The Perversion Scheme Series

The devil is not a creator. He is very good at perverting things, but he never creates new material. He can only use God’s material. - Daniel Heimbach(1)

I want to begin by reminding us how the Bible says that we are at war daily with Satan and his demons (Eph 6:11-12). The devil is real, his demons are real, his schemes are real, and the war is real; and much of the war is fought within the realm of the mind, knowledge, thought and reason (2 Cor 10:4-5). We must become aware of Satan’s tactics, so that we will know how to better defend ourselves.

The devil could be accurately called a pervert, for one of his schemes is perversion. To “pervert something” means, “to lead astray morally, to turn away from the right course, to turn to an improper use, to misconstrue or misinterpret and distort” and “to change to what is unnatural or abnormal.” Daniel Heimbach defines “evil” as a perversion, stating how it is “the deformity of good things, and only exists when things God made perfectly good become bent, twisted, crushed, or damaged compared to what they should be.”(2)

The devil is the great master of perversion, and through perversion he can render believers powerless and helpless. He realizes that if he takes something that God created for good, and twists it until it is completely unrecognizable, and even causes it to look like something evil, that he can cheat us out of what God wanted us to have. He knows that if he can make us afraid of something that God gave for our defense, that we will chuck our spiritual weapon and run, and then be vulnerable to his tactics.

In our message this morning we will be made aware of the devil’s perversion scheme. We’re going to look at a few examples of some things that he has twisted, and we’re going to be shown how to reclaim the weapons and the freedoms that have been stolen from us.

Perverting the Ways of God

Our primary example of the devil’s perversion scheme can be observed in how Satan attempted to rob Paul and Barnabas of their opportunity to witness to the proconsul of Paphos. We read in Acts 13:6-10:

6 Now when they had gone through the island to Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew whose name was Bar-Jesus, 7 who was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man. This man called for Barnabas and Saul and sought to hear the word of God. 8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for so his name is translated) withstood them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith. 9 Then Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him 10 and said, “O full of all deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease perverting the straight ways of the Lord?”

The apostle Paul, seen here as Saul, along with Barnabas were separated for the work of the Holy Spirit and commissioned for ministry (Acts 13:2-3), and here we find them working on the island of Paphos. They found on the island a proconsul, or governor of the province, by the name of Sergius Paulus who was willing to hear them preach the Word of God. However, there was an evil sorcerer there named Elymus who spoke against Paul and Barnabas, and tried to hinder their work and distract the proconsul from their message.

Paul declared to the sorcerer, “O full of all deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease perverting the straight ways of the Lord?” (v. 10). Did you catch what Paul said? He called Elymus a “son of the devil.” The reason why is because he was “full of all deceit and all fraud,” an “enemy of all righteousness,” and he perverted “the straight ways of the Lord.” Paul mentioned many of the methods whereby Satan weakens our faith: he deceives, he commits fraud, and he perverts.

The devil deceives people by perverting the good things of God. In Genesis we read how God created everything in the earth, and He said that it was all good (1:31); but Satan knows how to take the good and make it into something bad. The devil cannot create anything new. All he can do is copy what God has made, and distort it and pervert it into something else, and then lie about it and call it his own.

In John 8:44, Jesus said of the devil, “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.” The devil is called the father of lies, because he seeks to twist the truth into a lie by perverting the good things of God. As I have already said, the devil can’t create anything new; and I want to share a modern day example of how the devil is attempting to play the role of creator, and distort the truth in a process that geneticists call cloning.