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Mac Hammond in his book “Doorways to Deception” says, “Satan cannot afflict you with the destructive effects of the curse unless you allow it by choosing, with your own free will, something that opens you up to those effects. Think about it for a moment. Satan is not called the father of destruction; he’s called the father of lies. If Satan had the power to destroy you, he would have already done so. But he can’t. As it says in Proverbs 18:21: Death and life are in the power of the tongue. The power is in your tongue! And Hebrews says, ‘That through death he (Jesus) might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil. Ephesians 6:11 confirms this truth: ‘Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.’ Notice this verse doesn’t say you are standing against sickness or poverty or some other crisis. No, you are standing against the wiles of the devil. Wiles, as defined in my concordance, simply means ‘trickery.’ The armor spoken of in these verses that follow is not given to you to protect you from negative circumstances; it’s designed to enable you to stand against the root cause of all of Satan’s attacks, which as we have seen is deception…it would be helpful at this point to define what it means to deceive. To deceive someone is to convince him that something is true or valid when it is actually untrue or invalid. You see, no one intentionally chooses destruction or the curse. No, the only way Satan can defeat people is by getting them to believe something that is untrue and invalid. In other words, Satan can’t bring evil into your life unless you, in effect, choose it. And you won’t choose it unless he can deceive you into believing a lie” (pages 17, 18).

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