SATAN,
LIES OF

GREAT efforts have been made to seek peace in the Middle East. Every time it looks like we’re taking two steps forward in our progress toward a solution to the age-old conflict there, something happens that takes us three steps back. It looks like there is an accord, and then there is an eruption, and when you didn’t think things could get any worse, they do. The issue of terrorism has now changed the equation due to the phenomenon of the suicide bomber. This is a person who straps themselves with explosives, goes into a crowded area, and blows themselves up with the goal of taking as many of the perceived enemy along with them as they can.

In the news recently, we’ve seen a suicide bomber dressed up like an Orthodox Jew, with Jewish garb, Jewish colors, looking like he belonged to the Jewish people when he was simply an enemy in camouflage. Who would suspect that a person looking like a Jew, would, underneath the garb, be death incarnate? How do you defend your own, when the perpetrator is among you? This misleading situation is synonymous with how Satan deceives us.812

[Deception, Satan’s; Satan, Strategy of]

1 Peter 5:8

ALL OF us know what it is to be deceived. Credit card offers arrive in the mail, luring us with the words “Congratulations!” printed on the front. We are told that because of our good credit and because we pay our monthly payments, we can have higher limits, gold membership, or preferred customer status. We can feel special because we have a different color card. We are in a higher class of people who matter. We can spend to our heart’s content.

What we don’t hear is that we will be paying these credit card companies for the rest of our lives. They don’t tell us that they are going to own us. They don’t tell us that the credit will cost us much more than what we get out of the deal. They don’t tell us that they want more than payback—they want interest payments.813

[Deception; Materialism, Deception of]

TABLOIDS are notorious for the pictures they manufacture. They do this by creating pictures of people by matching heads with different bodies. These magazines want to paint a picture in order to sell magazines and papers. These pictures are often false creations, made up in order to achieve the goal of increasing sales. Just as a tabloid will reconfigure things to accomplish its own purposes, the Evil One is committed to changing our picture of God, in order to sell himself.814

[Deception, Satan’s]

Gen. 3:1–4