves the god they serve and are actually built upon. They remain in the law of self, in their pride, prejudices, and unreasonableness. Whereas when we truly humble ourselves and seek the Lord, He will faithfully remove these sins from us.

Many people fall into obeying these false gods that such people carry about in God’s name. And what is worse, is that so many people are willing to serve Christ, are willing to walk in a true obedience to God, and yet their obedience and faith are hijacked by the commandments of men, and they do not understand how they are being taken as slaves.

All of this is the devil’s twisting, deceiving people away from truly building upon God, just as he attacked Eve in the garden, trying to sever her from the great foundation of her life.

Many Christians lie “for God” (Job 13:7), and are endlessly trying to prove that these “commandments of God” are good when only the true commandments of God are. Always refusing and unable to see and hear how these commandments are terrible oppression, starvation, and darkness. They do not see that what they really defend is the commandments of men, and not the true commandments of God, just as that is what they have been deceived into serving.

Yet the devil makes full use of this darkness, blaspheming God with these evil ways, and driving people away from God: “For, as it is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'” (Rom 2:24)

What happened in the garden is that Eve and Adam began to build upon the “word” of another. They went outside of God and were deceived into building upon another’s word. They did not realize the cost of this, and neither do we.

The whole entire world does not realize the cost of this. The cost of living to the god of our ambitions and desires, the gods of man’s mere philosophies, of other people’s words and wishes. How easily we give ourselves over to these while equally resisting the only true One who is worthy of us. Worthy because He is pure and good, fair and righteous.

To set our souls/lives upon the “Gentile’s” idol or the “Jew’s” idol makes no difference, it doesn’t matter if our vanity is outside of religion or inside of it, all of these are deception from the enemy. All will fail us and be empty, vain, and lacking.

The great proof of what we are built upon is the lack of a real substance in us. Unreality and sin remain in us. Darkness instead of light. Nothingness rather than salt.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” (Mt 5:13)

“If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Mt 6:23)

“Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.” (Lk 8:18)

The Gospel is about bringing us back to God. About repairing this great damage that the devil has done. To find the true way of life. To learn real righteousness, wisdom, truth, and godliness. A mere pretense of these is never the true substance of them.

You Do Not Know What Spirit You Are Of

Another thing we must see in the garden is how the devil is able to deceive us because of how he operates with the sinful desires in us. This is very important for us to see when it comes to how the devil is able to deceive Christians—he does so by taking hold of sins in us.

In the garden, Eve was deceived because of her desire, not just because of the tactic of the enemy. She desired something she shouldn’t, and reached out in sin and took it.

In the church, we are deceived by the enemy by not seeing the sinful motivations we have in our “religious zeal”.

“But He turned and rebuked them, and said, ‘You do not know what manner of spirit you are of.’” (Lk 9:55)

We do not acknowledge the things we accept and believe and even obey because we are motivated by sinful desires in these things. We are motivated by pride, favoritism, self love, conceit/superiority, and so on. As in the case of the parable of the sower, we don’t take hold of the seed with an honest and good heart, but allow our sinful heart to continue unchecked in our region.

One of the great reasons the devil is able to get so far in the church is because he blinds people with pride and a wrong “assurance”. He gets people to feel that God has promised them some sort of elitism, and a kind of infallibility as Christians. They would of course give lip service to not believing things, but the fruit of their doings show that they secretly believe this in their hearts.

This causes Christians to become a people that are sure they know Truth, are held high above others, and feel they need to maintain this “superiority”, as if this is what it means to be a Christian. Because of this, they become more hard hearted and hard of hearing than people in the world!

They think they know God and obey Him, that they know the Word, have found all riches and life, and are morally wise and good. For many Christians, they feel that their proximity to the Truth of God makes them assured of being just as good. And this great error comes from their sinful hearts, not the Word of God. This “faith” works to make them more self confident and proud, rather than humble and teachable. Therefore they are unable to be continually taught by God, but stay at immaturity.

The Word of God is able to teach us about all of these, that is the great power of it, but we have to be willing to truly receive His Word and listen. To listen past our own ideas about God and Truth, past the ideas other people taught us, and allow Him to teach us by His Spirit, Word, and providence (experience). If we do not, we can miss everything God is doing, and all the devil is doing contrary to this, behind the smokescreen of our prejudices and oversimplifications.

They are just like the people of Philadelphia in Revelation 3:17: “For you say, 'I am rich, and I have grown rich, and I have need of nothing.' And you do not realize that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”

We must learn from the warnings in Scripture of all the Lord showed about the religious Jews. “Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, ‘Are we also blind?’ Jesus said to them, 'If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.” (Lk 9:40-41) We should fear such presumption and instead humble ourselves before the Lord and allow Him to continually teach us.

Reaching for Real Goodness and Glory

The greatest power the devil has in this world is our true love of what is good, and being willing to seek it above all else.

