The Devil No.7 His Tactics (iii-seduction)

2 Corinthians in chapter 11, and this morning reading the first 15 verses. 2 Corinthians chapter 11, beginning at verse 1. I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness, but you're already doing that. I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy.

I promised you to one husband to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.

But I do not think I am in the least inferior to those super apostles. I may not be a trained speaker, but I do have knowledge. We have made this perfectly clear to you in every way.

Was it a sin for me to lower myself in order to elevate you by preaching the gospel of God to you free of charge? I robbed other churches by receiving support from them, so as to serve you. And when I was with you and needed something, I was not a burden to anyone, for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied what I needed. I have kept myself from being a burden to you in any way, and will continue to do so.

As surely as the truth of Christ is in me, nobody in the regions of Achaia will stop this boasting of mine. Why? Because I do not love you, God knows I do, and I will keep on doing what I am doing in order to cut the ground from under those who want an opportunity to be considered equal with us in the things they boast about. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ.

And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.

May God add his blessing to that reading from his Holy Word. Now let's turn again to Ephesians and chapter 6, and as you're finding it, let me read to you some verses from the twelfth and onwards. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Verse 18, and pray in the Spirit on all occasions, with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert, and always keep on praying for all the saints.

Our Lord Jesus makes a very significant comment in John's Gospel, when he defines his reason for being on the earth, in terms of, I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me. A text which many of you know off by heart. I would suggest that if you invert that text, you have the eternal purposes of the devil defined.

I am the maze, get lost in me. I am the error, take that into your mind, and know nothing worth knowing. I am the death, commit yourself to me, and your eternal destruction is secure.

He'll never tell you that. He'll never define what his objectives are, because as our Lord makes it very clear in the eighth chapter of John's Gospel, the devil is a liar. Listen to our Saviour, I haven't time to sketch the context.

He's directing his comments to some religious leaders, and in the 44th verse of John 8, he says, you belong to your father the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

You see, I'm not exaggerating when I say, you take that definition of our life, of our Lord's life's work, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes unto the Father but by me. Invert it, stand it on its head, and you've got the raison d'etre, the reason for being of the devil, but he'll never tell you that. He's the father of lies, and you remember right at the beginning of the Bible, you discover the liar in full flight, as he moves into the Garden of Eden, and as, as he moves into the Garden of Eden, and as he placates in front of Eve, a temptation that alas, she submits to.

We're told in the first verse, the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made, and the craftiness, the conniving skill of the devil is set forth in those first six verses of Genesis 3. He promises her life, and she receives death. He promises her to be as God, and she takes into her own personality something of the evil of the devil, and as a result of her influence, Adam also sins, and far from gaining all the things that the devil had promised, they're expelled from the Garden. They reach out for life, and they discover death.

They want to be as gods, and they're made children of the devil. That's his lie, you see, and throughout the whole history of mankind, so the Bible tells us, the devil comes along in various fashions, and he sells the lie. Now you may have read, when Andrew was bringing the scripture reading to us earlier, you may have noted the fact that the devil is referred to as an angel of light.

He can masquerade, he can put on different guises, he's got a different costume for every situation, and his objective is to delude men and women. He doesn't always use the same technique, but in essence, his objective is always identical. Sometimes he's an angel of light, and with subtle sophistication, he comes along, and he endeavors to deceive.

Sometimes he's like a roaring lion that has its prey fearful before it actually, before he actually pounces. Sometimes he's a conniving serpent, but one thing remains true, that when the apostle Paul says, when he speaks about the, the schemes of the devil, he does so in language which well sums up the, the, the methodology of the evil one, as he endeavors to impregnate your life and mine. And so we're back again in this subject of the, the wiles of the devil, the devil's schemes, the way that he masquerades.

I find the last 100 years of human history amongst the most fascinating of periods. I say that for two reasons. If you turn the clock back a century, you discover in Germany and in France what is known as the birth of rationalism.

That means to say there were men who were studying the Bible and who were studying the great claims of Christianity, and they rejected them. Modernism came of its own 100 years ago. But also some other very interesting things occurred also from, say, about 1820 and onwards.

You get what has become known today as the rise of the cult. What is a cult? Well, a cult, far from being a heresy, for a heresy tends to be the thing that someone goes into having studied the Bible and going out on one particular tangent and, and interpreting scriptures along an imbalanced fashion. A cult comes along with a new personality, with a new revelation.

And in the 1820s particularly, you began to find cults emerging in Western Europe and particularly in the United States of America. There was a man, for instance, and he went prospecting on some of the southern hills in, uh, in the States, and he discovered what he claimed to be two golden tablets, and on these tablets were inscribed hieroglyphics. And Joseph Smith translated these in a most unusual fashion.

