The Simplicity in Christ Part 5

G. Satan can corrupt your mind from the words of God by cares and pleasures of life and the deceitfulness of riches. MAT 13:22; LUK 8:14. 1. Under this delusion of success, only the words of Scripture that appeal to the natural man will be heeded. ROM 8:5. 2. The lust-driven will look for other teachers with sweeter stories. 2TI 4:3-4. 3. Ambition for worldly increase and worldly success can blind one to the excellency of blessed prosperity, not blasted prosperity: the difference between Abraham and Lot. H. Satan can corrupt your mind from the words of God by hardening your heart against those who teach you the truth. GAL 4:16. 1. Your mind can be evil affected against your teacher. ACT 13:48-50. 2. This may occur when somebody else with a false gospel bewitches you, as happened in Galatia. GAL 3:1. 3. It may occur when your teacher steps on your fantasies and delusions, or reproves you as he must do from time to time. 2TI 4:1-2. a. You can end up putting an evil construction on godly exposition of God’s word and dig up evil against your minister. PSA 64:6 c/w ISA 29:20-21. b. You can delude yourself into thinking that a good minister is actually the enemy of all that is good and frame him as such publicly. ACT 21:28. c. Counter all this with David’s heart. PSA 141:5. I. Satan can corrupt your mind from the words of God by the blinding power of sin in your life. 1. Sin must be laid aside to receive the words of God. JAM 1:21; 1PE 2:1-2. 2. God will even accommodate your delusion if you love unrighteousness more than the truth. 2TH 2:10-12. 3. This can become such a severe condition that you develop an outright antagonism towards God’s word and refuse to even consider it. ISA 30:8-11; ZEC 7:11-13. J. Satan can corrupt your mind from the words of God through worldly philosophy (love, study, or pursuit of wisdom, or of knowledge of things and their causes, whether theoretical or practical). COL 2:1-8; JAM 3:14-15. 1. There is a worldly wisdom which fascinates but opposes God’s words. 1TI 6:20. 2. The world by such wisdom knew not God. 1CO 1:21-22. 3. Athens was the capital of human wisdom but also the capital of idolatry, the epitome of superstitious ignorance. ACT 17:16-23. 4. Consider the negative effects of the philosophy of blind, naturalistic evolution in the minds of professed Christians: the Creation record and the fall are by it denied and so the very basis of the gospel of the Last Adam undermined. 1CO 15:22, 45. 5. Consider the negative effects of doubt-filled academic textual criticism which ultimately denies the preservation of God’s words. 6. The following is a quotation from History of the Church of God by Baptist Elders C.B. and Sylvester Hassell: “It remains, then, that He was the only begotten Son of God by eternal generation, inconceivable and mysterious.... Question 4. - If He was the Son of God by generation in the divine nature, how could He be co- equal and co-eternal with the Father? Answer. - When we conceive of the Father and the Son, there is a priority in the order of nature, but not in the order of time. As God's eternal decrees, the mind and the thought, the sun and the light; though The Simplicity in Christ 4-18-21 Page 7 these be prior and successive among themselves in the order of nature, yet not in point of time. The instant the sun existed, light did exist also, proceeding from it, or, as it were, generated by it. So the instant there is a Father, there must be a Son; and as the Father exists a Father from eternity, so does the Son a Son.” (pp. 561-562, emphasis mine, TEB) a. priority: The condition or quality of being earlier or previous in time, or of preceding something else. b. The appeal to the simultaneity of the sun and light breaks down under the facts of GEN 1:3-5, 14-19. c. When Scripture speaks of the generation of Jesus Christ, it points not to some mysterious relationship and movement within the Divine Godhead in eternity past, but to His fleshly descent from Abraham (MAT 1:1) and He is called the Son of God because of the incarnation (LUK 1:35). Simple. d. Watch out for buzzwords like inconceivable, unknowable, inscrutable where some philosopher has built himself into a logical corner and can’t get out of it, so he wraps up his conclusion with an aura of mystique and declares it to be orthodoxy that cannot be challenged. All are expected to declare that the proverbial naked emperor is wearing the most splendid garments. 6. Remember that not all deep thought is profitable thought. PSA 64:6; REV 2:24. K. Satan can corrupt your mind from the words of God by slick orators who know how to get you “under the ether” by appealing to your lusts/natural instincts. 2PE 2:1-3, 18; JUDE 1:16. 1. Good words and fair speeches can deceive the simple who have not grounded themselves in apostolic doctrine. ROM 16:17-18. 