We are all ruled by different desires, and we very easily live after these, instead of living from the law of what is truly good and right, denying ourselves whenever our desires clash with this true law of God in what is good.

The power of sin in us is when we do not truly seek what is good, putting this first. To seek what is good in seeking God and all He has to say, and seeking to walk rightly in all that is just, wise, and full of light.

Much of our sin is when we do not give ourselves to this true work. When we do not seek wisdom for wisdom’s sake, or righteousness for righteousness’ sake, but seek it merely for an image or to fantasize over. When we merely treat study and intellect like a play-thing or some jousting match. And a great majority of Christians today are just as guilty of this as much as anyone in the world.

So much of our ways can be weighed in if we are truly seeking wisdom, this will show us how much we are sincerely seeking God and to walk righteously before Him.

This is the humble work, the unseen work. And what many want instead is a false glory.

The Lord teaches us that there is the path to real glory, and this path is lowly and hidden, found by those seeking true godliness and wisdom, righteousness and what is good. And there are also many false paths to glory.

Eve reached out in the garden for a false glory. She didn’t stay with God, looking to His ways to lead her to a real and right glory, but she tried to cheat her way to it.

What is quite phenomenal about Eve is that the thing she reached out for was a kind of wisdom and knowledge. Women have gotten a lot of abuse throughout the centuries as being ones who are not intellectuals or scholars, when that was the very thing that Eve desired—that and a false glory.

Her attempt at glory was corrupt because it sidestepped God and tried to take the place of God. This is the very same pride of the devil. But glory is often taught to us as being a sinful desire, as if it is always pride and wrong. That’s like saying any desire for knowledge or wisdom is wrong…

All of us are made to possess right glory, the sin in mankind is that we seek glory in a very wrong way, as well as not knowing the pathway to find real glory.

God is showing us how to have real glory, and it is in truly humbling ourselves to Christ and learning of Him. In following Him in the pathway of seeking true godliness and holiness. Of learning who God is and what He is really saying to mankind, and forming our lives to it.

“Wrong glory” is something that is always trying to get a foothold in us. We can see how people pursue a wrong glory, through fame or riches, beauty or power. And God is showing us not just that “riches” are foolish, but all wrong glory is foolish.

What we need to understand in the church is that this is just as real and true in the church as anywhere else.

If we are not careful, we can come near the great wisdom and truth of God with just as evil a heart as Eve did in the garden with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

Many take the Truth of God in a very evil way. They take hold of “wisdom” in a way for elitism and contempt, harshness and bitterness, pride and self seeking. For seeking an image of being “wise” and philosophical. It is horribly marvelous just how little fear we have in how we seek to take hold of God’s Word, and yet we are so easily sinful and wrong in our approach to it!

Many people try to take hold of God’s Word for a false glory. From people who seek to twist the Scriptures to make some “proof” of an inequality (and therefore an “elitism” for them), to those chasing fame and wealth through abuse of it. All of this is no different than Eve in the garden chasing a wrong glory.

The problem for us in neglecting the true work of obedience and holiness is that we will be busy with false work. And if we put off the true work of glory, we will always fill ourselves up with a false “glory”. This false glory is born from inequality (which we feel supports superiority), contempt, selfishness, half truths and “easy wisdom”.

And one of the great lies in the church today is that any concern for our glory is somehow an attack on God’s glory and a lack of humility. When the real issue is that we are all too busy seeking a false glory rather than seeking the pathway to true glory which Christ taught us.

When we so “rebuke” Christians like this, we leave their false ways of “glory” to fester in their hearts and never be checked for the great sin that they are. And this sin in them generally destroys their walk, and poisons them away from right believing in God, to a believing that is all centered around some perverse favoritism for themselves and some elitism. They feel they are elite because of something according to the flesh, whether it be where they were born, what family they were born to, what gender they were born as, or whether it be some fantasy of being superior to others, deeper than others, because of lived experiences, all of mankind is chasing the drug of this “superiority”.

And one of the great tests of the true work of Christ in our hearts is if that great secret festering of pride in us has actually been broken or not. It can only be broken when we see that the true path is in choosing true righteousness and making every effort after it. How wicked that the devil teaches people in the church the very opposite on this point! Practically teaching that seeking righteousness is opposed to receiving Christ!

Self righteousness is not about seeking a true righteous living and seeking a true worth in life through this, but it is being content without a real righteous living!

We all need glory, and we will seek a true glory or a wicked and selfish “glory” born of wicked means. All of these wicked means oppress others and deny God for them. As Eve sought this false elevation, this is the very same superiority that so many seek today. It’s the bedrock of so much of the world’s wickedness such as racism, sexism, and classism. That need for a false superiority. And while we talk about how wrong something like racism is, still we don’t see the heart of it. How we walk in the very same efforts of superiority that was the heart of those great sins, we just seek it in different ways.