Imagine that you have one job: Making sure as few people as possible are saved by God’s plan. How would you go about it? Our creative answers are not far off from what we have seen happen in this world. No one has a “job” with this description, but Satan finds that his only consolation is to play the spoiler. So this is his self-appointed task.
Many people think that Satan, as described in the Bible, is just a literary flourish to personify evil in the world. The same people probably also think God is only a personification of good. I think this is short-sighted and probably playing into Satan’s plans to ultimately obscure the Gospel. I have not laid eyes on Satan, but I trust the Bible. I have no desire to credit to Satan anything he has not done, but the following strategies are clearly observable in the world. I can come up with other explanations for them, but I think Satan remains the best explanation.
So what would I do? First, I would make sure that there are plenty of alternative worldviews to be had and to give them as much credibility as I could muster. So I would plants myths in the minds of men.
And so it is. I think people could create these myths on their own, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they have an origin at a spiritual level. They all lack conclusive proof, but Satan can reinforce them with personal desire (we like it), cultural attraction, family pressure, cultural pressure, and even government. People will often ignore all evidence to the contrary, adopt, transmit, and enforce a myth that contradicts God’s revelation and invalidates the Gospel in some way.
I include amongst the “myths” the idea that the universe was created by chance and we have just evolved. The evidence found in nature does not support this. There is too much unexplainable order in this world. If I am Satan, I can sell this worldview if I combine it with one more thing. That could be a distain for God. This starts naturally in humans and is easy to magnify. Or I can combine it with a desire to control my own destiny. Also, natural. We love our sins and don’t want God to cramp our style.
If people get close to receiving what God promises in the Gospel, God’s plan does have a sensitivity that is exploitable. I would work it. We are saved by Jesus’ action. So any distortion of belief that says we earn it in some way renders the promise powerless. Notice how this works in Galatians. They added a tiny modification to the Gospel. They believed that they were saved by Jesus’ work and circumcision. Paul’s response is strong:
2 Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. 3 I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. 4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.
Galatians 5:2-4 (ESV)
Most world religion distortions are much stronger. For instance, Islam and Hinduism both acknowledge Jesus in some way. For Islam he is a prophet. For Hinduism Jesus is one of many emanations of Brahman. Neither acknowledge his actions as saving. This insufficient nod to Jesus is used to obscure the saving truth.
Within nominal Christianity, Satan can introduce teachings or even informal beliefs that set people up to fail in the way the Galatians did. The Galatians were nominally Christian. There are distortions of doctrine that exist because we are in a learning process. We are not saved with a full grasp of truth. Most of them do not threaten the validity of the Gospel. But Satan moves these to the point where they are a threat.
Another thing I would do is to try to discredit the Bible and especially the New Testament. You can attack the reputation of the writers of the New Testament. You can argue that the Bible wasn’t transmitted through time faithfully. You can lump it with myth. You can discredit it among modern readers just as being ancient and irrelevant. These approaches dissuade many.
You can also attach the credibility of those who believe today. Sadly, because we are humans needing a Savior ourselves, we make this easy. We are all hypocritical, because we ourselves are an enigmatic blend of beings who have the Holy Spirit accessing our minds at the same time that we are genetic distortions of God’s plan that naturally resist God (human nature). The mess that this creates is exploitable. If you can get bad behavior from a leader or pastor you get more bang for the effort.
If all of this would fail, I would raise the temperature on effective believers. Persecution will make many quit sharing the Gospel. You don’t have to discredit something nobody has even heard. You could take the opposite approach. You can make people comfortable in the pews to the point that they do nothing. This works very well. This can even extend to those who received Christ through their families. If you can get them to fall away or at least be inactive then you win. People who fall away from within the faith tend to focus on whatever undermines the faith in their minds. They don’t think about the failings of all the other worldviews that are out there.
Finally, I would poison the world as much as I can. I would fill it with misery. This helps because people tend to commonly believe that God controls the details of this world and that good things happen to good people. Under the curse, this is definitely not true. I would exploit this common fallacy and crush any belief in God under the weight of evil in this world.
These three things play to Satan’s favor: God does not tightly control the world so he can, the Gospel is sensitive to distortion, and humans are naturally closed to God’s truth. With these things in the hands of a being who isn’t just a human, it is amazing that anyone is saved. But people are saved. It is a miracle, and it still happens all the time. That is because God is still working to save people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Giving Christ 