How many ways have Satan tried to thwart the plan of God?
If we stop and think about the question, we realize that the bible from the opening passages to the closing passages deal with Satan’s attempts to screw up God’s plan that he has laid out in advance, and it is The Great Deceiver’s intention to prove that he is as great and as powerful as The Lord, as we read in Isaiah 14:12-14 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (KJV). We could probably spend years listing all the events through history that has Satan’s signature and seal stamped on them. I have just covered a couple of seemingly obvious one to me.
There have been several ways that Satan has tried to thwart the plan of God throughout history, but what immediately came to mind when I thought about this subject was one way that Satan has tried to thwart the plan of God that is still continuing to this day. The way I am referring to is to sow derision, doubt and conflict within the Body of Christ.
All the different groups within the religious body called Christianity, for the most part, are separated by seemingly insignificant differences. These differences can find their beginnings in the first years of The Way*1, as the group of people that followed the teachings of The Christ were called in the book of Acts. Satan was able to insert false prophets and sow doubt and deception within the Christian movement almost from the beginning. Small, subtle changes here and there, a doubt about the real meaning behind this passage or that passage and Satan’s ability to convince scholars and teachers that taking passages out of context is OK all resulted in the beginnings of the division of the Body of Christ. He was also very successful in his campaign to deceive the early church fathers into questioning the meaning of the scriptures, which allowed them to start creating their own interpretations of the Word, which resulted in a more palatable form of religion for the Holy Roman Empire. The disgust with the end product of the religious/political superpower that it morphed into resulted in the reformation movement*2. Part of the problem that the reformation movement left us with is many of the reformed protestant religious entities that formed didn’t take the reformation far enough, which has resulted in many of our ‘siblings’ in the Body of Christ still firmly believe in allegorizing the scripture, just as they did in the fourth century to make the lessons and commandments of the Word of Our Lord easier to accept and therefore a little less rigid, and a lot less ‘black and white’. Therefore many of our brethren teach traditional interpretation of the word instead of what the scripture really says. To do this effectively, they have to do several things.
First, the fact that the holy scriptures from Genesis to Revelation is a single, cohesive message system with a beautiful woven tapestry of meaning and purpose about God, his peoples and his Son has to be ignored and tossed out the window is the first and most important thing that must be done. Once this is accomplished, the rest becomes easy. After they destroy the cohesiveness of Our Lords message, it becomes easier to take and chop the word of Our Lord up into individual sections that don’t relate to each other significantly or not at all to be able to build the traditions and religious philosophy the the church has replaced Israel as God’s chosen people. This mindset and philosophy is referred to as replacement theology*3 and too many of our brethren teach this doctrine weekly from their pulpits as gospel.
Looking at this particular religious philosophy from a microscopic perspective, or even a planar perspective, it may seem to pass muster, but if you back up and get above it look at it from a distance you can clearly see that they have taken the flowing structure of the Word and chopped and cut and ripped the beautiful tapestry of the scriptures into pieces and then in an attempt to try and justify their view they have taken the portions and blindly reassemble them into some sort of ugly jigsaw puzzle that they have hammered and taped back together into an non-fitting picture that more resembles a Jackson Pollack painting than a smooth flowing message system that easily fits and continues from end to end, the way the Holy Spirit wrote it and the way the Creator of All Things intended. By doing this, these unknowing minions of Satan have created great tears and gaps in the message of Our Lord that keep getting larger over time. These chasms that they have opened up allow false teachings, ideas and deceptions to enter into the scriptures and drive ever-widening wedges between those different groups that cling onto their own particular ideas or viewpoints that has been torn from the flowing structure of the Word. This could be compared to wounds in our skin that allows harmful germs and bacteria which can cause great harm if left open and untreated. We as the Body of Christ are much like extremely dysfunctional siblings that are constantly fighting and squabbling over minor issues and irrelevant things that, for the most part, have been caused by the attempts to destroy the intricate tapestry of the scriptures, to the point that most of our energies are absorbed in this in-fighting instead of taking the Word to the lost of the world. This has to be one of Satan’s more successful campaigns in his plan to thwart the plan of Our Lord.
While I was proofing what I had written above, another thought struck me. Another one of Satan’s great successes in his attempt to thwart the plan of God was his successful ability to control and deceive the Jewish leadership throughout the period of the Old Testament by causing them to doubt and ignore part of their own Torah through the lack of diligence in following the commandments of the Lord to read the Torah at certain times of the year while examining other parts of the Torah through a microscope (sound familiar?). This is easily inferred as we read the historical records of Israel and the prophets. I’m sure Satan went to far greater lengths than that, probably through deception and centuries of whispering in their ears to create doubt that God really doesn’t mean this and that. Satan really did some impressive work here; the leadership completely ignored Daniel chapter nine as if it never existed, because it told them precisely what day to expect the Messiah’s entry into Jerusalem and on the day that Gabriel gave to Daniel five hundred years earlier for all to see and hear, instead of welcoming their king, they grabbed him and treated him as a heretic and a criminal.