And as a result of his work, he gave birth to what we commonly now know as the Mormon Church. Also around that time, you had people who were speculating as to the return of Jesus Christ, actually fixing the dates. You got a movement referred to originally as Millennial Dawnism, now much more popularly known as the Watchtower Society, or even more so as the Jehovah's Witnesses.

You had the phenomenon of two sisters, uh, Margaret and Mary Mead, and they got themselves involved in a spirit phenomenon. They reckoned that certain unusual things happened in their lives that were utterly inexplicable. They were able to go into seances and the like.

And as a result of their influence, the Spiritist Church, as we now have it today, was born. Both these sisters, incidentally, original founders of the Church, became alcoholics, and finally they rejected what they had come to found. But the Spiritist Church lives on, as evidenced here in Worthing.

Now, I could give you many other instances of what has happened over the last hundred years, not just in terms of liberalism detracting, detaching various peats, pieces of the Bible away from this book, but in terms of the cults. And I want to ask you this question, as thinking people, how do you explain it? The mushrooming of the cults, not only in the 1820s and the 1860s, but now picking up speed into the 20th century, so that there's almost a new cult per month coming into being in the United States of America and elsewhere. How do you explain it? You see, heresies that have always been within the history of Christianity, but the cults, they're something relatively new, a new phenomenon.

And so I again put the question, how do you explain the emergence of these things in the past 100 years? Well, my answer is simply this. It is a manifestation of the schemes, the evil conniving of the devil. I can find no other reason that explains the phenomenon of the cults within the last 100 years.

And I would suggest to you that their very emergence is in one sense a fulfillment of the predictions of the Bible. For instance, if you went to 1 Timothy and chapter 4, there you will find the Apostle Paul saying this, of the end time, the opening verses of that chapter, the Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits, authorized version, seducing spirits and things taught by demons. If you check through other references that I've given in the notes and news on the back page, you will discover similar predictions as that one.

No time to go into them at the moment, but you can check them through yourself. In the last days, seducing, deceiving spirits, leading people astray, that's what the Bible predicts. And in a most uncanny fashion, we find ourselves witnessing the fulfillment of that prediction.

Now, how do you seduce? Let's just take this away from the spiritual for the and let's apply it to the physical. Let's take the rather unhappy, but alas, too much in evidence these days, the unhappy seduction that often takes place in the realm of sexuality. What happens when a man is seduced? What happens when a woman is seduced? Well, let me suggest two things.

First of all, their weakness, their weakness is exploited, and then an attraction is offered. Now here, biblically, we have an example of this. Take Jezebel.

Who is she? Well, she is the wife of King Ahab. He should never have married her. She wasn't of the stock of Israel, she was a Phoenician.

She was the epitome of sensuality and sexuality, and when she had got his, her hooks into him, then he was utterly under her control. Of that, there can be no doubt. You read it through in the book of Kings.

Move on into the New Testament, and you come across a woman by the name of Herodias. What does she want? Well, she wants the death of John the Baptist. How does she achieve it? Well, she achieves it by exploiting the weakness of Herod.

And how? Well, by that most insensitive means of a mother, using the sexuality of her daughter to exploit Herod, and as a result, she gets delivered to her the head of John the Baptist. Seduction applies itself to the weakness of an individual. It exploits that weakness, and then it offers something that seems to be attractive.

Now, that's a psychology of seduction. It works in the sexual realm. It also works, as I shall show you, in the demonic realm.

Here is the devil, and the apostle Paul says, take, take due caution as to the way that he will try to set his traps. He will endeavor to ensnare you. Look at these schemes of the devil and realize that when these things happen, you have been warned.

So, how do you find man in the late 19th century, or for that matter, in the 20th century? You find him in a very weak condition, and for this reason. You see, by the turn of the century, atheism had become very, very much in vogue. It's a phenomenon just of the western world.

You never find an atheist African. Have you ever thought of that? The problem in Africa is not that God exists, but who God is. That's what's causing the attention of missionaries, calling evangelists to go out and to tell the black man that God is none other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It's not a problem of atheism. You never get that in the continent of Africa whatsoever. The problem of atheism is a western phenomenon, and at the turn of the century, men and women were discovering it fashionable to be atheists.

And I say that one of the reason for the arrival of these cults is because of the failure of atheism, as far as most people are concerned. In the Soviet Union, there is a remarkable inquiring after God on the part of young people. Why is this? Well, you see, they've tried the Marxist philosophy, which takes at its foundation point that God does not exist, and they reject the notion.

