Satan’s Strategy for Your Life #36: Follow A Different Christ

“And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of His mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.” 

—2 Thessalonians 2:8-10

From the beginning of time Satan has been at war with God, although his war is more like a rabid dog in a cage while the owner looks on. Satan is not God’s nemesis any more than a fly on a horse. Satan is a limited creature that roams back and forth within this world. He does not possess any of God’s omni’s (omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence). He is a limited being that has been allowed a certain period of time to roam and terrorize the earth. And terrorize he does. He tries with all of his power to thwart God’s plan even going so far as to present an alternative Christ. Being a fallen angel, he knows God, God’s plan, and his own ultimate doom. He is an expert theologian, knows the Bible, and even knows how to present himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14) in order to attempt to turn people away from the risen Christ.

Our passage for today reveals what is going to happen in the last days when Christ returns. Right before Jesus returns, the “lawless one” will be revealed, also known as the “anti-christ” (see 1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7). This “lawless one” is known as the  

“the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God”—2 Thessalonians 2:3-4.

This “lawless one” will be empowered by Satan, able to do all kinds of false signs and wonders for the sheer purpose of deceiving those who are perishing in their sin. Why? Because they refused to love the truth of God’s good news made available through Christ and so be saved.

Satan has always wanted glory for himself and if he has to use a human agent to help bring that about, then he will. He has tried to exalt himself to god status from the beginning (cf. Isaiah 14:12-14), but failed miserably then and will fail for eternity, despite how hard he works and how much he plans.

The devil wants to create false Christ’s for each of us. He wants to create a Jesus who loves us in our sin, and is comfortable with us staying there. He wants a Jesus who says that every religion is okay and that we don’t need to read the Bible, pray, go to church, or live a holy life. Satan wants us to have a Christ that lets everybody in heaven and won’t let anybody go to hell. He wants us to have a Jesus that loves everybody so much that he forgives our sin and doesn’t care if we change. There is only one problem with this Jesus—he’s not real. He is a projection of who we are, a figment of our imagination, a Jesus of our own design, created in our own image. We are not free to make God in our image. We are to acknowledge that we are created in His. Many of us follow a Jesus of our own construction rather than the Jesus of the Bible. And we need to repent of that. The Jesus of the Bible is loving, indeed, more loving than we could ever imagine. But the Jesus of the Bible is resolute and unwavering. He is the God of hope and the God of wrath. He will not pardon the sin of those who just try and do their best, because it will never be enough. There is only one way to get into heaven—trust in what He has already done. And that means falling on our knees in repentance, surrendering our self-sufficiency at the feet of the Savior, acknowledging that He is the God who loved us and purchased us for Himself so that we might live forever with Him in everlasting joy. May God give us the courage to recognize the false Christ’s of Satan’s deception. And may we might walk with the real Jesus—the risen and ruling Savior. Amen.