Satan, our adversary, is a great deceiver, and one of his main devices is to counterfeit God’s truth. A good counterfeit must be nearly identical to the genuine article, or it is worthless. Monopoly money will never fool anyone, but a good counterfeit will. The way to recognize a counterfeit is to become so familiar with the real deal that any discrepancy will become obvious. God has given us his Word to inoculate us against deception, but, unfortunately, many of God’s people do not bother to study the Bible in much depth at all. This makes us vulnerable to those who can manipulate what it says in such a way to lead us astray.
One of Satan’s most diabolical tricks is to convince us to reinterpret God’s Word so that it agrees with his lies. This has happened repeatedly and still goes on today, even among those who profess to believe every single word of the Bible.
Unlike with God, there is nothing truly creative about Satan. He can only imitate what God has already made. His deceptions are always inferior and inherently marred, but for some reason the often powerfully appeal to our 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. His goal is to alienate us from God and give him our allegiance.
Satan has no wisdom because that is a godly attribute, but he is extremely intelligent and clever. He is a foe we should never take lightly. His deceptive schemes have been much grander 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 is able to deceive the majority, especially if it controls 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, are accepted by the majority who themselves become defenders of the deception. Once we become settled in 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 believe. As 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 has over time become accepted as proven “science,” even though it is inherently unprovable and flatly contradicts the Bible.
Satan’s lies are meant to make us question the validity of the Bible and to accept an alternate version of reality that contradicts God’s Word. This goes all the way beck to Eden.
Regarding Darwinism, Satan used this man to provide an alternate version of how we “got here,” which satisfied man’s desire to be free from any responsibility to a Creator. Even though the theory of evolution violates the proven law of entropy, it has been generally accepted as being true, so much so 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 ever discover scientific truth by ourselves. It either comes from God, or we get an occult version from the pit of hell. However, Satan is more than willing for us to believe that the insights he provides came from own brilliance.
The unwavering truth is that any so-called insight or scientific breakthrough that contradicts God’s written Word is a satanic 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, and eschatology, which is the doctrine of the end times. I will briefly comment on each one 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. Over the centuries, all sorts of false gods have arisen, each being a counterfeit designed to take glory from the true God and steal our allegiance from him.
- Creation. As mentioned above, Darwinistic 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, our responsibility toward him, and divest us from any sense of meaning and purpose beyond the experience of pleasure and acquisition of wealth and power.
- Reaching our full potential. Jesus said he came to provide us with abundant life, but Satan has an alternate plan based on knowledge. The truth is that we can only become what God intends by submitting our lives to Christ and learning to live through the indwelling Holy Spirit. The serpent told Eve that she could become “like God” by disobediently partaking of what promised to provide her with forbidden or occult 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” to the exalted status it has today is a by-product of this lie. Science has become of our greatest false gods.
- Cosmology. Satan introduced an esoteric or occult cosmology during the Enlightenment, that period when mankind began to throw off the “chains” of the Bible. 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 heliocentric theory originated in Egyptian hermeticism and the Kabbalah and gave birth to Darwinism and the Big Bang theory.
- The Old Testament. The Alexandrian Septuagint (LXX) was a translation from the paleo-Hebrew into Greek initiated by King Ptolemy of Egypt. It was completed over 200 years before Christ and was the most dominant form of the Hebrew scriptures in the Greek speaking world. It was the version quoted in the New Testament. 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 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 any many minor and major discrepancies. My position is that I believe the LXX is better because it is validated in the New Testament.
- God’s Chosen People and Eschatology. I put these two together because the false teaching of Dispensationalism is behind both errors. John Nelson Darby and C.I. Scofield introduced the Dispensational heresy in the late 1800’s, which contradicted the position held by the church for the previous 1800 years. Dispensationalism makes Israel the focus of the end times and insists that natural descendants of Abraham are still God’s chosen people, even though they refuse to acknowledge Christ. This heresy 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 as a mean to garner support for the establishment of the nation state of modern Israel. Christian Zionism holds that Christians have a moral obligation to support the nation of Israel in all things, even its genocide of the Christians in Gaza, lest we forfeit our blessings from God. This has produced an Israel-focused eschatology rather than a Christ-centered one and has deceived Christians into supporting a nation that is decidedly against Christ.
Much more could be written about these things, but I hope you have read enough to make you want to investigate these things 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.
