The Devil’s DNA - Part A

Here's a group of people who believe that God was their father, but they had the devil's DNA. They had murder in their hearts. They detested truth, and they hated God's messenger. So Jesus will give them in this paragraph, a paternity test ways to tell who their real spiritual father is.

Welcome to Connect with Skip weekend edition. It's been well said that we always fear what we don't understand. So today we're going to learn a whole lot about our enemy, the devil. And in learning to understand him, we'll learn why even though he is a powerful foe, he isn't somewhat a child of God needs to fear.

The fact is there's no demon or devil that doesn't fear God. And Skip Heitzig will get us started here in just a moment. But first, we have an excellent resource for you this month at connectwithskip.com. If you want to fix a society, they need truth. If you want to fix a broken political system, you need to infuse it with truth and expose ourselves to the truth of the Word of God. True freedom is ours, but we need to understand the terms.

That's the truth of the Word of God. That's what you'll find in our freedom package of resources by Skip Heitzig. The package features Skip's 10 full-length message set of your path to freedom messages, including Securing the Foundations and Jesus in the Age of Confusion. The freedom package is our thanks for your gift of $50 or more to support Connect with Skip Heitzig.

So request your freedom package today when you give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. We'll start today in verse 37 of John chapter 8. So turn there and Skip Heitzig gets us started by addressing an issue that's very prevalent in today's culture. There's a popular notion that's been around for some time now known as universalism. The idea of universalism is that everyone, no matter who they are or what they believe, will eventually be saved.

And the tenant of universalism is called the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, that since God is the father of all humanity, we are all one another's brothers and sisters. Well, that would be lovely to think so, but it would also be wrong to think that. If you believe the Bible, moreover, if you just believe the red words of Jesus Christ, you could not come to that idea. That idea and ideas like that fall under the category of, well, let's call them Hollywood truths. You know what a Hollywood truth is? If you were to just live your life watching films, you would come up with a whole worldview that's different from reality. Hollywood truths don't really happen in the real world.

Let me give you an example of Hollywood truths. All grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread. There's always one sticking out that paper bag in the movies. The ventilation system of any building is the perfect hiding place. They're always up there. Here's another one. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window in Paris.

Every time they shoot a movie in Paris, out the window is the Eiffel Tower. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating, but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds. Is that right? Man, he'll roll with the punches, and the little girl dabs a little, wah-rah.

Here's another one. Persons knocked unconscious by a blow to the head will never suffer brain damage. It's always possible to park a car directly outside the building you're visiting. I've always been amazed that they never look for parking spaces, pull right up, nobody's there and they run right in New York. Any lock can be picked by a credit card or paper clip in seconds, unless it's the door leading to a burning building with a child trapped inside. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts, so you know exactly when the bomb will go off. Medieval peasants had perfect teeth. Oh my goodness.

It's not necessary to say hello or goodbye when you begin or end a phone conversation. And finally, it doesn't matter if you're heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts. Your enemies will patiently wait to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessors. Those are Hollywood truths, doesn't happen in real life. Well Jesus didn't have Hollywood to contend with, but he had, let's call it Folly-wood to contend with. People with foolish and wrong ideas about spiritual things. Not only is God not the father of all humanity, God is not the father of many people who think God is their father.

That's what we're gonna find out today in this paragraph. The fatherhood of God, whose child are you really? Here's a group of people who believe that God was their father, but they had the devil's DNA. They had murder in their hearts.

They detested truth and they hated God's messenger. So Jesus will give them, in this paragraph, a paternity test, ways to tell who their real spiritual father is. Now paternity tests have become very popular in the last several years because it seems there are so many children that no one exactly knows who the father is. Every year in the United States of America, 220,000 paternity tests are performed.

It's gotten so bad in England that according to one source at the University of Liverpool, one in 25 dads unknowingly are raising another man's child. Well, how do we know what our spiritual DNA is? Are there tests that we can take?

Yes, indeed, there is a test we can take, and we're gonna look at that this morning. And you can tell by simply seeing the similarities in traits. If I were to stand my son up next to me this morning, it's pretty easy to tell that we're related.

There's so many features that are similar. And so it is spiritually. There are traits that children of a father, spiritually speaking, will exhibit. Now this morning I'm gonna begin going from wide to narrow, from the premise that Jesus is working off of, as seen in all of the verses we're gonna read. There are 11 verses we're gonna look at, verse 37 to 47.

So we'll start with the premise. We'll move to the group that Jesus speaks to, the pretenders, those who pretended that they were children of God, and then finally to the paternity test itself. Verse 37, the conversation continues from what we have been reading the last few weeks. Jesus is speaking. He says, I know that you are Abraham's descendants, but you seek to kill me, because my word has no place in you. I speak what I have seen with my father, and you do what you have seen with your father. They answered and said to him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if you were Abraham's children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God.

Abraham did not do this. You do the deeds of your father. Now they have no idea what he's speaking about when he's saying your father.

