God’s Devil - Part 8: Neutralizing the Serpent’s Poison
Even the most devoted Christian can, at times, have within their lives some of the characteristics of Satan because we still struggle in our fallen position. We can be bitter and rebellious and there are even more parallels than these. Honest reflection reveals to us that these times exist.
Satan wants us to sin so that we will be like him. God wants us to renounce evil and sin and reflect the Holy Ghost who indwells us, so that we become more conformed to the image of His Son. The battle within and without is intense. These struggles begin in the mind but quickly become battles of the flesh. The devil does not have absolute authority over human beings. He tempts us with evil but we are the ones who willingly choose to do what we wish and in our walk of faith, we must face up to our own sins.
Paul grants us a special teaching on this very matter in Galatians 5:19-21 :
“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envying, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
The list is long and by no means complete. Our task is to identify the fruit of rebellion and give Satan no place. If we are successful in our struggle against temptations, God is glorified. But in order to understand the battle we must first see the characteristics within us that remind us of the devil himself.
An immediate factor that comes to mind is verbal slander. Even as words leave our mouth, we know we should not have said them. Evil words may even contain some truth, but the hidden desire is to discredit and disparage. When we gossip, we do the devil's work for him and we are promoting the kingdom of darkness. This “venom” has its source in the serpent.
A far more serious similarity is the failure to confess Christ. Both the believer who neglects to confess Christ by witness and the unbelieving demon are similar. The silent Christian and the rebellious demon have this factor in common. Both cannot find it within themselves to honor Christ in the presence of others. Consistently in worship we sing the phrase “O for a thousand tongues to sing” but our hesitancy to use the one tongue we have may find its root in our unwillingness to show full surrender. We can deny Christ by spoken words, which is serious, but we deny Him also at times by our silence.
Another factor that brings us similarity is uncleanness. At least 20 times in the New Testament demons are referred to as “unclean spirits”. This has nothing to do with physical cleanness, but refers to spiritual and moral impurity. To be unclean is to be out of moral agreement with God. Anything unlike God is impure. When we are self-driven rather than Spirit driven, we become unclean in the eyes of the Lord, even though we spend much energy trying to tell ourselves otherwise.
Desiring control is strongly and seriously demon driven. Satan works diligently to control our lives. When we do the same at the expense of surrender to the Lord's control, we are showing the fruit of self-will. We share this aspect of life with Satan as he wishes the same for us as we surrender to his temptations rather than stand against them seeking God's stronger control.
Desiring praise is another similarity we share with Satan. When Satan told Christ He could have the entire world in exchange for just one act of worship and in doing this, he revealed his deepest desire. Self-will craves recognition. We sometimes step into this unworthy characteristic ourselves. We must recall that Jesus insisted upon humility in His chosen ones, and we ourselves are now chosen by Him.
Practicing deceit is a another similarity that needs mention. Satan is a deceiver and is self-deceived. Deceit is tricky. Remember the one who is deceived is unaware that he is being deceived. We have a tendency to deceive ourselves into believing that we are capable of properly controlling our lives. We are not. Jesus was careful to teach us this fact in John 15:5 when He taught us “... without me ye can do nothing”. Our deception is willful and we must ask the Lord to give us the grace to “put to death” the deeds of the flesh, which mirror the deeds of our enemy.
When we do so, we will no longer tell God what he can and cannot do to refine us. The ownership of our lives will have been transferred and we will fully believe that God is greater than us and the devil.
We have been bitten by the serpent, but the wound has been lanced and there is a pure form of anti-venom that neutralizes the effect of the poison. By faith, Christ came to set us “free indeed”.