We continue researching the various schemes Satan uses to ensnare, deceive, and ruin humanity. The Bible says we are not ignorant of Satan’s schemes (devices). We need to recognize them in order to combat them. I have attempted to identify some, but they are only a drop in the bucket.

[29]. INDULGE IN SATANIC PLEASURE WHERE YOUR IDOLS ARE FOUND, RATHER THAN IN GOD

Here is a verse speaking of the last days of the Church age – 2Timothy 3:1-2 “Realise this, that in the last days difficult times will come, for men will be lovers of self, lovers of money… LOVERS OF PLEASURE RATHER THAN LOVERS OF GOD.” God is not a killjoy who bans all forms of pleasurable activity. Some like to go fishing, walking, play a sport, belong to a music society, etc. Eden was from the ancient leisure park.

The emphasis in the Timothy verse is on the words “RATHER THAN” or “MORE THAN” (AV). It is when God is put into second place. What comes first for you – being in God’s presence or being at your favorite sporting game? Being with God’s people or having the day off to entertain yourself?

In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon outlines a most active life of pursuits, looking for fulfillment, but he did not find it. And the great conclusion was, “All is vanity.” Vanity of vanities. That is a life without God. Just one of those pursuits was pleasure – Ecclesiastes 2:1 “I said to myself, ‘Come now, I WILL TEST YOU WITH PLEASURE, so enjoy yourself,’ and behold, it too was futility.” However, in the modern world, so many are living just for pleasure – what the fallen heart desires – with God firmly locked away lest a man’s conscience be touched. In the end, all is transient, all will fail and be worthless, but Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is:- fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For GOD WILL BRING EVERY ACT TO JUDGMENT, EVERYTHING WHICH IS HIDDEN, WHETHER IT IS GOOD OR EVIL.”

Pleasure is the huge soap bubbles of lightness that may glint in the colorful spectrum of light for a fleeting second of time, then burst into emptiness and be gone forever. Lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. Don’t you have a desire to be with God? Do you love that, or do you have a light bubble of relationship?

The devil makes sure that a man’s program is full – no time for God; no time for church; no time to read the Bible; no time to take the kids to Sunday School. Your love of a sporting fixture, being at the game, out racing cars, watching sports on media channels, and a thousand things take precedence over any time you might give to God. Satan makes sure there is always some attraction he wants to place before you to dethrone God from first place. As the words of the gospel hymn say:

Have you any room for Jesus,
He who bore your load of sin?
As He knocks and asks admission,
Sinner, will you let Him in?

Refrain:
Room for Jesus, King of glory!
Hasten now, His word obey;
Swing the heart’s door widely open,
Bid Him enter while you may.

ROOM FOR PLEASURE, ROOM FOR BUSINESS,
But for Christ the Crucified,
Not a place that He can enter,
In the heart for which He died? (Refrain)

I played fixture sports, mainly cricket and tennis. I opened the batting in cricket. (Greetings to anyone from Australia, India, and the UK). However, I refused higher positions because those games were on Sundays. Should I have compromised? I did once and have not forgotten it. I felt uneasy. We either put Christ first, or we don’t honor Christ at all! Satan has gathered so many opportunities for pleasure that sometimes we are awash in it all. He loves to crown Sundays as his unholy days!

Take stock of yourself and determine that the Lord must come first – Joshua 24:15 “If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, CHOOSE FOR YOURSELVES TODAY WHOM YOU WILL SERVE: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living, BUT AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD.”

My grandfather used to cycle all over Brisbane to umpire cricket matches up until about the age of 80. I vividly remember how angry he was when, in the 1970s, they introduced Sunday sport into cricket in test matches. He saw that as blasphemy. He was a great Christian man. That was the start of Sunday sports in Australia, and now, in 2023, Sunday is a pagan day with everything operating. This is a secular, pagan nation strongly in Satan’s hands, and doesn’t he know how to manipulate pleasure!

Need I raise the addiction to gaming – computer and phone games, PlayStations, and everything else associated with pleasure? Cell/mobile phones operating at fever pitch to provide their owners with endless pleasures! Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God! Sad but true. Satan’s great allurement and hold on people drown them in pleasures and a Christless eternity. There is nothing sacred anymore. For a couple of decades now, great sporting fixtures are held all over the Easter break. Easter is paganized. Take the phone away from young people for a day, and some of them would go into withdrawal symptoms.

