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by Charlie Wolcott

And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.
~2 Timothy 2:24-26

You are a slave to someone. You are a slave to sin and the devil, or you are a slave to Christ. Not many people like to hear this; there is a lot of kick-back to the notion that we are just pawns in a cosmic game of Chess between God and the devil. No matter what culture or religion you are, this is a fundamental question all mankind wrestles with. Look at many role-playing video games. A number of them depict the heroes defying their “fate,” and the “gods” that seek to control them so that they can live independently, ruling their own lives. But it sure is interesting how in many of these stories, even the heroes turn to someone to guide them. Even when you are making your own choices, you are serving someone. Those who are born-again are servants, or more accurately slaves, to Christ. Those who are in opposition to Christ are slaves to the devil and they do his will. See Romans 6 for more on this.

But this is not just a statement by Paul. Jesus drilled this point home hard in John 8. He told the Jews, who had proclaimed to believe in Him, that they were of their father, the devil, because they were doing his will. We only have two options: serving God or serving someone else. We are obedient to one of two masters: God or the devil. We will choose one or the other.

God makes His case crystal clear. Life or death. Hope or doom. Success or failure. Obey and you get the goodies, disobey and you don’t. It’s not hard, yet so many just refuse to listen. Go through Deuteronomy 28 and look at the promises for obedience and the curses for disobedience that Israel shouted to each other. It was an easy choice, and God’s laws are not burdensome. They were all about separation from the rest of the world and faith in the Savior that would come. It wasn’t that hard. Yet time and time again, Israel kept disobeying and breaking God’s laws. We can look at them and think: “Are you guys insane?” Actually, yes they were insane. Again, look at the passage at the top of this post. God would have to grant them repentance so they could come to their senses. But how are we different? How many times do we do something utterly stupid that looked good at the moment? We call it “foolishness.” We were not thinking clearly when we made that decision. And it is when we lose sight of the standard of truth, when we lose our ability to think rationally, that we fall for the traps of the Devil and then become his puppets, his slaves to do his bidding.

Brainwashing is part of this process, but the term “mind-control” is not out of the picture. Few Biblical accounts showcase the power of the control of the enemy over a person than Ahab and Jezebel. Ahab’s sins were bad enough, but the sin of marrying Jezebel topped them all. In fact, every time Ahab moved towards repentance, Jezebel was there to reel him in, and she controlled him. There is a saying that the man is the head of the family, but the woman is the neck that turns the head wherever she wants. This certainly was true of Ahab and Jezebel. I often wonder if Ahab would have repented and turned to God on Elijah’s call had he not married Jezebel. It was Jezebel who brought in Baal worship. It was she who went after the prophets of God. It was she who carried out Ahab’s wish and got Naboth murdered. Ahab was totally powerless against that woman. The same is true about any person dealing with a false teaching. In fact, Jezebel’s name became synonymous with “false teachings” come the fierce rebuke to Thyatira.

Whenever we face a false ideology, we have to remember that most of these people are not in it to be intentionally deceptive and wicked. They are in it because they were deceived and are enslaved to it. Eric Ludy “lent the pulpit” to Richard Wurmbrand in one sermon (that is, Ludy preached what Wurmbrand would have said through Wurmbrand’s writings). In that sermon, he discussed Wurmbrand’s dealings with Communism. Wurmbrand loved the Communist and hated Communism. That is NOT an easy thing to do. He longed for the people to be freed of the hatred that Communism brings upon people. But he described an account where a Communist was thrown into prison (for an unknown reason) and tortured like the other prisoners. The Communist began to think about what was happening to him. For Communism to torture Christians was good because Communism was good and Christians were hinderances to Communism. Yet for a Communist to torture a Communist is for no other reason that pleasure and that is unmitigated evil. And if this is unmitigated evil, there must be unmitigated good. The Communist became a Christian. God used the torture of Communism’s own system to break this man free from the control of the devil and set his mind free.

John Ramirez was a head honcho in the occult. He would describe how he was so close to Satan that they’d talk as though they were father and son. He knew everything about what was going on behind the scenes and could control people or kill people from a distance, yet the whole time he was being played. The first bit of light was a Christian concert in New York City, and I keep picturing David Wilkerson being that guy. It was something he couldn’t touch. Soon God gave John a vision of Hell, and John realized he had been betrayed by Satan and became a Christian. The powers involved in these deceptions are supernatural and they are POWERFUL.

It doesn’t matter what the false teaching is. The more I deal with Evolution and Deep Time, the more I see it’s a spiritual issue. No amount of reasoning, logic, and proper science is getting through. So I need to stop arguing those points because they cannot think. This is not an insult; they are enslaved by the devil. Whether they realize it or not, they are doing the devil’s work, not only by believing lies themselves, but by spreading them around. They are deceived people, but they are deceiving others in that deception. It could be argued that no one is greater deceived than Satan himself who still somehow thinks he is going to win in all this. I see this in Prosperity Gospel, Mormonism, New Age, Islam, Communism/Socialism, the LGBT movements, money, a position/title, a sport/hobby, and so on. It’s truly insanity. God has given them over to a depraved and reprobate mind. They have rejected the truth, they have lost their sanity, they are entrapped by the devil, and now they are doing his bidding, which is ultimately “Do whatever you want as long as it’s not God’s will.” This is why the LGBT can get along with Muslims, despite Islam teaching such actions deserves of beheading. They are all on the same side: the devil’s. Satan doesn’t care what false teaching you believe. He only cares that it’s not God. And he’ll take as many as he can to Hell with him in the process.

So that is the status of the unbeliever according to 2 Timothy 2:24-26. They are in opposition against God. They do not have the truth in them (though they know it intuitively, which is why they fight it). They do not think straight or clearly. They have been ensnared by the devil. They are being controlled and manipulated by him to do his will as mere puppets. So, what do we do about it? How do we engage them? Now that we know their plight, what should be our plan of action? Paul gives us that answer as well. As I continue this series, we’ll look at Paul’s answer in this passage and then look at the surrounding context to see what else we can pick up.

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