The Lord's Truth

Bible

Introduction

Why is this book important to you? In these pages, you will find absolute proof that God exists; proof that you can use to convince yourself, your children, and anyone else who may doubt God’s existence.

You will also find answers to the most important questions in Christianity today, questions that often act as barriers to one’s faith.

•What is the meaning of life?

•Why does God allow Satan to exist?

•Why does God allow human pain and misery?

•Is the god of other religions just our God by another name?

•What really happens after you die?

•Why does God allow evil to exist and evil men to prosper?

•What is God’s opinion on wealth, homosexuality, abortion, the death penalty, and our welfare society?

•Is there any real proof that the Bible is the actual Word of God?

•Can my departed loved ones see and hear me now?

•Cut all of the red tape; what must I really do to be saved?

•How can a loving, merciful God torture (by burning) his beloved children in hell for all eternity?

The Lord’s Truth is dedicated to the many men and women who have spent much of their lives seeking and discovering the truth about God and then graciously passing that truth on to others.

I pray that my efforts to compile their work into an easy-to-read format is worthy of their blessed endeavors.

1

Pontius Pilate Had a Point

During the time of Jesus, Judea was occupied by the Romans. Pontius Pilate was the fifth governor of Judea under Roman rule. After Jesus was arrested (on the evening of His last supper), He ended up in the house of Pontius Pilate. After a back-and-forth Q&A session, Jesus said, Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

Pilate’s reply to Jesus was, What is truth?

What a profound question! There can be no doubt that this flippant question of Pilate’s ended up in scripture for a reason. Although no one shines light on it today, we Christians need to realize that this is an extremely important scripture, one that becomes more important with each generation that passes.

What is truth? Think about that question for a moment. Can anyone ever know, I mean really know, if something is the truth?

As a Roman governor, Pilate knew all too well that truth depends on many variables. Truth will always vary from differing perspectives of an event. Truth will be determined by who won a battle (history is written by winners, not losers). Truth will be declared by those in power. Truth is often defined as what is believed by the majority. In other words, truth can be, and often is, not the truth.

In reality, there is only one truth. That is the Lord’s truth. The apostle Peter knew this and warned us of the false truths that were inevitable. Peter warned that there will be false teachers among us. They will secretly introduce destructive falsehoods; some will even go so far as to deny the Lord. Many will follow them, bringing the true way of God into disgrace. They will exploit you with stories they have made up. Bold and arrogant, these men are not afraid to slander God’s glories. These men blaspheme in matters they do not understand (2 Peter, chapter 2).

Peter wrote this in a letter that was intended as his final farewell. Knowing that his death was near, he knew that this was his last chance to say every important thing before his death. This letter is now a book of the Bible that we call Second Peter. It is a prioritized list of the knowledge that Peter wanted to pass on to a fledgling first-century church. And guess what the primary message was: a warning of false teachers and their twisting of the Lord’s truth.

They will exploit you with stories they have made up.

If you want to truly know God, those words need to penetrate your defenses. All of us must admit to ourselves that it is possible that some of our beliefs are based on stories that were made up. We must open our minds and test everything in our faith as God instructed us to do. It is only by testing everything that we hear about God that we will learn the Lord’s truth and come to reject everything else.

To get to the Lord’s truth, we need to beware of interpretation. Much of the false doctrine that exists in Christianity today is the result of someone’s private interpretation of biblical scripture. You’ve heard people say things like I interpret that to mean…, Well, that’s your interpretation…, I don’t believe that the Bible means that…, My church doesn’t interpret it that way… On and on and on.

Well, the truth is that scripture is not open to personal interpretation. It says what it says, and that’s all that it says. Where can you find this statement in the Bible? It’s written in plain English in the King James Version of the Bible, 2 Peter 1:20: Knowing this first that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.

The King James Bible is the earliest version of the English Bible in print today. Because its text extends back to around AD 1600, it has not been subjected to subsequent generational alterations to reflect modern language. Therefore, the King James most closely adheres to the original Greek version of the New Testament. This verse clearly states that scripture is not open to private interpretation, period.

All of this brings me to the purpose of this book. The Lord’s Truth is written to show you many of the false doctrines that exist in Christianity today. By exposing stories that were created by various personal interpretations of scriptures over the centuries and, worse yet, exposing stories that were made up by various individuals, you will come to know God in a way that is impossible for those who remain blinded by false doctrine. Simply stated, knowing the truth draws one closer to God.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says:

He is always convinced that it says what he means.

