Thursday, June 21, 2007
Satan:His Motives and Methods by Lewis Sperry Chafer
I just finally finished reading this book about Satan. I love sports and am competitive. When a team prepares for a game, they get to know their enemy as much as possible. Our ultimate enemy in Satan, knowing what the Word of God says about him is very helpful. My favorite part of this book came in chapter 10 where Chafer points out that "it was necessary for Satan to rob the church, to a great extent, of her 'blessed hope' of Christ's return, before he could attract attention to his own attempts at world improvement, and establish his own authority as ruler over this age." He goes on to say that many Christians today do not look forward to Christ's coming again. This is exactly what Satan wants because if he can take away our greatest hope, no other lost soul will want what we have and we will never be asked to give the reason for the hope that lies within us. Time and time again we see in scripture that the only way that the early church was able to endure such persecution was because they were looking for the day that they would see Christ face to face. We need to be more like the early church, especially in the culture that we live in today. I echo what John said at the end of Revelation, "Come, Lord Jesus."
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"Many Christians today do not look forward to Christ's coming again."
Satan has engaged a number of techniques to effect this sad state of affairs. Some that come to mind:
1. Preoccupation with/worry about temporal acquisitions and/or community/social status. The ordinary cares of life often cloud our vision of Heaven enough without us deliberately giving them preeminence.
2. Focus on community improvement as the overriding purpose of the local church. The power of the Holy Spirit permeating the lives of individuals in a community will undoubtedly affect the community positively in many ways. But using the church's resources and energy trying to fix community problems as a substitute for spiritual regeneration is like trying to clean a pile of dirt by throwing it in water. All you end up with is a bucket of mud!
3. Underappreciation of who Jesus Christ is and what He has done for us, in direct correlation to an underappreciation of how desperately wicked our sin is. Preaching about sin isn't very popular, nor well-received. When we fail to contrast our sinfulness with the glorious salvation provided by a glorious God and Savior, who inhabits a glorious eternal heaven, then contemplation of eternal life in heaven with Him becomes mundane. And even when we do contemplate it or hear preaching about it, it is often "me"-centered rather than "Christ"-centered. Heaven becomes mostly aboutmy mansion, my rewards, my eternal well-being instead of about a self-less glorification of Jesus Christ forever. In other words, we don't deserve it. He does!
4. The ambiguity of amillennial theology and its companion doctrine that everyone is (or will eventually become), by virtue of being a creation of God, a child of God. Instead of a miraculous redemption of saints from the presence of sin on earth, the awful judgment of the nations for sin, the rescue of Israel and restoration of her promises, and the establishment of Christ's 1000-year kingdom of peace on a curse-free earth, amillennialism reduces Christ's return to an anticlimactic formality that really isn't all that necessary if the Church has already built God's kingdom for Him.
Perhaps others can identify more of Satan's techniques for shifting our focus away from our blessed hope?
Jenny says I have to comment but I don't know what to comment so....
"comment"
Hope that precious baby of yours is doing well!!
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