Our adversary, Satan, is a great deceiver, who counterfeits God’s truth in order to turn us against the Lord. A good counterfeit must be nearly identical to the genuine article, or it will be easily detected. Monopoly money will never fool anyone, but a good counterfeit bill can. The established way to recognize a counterfeit is to become so familiar with the genuine article that any discrepancy will become obvious. God has given us his Word to protect us against deception, but, unfortunately, many, perhaps most, of God’s people do not bother to read or study the Bible in much depth. This makes us vulnerable to those who artfully manipulate and contradict what it says to lead us astray.
One of Satan’s most nuanced tricks is to convince us to reinterpret God’s Word so that it agrees with his lies. This clever ruse still fools many who profess devotion to the Bible.
There is nothing truly creative about Satan. He can only imitate and mar what God made. Despite his deceptions being woefully inferior to God’s original creation, for some strange reason they often powerfully appeal to our fleshly hearts and minds.
The devil seeks to trick us, as he did to Adam and Eve, into choosing his false version of reality over God’s truth in order to alienate us from God and gain our allegiance.
Satan has no wisdom, but he is extremely intelligent and clever and should never be taken lightly.
The devil wants us to underestimate him so that we will never suppose that his deceptions are far greater in scope than most of us ever imagined.
Propagandists have discovered that a big lie is sometimes more easily believed than a small one.
A minority in possession of a convincing lie often is able to deceive the majority, especially if it uses trusted spokespeople to repeat that lie until it becomes regarded as the truth.
Over time, such lies, though initially resisted by those who understand what is happening, become accepted by the majority who themselves become defenders of the deception. Once we become settled into believing a lie, it is hard for us to accept another version of things. This is why brainwashing works so well. If children can be taught a lie, since they have no adult ability to properly weigh evidence, they will simply continue to believe. When they become adults, it will be difficult to “un-convince” them. A contemporary example of such a use of propaganda is how Darwin’s theory of evolution over time has become accepted as proven “science,” even though it is inherently unprovable, runs contrary to the established law of entropy, and flatly contradicts the Bible.
Satan’s lies are meant to make us question God and accept an alternate version of reality that contradicts God’s Word. This goes all the way beck to Eden.
Regarding Darwinism, Satan used that man to provide an alternate version of how we “got here,” which satisfies man’s desire to be free 
from any responsibility to a Creator. Today this theory, really an untestable hypothesis, of evolution has been generally accepted as a fact, to the extent that the “educated” mock and resist any attempt to introduce creationism into a science curriculum.
Satan has duped us into thinking that we are capable of figuring out how things came to be and how they work without needing any help from God. Little do we realize that we seldom discover truth by ourselves. It either comes from God, or we get a falsified occult version from the pit of hell. We should realize, however, that Satan is more than willing for us to believe that the insights he provides come from our own brilliance. Many would be shocked to discover that Isaac Newton and Copernicus were influenced by Egyptian sun worshipers in coming up with the theories of heliocentrism and gravity.
The unwavering truth is that any so-called insight or scientific breakthrough that contradicts God’s written Word is, by definition, a lie. This basic principle never changes.
Satan has counterfeited a great number of extremely foundational ideas: God, creation, how to reach our full potential as human beings, cosmology, the Old Testament, God’s chosen people, Israel, and eschatology. I will briefly comment on each one below and provide links to other articles in which I go into greater depth.
- God. In the garden of Eden, Satan introduced himself as an alternate god, asking Adam and Eve to believe and follow him instead of their Creator. The Kaballah, a highly regarded occult Jewish book, teaches that Lucifer, in the form of a serpent, was the messenger of the “true god,” who came to enlighten us, rather than lead us astray. Over the centuries, all sorts of other false gods have arisen, each being a counterfeit designed to take glory from the true God and steal our allegiance from him and give it to demons.
19 What am I saying then? That an idol is anything, or what is offered to idols is anything? 20 Rather, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons. 1 Corinthians 10:19–20 (NKJV)
- Creation. As mentioned above, the theory of evolution seeks to replace the Creator with a quasi-scientific explanation of how all life came into being. The purpose of this lie is tempt us to deny God’s existence, absolve ourselves of any responsibility toward him, and steal from us any sense of meaning and purpose beyond the experience of pleasure and the acquisition of wealth and power. Embracing this lie results in the loss of the ability to properly reason, as has become somewhat obvious, it seems.