—George Bernard Shaw

2

The Snowball Effect

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousand fold.

—Aristotle

You can bet that Jesus hadn’t been back in heaven a day before some guy in a gathering somewhere in Judea distorted the Lord’s truth just enough to win an argument over a rival. Over and over again, with a small distortion here and a small distortion there, arguments would be won and lost. Then as we know happens, cliques formed within the body of the church as people chose sides on various disputes. Multiply this by centuries of wannabe leaders in each city’s developing church and you can see how the snowball effect would work quickly to forge false doctrine.

So obvious was this to the apostles that they wrote letter after letter warning about the distortions of the truth that they were already hearing about in the new churches in various cities. All of the Epistles were written as warnings to churches, warnings of current and future false doctrines and of the men who would come to make up stories to distort the Lord’s truth for various personal motives.

These falsehoods grew and grew and grew.

•At first, men would deliberately distort the truth to gain followers to them. Warning after warning exists in the Bible about this because God knows human nature. It began immediately upon the creation of Christianity and has continued nonstop for over two thousand years. (How many Christian denominations are there anyway? In which one will you find the Lord’s truth?)

•The worst and most destructive false truths resulted in the fourth century when downright deception was used by a politically powerful Church as it struggled to control the masses. The Church first gained political power in the Holy Roman Empire, and for a little over one hundred years, Christians were forced to believe what the emperor and pope told them to believe. All at the point of a sword.

•When the Holy Roman Empire faded and the Church lost its military power over the world, the Church began a time of deception like the Christian world had never seen before or since. To maintain control of the masses, lies, terror, and destruction occurred throughout Europe during the time known as the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, or the Medieval Period. (Do you know much about the Inquisition and the Crusades?)

•Then there are the more innocuous distortions that have occurred from men who were trying to do good but made mistakes. It was not until the 1400s that the Bible was first translated into English. Of course, by that time, monks (who did the translating) were totally tainted and biased by 1,400 years of false doctrine. It was due to these false doctrines that translators made mistakes when translating Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into English. As they attempted to force the Greek and Hebrew text into saying what they deeply (and falsely) believed to be the truth, they forced the translation to match their belief.

These false doctrines became part of the first organized Christian church in existence, the Catholic Church (catholic is an adjective that means universal). Eventually, Martin Luther corrected many false doctrines as he protested and then separated from the Catholic Church, leading to the Protestant movement. However, the Protestants failed to correct all of the false doctrines, and as a result, many false doctrines passed through to the Protestant Churches of today. We will soon discuss these remaining false doctrines.

Heresy

Before we move on, we need to talk about heresy. Heresy is defined as any belief that opposes the current belief of a specific religion. Note that heresy is not defined as belief that is opposed to biblical truth. That is a very important distinction! A heretic is a person who believes something other than what a specific organized religion teaches. Because the definition of heresy is based on man’s religious doctrine and not biblical truth, the definition of heresy changes as often as church doctrines change. Jesus was considered a heretic by the Pharisees and priests of His day. All of the apostles were considered heretics too.

The term heretic has often been used as a weapon to destroy individuals. All of the Protestants who followed Martin Luther out of the Catholic Church were labeled heretics by the Catholic Church. Many men before the Protestants were branded heretics for believing scientific facts or some aspect of biblical truth that disagreed with man’s truth of the day. Countless numbers of the truly faithful were labeled heretics and killed during the Spanish Inquisition. Today, the term heretic continues to be used as a weapon to keep Christians corralled in a church. Anyone in a congregation who openly challenges a church doctrine is called a heretic by those in control. This protects the establishment. To get to the Lord’s truth, one must ignore those who use this term to silence others who disagree with them.

Moving On

Let me give you just a few examples of false doctrines that existed in Christianity for centuries but have been corrected. Remember, the Christians who lived way back then and there believed these church teachings as facts. They believed just as strongly as you currently believe the doctrines that you have been taught here and now by your church.

1.It was once heresy (and punishable by death) for a Christian to worship on Saturday (the Sabbath day).

2.It was once heresy to believe that the earth revolved around the sun or that the earth was round.

3.The Church once sold forgiveness for a price (indulgences).

This allowed a prosperous person to sin with impunity because they had purchased God’s forgiveness ahead of time.

4.It was once against the law for anyone but a clergyman to read the Bible (ad 1229). Do you think that this might have been an effort to keep the ignorant masses ignorant?

