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When someone learns that there is a spiritual battle between God and Satan
questions come up.
When we face difficulties or experience something painful
we have a very standard reaction:
How do I make it stop?
But we aren't able to make very many conflicts go away immediately and
that is from a lack of power.
And it causes us frustration and sometimes anger.
If we had enough power we would make our hardships and pain stop, wouldn't we?
The struggles we are most familiar with are power struggles
where we lack the power to do what we want.
So it's natural that we would assume that a
fight between God and Satan is a power struggle.
As a result it is common and reasonable
for certain questions to come up, like,
why is God allowing so much suffering
on Earth to go on?
How can God really be a god of justice?
How can God really be a god of love?
These lead other questions, one in particular:
If God is all-powerful why doesn't he just
fix everything?
Well, God does have what we call infinite power.
God is the only being that has always existed.
He designed and created the universe, people,
and everything else.
In some sense I don't understand
God exists outside of time and space.
He always existed
and he always will exist.
He is eternal.
He is all-powerful.
God always has the power to do whatever he wants to do.
God is never restricted from doing something because he lacks the power.
God not only created the universe and mankind, but also created
powerful spiritual beings.
One of them was particularly powerful
and God said some amazing things about him.
God said he was full of understanding
and perfect in beauty,
referring to his whole being, not just his appearance.
God also called him the model of perfection.
And he had the freedom
and power to be able to acquire whatever he wanted.
But because of his great knowledge,
understanding,
all that he had,
and all he was capable of,
he started to think more and more himself.
And his thinking changed as his pride in himself grew.
He did see God as awesome,
but eventually he wanted to be as great as God.
and at some point his desire for greatness turned a corner
and what he thought of himself transformed into sinful arrogance.
He forgot that God was his creator
and ultimately his source for everything.
and because of his sinful pride he rejected God.
He's thought more of himself than he did of God.
At that point evil came into existence
and he got the name Satan.
Because he fully disconnected from God
he lost all capability to do anything good
and was only able to do evil.
Understand that Satan knew it was immoral to rebel against God.
He intentionally did wrong.
So immediately something happened
that is best described as a war in God's realm,
and as a result Satan was thrown out of heaven and God's presence.
We are not like Satan.
We still have the ability to choose or reject God,
but everyone one of us is tainted with sin.
Whenever we do something wrong—sin—
its effects and its taint are permanent.
When our ancestors sinned,
their nature was permanently changed
so they could no longer give birth to un-sin-tainted babies—
so we're all tainted with sin.
Even though it sounds unfair,
"It's not my fault they sinned!"
We prove we agree with them whenever we choose to sin
and we've all sinned.
All sins are eternal sins.
God can forgive the sin if is just to do so—
just, as in justice—
but history cannot be changed to
undo the sins that already happened.
More sin entered the world. It's done.
Its effects go forward.
So that's where Satan came from,
but what is he doing now?
Well, if you want some truth about Satan
start by forgetting the stories, movie scenes,
pictures,
and possibly everything you've ever heard about him.
The common perception of what he is like has gone gone through
all kinds of seemingly random imagination.
Instead, picture a concentration camp.
This photo is one of
many horrible
images taken at World War 2 concentration camps
that convey to me
a tiny bit of what Satan is really like.
He is far worse than what any pictures might
reveal to you.
Take all the evil people
who have ever lived and pack them into a single person
and he still wouldn't even be close to how evil Satan is.
He is incomprehensibly evil.
Remember Satan is not capable of doing good
because he fully disconnected from God.
He fully rejected God.
Satan wants to cause as much suffering and destruction as he can
for mankind as a whole and for every individual. No exceptions.
He is a 100% completely corrupt and can no longer change.
But believe it or not, causing us to suffer is not his #1 goal.
The most important thing to him is to prevent people from finding out
any truth about God.
because God is the only one that can save us from
eternal punishment,
and unfortunately, Satan's had a lot of success.
For example there are so many religions now
that a person can't tell which one teaches what is true about God.
Also a lot of people today don't even believe God exists
and so they aren't
gonna have much chance at all of finding the truth out about him.
They aren't even gonna try.
Even worse off are the people who think they have
found God what they haven't,
and so are not interested in looking more deeply.
There's also people who are afraid to look more deeply because of what it
might mean for the lifestyle.
A person can know which God is the real one.
There is a lot can be said about that,
but I'll just say a few things right now
It starts with choosing to be obedient to Jesus Christ's commands
before you're sure
he is real
and is God, and is God's savior to rescue us
from having to pay for our sins ourselves.