21 because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, Romans 1:21–22 (NKJV)
- Reaching our full potential. Jesus said he came to provide us with abundant life (John 10:10) if we place our faith and allegiance in him. Satan offers an alternate path to “godhood” that is based on the acquisition of knowledge a, which will ultimately
lead to destruction. The truth is that we can only become what God intends by submitting our lives to Christ and learning to live through the power of his indwelling Holy Spirit. Conversely, the serpent told Eve that she could become “like God” by independently partaking of what the devil promised would provide her with hidden (occult) and forbidden knowledge. Through the centuries this lie has taken many forms including the heresy of Gnosticism (knowledge), Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age paganism, the Jewish Kabbalah, Trans-humanism, etc. The rise of “science,” which should be called the religion of “Scientism,” to the exalted status it has acquired today is a result of believing this lie. Science has become one of our greatest false gods that many Christians believe has greater authority than the Bible. - Cosmology. Satan introduced an esoteric or occult cosmology during the Enlightenment, that period when mankind worked hard to throw off the “chains” of the Bible in the realm of science. I have written extensively on this subject. If you wish to read more, click here for a list of articles. Once again, the purpose of this counterfeit is to “disprove” the Bible, eliminate the need for God’s existence, steal his glory, and alienate mankind from our Creator. The satanic heliocentric theory originated in Egyptian hermeticism (sun worship) and gave birth to Darwinism and the Big Bang theory. Today most Christians prefer Satan’s version of cosmology to the Bible’s. I find that alarming, ironic, and profoundly sad.
- The Old Testament. The Alexandrian Septuagint (LXX) was translated from paleo-Hebrew into Greek by 70 or 72 Jewish scholars at the request of King Ptolemy of Egypt. It was completed over 200 years before Christ and was the most accepted version of the Hebrew scriptures in the Greek speaking world. It was the version quoted in the New Testament and by the Jewish historian
Josephus. The Masoretic text (MT) was introduced after the resurrection of Christ and appears to have been used to cast doubt upon some of the verses quoted in the New Testament that show that Jesus is the Christ. In around the year 300, a great controversy arose resulting in the Western church’s moving toward acceptance of the MT over the Septuagint, which was set in stone by Jerome’s using it to translate the Vulgate into Latin and the Reformers accepting it as being more reliable than the more ancient LXX. The Eastern Orthodox Church, to its credit, retained the LXX to this day. I have been diligently comparing the LXX to the MT and find that there are many minor and major differences. My position is that I believe the LXX is to be preferred because it is validated by the New Testament and is an older translation. I find it somewhat shocking that the Western church could be led astray in this matter, but it only goes to show that the devil’s motto seems to be “Go big or go home.” If you wish to read my article on this subject, click here. - God’s Chosen People, Israel, and Eschatology. I put these three together because the false teaching of Dispensationalism is responsible for the lot. John Nelson Darby and C.I. Scofield introduced the Dispensational heresy in the late 1800’s, which contradicted the covenant theology held by the church for the previous 1800 years. Dispensationalism makes modern Israel the focus of the end times and insists that the natural descendants of Abraham are still God’s chosen people, even though they refuse to acknowledge Christ. This heresy, which contradicts Paul’s and Jesus’ clear teaching about the kingdom of God, the identity of true Jews, and the church, became widespread due to the publishing of the Scofield Reference Bible by Oxford University Press and its distribution to seminaries all over the USA. This project was underwritten by Jewish Zionists, particularly Samuel Untermeyer, as a way to garner support for the establishment of the modern nation state of Israel. Believing this lie resulted in the growth of Christian Zionism, which holds that Christians have a moral obligation to support the nation of Israel in all things, including its genocide of the Christians in Gaza, lest we forfeit our blessings from God. This contradicts the New Testament which clearly states that we are blessed with all spiritual blessings in Christ. (Ephesians1:3) This has produced an Israel-focused eschatology (doctrine of the end times) rather than a Christ-centered one and has deceived Christians into unreservedly supporting a nation that is decidedly against (anti-) Christ.
Much more could be written about these things, but I hope you have read enough to make you want to investigate further. Do not take my word for it. Search the scriptures to see of these things are true. Resolve to study God’s Word so that you can recognize and refute Satan’s counterfeit. It is time for a brand new Reformation in which we recapture the Reformer’s creed – Sola Scriptura!