They will in a moment. They said to him, we're not born of fornication. We have one father, God.

Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me. For I proceeded forth and came from God, nor have I come of myself, but he sent me. Why do you not understand my speech? Because you're not able to listen to my word. You are of your father, the devil. And the desires of your father you want to do, he was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there's no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources or his native language, where he is a liar and the father of it. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin?

And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears God's words, therefore you do not hear because you are not of God. The words of Jesus Christ indicate that he is working off of a premise.

I don't want you to miss that. The premise is the devil is real. Jesus refers to the devil in this paragraph as being real. Not only that, but because he's speaking of the devil in the same paragraph as he speaks of Abraham, a historical figure, he's referring to the devil as a real historical figure. Not only that, but Jesus refers to the devil as someone personal. Notice the personal pronouns the Lord uses. He refers to the devil as he, not it, him, not that.

Personal pronouns. In other words, Jesus' premise is that the devil was real, historical, and personal. And even more than that, that he was fallen.

He was fallen from someplace where he was before and has sunk to a lower level. Look at verse 44. It says, he does not stand in the truth. The old King James says, he abode not in the truth. That is, he had once a standing from which he fell. He's not in that standing any longer.

Now he's a murderer. He's a liar. Now I bring all of that up as the premise, because to most people, the idea of a real historical personal fallen being called the devil is sheer nonsense. Sheer nonsense. It's mythological. People made it up. They had to deal with their guilty conscience, so they talk about a devil. That's what most people believe. That's because he's the stuff cartoons are made out of.

He's that little guy in the tight red underwear that runs around with a goatee and horns and a pitchfork. I'm not gonna believe in that. The Gallup organization helps us understand what Americans really believe. According to the Gallup poll, 70, seven zero percent of Americans believe in a devil.

Seventy. However, of the people that believe in the devil, according to Gallup, 35 percent, or excuse me, half of that 70 percent say that the devil is a personal real being. The other half believe that he's a metaphor of evil, a symbol of evil, not a real person.

The Barna research organization gives us even further help. They made a statement, and they asked people to respond to the statement. Do you agree with the statement or disagree with the statement? Here's the statement. The devil is not a living being.

He is just the symbol of evil. That's the statement. They asked people that. Let me make a statement.

Now, would you please respond to it? Here's what they found. Of those who claimed to be born-again Christians, 32 percent strongly agree the devil is not a real being. He's just a symbol. Also, 11 percent agree somewhat, whatever that means. Five percent don't know.

Here's the point they're making. Forty-eight percent, almost half, in this survey, almost half of those who said we're born-again Christians would say the devil isn't real. He is simply a metaphor or a symbol of evil. Like the two little six-year-old boys who were having a conversation, and one said, I don't believe in a devil, and the friend said, you don't believe in the devil? He's written about all over the Bible. The first guy said, yeah, I know, but he's sort of like Santa Claus. Well, the devil turns out to really be your dad. Well, according to Jesus, he might be your dad, spiritually speaking. But the premise he's working off of is the devil is real, historical, personal, and fallen from his original position, and is now a malevolent being, wreaking havoc. There's another part of the premise. Not only is there a real devil, but everyone has a relationship with him.

Everyone has a relationship. That is, he is either your spiritual father, or God is your spiritual father. Everybody would like to say, well, God is my spiritual father, but Jesus is not so quick. Everybody has a relationship with the devil. You're either on his team, and part of his family, or you follow Jesus Christ, which means you've defected, you jump ship, and the devil is now your enemy. A lot of people immediately and automatically resist that notion that I just stated. They'll say something like, nobody controls me, I make my own choices, I'm the master of my own ship, the captain of my own fate.

You'd love to think so. According to John White, he writes in a great little book called The Fight, I love that book, he writes this, you may not have realized you had a relationship with the devil at all, unless you were fooling around with the occult. Yet aware of it or not, his spirit was at work in your body. Unknown to you, his deceptions obscured your thinking, while his music inflamed your senses and influenced your will. He thought of himself as your master, but like credit rating agencies, he makes himself unobtrusive as possible. His greatest skill lay in giving you a feeling that you were your own master.

That's his lie, you're the master, you make your choice, nobody influences you. It's interesting that White in that paragraph said, unless you were fooling around with the occult, I was, I've been there, done that, played around with astral projection, spirit writing, I've told you my story. Here's the deal, when I was doing all those things, I knew they were wrong. I knew that I was dealing with something demonic. So one day I got to thinking, because I had a religious background, I thought, if there's this much power on the wrong side, there's got to be a whole lot more power on the right side.

But I understood, there's something very powerful that is happening here. However, for most people, they play this unknowing part of being part of a global satanic conspiracy while they are unaware. See the Bible says, Ephesians, Paul writes, we don't struggle against flesh and blood, but principalities and powers, and he sums it up by saying, spiritual forces of evil in heavenly realms. So the premise Jesus works off of is, there's a real devil, he's historical, he's personal, he's fallen, and everybody has a relationship with him.

