The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled

If you've ever seen the movie "The Usual Suspects," then you're undoubtedly aware of the famous line that became so popular in the mid to late 90s, that it was practically woven into the fabric of the modern and popular culture of that time.

"What's the greatest trick the devil ever pulled? Convincing the world that he didn't exist!"

We know that this line, although probably intended solely for cinematic and entertainment purposes by the one who wrote it, also happens to have a lot of truth to it from a Biblical perspective as well.

In John 8:44 we see no better example of a treatise given on the dark and dishonest nature of satan, the enemy of our souls, than the one that our Lord Jesus Christ gave, as he addressed those hard-hearted, and obstinately stubborn Pharisees of that day, who refused to believe in Him as the Son of God, and as the Savior of the world sent to redeem mankind.

44 "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

Yes he is indeed the father of lies, and the only tell tale sign that you need to see to know whether or not he is lying is if his lips are moving, as lying is his native language!

But, whatever amount of truth there is to this movie quote, I feel that it is somehow lacking and incomplete, and doesn't capture the most ultimate, and damaging expression of the devil's destruction.

Yes, I'm afraid that I have to disagree with that famous quote, however cleverly it was penned.

The greatest trick that the devil ever REALLY pulls is when he hurts someone through a person who is supposed to be representing God. That way, the innocent victim cannot help but feel like God must have sanctioned that abuse, pain, or suffering Himself, right!?

And can you blame anyone for thinking that? Of course not, if you have even an ounce of compassion.

The paradox of course, is that that very same love and compassion will lead you, if you truly know The Father, to do ABSOLUTE ANYTHING THAT YOU CAN to help show that person that God in fact DID NOT cause the offender to act in such a wounding way.

How do I know this?

I know it through 3 primary ways:

1.) God's Divinely inspired, and inerrant Word

It has been said by people far wiser than myself that if someone isn't interested in God, or is harboring a resentment against Him, it is because they have a false and negative picture of Him.

So, in the hopes of recapturing their interest in Him, you have to present them with an accurate picture of who He really is.

There is no better picture than the one Jesus, (God in the flesh Himself, and the very second person of the Holy Trinity,) gave of His Heavenly Father, and it is found in Luke 11: 15-32

The Parable of the Lost Son

11 "Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

13 “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. 14 After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. 16 He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

17 “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ 20 So he got up and went to his father.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

21 “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

25 “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 27 ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’

28 “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’

31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

As we take in this beautiful story, we can clearly see that the father in the story represents our Heavenly Father. And He, like the father depicted in this parable, "sees us coming from a long way off," and instead of wagging his finger at us and rubbing our noses in the condemnation that we feel we deserve, or are afraid that we'll get, if we are the least bit sincere in our hearts about our desire to turn from our former ways and come back to Him, He instead runs out to meet us and throws His arms around us in unconditional love and forgiveness! Thank God for His unfailing love, grace, and mercy! 🙏🏼❤️🙌🏼

2.) Our personal experience through The Holy Spirit

While we have established that, yes, the Word of God is abundantly clear through a story told by Jesus Himself, about How much God loves us, and His unconditional Love towards us even when we fail, it is still more than just a mental ascent toward an objective truth, as important as that is to start with.

In 1 John 3:24 we see about as clear of a statement concerning this as we're gonna see, “And the one who keeps his commandments resides in him, and he in him. And by this we know that he abides in us: by the Spirit whom he has given to us.”

Here John the apostle speaks about this inner witness of The Holy Spirit living withing us as we continuously surrender, and try our best to follow Him in obedience. This confirmation then continues to comfort us as we now FEEL his overwhelming love and presence in our hearts. We no longer have to wonder if we are just theorizing, about whether God loves us or whether or not He lives in our hearts and souls, because we now are PALPABLY and TANGIBLY EXPERIENCING it within us, even on an emotional level!

Romans 5:5 also speaks of this same tangible impartation of The Holy Spirit within us,

"And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us."

Lastly, we see in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4,

3 "All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. 4 He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us."

There you have it again, if God really wanted to hurt us , why then would He take up residence within us, and allow us to feel His all-comforting love on a consistent basis, as our new emotional baseline, and then include us in His plans as vessels of that same comfort toward others!?

The answer is of course rhetorical. He DOESN'T WANT TO HURT US!

It is the enemy of our souls, the devil, hard at work to try destroy anything that the ONE TRUE GOD has created, especially the most prized of all His creation, we human beings.

Unfortunately, when wounded people, yes even Christians, still pridefully insist on being dishonest through omission, and not to humble themselves and seek help for their hurts, and instead insist on willfully continuing to go against the will of God, and go their own way, they become prime candidates to be influenced by Satan to do harm to others, WHETHER THEY BELIEVE THAT IS HAPPENING OR NOT.

