Tagged: Satan the destroyer
Satan: The Destroyer (Part 5)
The following excerpt is taken from What Every Christian Should Know About Satan. Order your copy in print, Kindle, or Audible versions here.
[Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4 of this brief series on Satan: The Destroyer. This is the final installment.]
Satan seeks not only to destroy our spiritual lives – our confidence in the Lord, our testimonies, our spiritual disciplines – but our physical lives as well. In The Strategy of Satan, Warren Wiersbe points out that Satan targets our bodies for a number of reasons.
First, our bodies are temples where God resides (1 Cor. 6:19-20; Phil. 1:20; 1 Pet. 2:9). “This means when Satan attacks your body, he is attacking the one means God has for revealing his grace and love to a lost world. Creation reveals the power, wisdom, and glory of God; but Christians reveal the grace and love of God.”
Second, our bodies are God’s tools (Rom. 6:12-13). Just as he employed the natural abilities of Noah to build an ark, and the skills of Bezalel and Oholiab to construct the tabernacle, the Lord uses our bodies as his hands and feet to carry out the Great Commission.
“Just as God the Son had to take on a body to accomplish his work on earth, so the Holy Spirit needs our bodies,” writes Wiersbe. The members of your bodies are tools in the Spirit’s hands to help build the church here on earth. We should never minimize the stewardship of our bodies. “The Christian who is careless about his health or safety is playing right into the hands of the destroyer.”
Continue reading Satan: The Destroyer (Part 4)
The following excerpt is taken from What Every Christian Should Know About Satan. Order your copy in print, Kindle, or Audible versions here.
[See posts #1, #2, and #3 on Satan: The Destroyer]
In this post, we continue our examination of 1 Peter 5:6-9:
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your cares on him, because he cares about you. Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour. Resist him, firm in the faith, knowing that the same kind of sufferings are being experienced by your fellow believers throughout the world.
Prowling, roaring, ravaging
Peter depicts Satan as a prowling, roaring, and voracious lion, seeking “anyone he can devour.” First, he prowls around (peripateo – to make one’s way; to make due use of opportunities). This harkens back to Job 1:7 and 2:2, in which the Lord asks the satan where he has come from. “From roaming through the earth,” the adversary replies, “and walking around on it.” According to Marvin Vincent, the word peripateo gave identity to a sect of Greek philosophers known as Peripatetics, who walked around while teaching or disputing. Satan is the consummate Peripatetic – always on the move, and always looking for a fight.
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