OUR DANGEROUS INFLUENCE

“Be self controlled and alert.  Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.  Resist him, standing firm in the faith because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of suffering.”  1 Peter 5:8-9

          Just as the devil is like a dragon in his revenge, breathing fire and trying to burn to cinders our knowledge of God, he also prowls around stealthily trying to scare us with his fierce growls into paralysis for the same reason. The devil is out to destroy our knowledge of who God really is. 

Maybe he will try to convince us that God is not as powerful as he is so that we will give up on a lost cause and throw our energies behind his “winning team.”  After all, look at how the world is shaping up.  There is certainly a lot of evil out there, and good people are often victimized by it.  It doesn’t look like good will win out over evil; things just seem to be getting worse and worse. I went to a PG-13 movie last night believing it might be decent entertainment, but I was dead wrong.  All the definitions have changed.  What once indicated safety no longer can be trusted.  But the Bible says that God will not be mocked, and we know that all that is going on down here doesn’t get by the eyes of our all-seeing Father.  He is just, and one day everything will be made right.

Maybe the lion will roar that God is not as good as we thought He was or as attentive to our needs.  He will accuse Him of turning a blind eye to pain and injustice.  He will bring things to mind both afar and anear about how God is not doing His job in a very kind and loving way. He might argue that faith is not a strong enough cord to bind us to heaven, and anyway, who wants to be bound, period?

The revenge he wants can be found if he can destroy the strong faith it takes to make us the testimony that will turn the world from its evil ways. What the devil wants is strong ambassadors for the life lived with no God. He argues that we are slaves to an unkind or at least uncaring, or maybe just a weak, god. What he doesn’t roar about is that without our trust in our big God, we are not really free agents able to make our life the way we want it, the way it really ought to be; instead, we are really just a bunch of little gods who are all vying for our own way. No one ever wins, and there is never any freedom in this kind of living. There is war on every side from every other one of us competing for lordship.

But in the third chapter of 2 Corinthians, Paul outlines for us why our thinking about and our belief in our good, almighty God is so crucial and so dangerous to our Adversary: “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts known and read by everybody.  You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” ( 2Corinthians 3:2-3).

What we believe and how we live as a result is powerful in this fallen world. It screams, louder even that the roaring lion, that there is Hope!  There is more going on than what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.  The devil knows that there is, but he doesn’t want us to know that.  We are the letters of proof to a watching and wondering world.  

 And we are not alone as we go about trying to live faithfully. As crucial as it is for Christians to be aware of the truth of the prowling lion, let us never forget that our faithful Father’s answer to all this prowling is His own far-reaching and ever-constant ranging eyes: “For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him.”  2 Chronicles 16:9.