We are under attack and I’m not talking about all the mayhem that we see on TV or on the Internet. No, it goes much deeper than that. Before I go any further I would like to say this one thing if any of you do not believe that Satan is real, then you are fooling yourselves and by not believing it is making unity with God even more difficult. Anyone who believes in God needs to believe that the enemy of God is present in any place on earth where he thinks he can lure lost and confused souls to hell and try and destroy God’s plan.

To begin with, God is love, above all else we need to realize that He is love and heaven is all about love and is even overflowing with it. Whereas Hell is just the opposite of heaven and it is where lost souls will find no love, just hatred. Because Satan hates God and all that He stands for.

Satan did not always hate God, in fact, He was created by God as one of His own angels created by love and was once beautiful. However, Satan and a few others that followed him did not want to serve their Lord, instead, Satan wanted to be equal with God or even better than God. He wanted all the power and when he refused to obey God he was thrown out of heaven along with all who followed him, never to see the beauty of heaven again. From that moment on Satan hated God and would stop at nothing to destroy anything and everything ever created by God. And he continues to this very day. He is the enemy of God who seeks to destroy what is good in every relationship and replace the good with exploitation and manipulation.

So who is Satan? He’s the “great manipulator”, the “great deceiver”, the “evil one”, the “enemy of God” and Jesus came right out and called him a “liar”, which he is. Nothing that comes from him holds any truth.

So how does Satan try to destroy relationships and God’s plans for all His children?

• Sometimes the devil will whisper to us that a person is weak or foolish and will try to get us to manipulate them and use them for our own personal gain or gratification.

• The devil will try to fill us with insecurity and make us believe that others are taking advantage of us and treating us badly.

• He tries to persuade us that others don’t appreciate us or what we do and that they don’t see our good qualities and our efforts.

• He tries to make us believe that we are unloved, unworthy, misused and underappreciated.

• He also tries to make us believe that we are wasting our time on people who don’t love or appreciate us.

The whispers from Satan go on and on and if we are trying to follow the path that God has asked us to follow, you can bet that Satan is right there trying to pull us off that path and lead us in the opposite direction. If he did it to Jesus, why wouldn’t he do it to us? He had no fear of trying to tempt the Son of God, why would any of us think that he would let any of us alone?

In the world today, the devil is like a snake that changes its looks based on the environment that it finds itself in and that way he can hide right out in the open. He searches for souls that have forgotten that they need a strong allegiance with God in order to survive the constant onslaught coming from the enemy. Satan rebels constantly against God in this fashion and he mocks God every chance he gets and tries to get God’s children to do the same thing, even if they don’t know they are doing it.

As Christians and even non-Christians, we need to understand that Satan wants only our destruction. He has an agenda for us that includes unhappiness and eternal despair. He is the one that sends out into the world, temptation. He mocks humanity and he works tirelessly to sow seeds of restlessness, anger, frustration, and bitterness in all of us.

Just as God loves us unconditionally, Satan hates us just as much. It’s really simple, we are all God’s children and Satan hates us. Period. This means that God’s enemy is our enemy and he only wants destruction for us and he will do whatever it takes to get the job done.

The devil has the ability to hide himself by boldly standing right out in the open, well camouflaged. He has camouflaged himself in today’s world so well that we can often lose sight of him if we are not careful. He blends in with everyone else. He will call himself good and then dares God’s children to state otherwise.

“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.” (John 8:44)

Satan is jealous of God, always has been and he tries to mimic Him. This mimicry is just another strategy that is used by Satan where he acts like God by pretending to care about people and by stating that evil principles are actually good and merciful to humanity. For example, he loves to use the word “choice” and it sounds good to one’s ears, however, when it comes one thing, in particular, a “woman’s choice” as fair and good as this may sound, there is a dead baby at the end of that “choice”.

The Women’s Movement started off innocent enough, asking that women are treated as equals and there is nothing wrong with that. We all know how Jesus treated women, no different than His chosen 12, in fact, we all know that He chose to appear to Mary Magdalene after He had risen before He chose to show Himself to anyone else. But the devil destroyed the pureness of this movement by adding “choice” to it. He infiltrated the movement and distorted it with women even turning against men. The perfect plan of Satan’s because he knows if a house is divided it won’t stand for long.

All the freedom that the Women’s Movement gave women it fell right into the hands of Satan, it put women right where he wanted them to be. With more freedom, he was able to turn it around and whether women wanted to believe it now they were treated more like objects with no respect for who they really were and it continues to this very day. Especially when it comes to sex.

God’s version of sex is one of beauty and harmony between a man and a woman and for most to create beautiful children of God. However, Satan’s version is far different. His version has turned it into something that can be used just for pure pleasure and that there is nothing wrong with using someone just to derive pleasure. His version of sex is selfish, emotionally dangerous and is simply bad for all of humanity, but then again, that’s what he’s always wanted. Satan likes to tell us that disobedience and rebelling against God’s plans is alright, it’s our own business and that we’re not hurting anyone if we do exactly what we want to do.

Satan loves to throw it in God’s face that the creatures He created in His image are doing what they want, when they want and are developing into the image of His enemy. Can you imagine how painful this must be for God?

Satan likes to point to God and then tell us that “Hey, God is way too demanding of you, God is unreasonable.” Then he likes to distract us with the lure of sex, drugs, alcohol and all other things that make the senses respond. He encourages us to believe that all that matters in life is finding earthly pleasures, wealth and as many possessions as we can get our hands on. God has nothing against us being happy and having things, however, He doesn’t want these things put ahead of Him because when it’s all said and done, none of it goes with us when we leave this earth. NONE of it. But the enemy would have us believe that this is NOT true, that there is nothing more important than making sure that we get what we want even if that means forsaking God for it.

Satan loves to lure people into addiction because this gives him more pleasure than anything else. It is through any kind of addiction that he has the shortest leash on someone and can truly take control of them. We need to stop and realize that all substances such as food, alcohol, and drugs must be treated with caution because just as heaven has a good use for all these things, the enemy of God has a misuse for all these things!

So who is Satan? The enemy of God. The one that tries to fill us with doubt about people around us, about God. He wants us to self-doubt so that we will feel unworthy of God’s love and make it easier for us to turn our backs on our Creator. He tells us we are failures so that we become weak and don’t believe that we can’t continue on the path that God has put before us.

Satan is everything God isn’t and everything he wanted to be before he was cast out of heaven.