2. With a little effort, a false teacher by appealing to your carnal instincts can convince you of a false prosperity gospel (1TI 6:5) or that the gospel encourages fornication and mingled religion. JUDE 1:4; REV 2:20. 3. Saints can be so mislead as to willingly accept such bondage and call it liberty. 2PE 2:19; 2CO 11:19-20 c/w ROM 6:1-2. 4. Watch out, therefore, for the misleading power of emotion. GAL 4:17. a. A false zeal is a dangerous zeal. ROM 10:2 c/w GAL 1:14. b. The heart is untrustworthy (JER 17:9). Satan knows he is opposed by faith but that he is supported by feelings. c. Christ is to dwell in our hearts by faith, not feeling (EPH 3:17), and faith comes by hearing the word of God. ROM 10:17. 5. People can be deceived into thinking they are having true spiritual experiences because of the feelings they experience in connection with them. 6. Scripture nowhere speaks of feeling God’s presence. 7. ACT 17:27 speaks of feeling after God. This is describing someone seeking God in order to find Him, NOT someone who has already found Him and is enjoying His presence through faith in His word. 8. There is a big difference between finding God through good feelings and finding good feelings through God by faith. 1PE 1:8. 9. Sadly, the errant model is not atypical of many Christian churches and parachurch organizations. This is a likely contributing factor to the cults’ ability to recruit from professing Christian communities: the weak/unstable/unwary/emotion-led have long been accustomed to equating feelings with God’s presence. L. Satan can corrupt your mind from the words of God by, as he did with Eve, getting you to wonder just for a moment as to whether God was withholding something “good” from you, which thing can be obtained by following Satan’s advice. GEN 3:1-6. 1. The theme of Satan’s technique was essentially, “...Let us do evil, that good may come...” (ROM 3:8). 2. Sin will always sell itself to you under guise of a benefit that God doesn’t permit. 3. This “spin cycle” worked on a sinless person: don’t think it can’t work on you. 4. With a little building upon a faulty premise, you can conclude that it is in your best interest to sin, or God would be frustrated in His desire to save sinners by grace. a. Mind that if men didn’t sin, they wouldn’t even need to be saved by grace. b. Paul’s answer to this delusion is simple enough. ROM 6:1-2. 5. With faulty logic based upon a false “good” to be obtained you might mentally override the plain action/consequence model of ROM 6:23 and conclude that, unless you sin, you are denying your own Christian growth experience through chastening, per HEB 12:11. 6. With faulty logic based upon a false “good” to be obtained for another, you might conclude that you can’t be a positive force for someone involved in a particular sin unless you can identify with that person through experiencing that sin yourself, and you will read a text like 1CO 9:22 along these lines: “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: if I need to become a drunk to better understand drunkenness so I can counsel from personal experience, I will do it.” 7. Sin never works your good, nor another’s. It’s that simple. ISA 59:2; JER 5:25. M. Another method of Satan to corrupt men’s minds from the words of God is the “shock and awe” principle of false gifts and miracles, etc. ACT 13:6-8; REV 13:13-14. 1. In order for this method to work on believers, the believer must place more stock in sight than in faith (2CO 5:7), a contradictory folly. 2. True miraculous signs must agree with Scripture (DEU 13:1-4) which declares a limited season of genuine God-ordained miraculous signs for the confirmation of the New Testament. MIC 7:15 c/w ACT 7:36; MAR 16:20. 3. Miracles can awe the natural mind but only Scripture has a correspondence in the spiritual mind. 1CO 2:13-14. N. Satan can subtly beguile and corrupt minds from the plain words of God by faulty hermeneutics (the art or science of interpretation, esp. of Scripture.). 1. Never downplay the importance of word definitions and grammar (the very means by which the words of God are transmitted to our understanding). NEH 8:8; 2TI 1:13. 2. Context is important, but even context must be understood by words and grammar. 3. With enticing words of man’s wisdom (1CO 2:4) and crafty, deceitful handling of the word of God (2CO 4:2), a charlatan can convince the hearer that the words of God as given are not to be understood as final: their message is actually the opposite of what was revealed. Thus did Satan in GEN 3:1-6 where the authority shifted from God’s words to the expositor. 4. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 72) 5. Christ died to take away your sin, not your mind. Gird it up. 1PE 1:13; EPH 6:14.