That doesn't mean to say they're becoming Christian, but they will look into theism. They will look into the possibility of God. Now, you see, man is born as a religious animal.

He's born with certain desires. He's got desires at the physical level, for food, for physical satisfaction. He's also got desires at the spiritual level, and atheism will never satisfy a man, not for any length of time.

And the devil recognizes this. So, he sows the seeds of atheism, and when atheism starts to reap the reward that he wants, he brings in another seed. In other words, he changes the mask, and he says, all right, here's your religion.

And he brings you back to what seems to have its moorings in the Bible, and then he starts to deflect and pervert what is taught within the Bible. He gets the Word of God, and he puts it, so to speak, in a cauldron. But he adds poison to the cauldron, so that what is digested, instead of doing good, does harm.

You know the notion that the half-truth is more devastating than the lie, and that's the problem with the cults. You see, there's half of the truth. There's a modicum of truth in what they're saying.

There's also a great deal of error, and those poor people caught up in spiritism, in the Church of the Latter-day Saints, in the so-called Unification Church. These are people who have been duped by nothing else than the devil, who has played upon this weakness, the failure of atheism. And what is more, he's played upon our susceptibility to superstition.

Our susceptibility to superstition. Man qua man tends to be a superstitious person. Even to this day, he'll not go straight under a ladder that's over against a wall.

Why not? Well, because in Egypt mythology, to, to break that perfect triangle, was to make yourself unlucky. So he walks around the ladder. He doesn't know the reason why he does it.

He doesn't know anything about Egyptian mythology, but he does this. Now, when you sneeze, someone will say, bless you. The reason is, because when you sneeze, according to mythology, you're more susceptible for a demon coming into your life.

You see, this whole business of man being suspicious. Now, listen to this. In the jungles, it used to be the feature, and today still is, I, I suppose, that when you're on your own, or when you were with a group of people to ward off the wild animals, you did one very intelligent thing.

You lit a fire. And as the fire was burning bright in the blackness of the jungle night, you could see at the edge of your camp, the reflection of the fire in the eyes of the wild animals. It kept them at bay.

And when your fire began to burn a little low, the eyes would be that much nearer. They would be attracted, or they would be repulsed, depending on the height and the ferocity with which the fire was burning. Christianity has always been a light that has illumined Western civilization.

When it's burned brightly, the encircling eyes of the occult of superstition, of the demons, so to speak, have been at bay. But when Christianity becomes a little flicker, no matter how educated your pay good may be, the encircling eyes, they come nearer until they virtually penetrate to the whole of the camp. And so what have we witnessed in the last 100 years? Well amazingly, a revival of Spiritism, a revival of the occult, a revival in such so-called sciences, pseudo-sciences as astrology and so forth.

The devil playing upon our superstitions. Spiritism was given the greatest Philip in years, when a man by the Bishop Pike, what strange bishops the Episcopalians have sometimes pushed upon to the Church of God, when a man by the name of Bishop Pike got caught up in Spiritism in one of our British universities. No time to tell you the tale, it's in the leaflets that I produced some years ago on the cults.

You could take a selection of those and read it through. This man who had declared his objection to belief in the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, when his son died, was inexplicably confronted with certain phenomena at Oxford. He couldn't understand it.

He got in touch with a medium, one of the greatest mediums in this country, one of the greatest mediums in America, and ultimately he placed himself within the powers of those encircling eyes. I don't exaggerate. And in one of the most curious ways imaginable, in Palestine the man died.

His secretary claimed to have seen his spirit hovering above the hills of Judea before he went to meet Paul Tillich and other theologians who had denied certain aspects of the validity of evangelical Christianity. That was the story that was put around. Playing on superstition, that's what the devil does.

He plays and he puts back what we should be relying on in terms of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. He replaces us with something that is harmful. Man has a need for authority.

Man is not a dominant figure, he needs a leader. He is made in the image of God, he has a natural inbuilt dependence upon God, but when that is perverted, then other lords, to quote our hymn writers, hold their sway over man. And so he'll turn to somebody else or something else, some young boon, some system.

It doesn't matter what, it may be a political leader that he gives religious devotion to, a Hitler, a Mussolini. It doesn't matter in the Far East, in India, it may be Rajneesh, maybe Sai Baba, but there will be someone to whom he looks up to and he submits to. You see, the general characteristics of the cults, as you work out what they have to teach, they all come to this brief synopsis of their beliefs.

