The devil loves it when you twist Scripture

Biblical literacy is at an all-time low in America, with only 20% of Americans claiming to believe the Bible is the literal Word of God. As if that weren’t bad enough, only 11% of churchgoers in the U.S. have read the scriptures from front to back — creating the perfect condition for false teaching to spread like wildfire.

Add to that the fact that many immoral preachers have crept into the Church, weaseling their way behind pulpits and teaching that anyone who believes the Bible too strongly has a “religious spirit.”  I’ve seen people stand on stage, read 1 verse, then close their Bible and say, “There, now it’s legal” and go on to preach whatever they want without opening the Bible again — as if teaching from the Scripture is some kind of legalistic burden they have to carry in order to have a job as a public speaker.

In fact, most people who are fed a steady diet of modern preaching will end up having a negative view of what the Bible actually says about God. By selling a false version of God to the church, the devil is attempting to make us reject the true version when He appears. This isn’t a new strategy of his, he’s been twisting how humans perceive reality about God from the very beginning, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

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Genesis 3:1 says: “Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”

Most of us have probably heard someone teach about how the enemy tries to get us to doubt God’s word, which he is obviously doing in the passage above; but if you look closer, he’s actually doing much more — he’s misquoting what God said in order to make Him seem unreasonably controlling in a way that isn’t true. Notice how he didn’t ask if God told them not to eat from the tree of knowledge, but he exaggerated the command and asked her if God had banned them from eating from all the trees in the garden.

By intentionally misquoting what God said, he tricked Eve into clarifying the command so that she would engage in conversation, giving him a chance to manipulate her into eating from the tree. So his first order of attack was to present a false version of God that seemed overbearing and harsh, and even though Eve explained that God had only told them not to eat from 1 tree, the mindset had already taken root and Eve became convinced that God was withholding something good from her; so she and Adam reached out and ate, subjecting the entire planet to the Devil’s rule.

He’s still using the same strategy today with messages like the prosperity gospel but in reverse: he’s presenting a God of toxic positivity that only blesses, has no wrath, and never brings judgment so that we reject any expression of Him that actually holds the world — and as a byproduct, the devil himself — accountable for their deeds. If the Church believes that God will never bring judgment to the earth, then the devil might be successful on the day when angels appear in the sky to judge the rebellious nations. The sad part of it all is that it looks like the Devil’s strategy is working.

With a generation of Christians whose knowledge of the Bible is less than an inch deep, who don’t even believe that all Scripture is true, we’re in greater danger than ever of the great apostasy that the Bible warned us about.

Can we hold back his plans a little bit longer to save as many as possible before the end comes? I have hope that it’s possible, but it has to start with a renewed commitment to teaching God’s Word with honesty and not twisting it. We need to approach the text with an awareness of its sacredness and have a holy fear of offending God with our sloppy homilies and inaccurate analysis. 

Our God is an all-powerful King, whose heart burns with a fire of overwhelming love and passion for His children and a righteous vengeance towards all those who would seek to bring them harm. We can no longer present Him as some kind of jolly Santa Clause in the sky who only exists to give us gifts and whatever else we want. Preaching isn’t a creative exercise in ripping Bible verses out of their context and twisting them to fit into sermons that we think will attract more people into our churches.

The Church can no longer be a theater, it’s time to once again become a temple.