If You Were the Devil
If You Were the Devil
by Lonnie Lane
What if you were the devil and for eons you had been trying to outsmart God and to upstage His claim on worship and glory and splendor and sovereignty and now you had to deal with those, uh, peasants, fisherman, nobodies … and even women who are going around acting like they had the power of God on them? What would you do?
You might say to yourself with seething words and slinking posture, Sssssomething has to be done! Thissss can’t be allowed to continue. With all that I tried to do to destroy the Sssson of God He conquered my greatest weapon, the fear of death, by willingly facing His own death. And as if that wasn’t enough… being raised from the dead He made a public dissssplay of me, making me look weak, you might spit out with growling venom in your throat. Pausing for a moment to try and peer into the future, you might think, Now He’s given the Holy Spirit to these Jews. They’re worse than Yeshua was. At least He was only one Person but now there are thousands of them, all giving their allegiance to God.
You might hold your head as if you had a splitting headache if you were the devil. You might even have one. Then you might continue: It was bad enough when I only had to deal with the Jews, but now they’re telling the Gentiles about Him. If I don’t do something the whole world will know about Him and how he disssgraced me. They will all believe in Him and turn to God. Now let me ssssee. What can I do to get them to believe me instead? you might deliberate if you were the devil.
One thing was certain. God had made it clear from the beginning: “Salvation is of the Jews.” And so, if you were the devil, you might say to your counsel of screeching demons, “It would seem that we can’t stop the spread of this faith in the Resurrected One. They think they’re so strong in God. Well, we must weaken them. Here’s what we’ll do. Plan Number One: We mussst get the Jews out of the picture. Since salvation comes from them they must be eliminated from the church. We mussst bring division and disunity between the Jews and the rest of them. It won’t be easy. It’ll take some time.”
When the Believers in the Book of Acts 15 wrote to the Gentiles to tell them how to live their new lives in Messiah, they expected they would be attending synagogues to learn more of what God mandated for Israel, of how to live their lives as people now serving the God of Israel. This is what is meant by the apostles when they said, “For Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21). The commandments in Torah which God gave to Moses would be learned by the Gentiles in synagogues as they learned how to love one another, how to live righteous lives, being accountable to God and each other, keeping the Sabbath and the feasts of the Lord, and observing the Ten Commandments.
Since the Jewish Believers continued to be part of Israel, believing that all Israel would be saved, it would seem only natural for proselytes to likewise join them in the freedom, though not the legalism, of the community of God, as Gentiles who wished to join them had before. As the Gentiles learned the ways of the Jews, they entirely changed the way they saw life and how they lived with one another. Being the husband of one wife, being responsible for their children, being honest, not coveting another man’s wife, not stealing… all these were new for the most part to the Gentiles as they learned how to serve the God of Israel. If you were the devil you were likely to observe this and ruminate on how to change the direction of these Gentiles so that they weren’t contributing to the ways of God in the earth, as He commanded through the Torah.
After all, you would likely think if you were the devil, The last thing I want is for the Gentiles to be acting in ways that strengthen them to be like the people of God. We need to be sure to sanctify their pagan ways and make them think they are holy. We have to do something about these Gentiles who are now being like the Jews. Yeshua summed up the Torah to them as love. Oh, how I hate that word love, you might say wincing as if in great pain. I have to do something about getting THAT out of the way. I must get rid of the Jews once and for all. We have to get them and all they believe about God out of the church. They may have been there at the start, but by all that’s unholy, I’ll make the church look like it’s so far from being of the Jews it’ll seem like sin to include them! That will be my highest priority.
After all, you might say, for as much division as we’ve been able to put between the Jews with their sects of Pharisees and Sadducees and Essenes, they still have had centuries of living with God. They understand the fear of God. They know He’s a holy God. So we must be sure that the Gentiles in the church think that all the ways of the Jews and the commandments are obsolete so that they don’t need to know them or keep them. Our job now, you might say as you paraded yourself in pretended pomp before your demonic army of demented subjects, is to make the church despise the things that are of the Jews, including the Torah. Make them think they are doing a wiser thing in doing away with all that.
And for hell’s sake, be sure to lie to the Gentiles so they think that God hates the Jews and never let them see the compassion or the passion of God for the Jews! The Gentiles must be made to think that the commands of the Torah aren’t for them so that they never look beyond the ten commandments. And whatever you do, make sure they think Torah is about law and obligation rather than freedom and love.
And see to it that they think that because Yeshua took them out from under the curse of the law that they can disregard what the Torah has to teach them. Be sure that they are blinded to Yeshua’s words that anyone teaching against Torah would be the least in the Kingdom of God. See to it that the people revere those men who teach against the Torah and make sure these men and not the original Jewish apostles are called, the “church fathers” so the people will obey what they say. Once they turn against Torah they’ll turn against the Jews and we will have accomplished a great victory in weakening the church!
And so in time, if you were the devil, you would have managed with your hordes of demons to convince the church of the lie that God was through with the Jews and that the church was justified when they vilified the Jews and their writings. And you would have so blinded the church after a while that they never realized that the Holy Spirit withdrew about the same time that they outlawed things Hebrew, for after all, the Torah was written by the Holy Spirit as He inspired men to write, and to excommunicate the Jews and their Torah was to excommunicate the Spirit of God.
