Caldera:
Satan is the prince of this world.
That doesn’t mean he is without dissenters in this world, who resist his efforts when they can.
That includes all of us. Well, that makes sense because we are supposed to look beyond things that are temporal and toward things eternal. If we rely strictly on the faith of the birds and the flowers, then we can completely dissociate our spiritual condition and even emotional condition with worldly issues. Then we can fly. (Just kidding – worldly goal.)
What role does the heavenly Father play in this world as opposed to Satan?
When good things happen, or when things are given to us, how do we know it’s from God rather than from Satan?
First, we test the spirits, but that’s kind of hard to know how to apply sometime. People more learned than me can answer definitively.
I try to take “do not judge” seriously, to the extent that no matter what happens, I find no value whatsoever in determining whether something in the past was sinful or not. Therefore satan’s lies do not affect me as much, I hope, because I can do nothing about the past except learn from it and go toward the future.
Romans tells us that neither the past, nor future, can separate us from the love of God. That’s because God is love NOW, and has already paid your price with His son. To tell you that Jesus doesn’t want to walk with me because I’ve sinned, is counter to the Good News.
Therefore, I think satan keeps us believing mantras of the past, which play on our original sin through our humanity, and this includes worrying about whether a particular answered prayer was by God or satan. Whatever it is, you play the cards you’re dealt and go from there. Life gives you lemons, make lemonade, or maybe slice it and use it form Magaritas!
Satan also scares us about the future. Planning for the future, dreaming about the future, and all is great. The Lord is the Lord of hope, faith, and love, so really we as Christians should not worry about the future. We make plans, and they either turn out or they don’t. We don’t have control over the future. We influence the future by everything we do in the present, including being paralyzed with fear about the future not turning out The Way We Wish or being bound to guilt over past sins that the devil would have us dwell on.
I think God and satan both use human beings as vehicles. By our being made in the image of God, and then by original sin, we share in tendencies toward both good and evil. Therefore, it’s like cartoon where there’s a little angel by one ear and a little devil by the other. We have to decide whom to believe in any given situation, because by our very nature we always consider the opposite of everything we’re told. Therefore there is always a good and bad component of the possible influence any given message from the world (including verbal, situational, and otherwise) will have on me.
Alan