Once again, I love how Jesus puts it so simply, and breaks it down to the irreducible minimum. You're either born again, or you're not. You are either in light, or you are in darkness. You are either saved, or you are lost. You are either sons of God, or sons of the devil. You're either for me, or against me.

He does that a lot. Now if you're a Christian, the devil is your enemy. Can I just say, that's where you want him. You go, you do?

Yep. If you're going to have any relationship with him at all, you don't want him as your friend, you want him as your enemy. You want to have defected from his kingdom, and be followers of the Lord, because greater is he that is in you, that is the Lord Jesus Christ, if you're a believer, than he that is in this world system, that is the devil. Let's move and get a little more narrower, from the premise to the pretenders, the crowd Jesus is speaking to. Verse 37, he says, I know that you are Abraham's descendants. Now they had claimed they were, and they were. They were physical descendants of Abraham. They were Jewish people.

However, they were pretenders. Because what they're doing is hiding behind their physical ancestry, trusting in that for their spiritual standing before God. He acknowledges, I know you're Abraham's descendants. Look at verse 39, they answered and said to him, Abraham is our father.

Jesus said to them, if you were Abraham's children, you would do the works of Abraham, but now you seek to kill me. If you're gonna have somebody in your family tree, Abraham's a good guy to have in your family tree. He's the man of faith in the Old Testament. It says in Genesis 15, Abraham believed God, and God accounted that to him for righteousness. In fact, the New Testament holds up Abraham as the example of faith. An entire chapter of Romans, Romans 4, Paul devotes to Abraham, the example of faith. Hebrews chapter 12, that list of people who believed, Abraham is one of the first. And the writer of Hebrews says, by faith, Abraham obeyed God. So you have Abraham believed God, Abraham obeyed God, there's something else Abraham did. Abraham received heavenly messengers. Remember Genesis 18, those three people that came as visitors, and Abraham went out of his way to get Sarah to whip something up for him, a nice meal, and he treated him real special.

They were God's messengers. Well, God doesn't have any grandchildren, a fact that the devil often uses to his distinct advantage. In fact, there's so many ways the devil likes to deceive, confuse, and mislead. So we'll continue with our study of what makes him tick next time.

And before we go today, here's Skip and Laniya with a final thought about today's study. Well, I don't want to become church lady or anything here in this juncture, but you just mentioned a whole lot of ways the devil deceives people and confuses them. So… Would it be Satan? And you know, when you walk through a bookstore or just even look at videos or, you know, drive to the theater, it just seems like, I don't know, there's zombies and vampires and witchcraft and a cult. And it seems to me to make little of much, something that maybe have greater consequences, danger than people realize.

So do you think there's a problem with this kind of entertainment or, you know, how do we deal with that? I think it's always been popular. I think that from time to time, we notice it more or things do trend upward with a popular thing like vampire movies and books. When I was in high school, there was like Dark Shadows.

It was a whole sitcom thingy that was all vampires. And I remember in high school when the Church of Satan got very popular, Anton Zander LeVay and his followers. And some people just joined that purely out of entertainment and they were bored. But there's a dark side to these things.

I've interviewed people from the Church of Satan and they've told me their background and how weird it can get and the sacrifices in the belief system. So I think probably it goes out as entertainment, that light-hearted level, but what's behind that is a reality. There's principalities and powers and there is darkness. And we ought not to dabble in it, number one. Number two, we ought to know what is really behind it, the truth of what the Scriptures say.

And then I think to not get freaked out by it. The Bible says, greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. The power that we have in Christ is insurmountable and any assailing of the enemies of God can't get through. God can do all things. Maybe he can take some of those scary movies or programs and scare people into heaven.

I would hope so. I remember when I saw The Exorcist and I did it as soon as I was saved. I could not sleep. And it just so freaked me out that I went outside of the theater in Hollywood and I started sharing the Gospel with the next line that was waiting to get in.

This is the pre-released version of it. Because it was rooted in reality. It was made entertainment. It was rooted in reality. Well, the other thing is, I think maybe the listeners forget some of the great authors of old, Tolkien and C.S.

Lewis. In their writings, they had a very vivid description of the dark side and the light. And so whether it was Moldor or... Cosmic battles. Yes. It is through generations and it can be redeemed, you know, if it's used in the right hands as well, like a Lewis or a Tolkien, The Hobbit and so on. That's right. There is a battle and we need to know what side we're on and we need to know how detrimental the wrong side is.

Well, those are some vitally important things for us to remember. So thank you, Skip and Lenya. And before we go today, if you'd like a copy of today's message, it's available on CD for just $4 plus shipping. You can find it at connectwithskip.com.

Or you can call us and order one at 1-800-922-1888. We'll continue to explore the devil's DNA next time. So join us to learn a little bit more about what makes him tick, right here in Connect with Skip weekend edition, a presentation of Connection Communications. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross, cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection, a connection, a connection. Bringing you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.