But there had been another problem which the devil resolved rather early on. Because the church had been winning people to the Lord left and right something else had to be done to stop them. So, if you were the devil, you might think, Well, now, if God gave gifts to the church of people to equip them to do the work of the ministry, we must dismantle those gifts so that they can no longer function. We must, convince men that they are the ones who decide who is anointed, so that they control who is in charge, not the Holy Spirit. We must be sure that we make certain men whom we can control think they are doing the controlling. Make them lord it over others so that the people are immobilized from functioning under the Spirit.
You might address the bickering crowd who do your bidding, telling them, Make sure you do everything you can, demons, to establish a hierarchy so that a few control the rest. This will keep the masses silenced where those gifts are concerned. I want you to do everything you can, to do away with the apostles they make ssssure leadership according to the Spirit is instituted and that Yeshua is central and supreme. We certainly never want that to happen, so make them believe that apostles only existed right after Yeshua was alive and not after so we never have to deal with that anointing.
Be sure that there are no more evangelists. No more preaching among the people and bringing groups of people together. Put intimidation and fear upon the people of sharing anything of Yeshua with anyone. We’ll have none of that “did not value their lives even unto death” anymore like we had with those early disciples. Make them so fearful and so concerned for their own welfare that they never tell anyone about Yeshua. Make them forget entirely that it was His great commission for them to go and make disciples of all men. Oh how those very words are piercing to my ears.
Be sure above all that the Bible is locked away from the people so that they never have the truth. Our lies are what they are to believe. Give them stained glass windows instead of the Word so they have something to look up to. Make sure that all the pictures make Yeshua and his disciples look so heavenly that the people think they can never be like them.
And for hell’s sake, be sure you disssscredit anyone who presumes to be a prophet. Make them look ridiculous. Whatever you do, don’t let the people hear any truth from them. If any of them are to continue to speak out, be sure they are speaking false prophecy. If you do your job well, many of the leaders will even help you with this to secure their own positions of power.
We can’t leave them leaderlesssss. We need the leaders to help us control them. Take the gift that’s least mentioned in the Bible, the pastors that’s only mentioned once and elevate them to positions of power they were never meant to carry. Put that burden on them and make them seem like they fill the whole counsel of God for leadership. That way we can wear many of them out and at the same time control the whole group and keep the church from being as effective as they were in the beginning when all the gifts functioned together. Make them all think that all the responsibility of the church is to be upon the pastors so they never notice the apostles, prophets and evangelists are missing. Allow the pastors and teachers to flourish. Put them in the pulpits over the people but be sure they have no real revelation.
And whatever you do, don’t let any of them get the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Once that happens, and they begin to speak in tongues, they’ll pray and come to know things we never want them to know. Be sure they think that tongues is from us so that they’ll fear it. We do not want them to know the power of speaking in tongues! That would be a serious jeopardy for us. Once that happens, we begin to lose our hold on their lives. Do you underssstand? you might hiss at the demons under your authority, if you were the devil.
And be sure to keep them so busy with their daily lives that they never realize that the power of God is no longer there. Tell them the lie that God is not the same yesterday, today and forever. Make sure they believe that God no longer does or is like what He did and was when the first disciples were here. And for hell’s sake, never let them realize there’s a connection between the Jews and the power of God being present.
If you were the devil, these are things you may have thought and said and planned and executed. But today God, who always wins, has said, “Enough!” Today He is restoring to the true Body of Messiah a revelation of how Israel is a part of His plan of salvation to this day. Today He is bringing all who are His back to seeing that to walk with God is to fulfill Torah in loving Him with all our hearts, minds and souls and loving each other as we love ourselves, just as Yeshua summed it up.
Today a unified new humanity is coming together, Jew and Gentile as God intended from the beginning and before this is over, the earth and the heavens will see the greatest display of the witness of God the world has ever known, even in the beginning of the church because God has declared that “the latter will be greater than the former.”
Will the devil still try and defile the people of God? Will he still try and discredit God? Will he still try to destroy the Jews and Israel? Will in time he also want to put an end to any Gentiles who seek to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in Yeshua’s Name? The answer to all is yes, he will. The darkness that comes with his lies that what is good is bad and what is bad is good will cover the earth.
But the light of God and His glory will cover those who are His, and despite any plans of the devil, we will be witnesses of our God and rewarded with the righteousness of Yeshua which is also our entrance to eternity with God. And we will join together in a great shout of rejoicing as we see the devil and his demons thrown into the lake of fire, the fullness of his weakness exposed finally and forever. And his lies will burn with him and we will worship our God in spirit and in truth, Jew and Gentile together. Amen.
Lonnie would enjoy hearing your response to this or her other articles. You may send them to LLane@sidroth.org and she will be glad to respond to you. Use this same address to contact Lonnie about speaking engagements. For Lonnie’s other articles, go to our Powerful Prayer section on this web site.
Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Lonnie Lane comes from a family of four generations of Jewish believers, being the first one saved in 1975. Lonnie has been in church leadership for many years, and has planted two “one new man” house fellowships one with her brother Michael Lane in the Philadelphia suburbs and the other in Jacksonville, Florida, where she now lives near 6 of her 8 grandchildren. Lonnie is the author of “Because They Never Asked.” She is the Producer of Messianic Vision’s radio and TV shows and the International Prayer Co-Coordinator for Messianic Vision’s intercessors.