The Americans have an expression I have not heard elsewhere, and it is, “What’s your pleasure?” meaning, “I am giving you two or more choices, so what are you going to choose?” The word pleasure, though, is always used in a bad sense in the New Testament. These are four examples:

(a). James 4:1 “What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source, YOUR PLEASURES THAT WAGE WAR in your members?” (It is pleasures that are always wanting gratification, and they create conflict.)

(b). James 4:3 “You ask and do not receive because you ask with wrong motives so that YOU MAY SPEND IT ON YOUR PLEASURES.” (The overriding desire of the carnal mind is to mount up pleasures for the satisfaction of the flesh. It will consume the person.)

(c). 2 Peter 2:13 “suffering wrong (justly) as the wages of doing wrong. THEY COUNT IT A PLEASURE TO REVEL IN THE DAYTIME. They are stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, as they carouse with you.” (False teachers and unconverted men are controlled by pleasure. It grabs hold of the fleshly desires and won’t release its grip, for it originates with Satan.)

(d). Luke 8:14 “The seed which fell among the thorns, these are the ones who have heard, and as they go on their way they are choked with worries and riches AND PLEASURES OF THIS LIFE, and bring no fruit to maturity.” (The pleasures of life are a cancer that mutates to choke out the new life and overcome it. Those who pursue pleasure will come to grief just like a ship that is shipwrecked on cliffs when the storms come.) Satan knows the attraction and the addiction that pleasure holds over human beings.

Bengel mentions in his Gnomen, “Pleasure is an epithet of the Epicureans. It destroys the love and sense of God. Such are our Epicureans.”

Commentator Alfred Barnes wrote this thoughtful piece: “Lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God – That is, of sensual pleasures, or vain amusements. This has been, and is, the characteristic of a great part of the world, and has often distinguished even many who profess religion. Of a large portion of mankind it may be said that this is their characteristic, that they live for pleasure; they have no serious pursuits; they brook no restraints which interfere with their amusements, and they greatly prefer the pleasures to be found in the gay assembly, in the ball-room, or in the place of low dissipation, to the friendship of their Creator.”

The Nativity and the Passion

[30]. DEVILISH DISTORTION AND MISREPRESENTATION OF CHRISTMAS AND EASTER

When something is too big to change immediately, then the next thing you do is to distort and corrupt it. No better examples of this are found than Christmas and Easter, or to be more biblical, the Nativity and Passion. It is how Satan works. The truth is not in him, can never be in him, and he is reprobate right through. Both Christmas and Easter are corrupted to distract from the truth and the importance of the fact.

Let’s take Christmas first. When was Jesus Christ born? No, it is not the 25th of December. The answer is we do not know exactly, but it certainly was not in December. Jesus was born at the time of the Roman census when all over the Roman Empire, people largely moved to their birthplace to record the details. In the case of Jesus, his family went to Bethlehem. This was no accident because the prophet Micah long ago was inspired to write this :

Matthew 2:3-6 “And when Herod the king heard it, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him, and gathering together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he began to inquire of them where the Christ was to be born. They said to him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it has been written by the prophet, “And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah, are by no means least among the leaders of Judah FOR OUT OF YOU SHALL COME FORTH A RULER WHO WILL SHEPHERD MY PEOPLE ISRAEL.”

Because many parts of the Roman Empire were snowed under in winter, the census time had to be summer or either side of that a bit. It is presumed that Jesus was born in July to September. Why is the date important? Well, in one way, it isn’t, but in another, it is because the 25th of December was chosen, and why was that? Therein lies a story.

Here is a quotation taken from “The Washing Post” quoting the 1922 edition of the “The Golden Bough”:

An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar, the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!”

The Egyptians even represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant, which, on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess; in Semitic lands, she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly identified by his worshippers with the Sun, “the Unconquered Sun,” as they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of December.

Thus, Satan manipulated the keeping of the 25th day of December – Astarte’s day – a pagan day – for the birth of the Lord. Other aspects were introduced that came directly from paganism:

Christmas Tree: Pagans would either worship the trees while in the forest or would sometimes chop them down, take them home, and decorate them. The trees were gods to the Pagans.

Santa Claus: Santa Claus became the pagan substitute for Christ. Satan has really conned the world and made Christmas a time of debauchery, greed, and misrepresentation. Pagan Germanic and Icelandic people of the past celebrate a winter holiday called Yule. The Pagans had a god named Odin, also known as Woden, being one-eyed, having a long iconic beard, wielded a spear, and wore a cloak and a hat. One of the many names of Odin was the name Jólnir, meaning “Yule figure,” and Langbarðr, meaning “long beard” in the Old Norse language.