Every single one God's commands
is for our benefit.
When he created mankind he
only had one command for us.
It was a necessary part of him creating us to have
genuine free will.
We needed the ability to choose between right and wrong.
One command.
It was a great honor to be made by God in that way.
The number commands started increasing after sin infected mankind
and we began to find more and more ways of doing evil.
One reason he gave us commands
is so that it would be clear to us
which things we were doing
were bad for us
and which things we were doing
were good for us.
Like I said, every one of God's commands is for our benefit.
The other reason he gave us commands is so we would come to realize
that we couldn't obey them all,
and so we would look to God for some other solution,
which he did provide through Jesus Christ's death on the cross.
God created every one out of his love.
It would be a poor thing for God to create
intelligent beings who would eventually cease to exist—
and he didn't do that.
He created everyone to exist forever,
and everyone will.
When we die we go into God's presence
if we aren't tainted with sin.
Remember after Satan sinned,
he was thrown out of God's presence.
We can't withstand God's presence while
we're tainted with sin.
That is why it's so important to get rid of the taint of sin we have
before we die.
However there's nothing we can do to get rid of
our sin taintedness;
God is the only one that can do that.
When he does do it, the result is that people are saved from the justice that
he must eventually bring to everyone who has done wrong.
Wrongdoing deserves punishment.
That is fundamental
to having a moral system.
If there is no punishment for anything,
there is no substance to the difference between right and wrong.
Satan who's very nature is pure hatred and ***
wants to keep people from believing God exists.
And failing that, keep people deceived about God.
He wants as many of us as possible to enter into the eternal punishment
that he knows is his fate.
He wants is to reject
God just like he did,
but his goal is still accomplished
if we never receive God's payment for our sins
even if it is through ignorance.
God, on the other hand
wants us to understand the truth of what's going on.
Everyone has been immoral.
Justice will eventually be done.
Punishment for our eternal sins must happen.
What's sin and what's not sin, what's right and what's wrong,
are not things God thought up.
It comes from his nature
which has always existed and will always be the same.
God's commands are a reflection that nature.
We learn a lot about God by knowing his commands and even more about him
by experiencing his commands through obedience.
Now I'm gonna talk about God paying the price demanded by justice for our sins
instead of leaving us to pay the price.
Some of God's commands—a part of who he is—are about how members of a family
including distant relatives
need to treat each other if they want to do what's right.
Most people in ancient times were poor;
people starved to death.
so people sometimes sold themselves into slavery
such as when they were too indebted to buy food.
We learn from God's commands
that if certain conditions are met
such a slave must be freed if a relative
pays off his debts.
Until Jesus died on the cross no one knew that this could be
applied to a person's debts to God.
A person that sins owes God
because the person did something immoral against God.
When a person sins
God's nature and commands are violated.
It's a type of rejection of legitimate authority
and therefore way to reject God himself.
That's what sin is.
As God and our Creator he has the right to hold us
accountable for wrongdoing.
When someone sins they create an obligation to God that
demands that justice be done.
Only God himself is both without the taint of sin
and has the moral authority over us
to pay for our sins.
Because God loved and loves us intensely
he chose to provide the payment for all our sins himself.
But payment for our sins can't be done by God
just saying all is forgiven,
because that's not just.
The demands of justice must be satisfied,
which is eternal punishment...
A very expensive payment was needed
to pay for all of our eternal sins.
God, the Father, sent God, his son, to Earth to become a man
a member of mankind, a member of our extended family,
so as God he was our sinless Lord over mankind,
but he was also a part of mankind.
These were both necessary so he would have the
legitimate authority to pay off our sin debt
and set us free.
Our sins required eternal punishment,
which in the Bible is known as eternal death,
to satisfy the demands of justice.
And so our timeless God,
Jesus, about 2,000 years ago
did something that only God could have done.
He accepted all our sin debt, past, present, and future off of us
and took it on himself.
And then he died with those sins
as the one that had committed them all.
He chose to accept the debt we all owed to God.
He intentionally
acquired the responsibility to pay for our sins.
When Jesus died with our sins
something very unexpected happened.
It was then revealed for the first time
what happens when God
and sin come together.
That had never happened before.
And what happens is that sin is destroyed
and God remains standing strong.
It was also made more clear that God is Lord over physical death
and eternal death.
God does not have to yield to death.
He is in charge over everything, including death.
So, looking back what we find is
that Jesus paid for our eternal sins with the death of his body
and then the sins were gone.
The debt was paid.