5.In 1864 and again in 1907, the Church condemned all scientific discoveries not approved by the Church. All scientists were heretics if their research differed from Church belief.

I give these five examples only to help you to understand that the masses accepted as truth these doctrines that seem silly to us today. There are many, many more. Could it be that modern Christians are equally misled by other false doctrines that still exists in Christianity? Just why do we have over four hundred major Christian denominations anyway? If there were no remaining distortions and deceptions, there wouldn’t be any denominations, would there? We’d just be Christians all believing the same thing.

Why is this important to you? It’s important because the presence of a false doctrine can cause a person to begin to doubt that God exists. If your faith does not make sense to you, your faith will be weak. What good is your religion if you don’t understand it? You’ve heard it before: "If God exists, how could ________? (You fill in the blank.)

These doubts are spawned by a lack of biblical knowledge. The false doctrines that have taken the place of biblical truth cause doubt in the mind of an otherwise faithful Christian.

As one person after another loses their faith in God due to all of this confusion, our society becomes more and more secular. Our children are then taught by agnostics (or worse), and our nation grows farther and farther from God. Is any of this ringing true in your mind?

The Ultimate Outcome

If a person does not learn the truth that is in the Bible, that person is easily deceived by those in today’s society who use religion as a tool to further their political agenda. Political arguments about abortion, the death penalty, welfare, gun control, etc., are rife with supposed Christian viewpoints that are not at all in alignment with what God has clearly said in the Bible. It is truly amazing that in the secular society that politicians have forced upon us, politicians turn around and argue many political points based on what Jesus would say. What hypocrites!

But what if we are fooled into a belief about what Jesus would say, and that belief is wrong? Could that drive our nation farther from God? Are we making laws in this country that Jesus would not support? I ask you, how are our laws working out for us? Do you see our nation growing in moral character? Or is our nation slipping into moral decay?

Can you see why it is so important to seek the Lord’s truth, the truth as it was originally told to us by God? As Christians, we must come to know our Bible, and we must come to use it to weigh what other men tell us about God. We must turn toward the wisdom of God and away from the wisdom of men when we consider our faith.

In regard to our faith, God told us: Do not rest your faith on the wisdom of men (1 Corinthians 2:5, NIV).

And in regard to our beliefs, God spelled out our responsibility: Test everything (1 Thessalonians 5:21, NIV). Don’t accept a single doctrine that you have not tested for yourself.

Where Most Christians Are Today

How many of us rely on someone else to tell us what the Bible says? How many of us simply go along with the crowd when it comes to our beliefs? We go to church regularly, and we listen to the sermon by our minister or priest. Afterward, as we drive home, we may even discuss the sermon in the car. But do we give any thought to the truth or validity of what we were just told? Do we go home and read things for ourselves to see if what we were just told was God’s truth or man’s interpretation of what God said? Are we lemmings following one another off a cliff?

Nothing is new about this. Our willingness to test everything that another person tells us about God has changed little since six hundred years before Christ when God said, "These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules of men" (Isaiah 29:13, NIV).

Take a moment and read that again. As a matter of fact, take a moment and open your Bible and read Isaiah 29:11–13. Read what God said to the people of Jerusalem in regard to the need for them to read His word for themselves. I’ll put this in today’s language to make it easier for you to understand.

When I give you the truth you close it up in a book.

If you give the book to someone who can read and then ask them to read it, they say, I can’t, it’s closed.

If you give the book to someone who cannot read and ask them to read it, they say, I can’t read.

Yes, all of you come near to me with your words but your hearts are far from me.

Your worship of me is just made up of man-made rules.

What did God just say? Can you not see clearly that God wants you to read His word for yourself? God does not like it when we let another man (no matter how holy his title might be) to make up rules that we follow in our worship of Him. God does not like it when we turn our Christian education over to men who were taught by a man-made religious system that has twisted His words for over two millennia, forming over four hundred major denominations of Christians who follow men instead of following Him. Don’t misunderstand. I am not saying that church is bad. I’m saying that only relying on church is not enough. You must take personal responsibility to find the truth.

From what God said to Isaiah, He obviously wants you to open the book to read His words and learn His truth. Take control of your relationship with God. Stop worshiping Him with rules made by men and begin to worship God with His rules. In a sentence, God does not like it when we fail to read the Bible for ourselves.

So I ask: Are you ready to test everything you’ve learned about God for yourself? Are you willing to set aside the excuses of I don’t have time and It’s too hard and do what God has clearly asked of you—accept responsibility for your own personal relationship with God?

