Some of you who are old enough will remember Flip Wilson and his famous quote, “The devil made me do it!” He was wrong. The devil can incite and entice, but he can’t make us do anything. Sin is a choice. We often look at Spiritual warfare as something that only happens in the extremes of life. I think it’s more devious than all of that. I was reading the book Jesus is Risen by David Limbaugh and in his commentary on 2 Corinthians 10, he shares a snippet from J. Philip Arthur that I thought was particularly appropriate for our time. Arthur writes:
“think of it this way. Far more souls have been lost through Satan’s manipulation of the intellectual and theological fashions of the age than through the recruitment of a handful of witches, or luring people into dabbling in the occult.”
I think he is right. There are a lot of people in our world who seem to think they are smarter than God. Sadly many of these are found in religious studies departments and seminaries. While there is need to dig deep into the Scriptures, they can only mean what God intended them to mean. Their meaning is not derived from the prevailing culture of the day, nor from the conventional wisdom, which much of the time is neither. Indeed most of the time the meaning of the Scripture is right there on the surface, interpreted best by other Scripture.
We are not here to change the Scripture. The Scripture is meant to change us. The devil doesn’t make us do anything, but he’s more than happy to let us pridefully deceive ourselves.
AMOKArts 