Rev'd Flint's post was particularly helpful for me. Often when we see secular children living in comfort, laughing, enjoying life surrounded by their secularist friends showing one another kindness I am challenged to think
isn't that a better place to be?
Satan is very attentive in just this area. He wants the place you should not be to appear as kind and as friendly & loving as possible. No deception is beneath him, no lie untold. By repeating falsehood over and over and over again from the mouths of friends and playmates, often while sharing a cake, his deliberate fraud takes on a glamour as though it were true. Cakes like this:
Satan has the heathen or secularistic child just where it should never be. On track for the Lake Of Fire. Satan makes sure that during these formative years they are contented enough not to look elsewhere for answers, or even to ask questions in the first place..
And his mantra blares from every outlet. Godless educational material (even at pre-school level), children's television, play songs, jolly cakes, warmth and encouragement and kindness and when I compare God's standard so clearly set forth in The Bible and when I understand the deception being funnelled into those young minds during their most vulnerable years through kindnesses and reassurances and comforts and singing and those infernal cakes I despair.
What hope can there ever be? I think to myself.
His is a two pronged attack. To make the place we should
not be appear attractive is just one prong. The other is to misrepresent the place we
should be as cold, uncaring and harsh. Satan is so monstrous a wretch that he will not shrink from declaring God's Perfect Love as cruel, vile, wicked. There are 3 stages in the satanic road map for children.
...age
.0 – .7 Mind not fully developed, will accept just about anything as "normal" or "true" SATAN SAYS: Repeat lies as frequently as possible to establish a daily routine of deception
.7 – 14 Bolster the fraudulent paradigm established by rote (above) SATAN SAYS: Use staged outcomes at every opportunity. Encourage peer approval. Relax moral sensibilities
14 – 21 Adults "recall" their own rebellion & celebrate teen fads SATAN SAYS: Reiterate values instilled from birth using staged crisis resolution tableaux. Dress up delusion as insight
Satan is now at the point where a generation is making up laws under his direct supervision. Career politicians having no concept of reality whatsoever enter the fray not much older than 21 and can expect to get elected within a decade. This is what we're up against. And that is why laws criminalising any form of spiritual guidance as revealed by God in The Bible are passed. Discipline is re-branded as "TORTURE" and don't take my word for it, just visit the appropriate government department in your country and read the laws for yourself. Beating with an implement to the point of injury is a criminal offence across the occident. Yet this remains the ONLY method of directing children to Salvation recorded in The Bible.
The Bible does not change. And in The Bible we are instructed not only of the outcome for sin filled lives but of the absolute certainty that every child is indeed full of sin and that injury by beating is the way to train up a child to appreciate the need for Redemption and the price Christ had to pay. That is what The Bible teaches and that is what secularism opposes.
Satan does not want us to feel comfortable where we ought to be: we know that already. But what was reassuring for me in the Pastor's comment was the reminder about places we ought
not be. Satan wants us to feel very comfortable there. Satan is the master brainwasher.
Day and night, week by week, year by year. From the cradle to the day-care centre, from tweenie to techno-rave. Sometimes they do seem happy but it is a fraud from the outset. Satan never gives up.