Know You Enemy - Rebellion On Earth Series

Spiritual Warfare - Know your enemy

Rebellion on Earth

In the last message, we talked about Lucifer’s fall from Heaven and his vengeful determination to bring down mankind and procure worship for himself on this earth.

This battle for the hearts and minds of God’s creation began with Satan’s first assault in the Garden of Eden. As he had turned away from the truth – the truth of God’s sovereignty and the truth of God’s love - so now Satan set out to deceive man into doing exactly the same thing!

He himself had fallen prey to blinding ambition and sinful pride. These had prompted him to deny God’s authority and to attack God’s very nature – a nature that is the very essence of Truth and Love – as evidenced by Christ Himself who was (and is) full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

We can only imagine just how completely the perspective of this once-glorious cherub must have been corrupted by his own splendour. So blinded that he developed a distorted view of these two essential components of the Divine nature.

Firstly Lucifer would have certainly won a following among many angels by convincing both himself and them that God was not all-powerful and alone worthy of worship. How else could he have entertained the possibility of an equal claim to God’s sovereignty- as is made clear in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28? In his rebellion, therefore, he effectively called God a liar; God was not all He claimed to be - and He certainly wasn’t the ultimate authority.

Secondly he would have denied God’s love. A being with such burning ambition to reach the top (as it were), would have experienced incredible resentment at being thwarted in his ambitions. This would have resulted in that age-old sinful attitude, so familiar in human relationships, of: “He doesn’t want me to reach my full potential and succeed because he wants all the glory!

These two alarming and ultimately catastrophic perspectives had clearly warped Lucifer’s thinking and had even persuaded other angels to join him in his rebellion against God.

So he would employ these same tactics against mankind. If he could deceive Adam and Eve into precisely the same grandiose delusion that had precipitated his own fall from heaven, then he may well have taken the first step to replacing the image of God in man with his own image and hence the first step to usurping the throne of this world.

And that is precisely what our arch-enemy did - using the tactics that now came naturally to him: deceit, delusion, and lies.

God had placed man in an ideal setting: a beautiful garden filled with every kind of luscious fruit tree for him to enjoy and thereby rejoice in his God-given freewill.

As God said in Gen. 3:16:

You are free to eat from any tree in the garden….

But of course such a privilege was dependent on man also respecting God’s will. And God had said in Genesis 2:17: you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil….

Surely this was no onerous task. Man had only to abstain from taking fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Just one tree!! Indeed, just as the path to salvation is narrow - so was the path to sin. Only one tree among so many!

And what made this tree so special? According to Genesis 2:9, all the trees God placed in the garden were pleasing to the eye and good for food but unlike the others, this tree was not for the maintenance of human life or for sensual pleasure: It was a tree to make men wise - to give man the knowledge of good and evil. Notice that God did not say that the fruit would make man a god but that it would give him the knowledge of good and evil – as God Himself had.

But taking the fruit in disobedience would destroy man.

Gen.2:17: “for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

Firstly, such an act of rebellion against God would estrange man from his Creator who was the only source of life. Corruption and death therefore, both spiritually and physically would be the inevitable outcome of disobedience.

Rom.6:23: The wages of sin is death.

Rom.5:12: ..just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death passed upon all men because all have sinned.

Secondly – and subsequently – man would be condemned to continue on indefinitely in a similar state of disobedience. This is because he had indeed gained the knowledge of good and evil but lacked any capacity to differentiate between the two. This lack of understanding would corrupt his values and render him unable to reject the evil and choose the good!