And, there is unfortunately, no one that the enemy would rather use than a Christian, because again, there is no better way to alienate people from God than to successfully convince them that the hurt done to them was from a genuine Christian, a representative of God's true nature.

"For God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble." 1 Peter 5:5-6

3.) The third and final way that I know that a God who would want to harm us is a completely false picture of God, is through an abundance of psychological research.

I have been an alcoholic, who has been sober, and active in recovery for many, many years. In my earlier days in Alcoholics Anonymous, I can vividly remember a quote from a speaker that I first heard over twenty years ago.

"God created man in His image, and unfortunately man constantly returns the favor!"

Truer words have almost never been spoken. There seems to be an incredible, yet very real tendency that we as human beings have to project ourselves, and what we have been through, or are going through onto others, and onto noone more than God Himself.

"This reminds me of another common saying, you treat others the way you treat yourself." In other words, in order for a mindset or behavior to go through you, it obviously has to live within you first.

Suddenly the implications of this truth become clear: If you show someone, even if you don't know them personally, patience and kindness, even if it's through an act of holding the door open for them, or being patient with them as they search for the right form of payment to buy their groceries ahead of you in line, then clearly you think that you also have enough value to be treated with that type of kindness, because you can't transmit something that you don't have to begin with.

Conversely however, if you think that every homeless person, or someone who is struggling financially, is to be detested as the worst kind of loser, and all of their troubles are COMPLETELY their fault, or if every time someone makes mistake on the road you fly off into a fit of rage and start blurting out curse words at them, then I would shudder to look at the condition of your heart, as those perceptions inevitably live within you, as you are merciless concerning the condemnation that you tou secretly harbor toward yourself.

I have been there in the past myself. But, by the grace of God, wise choices and actions taken based upon those choices, I didn't have to STAY there!

These last observations bring me to my final point concerning our psychological tendencies as humans.

My wife has a Master's degree in mental health counseling, and she has shared many interesting and valuable things with me about what she has learned from her studies, and years in the field as well.

I can think of almost none of these lessons being more valuable than what is called "attachment theory."

For the sake of brevity and to put it in laymen's terms, "attachment theory" is a perspective based on many years worth of conducted research that suggests that a very large part of how we develop our conceptions about, and ultimately our relationship with God is based upon the relationships of our parents, and those closest to us.

If we consider that God intended the nuclear family to be "the domestic church," the first point of contact and society wherein we were supposed to be correctly taught about Him, and then had those living truths lives out and modeled for us, then this makes absolutely perfect sense!

Rarely is anyone entirely bad, and neither are they perfect. There are hopefully many good things that our parents model for us and show us both through teaching and example. There are them, however, some of us who have grown up in families with EXTREME DYSFUNCTION that far exceeds the normal parameters of just human imperfection, and here's where a very damaging dilemma is born.

If all we know is what we're first experiencing within our family life as a child, and we of course have no other experience outside of that to compare it to, we then begin to think, even on a subconscious level, that this deep dysfunction is normal. These subtle concessions then take root so deeply, and far down within our psyches that we think that, this is just how life is, and therefore must have been what God wanted for me. We can't help but then feel like, and develop the idea that He must not like me too much, or maybe He even hates me.

NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH!

While I don't always understand His ways, I have learned to always trust them.

As 2 Peter 3:9 clearly declares:

"The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.”

And Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

And finally, John 3:16,

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

As the scriptures abundantly, and unequivocally show us, God loves all of humanity, yes He loves YOU PERSONALLY!

But there are two fundamental problems here for many people:

1.) receiving His Love, forgiveness of sin and, ultimately being in a state of Peace with God is CONTINGENT UPON RECEIVING JESUS CHRIST AS Your personal Lord and Savior, as His sacrifice is the only one that can make any of us right with God

2.) Many people also struggle with the fact that when He created us, God gave us the gift of free will. He wants us to then use that free will to choose to respond to the fact that He first loved us and gave up His only Son to die for us, by loving Him back.

Unfortunately, many people don't choose to use that gift of free will for good, they choose and do evil, even Christians. And when Christians choose to do wrong, and hurt others, God's name is COMPLETELY MISREPRESENTED.

While it is terrible that anyone has to experience pain or abuse of any kind, the Good news is that GOD IS NOT THE PEOPLE WHO HARMED YOU, NOR DID HE SANCTION THAT BEHAVIOR!

I am a living witness, that through a sincere and consistent commitment to Prayer, studying of scripture, and a whole lot of counseling and fellowship with other believers, YOU CAN BE HEALED of all of your emotional wounds! 🙏🏼

That's what God really wants for you, and then you in turn can be used of Home to help others recover from those same hurts!

It all starts though, with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, if you don't have that yet, I encourage you to seek Him today! 🙏🏼♥️

I Pray daily for all who read this blog. I hope that this post was a huge Blessing to you! Please don't hesitate to leave a comment, and God Bless you richly!

Sincerely,

NDV