Then God the Father raised him from the dead
in a new body.
The words of God the people already had at the time
promised the eventual resurrection of the dead
so seeing Jesus alive again demonstrated to the people that saw him that the
promise of resurrection was indeed true.
It was hard to believe, even for them.
A person can't accept God's payment for sin if they don't believe in God.
What would he be accepting?
Where would it come from?
Who would it have come from?
There's no way to be safe
while remaining unbelieving or uncommitted.
Without believing in Jesus Christ's actual death and resurrection and giving control
of every area of our lives to him,
we reject giving the moral authority to God
that justice requires before he will save us.
We would be asserting that God doesn't have the rights
that are required to save us,
which is like saying he's not God.
He's not gonna force anyone to yield to him.
He gave us our free will.
It's for us to decide
whether we want to accept his lordship or not.
If we don't, our sin will remain
with us after we die
and we'll have to pay for our eternal sins ourselves.
It would be unjust and therefore immoral for God to do anything else
when the time comes
to call everyone to account
for what they've done,
on what is often called Judgment Day.
Please understand that whether we do good or evil
in our lives matters a lot,
but it doesn't directly affect whether we have
been cleansed from our eternal sins or not.
God gladly accepts the worst of sinners.
We're all sinners for whom God has already paid the price.
When someone wants to believe,
but just doesn't,
then the way to fix that is to start being obedient to God.
That is the key
if someone genuinely wants to accept God on his terms
and be saved.
It's guaranteed to work.
And at some point God will grant you to believe in him
and you'll understand that God really is real
and that you are definitely saved.
A lot of happiness
and peace can hit you at that point,
and that is why sometimees you see new Christians super happy
and trying to tell everyone about Jesus Christ.
If you persist in your, often difficult,
obedience you will get to know him more and more.
And as a result you will come to love him more and more.
And God will show himself to you in some fashion.
He said he would,
and God always does what he says he'll do.
So, our eternal, infinite God is not fighting Satan or anyone else
in a power struggle.
The war that is being fought is in the hearts and minds of people.
Both God and Satan are trying to influence you
in their direction.
God wants each of us
to entrust themselves to him
so he or she
will receive His forgiveness for their sins
and get protection and help with their lives.
He wants each of us to
understand that He loves us
and he will do what is best for us in the long run.
That's why he died for us.
It is necessary we understand that
each of us has rejected him at times
otherwise we won't understand that we need salvation from our sins.
He wants us to yield to the fact that he has moral authority over us
as God and as our Creator,
that he is our Lord
and has the right to tell us what is right and what is wrong
and to give us commands to follow.
If you haven't given control of your life over to God
he's not your Lord.
And if he's not your Lord
your disallowing him from being your savior.
Very unfortunately these days it is easy to fail to understand
what it is supposed to mean
to be under the legitimate authority
of God or a good person.
What it is supposed to mean is that
the one in authority protects you,
helps you,
and provides for your needs.
If you think of God as the sun in the sky
that provides us with sunlight and warmth,
obedience is fundamentally what keeps clearing away more and
more of the dark clouds that are keeping God away from us.
and from helping us, and even fixing our lives.
Were the ones that have made the dark clouds and keep them there.
God isn't choosing to be far from us.
We're keeping him away
by proving we don't want him in our lives
by rejecting what he has already told us to do.
And he's told it to us for our benefit.
You need to get to know more about God.
You need to get to know God himself in the same sense
as you get to know another person.
He will interact with you.
You need to believe everything he said
and rely on him to help you.
He will help you.
He will do things for you—
things you can imagine.
He's God.
He does great things.
The more you get to know the real him
the more you will love him
because he is so awesome.
Because we all been so hurt by people in positions of authority
it is common to think that having to be obedient to him is a bad thing.
But God being your Lord is actually a wonderful thing.
He knows how to run each of our lives
far better than us or anyone else.
He knows the future.
He knows what will happen
from the things that you do now.
God said that he made all creation for our enjoyment
and although we screwed up
the world pretty badly
it still reveals something of what he is like.
His goal for mankind,
our families, and each of us as individuals
is long-term happiness,
but you need to commit to being obedient
and get in the habit going to Jesus Christ for help.
That's it for now.
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Doing what God says is right
and not doing what he says is wrong
are choices you have to make every day.
By trying to choose what is right all the time
you start having fewer regrets.
Your self-esteem gets better.
You feel more like you have meaning.
You start to understand that you matter
and you are important to God,
because you do matter
and you are important to God.
Take care of yourself.