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Do you ever sense the presence of evil in your soul or in the world around you? Do you sometimes feel it in the room with you when you are alone? Have you felt a cold wave wash over your body when you sense that something or somebody dark is nearby?

As a clinical psychologist who has been invited into the cave system of a thousand human hearts, I am more convinced than ever that humans show amazing examples of divine design and—that Satan exists. The human heart alone is capable of great evil, but when Satan’s voice is added to the caldron as an additional ingredient, a poisonous stew of darkness spills over into the human imagination.

The enemy of God is particularly adept at lying, shaming, accusing, blaming, destroying peace, and luring men and women into worshipping idols instead of Jesus. He is equally as good (bad) at teaching us to do the very same things to others around us.

Satan is a fallen angel, a dark personality who seeks to destroy and kill what the God of light has created. He is particularly bent on driving a wedge between the Father God and His children. He is an intelligent spiritual being who strategizes how to blind and kill every human heart. His dark objective is to annihilate the individual human spirit but also to shipwreck corporate entities such as marriages, families, and churches.

The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 2:5-11 alludes to the fact that Satan desires to undermine the love, forgiveness, and unity that are at the core of the Christian family. Paul specifically writes that forgiveness is a characteristic from Jesus’ own heart that we must practice in our relationship with others so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs. In the original Greek, these last few words can be translated, for we are not agnostic about his plots (methods, designs).

An agnostic is someone who believes that while God or the supernatural may exist, nothing can be known about it since the material world is all that can be verified with physical senses. Unlike an agnostic, Paul is saying that believers in Jesus not only know there is a Creator God, but we also know that a dark opposer exists in this universe who has specific designs to corrupt individual spirits and dismantle corporate peace and fellowship.

Paul is telling the Corinthian Christians that we can know (and be educated about) Satan’s specific plots that he carefully crafts against the creatures created in God’s image.

In this blogpost, I ask you to think with me about how Satan might instruct his dark warriors concerning strategies, plans, plots, designs, and methods they might use to demolish men and women in this world. Below is a small sampling of those evil machinations. Picture Satan speaking to an assembly of dark spirits. . .

• Introduce it like a subconscious melody into the hearts of the human bone-bags that He is a judge who does not love them but is forever disappointed in them—quick to anger, slow to love. Lie to them that He is a harsh policeman constantly patrolling humans looking for someone to arrest. Convince them that He is a critical prosecuting attorney who seeks to condemn them whenever He gets the chance.

• Plant the earworm of deception into their skulls that all authority is bad and controlling, and that happiness lies only in individual freedom through a spirit of rebellion. Do you remember the seemingly innocuous proverbs we inspired back in the 1960s that led those bohemian two-legged animals to challenge all authority? ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30’, we taught them. ‘Do your own thing’. ‘Ditch the establishment’. ‘Don’t let the man keep you down’. ‘Born to be wild and free’. Or even the seemingly innocent phrase, ‘Flower Power’. Those words are a horticulturally cosmeticized way of saying, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want, and you pigs, pastors and parents can’t stop me.’ Yes, lie to the humans that happiness is the freedom to choose whatever they want to do with no rules to interfere with their choosing. Of course, at this time in the history of the human maggots, we have new proverbs that we inject into their foolish gray matter day and night. Nonetheless, the ancient message is always the same: Disobey. Defy. Destroy. Deconstruct. Disbelieve.
• Distract the walking corpses at all times from thinking about death. We have seen far too often that when the putrid ones open their eyes to the full reality of their ultimate end, they begin to ponder and question the meaning of their existence. We can’t allow that! Pondering opens the door to thoughts of purpose, and thoughts of purpose always lead back to Him. Hell forbid!
• Always strive with all your diabolical might to separate the worthless bipeds from Him, from other dust bags, and from their own hearts. Never forget that our primary objective is to divide and conquer. Isolate them! Exile them! Aloneness is our greatest ally. In that place of utter aloneness, it is open season to attack them with lies and deceptions and more lies. The only voices they will be able to hear in the murky dungeons of darkness are ours. Alienate! Isolate! Yes, scream at them to hide from the light for fear of the appalling things it might expose inside their tar-engorged souls.
• When they are separate, alone, isolated, hidden from others–then inundate them with lies. One point of clarification here: give the malevolent content to them sweetly, like deadly lullabies. Always insert into their puny gray-matter these two lies: first, that He and other people will never genuinely love them—how despicably unfair of them! And second, that if they scratch away at their skin and gouge deep enough, what they will find beneath is unlovable anyway. If they become convinced of those two lies, they will never trust their hearts to anyone. They will defend themselves to the point of utter aloneness. Then they will be totally at the mercy of our impaling lies.
• Convince them that He is a religion, not a person. And if they must view Him as a person, deceive them into experiencing Him as a distant or marginal divinity who is far less relevant to their lives than the NFL and movies and politics and food and drink and the rich and famous. Hell shudders when a single human practices the presence of Him until he or she fears nothing in this world. Nothing! One bone-bag with unshakable trust in the Divine is stronger than all of us dark warriors combined! Ugh. Don’t repeat that to anyone. One plus the Ruler of all is a majority.