I’m going to digress here for a moment for I think the link between Daniel and the birth of The Christ is extremely cool and it could possibly be a link that Satan missed. As a child, knowing the story of Christ’s birth, I always wondered who these guys called the Magi were. All anyone could say was they were wise men from the east. Historical research indicates that the Magi were members of the Medeo-Persian Priesthood*4 and we find that Daniel*5 was chief of the Magi according to Daniel chapter 4. Daniel 4:9 “Belteshazzar*5, chief of the magicians, because I know that the Spirit of the Holy God [is] in you, and no secret troubles you, explain to me the visions of my dream that I have seen, and its interpretation. (NKJV) This scripture tells us Daniel held this office over these magicians and this is an indicator that creates a link to the appearance of the Magi in the gospels and apparently it is one of those events where the bible implies a Messianic prophecy that didn’t make it out of the Holy Spirit’s editing room for us to read, though Daniel seemingly knew the specifics of it and it seems he taught his dedicated followers to pass on this prophecy down through the centuries to their successors*6. So what happens? The fact that five hundred years later this imposing procession of important foreigners suddenly shows up at Herod’s doorstep in Jerusalem looking for the new born king of God’s chosen people, means they had to be there following some precise instructions, and the fact they were descendants of the Magi priesthood that was under the leadership of Daniel the prophet several centuries earlier says linkage to me. Where am I going with this? My personal opinion is that Satan read the Holy Word and knows every prophecy, every covenant, every commandment and every screw-up of the Israelites in there. My thought is that this prophecy that guided Daniel to instruct the Magi to pass the prophecy down through their ranks from generation to generation was missed by Satan, causing him to ignore these pagan priests that are conveying the message of the expectation of a Jewish Messiah appearing under certain miraculous conditions to their following successions of priests. OK, if that’s true, why was it left out? We could throw out conjectures all day, but I believe this visit by the Magi gives us an indication, on a much smaller scale, of what celebrations should have been taking place in Israel if the Jews had known to look for the Messiah, is one possibility. Another possibility is their visit was an end-run around Satan’s deception campaign, which in part, was designed to prevent such an announcement to be heralded, but the Magi succeeded at announcing to the Jewish leadership that the Messiah and king was among them. Or maybe it’s a combination of the two thoughts. Regardless whatever could have happened, the Jewish leadership were, once again, asleep at the wheel and ignored this event, which is only one of the most important events this creation has ever witnessed.
Because Christ as the Messiah was rejected by the nation of Israel, The Lord turned his back on them as prophesied throughout the Torah, (though Hosea’s prophecies about these events are my favorite) which resulted in the catastrophe in 70 AD and the diaspora*7 of the Jews.
I have a non-traditional view of the scripture and in my mind’s eye, I see God discussing with the others in the Trinity over steaming cups of nectar, his script for our universe before zapping us into existence. We all know what happened…Satan immediately threw a wrench into the works, causing the Lord to rewrite the script of our complicated sim game*8, so to speak. I look for patterns and, I guess conspiracies and one pattern that I see is; after the Jews turned chicken and refused to invade Canaan the first time, The Lord sent them wandering for thirty eight years before they were allowed to occupy the land. Fast-forward several hundred years and we have the Jewish nation reject God again by rejecting His Son. Thirty eight years later, the Romans destroyed the temple and massacred over a million Jews in the process of the siege and occupation of Jerusalem. I can’t help but wonder if this was simply a modified script from the original one, one where possibly the Jews accepted him and thirty eight years later, the chosen people, with Christ as their King, started the rule of the earth from Zion. Just as they had captured and occupied the promised land so many years ago.
In hindsight, we can look back and think, “what dorks, these guys had these prophecies about the Messiah, mainly the one from Daniel chapter nine, right there in front of them and they ignored it and see what it got them.”. Before we get all holier-than-thou, we need to look at ourselves. Heck, forget religion, here in America, our leaders ignore and reject our own constitution, they reject moral judgments and teachings, much less the teaching of the scriptures and we’ve only had a couple hundred years to do it in. At least Israel seemed to hold it together longer than that.
God Bless, Jim
7-7-11
for Koinonia Institute
*1 Acts 9:2 and Acts 19:9, 23
*2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation
*3http://www.gotquestions.org/replacement-theology.html
*4http://ldolphin.org/magi.html
*5 Belteshazzar was Daniel’s Persian name
*6 Numbers 24:17 tells of a star in prophecy, but if you read it in context, I don’t see the link to Christ’s birth…
*7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora
*8 I personally think we are some sort of giant SIM game where our reality is all smoke and mirrors and the real reality is what we refer to as the ‘spirit world’. The apostle Paul supports that view, by the way in Ephesians 6:12
jimbussell 