They will deny the Godhead. They will deny the Lordship of Christ. They will deny the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

They will deny the importance of the cross and the shed blood of the Lord Jesus. They will deny the absolute authority and sufficiency of Scripture, and they will deny the power of prayer. I don't care where you look, whether it's into Mormonism, whether it's into Spiritism, it doesn't matter what permutations of the lie that you are inquiring into in these days, you have this as a common denominator, as common denominators that run through the cults.

And what does all this mean, add it together? It is a denial of the revelation of God. It is a denial of the person of the Lord Jesus. It is a denial of the efficiency and the efficacy of Calvary.

You see, that's precisely what the devil wants. He wants a denial of God's revelation. Hath God said? He puts up the question to Eve centuries ago, that very same question he puts up in many, many different guises to people down the centuries, and in the 20th century he's got a special opium in terms of the cults, and the way they pervert, and twist, and cause the teachings of the Bible, as they reinterpret them, to work for the harm of men and women.

I was going to say more about that, but time will not allow. In the face of all this, what are we to say? What are we to do as Christian people? The Apostle Paul says, stand against the devil's schemes, as though, and rightly so, he is admonishing us not to be over-terrified. You see, this is one of the things that worries me about preaching on the devil, that you may go away feeling that there's a devil under every carpet, and giving too much attention to him, and cowering, and cringing fear.

No, the Apostle Paul won't allow for this. Know what the devil's schemes are. Check out his strategy, where he is endeavoring to make his mark upon society in your day.

Be alert. We've not been given a spirit of fear, and timidity, the spirit of a sound mind. We know what he's about.

So the Apostle Paul says in the 18th verse of this epistle, pray in the spirit on all occasions, and he tells us always to be alert, always watching, ever ready to detect the conniving activity of the devil. Are you alert, my friend? You see, he'll come at you, the devil will, and he'll lay his trap. Just when you're most susceptible, a woman loses her beloved husband, and she's worried as to what's happened to him.

Where, where is he? Is this business of the evangelical gospel really right, or can he be contacted? And there along, the temptation of spiritism is put away. That's what you find, why you find that most spiritists are women. It's something that particularly appeals to the psyche of a woman.

Watch it. Be alert. When the cultists are on your doorstep, and you're feeling somewhat depressed and despondent, remember as you open your door, and as you communicate to them, these sincere people are deluded, misguided, and sometimes they can poison you, just when you're feeling spiritually low.

That's why John, writing his epistle, says to people, be careful who you take into your own home, and especially if there are peddling doctrines, which are opposed to the truth as it is in Jesus. Pray in the spirit, verse 18, be filled with the spirit. Go back to the fifth chapter, and you'll find exactly the same thing.

He tells us in the 15th verse, the days are evil. Well, what do I do in an evil day, Paul? Well, don't be foolish, verse 17, don't waste your time on what is profitless. Understand what the Lord's will is.

Don't get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the spirit. Stay your mind on the truth, as it is revealed in the Lord Jesus, and know the indwelling of His spirit within your heart, and within your life, so that what? Well, verse 14 of chapter 4, so we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching, and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.

I have no time to say more, but you see the whole impact of this epistle that Paul writes, the Ephesian epistle, is to enable people not only to guard against the wiles of the devil, but also to take certain actions which will help them in the day of evil to be able to withstand. This is the reason why it's so important that you come along and you listen to the Bible being taught, not because I'm doing the teaching, doesn't matter who you go to, as long as they are read in Scripture. Inform your mind, come around the Lord's table, live as best you can a holy life, open your heart and your mind to the impulse of the spirit, and in the day of evil, when all hell is let loose, those seducing spirits will not infiltrate into your heart, into your mind.

Make much of the Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus, you lover of my soul. Let me to thy bosom fly. Thou, O Christ, art all I want, all my needs in thee I find.

That's precisely what the devil doesn't want you to say, what he doesn't want you to discover, and the cults they rear their ugly head, and basically they're saying this, Jesus isn't enough, the Bible is not adequate, you need our formula, you need our methodology, come out from those people and join within us. By the lie, that's what the cults are saying, and the Bible says no. In the day of evil, when those seducing spirits are around, cling to the cross, take up your position within the body of Christ, and know the pulsation of the Holy Spirit, and in doing that, you'll be able to fight against the evil schemes of the devil, and when darkness is all around, and evil is at its worst, you will be able to stand.

Let's pray. Father, we bring this stern and this somber word to you, and ask that what is from yourself may stay within our hearts and minds, enable us as far as our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned, to see him more clearly, to love him more dearly, to walk with him more nearly, all our lives, and enable us to bask in the goodness of the God who has made provision for our spiritual security, as we work our way through this world. Amen.