“And they said; ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved’” (Acts 16:31).
“If you confess Lord Jesus with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised Him from death, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).
Lord is not a title, but a function, and is inseparable from His function as Saviour; if we confess Him as Lord when He is not, our confession is not true and is meaningless, for Jesus is the truth.
Truth is a rarity amongst Christians; not because it cannot be found, but because it is not obeyed; truth must be lived to be seen. We don’t have to search for truth; He is looking for us; “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost”: (Luke 19:10). So the rarity of truth is not in discovery but in obedience, for truth is not something to be searched for but a Person to whom we must hearken and obey and the unwillingness to obey explains the scarcity of truth amongst God’s people today, just as it explains the condition of Israel in the time of Christ.
This is Satan’s primary objective; to deceive God’s people. Although this has always been the case, that work will be at its most fruitful in the last days, according to Paul (1 Timothy 4:1-3).
“Some will fall away from the faith”, Paul writes, so he is warning us that Satan’s focus will be on the people of God; the reason for their fall is that they give heed to deceiving spirits; that is, the nature of their evil working is not known to be evil, but is a “covered” working, in other words deception, which is why they are referred to as “deceitful spirits”. The essence of their deception is that their deception is looked upon as being sincere and pure. The nature of their deception is described as “the doctrine of demons”; that is, the deception will be of a doctrinal nature; and the doctrines are delivered through the hypocrisy of false words (pseudologos in Greek). The Greek word for hypocrisy means “one wearing a mask” and this perfectly describes those through whom the deceptive workings of Satan are imposed on God’s people.
These are supernatural perils but they follow a pattern. Firstly, they will “cauterise the conscience” Paul tells us; that is, the conscience becomes dull and passive and doesn’t react to the false words but instead, embraces them as the truth, thus unknowingly yielding themselves up to the power of lying spirits. The false teaching will always tend to weaken the authority of the scriptures; distort the teaching of scripture; add to the scriptures the thoughts of men or put the scriptures aside entirely and rely upon some “new truth”.
In the final analysis, the test of all doctrine must be its harmony with the whole body of scripture and its attitude to the Cross and sin. In the true gospel of God, the sin of man is central and the need for a Saviour therefore fundamental. The whole of the Old Testament points to the Cross of Christ and the whole of the New Testament looks back to it; it is the central focus of all scripture. The essence of all deception will always be to draw a veil over the absolute necessity for the work of the Cross and substitute something else as a focal point of faith.
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