(Holly, mistletoe, Yule logs, caroling, gift-giving, Star of Bethlehem, poinsettias, and candy canes – all from paganism). That is enough, though. [Some of the above taken from S.L.A. © DawahMaterials.com]

EASTER: I have to be brief here and leave further research to you. Here, though, is a start (from Christianity.com):

The name “Easter” was derived from “Eostre,” “originally a Saxon word (Eostre), denoting a goddess of the Saxons, in honour of whom sacrifices were offered about the time of the Passover.” This very fact causes many to wonder if Easter is really a pagan holiday and if it should be celebrated by Christians.

All the fun things about Easter are pagan. Bunnies are a leftover from the pagan festival of Eostre.” Hot cross buns are related to “Israelites baking sweet buns for an idol, and religious leaders trying to put a stop to it.” Eventually, “defiant cake-baking pagan women” were successful, and a cross was added to the buns to Christianize them.

Today we eat chocolate bunnies and hunt for colorful eggs. The hare and egg are symbols associated with Eostre, representing the beginning of Springtime. In Germanic mythology, it is said that Ostara a.k.a. Eostre “healed a wounded bird she found in the woods by changing it into a hare. Still partially a bird, the hare showed its gratitude to the goddess by laying eggs as gifts.”

The reason for the distortion and the adulteration of Christmas and Easter is Satan’s way of detracting from the true reason for Christ’s birth and His sacrifice on the cross. It is a great delusion, and people love the pagan aspects of Christmas and Easter but not the Saviour associated with both. In both these sacred events, the devil has overturned them and disassociated them from their true meaning. Much earlier, we saw that Satan is a liar from the beginning and skillful at even distorting himself so that the red, impish character with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork is the world’s comical understanding of Satan.

[31]. FEMINISM AND EQUAL REPRESENTATION – SATAN LOVES IT

I will get into trouble with some here for raising this one, but it is such a crucial issue. When God created man and woman, He made them complementary and set Adam as the federal head of creation in a reflective way that Christ is the Supreme Head of all the universe.

In doing that, God gave roles to the sexes that created harmony and progress. As Satan is destroying the gender and sexuality of children and of all mankind in this demonic drive and through WOKE, so he is destroying the roles of male and female. Genesis 1:27 “God created man in His own image. In the image of God He created him. MALE AND FEMALE HE CREATED THEM.”

The true Christian position in church leadership and governance in the world is an extension of the roles set out in the Old Testament. However, Satan has delivered a fatal blow to God’s order in the form of feminism, and that is a rebellion against God Himself. It is an overturning of the order God established.

We see so many hard-faced, butch types of women in politics and government and commercial authority. That is not a judgment on all women – be clear about that – I am selecting one type, the arrogant feminist type, usually very anti-God and anti-Christian, and as we have seen lately, also anti-Semitic. God said quite clearly – 1 Timothy 2:12-14 “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet, for it was Adam who was first created and then Eve. It was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being quite deceived, fell into transgression.”

Although that principle was set by God for the operation of His churches, it is based on a higher authority of the roles set by God in creation and flows, I believe, to all aspects of human activity, one tricky part being “authority over a man.” Feminists are often nasty, dictatorial, arrogant, and very anti-God. It all goes hand in hand with disruption and disharmony.

There is so much I could say, but I will leave that one there. But this next aspect is the result of feminism. It is EQUAL OPPORTUNITY. That term means a whole lot more than the fairness of equal opportunity in, say, education for both boys and girls, and career prospects such as medicine and science. It is now a DEMAND for women to have men’s jobs based solely on gender and not on ability through what is called EQUAL REPRESENTATION as part of AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

The Labor Party in Australia has an equal number of men and women in ministerial positions in Government, with some of the women there just to make equal numbers, and they are terrible. Men of experience and ability are overlooked for inferior women, unqualified women, for the sake of numbers. I know this is happening in the USA, especially in Democrat areas.

I will leave that one there as well. Some might want to lynch me for these statements. What is most important to me is the question, WHY? Why is this happening? There are multiple reasons – discord, confusion, dumbing down society, among others, but the greatest reason for feminism and equal representation is THE WEDGE OF DIVISION that is driven between the sexes. Let us wake up to ourselves, but it won’t happen. Satan’s hold is much too strong and influential.

ronaldf@aapt.net.au