• Forever practice bait and switch. Lure them away from the heavenly Father with promises of fulfillment and happiness. Lie to them that if they rebel against Him and seek their own loves, they will be satisfied. Then after they have turned their backs on the Author of love, accuse them of being worthless, disobedient pond scum who are so selfish and shameful they deserve to die. Put blinders on them so they will only see that they are nothing but addicts, winos, sluts, users, losers, unlovables, and disposable piles of flesh whose existence makes no difference in this meaningless universe. Brand their brains with a searing iron so they will forget that the Messiah is the friend of sinners.
• Never let them look inside. If they do, they will detect the utter emptiness within. Distract them to look outside, especially at the faults of others. If they do begin to self-examine, lure them away and tempt them to do anything that will numb their pain and their heart-desires. The numbing agent might be as innocuous as sitcoms or as dangerous as a drug overdose, the love of money, or prolific pornography. Yes, always encourage the mortal ones to self-medicate their pain and to distract themselves from the true hunger for Him by seeking instead the desires of the body. Pain and desire, if not eradicated quickly or channeled somewhere else, eventually and always lead to Him. Always and always.
• Teach them—especially parents, teachers, and anyone in authority over vulnerable others—to kill the spirit of those under their care since they usually won’t kill their bodies (unless they are in the human incubator). Instruct them to impose on others under their authority the dogmas that lead to slow emotional and spiritual death. What are some of these core beliefs? Never show emotions. Don’t be needy. Hide weakness. Camouflage your true selves because others won’t love you if they see who you really are. Create your own relative truth. If they practice these directives, they will divorce themselves from their true hearts and be reduced to a false persona forever detached from Him, others, and themselves. Yes, always reduce them. Shrink them. Narrow them. Erase them. Then depression, anxiety, emptiness, and addictions will usher them to their death.
• Totally blind them to the existence of a spiritual world. Gouge their eyes out with a stick! Hammer it into their stupid brains that the natural world is all there is. Whisper into their ears that there is nothing beyond the material until their ears will tolerate no other belief. Then only sexuality and power will matter. The beauty of a perfect body will be their pagan god and goddess!

• Day and night whisper to them that they are the masters of their own destiny and the captains of their ship. Convince them that obedience to authority is an injustice to themselves. Their selfish individual rights are to be exalted and defended above absolute truth and common sense as well as love for others.
• Cultivate dissonance in them like a terminal cancer. For the human maggots who have already been kidnapped by Him, compromise their strength through internal conflict. We may have already lost their souls to the enemy, but we may yet be able to all but extinguish their light in this dark world. One method to achieve this dissonance in them is to fan the flames of the flesh. Find a dark desire they are uniquely vulnerable to and feed it until a tension grows between obeying Him and pursuing the coveted desire. As the dissonance grows, the disobedient desire may become so strong—yes, these desires can become so strong they have the power of a trance–that they exchange their love for Him by embracing their secret sin. Then we have secured a dark beachhead. We may never lure these carcasses back to our camp, but they may forget Him for long periods of time as they pursue the other desire. Soon they will be reduced to dim flashlights that cannot be seen ten feet away instead of lighthouses whose beacons can be seen for miles. At best, they will become powerless to impact those dying in darkness. At worst, they will broadcast hypocrisy to the world. Then the souls around them who are already enslaved in gloom will dismiss them as charlatans. How short a step away, then, will be the total denial of Him by those who once lived for Him. How the mighty have fallen!
• If the human animals have abusive, neglectful, or otherwise harmful parents, distort their foolish brains to believe that He is the exact image of these mothers or fathers. Then they will forever have a distorted view of Him as one of the evil parents: angry, absent, punishing, shaming, judging, controlling, abusive, rejecting, abandoning, silent, overall nauseating to their hearts. They will never choose to approach such an insufferable father. Never!
• If their parent is not abusive, distort the child’s mind so that he or she entertains a false perception and slowly comes to believe the false reality that the parents are judgmental and hateful. The child will then over time transfer the same distortion to Him.

• If you foolish fiends absolutely cannot deceive the humans into believing that He is wrathful and judgmental, convince them that His only attribute is love. Blind them to His other attributes like holiness, righteousness, omnipotence, justice and, above all, His grace. Grace—aagh, I hate the word. It drools stickily over my lips like coagulating blood! Blind them to every one of these attributes—but especially grace–because every single one of them points to the One we thought had died forever on that beautiful forsaken hill! Even now I shudder at the enemy’s ancient deception.
• Convince those who are walking dust to create the divine in their own image. Woo them into seeing Him as loving what they love. Instruct them that, like them, He is small and limited in His power, knowledge, and holiness. Deceive them into merging the Creator of all things with their own beings so they will be saddled with a hapless divinity reduced to the status of a tour Guide in a cemetery.
• Lastly, do not forget that it is never too late to disillusion them. Even if they trust Him in their younger years and burn with zealousness for his kingdom, use the pain, suffering, and losses of life to cloud their view of Him. Many begin strong in their stupid faith for Him but later this trust in the Divine can be subverted until they deconstruct their love for Him.

These are but a few of the lies Satan will summon from the pit of hell to reduce your life to human rubble. Do not be ignorant of them. Do not be agnostic to their existence. Know that it is always open hunting season on your heart. Be aware that the enemy of your soul does not simply want to complicate your life. He wants to kill you—spiritually, relationally, and even physically.

Listen to Paul’s encouragement to you as you stand up to Satan: Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes [methods] of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places ~ Ephesians 6:10-12.

Mental illness and physical ills are not the only sources of opposition that beset you in this world. Know what lurks in the dark recesses of your heart. Also, be savvy about the plots of the One who hates you. Keep these two enemies close enough at all times that you will not be ignorant of their intentions.

Above all, cry out to Him who came to deliver you from the kingdom of darkness. He lives to protect your heart from the enemy in this world and to bring you safely into the next. Practice Jesus’ presence and internalize His word or the enemy will have an easy time convincing you to believe his lies.

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving . . . and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me ~ Psalm 50:14,15

Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; from the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, for you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy ~ Psalm 61:1-3