This week’s lie – God helps those who help themselves – is a good culmination of many of the lies we’ve studied so far. As we’ve seen with each lie, Satan wants to make Jesus Christ small in our lives and exalt our own egos. He will stop at nothing to tempt us into believing that we can help ourselves to salvation and don’t really need Jesus to save us.
It’s easy to get lost in the philosophical and technical debates about the cross with complex definitions such as penal substitutionary atonement and propagation, but the sacrifice of Jesus is much simpler and more important than the technical terms can make us believe. Jesus died for you and for me, each one of us as individuals.
The fact that Jesus Christ had to die on the cross to satisfy the wrath of God against sin, is being disputed in philosophical debates and theological circles around the world and even challenged from progressive church pulpits by well-known pastors. Why did Jesus really have to die on the cross? Why does it matter?
We cannot do anything to become closer to God than we already are by the purchasing blood of Jesus Christ. No matter how hard we believe or pray, we cannot reach a higher level of Christianity, because Christianity is not a pyramid scheme. Therefore, if we can’t “let go” more than trusting in Jesus Christ, how do we let God do what we need him to do for us? It’s simple – we don’t let God do anything.
On the surface, “let go and let God” can appear to instruct us to surrender our will to God and trust in his wisdom. Unfortunately, this lie has morphed into an instruction during life’s struggles and difficulties that has left us confused and hurt. How do you actually let go and let God?
In the age of self, there is very little space for God and his magnificent gospel. However, during his life here on earth, Jesus Christ taught us that mankind’s power does not come from self-exaltation but rather in bowing meek and fearless before our Creator.
This week we investigate Lie #5 of The Gospel According to Satan: Your life is what you make it. We live in the age of self where we are inundated with self-help books by self-made gazillionaires promoting themselves on your social media feeds with their selfies. The devil is trying his best to convince us that we can create the life we want all by ourselves.
In chapter 4 of his book, The Gospel According to Satan, Jared Wilson shows us through the example of Job that our feelings in response to this seen world is not the ultimate reality. We hope in the love of Jesus and our eternal future with him.
God gave us emotions to enable us to experience the complex spectrum of life’s joys and sorrows. These feelings were supposed to lead us back to him, but in the Garden they became cross-wired and we’re still trying to figure them out. Emotions can be a good barometer of how we cope, process or experience the world we find ourselves in, but they do not tell us much about the world itself.
Jared Wilson reminds us that God’s truth is always true and we are not permitted to alter, remove or add to his truth. Some people regard the Bible as a difficult book – not because the words are hard to understand but because we do not always like what the words say.