If you are the type of person who can let go of man-made religious doctrine, I promise that you will become spellbound by reading this book. As you come across unbelievable things, test the accuracy of what you are reading. When it comes to your faith, you should follow God’s command to test all things! Confirm the truth. Don’t trust me. Trust your Bible! To help you to verify the truth, I’ve included Bible chapter and verse notations to show you exactly where you can read God’s words for yourself. All scripture references are from the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible unless otherwise stated.

Don’t skip around as you read this book. The Lord’s Truth is written so that one chapter builds upon another. Reading it in order will give you the easiest understanding. If you skip around to find the topics that particularly interest you, you will not understand much at all. So start with the first page and read all the way to the last page.

3

False Doctrine Leads to Confusion

Which Leads to Emptiness

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

—Harry Truman

If Satan cannot convince Christians to follow him, he’ll do his best to bring confusion about God into the Christian world.

However, I want to make one very important point here. Being confused about God and His plan for mankind does not mean that a person is not saved. Many of the most God-fearing, righteous people that you will ever meet may not truly understand many of the aspects pertaining to God’s truth. Faithful, loyal, upright, honest, sincere, generous, loving people who are absolute shining examples of how to live righteous lives can still be confused about God and His plan for mankind.

So please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that a confused or misguided person won’t make it to heaven. On the contrary, as you read this book, you will see how God has allowed confusion to occur. He fully understands that we are often misguided, and He will judge us and grant us grace in light of this. With that said, let’s dig in.

The Vast Majority

It’s a sad fact the vast majority of Christians practice their faith by going to church on Sunday, Easter, and Christmas—that’s it. They devote, at most, fifty-three hours each year to their worship of God (fifty-two one-hour Sunday services plus Christmas).

Given that there are 8,760 hours in each year, that’s only 0.6% of their lives devoted to God. (That’s not 6%; it is 0.6%. Said another way, it is 6/10 of 1% of their lives devoted to God. Think about that! Less than 1%!) As a result of this miniscule amount of time devoted to worship, the vast majority of Christians believe that they are right with God. They imagine that they have a special relationship with their God and that their God understands them.

Although these Christians have read select parts of the Bible, they don’t understand the basics of Christianity as given to us by Christ and His apostles. They follow their church’s doctrines (rules made by men), and they are convinced that when they die, they will immediately go straight to heaven to be with Jesus. These Christians are unknowingly living lives separated from God’s truth due to the many false doctrines that have slowly crept into our churches over the past two thousand years.

This vast majority of Christians pass through life not knowing God’s truth and not understanding God’s plan for mankind. As a result, they may live lives that are inconsistent with God’s desires for man’s existence. On one extreme, you have the We’re all under God’s grace, so if it feels good, do it crowd. At the opposite extreme you’ll find the ultra-religious groups who insist that you can’t eat this, you can’t wear that, you can’t use electricity, and so on. Between these two extremes there are countless in-between belief systems, but many of these people share a common thread—they don’t understand the Lord’s truth.

Most of the vast majority finds a good deal of happiness in this type of existence. But that happiness can be accompanied by an emptiness that is ill defined. You will see people who seem to have everything in life, but they lack fulfillment. These people usually seek greater and greater material riches to fulfill their lives, but their success seems only to lead to greater emptiness.

For a great example of this type of existence, you need to look no further than the icons (celebrities) of our society. The people that we, as a society, place on a pedestal are a reflection of who we want to be. Our celebrities are wealthy, beautiful, and surrounded by opulence, but still many are woefully unfulfilled. Although they appear to us to be happy, we read about them being on drugs for depression. Many die of drug overdoses while trying to escape the true reality of their lives. Simply stated, their lives are often a train wreck. When we see this happen to those who have everything, we all have the same question: Why?

Every Man’s Spirit Is Yearning

The answer lies in man’s uniqueness among all of God’s creations. In all of creation, only man was given a spirit, and this spirit yearns to join with its Creator. We have no control over this yearning. Even if we want to live a godless life, our spirit will still yearn. That is why all the money in the world cannot fulfill any man. No matter how wealthy a man becomes, without God he will feel like he has a hole in his heart.

That hole in our heart is a place that is reserved for a reverence for God.

