Creative Power of the Voice of God: The Serpent – No. 5

Most of us are a lot like Eve. We haven’t sharpened and trained our spiritual sensibilities by practice to discriminate and distinguish between what is morally good and noble from what is evil and contrary. 1  Thousands of thoughts come into our hearts and minds and we blindly accept them as our own.

If we’re honest with ourselves, our underlying struggle with living wholehearted and unreservedly for God emanates from several basic interrelated internal doubts:

• Does God really love me and have my best interest at heart? Isn’t His real desire to somehow deprive me of the things I really want and yearn for?
• Is the Almighty really good? If I fully surrender to Him isn’t He just going to make my life miserable by sending me somewhere I don’t want to go, and make me do things I really don’t want to do?
• Can God be trusted to take care of me? He didn’t protect me from the bad things that happened when I was growing up. So how I can trust Him to care for me as an adult?

We accept this internal struggle as part and parcel of living in our modern, pressure packed, dog eat dog, western industrial, media inundated, social networking, Internet paced, competitive, and ever-changing world. After all, most of the emerging generations of our day view the church, conservative Christianity, and what these institutions represent as irrelevant to what they are going through in their difficult day-to-day life. And sadly, this assessment is often truer than we’d like to admit.

But what if a lot of the thoughts that go on deep within us are, in reality, a facet of a pervasive, hidden, secret, occult, raging guerilla warfare that would make Iraq and Afghanistan look like the Mickey Mouse Club? What if an extremely adept and deceitful prince of the power of the air 2 has cunningly penetrated western culture and is using his years of experience in treachery, skillful deception, and well developed trickery to prevent us from perceiving the real ardor, of a non-stereotypical God who is passionately in love with His creation and therefore desires to bring about what will contribute to our genuine, long term well-being.

What if the devil and his angels are alive and well and conducting a raging, multifaceted, covert, clandestine warfare that would make the Central Intelligence Agency look like a bunch of rank amateurs? What if the cunning treachery of the serpent is so incredibly evil, illusory, malicious, and malevolent that it would make Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and the BTK strangler look like Sunday school classmates?

This is the fifth part of some thoughts I wrote in the fall of 2012 in an attempt to capture the incredible power, glory, splendor, radiance, and majesty of God speaking in the creation as well as the rebellion of Lucifer and his fallen angels. I'd enjoy any feedback you might have: L2G.Forum@gmail.com.
~ Rusty Rustenbach © 2012

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1 Hebrews 5:14 in the Amplified alludes to this lack of discernment for most of us. But solid food is for full-grown men, for those whose senses and mental faculties are trained by practice to discriminate and distinguish between what is morally good and noble and what is evil and contrary either to divine or human law.

2 Ephesians 2:2 (nasb) speaks of this clandestine and deceptive warfare. “In which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.”