Reverence is defined as profound and adoring awed respect (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). People who don’t have a reverence for God will try to fill this hole with things. There is the constant pursuit of youth, an accumulation of material wealth, and a multitude of other substitutes that these people use to replace this missing reverence for God. By stuffing all of these substitutes into this hole, all they accomplish is to push God even farther from their hearts.

Then it gets worse. As these people age, they are confronted with the fact that they have found no answers to the meaning of life…and it’s about to end. The emptiness in their lives grows even stronger, reaching a level of desperation. There is nothing worse than reaching old age with this hole in your heart still devoid of God. The emptiness that one feels at that point is indescribable. The good news is that there is a solution.

Reverence for God is gained by overcoming the many false truths that exist in Christianity and discovering the Lord’s truth. Make a choice to spend more than 0.6% of your life seeking God and learning His truth, and use this book as your first step. If you are determined enough to read this book from cover to cover (and if you take the time to prove all that it says), you will have a dark spiritual veil removed from your eyes, and you will truly see. Your heart will be filled with a reverence for God. Because that place in your heart will be filled to overflowing, any emptiness in your life will be gone.

It is absolutely true, the truth will set you free (John 8:32). To truly know God (and the absolutely wonderful plan that He has for you) is to find fulfillment and joyfulness in life. Your human spirit is yearning. Move closer to your Creator by working to eliminate any confusion brought upon by false doctrine. However, before you can do that, you must get to know your adversary.

4

The Devil Made Me Do It

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscrete, but we can at least respect his talent.

—Mark Twain

In our discussion of false doctrine and its potential devastating effect on our faith, let’s not overlook the fact that there is a spiritual power working against God on earth. Satan is the third strike against us in our effort to understand God.

1.Strike 1 is man’s alteration of the Lord’s truth either for personal gain (money, self-aggrandizement, and/or power) or as a result of personal interpretation.

2.Strike 2 is our tendency toward laziness, allowing others to spoon-feed us what to believe and not testing the truth for ourselves.

3.Strike 3 is Satan, who is always looking for opportunity to take advantage of strikes 1 and 2.

By definition, deception requires a deceiver, and Revelation 12:9 tells us that Satan is the deceiver who deceives the whole world. When God told the author of Revelation to write the whole world, He meant the whole world. No nation and no religion is exempt!

Most Christians would agree that Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims are all deceived. But what about the Judeo-Christian world? Within our ranks we have our own disagreements on God. Jews think Christians are deceived and vice versa. Within Christianity itself, most Catholics think that Methodists are deceived. Most Methodists think that Baptists are deceived, and so on. You could go through every denomination and find major differences in beliefs about God. And we all think the other guys are deceived. Who’s right in all of this? What’s the truth? Well, the truth is that Satan has deceived all of us—Christians, Muslims, Hindu, Buddhists …the whole world.

To begin to understand God’s apparent loss of control of things on earth, we need to learn about Satan. Who is he? Where did he come from? And why is he allowed to exist? All of this knowledge is critical to understanding that God is actually in total control and that He has a master plan for the human race. And everything is going according to plan.

Satan’s Origin

Before the earth was created, God created angels. He created angels with a conscious mind, free will, and with the free moral agency to make decisions concerning good and evil. How do we know this to be true? It’s because Satan and his followers (1/3 of all the angels) made a choice to be evil.

In heaven there is a governmental hierarchy (God always refers to government when He speaks of His kingdom), and archangels were created as chief angels in a line of command over other angels. Although there may be many archangels, we know of only three from the Bible: Lucifer, Gabriel, and Michael. We know of them only because they have each been to this earth to do God’s will. One of the three made a conscious decision to be not good. (You’ll see why I used the words not good instead of evil in the next chapter.)

There was one perfectly beautiful, powerful, all-wise archangel that was God’s model of perfection. To illustrate His perfection, God named this archangel Lucifer, which means light bringer or shining star of the dawn. God thought so much of this perfect angel that when He created the earth, He placed Lucifer upon the earth as this world’s ruler.

How do we know this? In multiple places in the Bible, Satan is called the ruler or god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4, Ephesians 2:2, Luke 4:6, and 1 John 5:19). And as this world’s ruler, Satan was right there in the Garden of Eden, waiting on Adam and Eve when God placed them there.

You see, Eden existed on earth for a long, long time before God created man. It was during this pre-Adamic time that all manner of creatures roamed the planet, including dinosaurs. All the while Lucifer was the earth’s ruler, and the angels under him followed his rule.

It was during this prehistoric time that Lucifer became corrupted with a sense of his own personal beauty and power. He began to envy God’s position, and this envy gradually led to lust. It may have taken Lucifer millions and billions of years to develop his self-centered, self-loving attitude. Slowly he swayed the angels under him to challenge God for supremacy.

Read Ezekiel 28:12 where God describes the perfection of Lucifer and where God gives us a glimpse into this world that existed before man. As you read, understand that the Lord is addressing Satan, who, in this passage, is referred to as the king of Tyre because Satan was in control of this New York City of the ancient world. We’ll discuss Tyre later in the book.

Eventually, Lucifer and the angels he commanded decided to act. Remember, like you and me, Lucifer was created with free choice to be morally good or morally corrupt. He chose corruption. Lucifer’s plan was as follows:

I will ascend into heaven; I will exalt my throne above the stars [angels] of God. (Isaiah 14:13)

The use of the word ascend is very telling. Ascend from where? Hell? Satan had not yet challenged God and fallen from grace, so certainly he was not in hell at this point. He ascended into heaven from right here on earth.

There was a war in heaven pitting God and His army of angels against Lucifer and his invading army of angels (we now call them demons from the Latin word for evil spirits). After losing the war, Lucifer and his demons were cast back out of heaven, back down to earth (Revelation 12:7).

As a side note, Jesus said that He was there when all of this happened—untold millions of years before He was born as a human being to a virgin named Mary! Read Luke 10:18 to see where our Lord gives us a brief look at his prehuman existence.

After his defeat, Lucifer found himself, along with all of his fallen angels, back on earth, but still in charge. Still in charge? Really? Yes! Evidence of this is found in Luke 4:6 where Satan tells Jesus that all of the authority and splendor of the earth has been given to him to do with as he pleases…and Jesus did not disagree.

God gave Lucifer free reign on earth and all power over the earth. God chose not to revoke Lucifer’s rule and power after the war. He did, however, restrict Lucifer’s movements to this world only. We know this because the Bible tells us that God cast Lucifer back down to earth where he is being held in bondage. Read 2 Peter 2:4 where your Bible says that God sent the angels to hell. In the original Greek text, the word was not hell at all. The word was tartaroo, which means a place of holding or restraint. When He cast Lucifer out of heaven and back down to earth, God sent the angels to a place of holding. Lucifer and his demons are now bound to this earth by God’s power.

Of course, we all wonder about this apparent goof up by God. When God threw Lucifer back to earth, why did He not revoke Lucifer’s rule over the earth? Why didn’t God simply destroy Lucifer and his army of demons? As you read, you will find that it’s because God still had a use for them. God has a master plan, and Lucifer plays a very important role in it.

For now, understand one thing: this is Satan’s world, and he is the god of it. The apostle Peter knew this. That’s why he said that "The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4). Also, don’t forget that it was Satan who tempted Jesus in the desert. Satan said that he would give Jesus all of the power of all of the kingdoms of the earth because it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to." All Jesus had to do was to worship Satan to get it (Matthew 4:8).

We all know that Satan failed to corrupt Jesus with this temptation, but that’s not the point here. The point is that this account of the temptation of Jesus reveals, without doubt, that Satan indeed had all of this power to give to Jesus. It belongs to Satan.

Stop for a moment and ponder what you have just read. Is it any wonder that evil seems to dominate our world—even its religions?

Satan’s Role in God’s Plan

Now you know that Lucifer was right here, waiting, when God placed Adam and Eve on this earth. As the ruler of this earth, Satan has tried to thwart God’s plan for man from the start. From the very beginning of man’s creation, there has been a good versus evil battle. The name that God chose to give Lucifer after he was cast back out of heaven is highly revealing of this struggle. Satan is an English translation of the Hebrew word for adversary. So from now on, whenever you read the name Satan, think adversary. That’s really his name.

Read this slowly and with great concentration:

God’s adversary rules the Earth. All worldly things are of him. He influences (and often controls) the government of every nation on Earth, the news media, every ethnic culture, every level of society and every religion. The adversary bestows wealth and poverty upon whomever he chooses. Just as he told Jesus, he rewards godless people with power, wealth, and with pleasures of the flesh (Luke 4:6). He has been given all of the power of all of the governments on earth, and unless God chooses to intervene in a specific case, he wields great influence over the rulers of this world’s governments.

The god of this world is not the true god.

Instead, a false god rules this world, and his name is Satan!

Jesus knew this. That is why He repeatedly told us not to concern ourselves with the