Diabolical - Agenda #1 - Divide and Conquer, Part 1

Where do good and evil come from?

Have you ever thought about that? I mean, if something is good, where does goodness come from? And if something is evil, where does evil come from? We're going to begin a series today called Diabolical, Satan's Agenda for Planet Earth, including you. And together we'll discover the force behind the evil in this world. And we'll find out how to protect ourselves from Satan's attacks on us and those we love.

Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Chip's our Bible teacher for this daily discipleship program, Motivating Christians to Live Like Christians. I'm Dave Druey, and as Chip just mentioned, the series we're about to dive into focuses on Satan's evil intentions for every follower of Christ. In the coming programs, Chip will point out the obvious and subtle ways Satan works to derail our personal and spiritual lives. We'll also learn about the biblical defenses we can use to protect ourselves and our families against our true enemy. With that said, if you have your Bible ready, turn to Acts chapter 6 for Chip's message, Divide and Conquer.

I'm holding something in my hands that you probably recognize maybe from junior high or elementary school as you were learning about the world, but this is the globe. And what I want you to know, that for this entire planet, and everything and every person on this planet, there are two competing agendas. God has an agenda for every person on this planet. He has an agenda for nations. He has an agenda for every man, every woman, every child, and it's an agenda of unstoppable grace, of compassion and love and restoration. By contrast, Satan has an agenda for this planet. He has an agenda for nations and how they function, for communities, for every man, for every woman and every child, and his agenda is to kill and to steal and destroy. And anything that is good, anything that is of God, anything that is positive, anything that is wholesome and winsome, he wants to destroy it.

Somewhere, you're on this, I'm on this, and as a result, we're involved in a pretty big battle that if we're not careful, you just find yourself like the Google map, zooming, zooming, zooming, zooming, this tiny little spot, and you can think that little spot that where you're living is where life happens, and you can miss the big picture agenda. We're gonna talk about Satan's agenda for planet Earth, including you. We looked at God's unstoppable agenda in Acts chapters one through five. Jesus defined the agenda in one verse.

John chapter 10, verse 10, he says, the thief, speaking of Satan, his agenda or purpose is to kill and steal and destroy. He says, my purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. I love the way the New Living Translation put that. I came that you might have it life, Jesus said, and have it more abundantly. And so I just want you to get a macroscopic view of the whole world and the planet and history and realize God's agenda is one word, life.

Would you write that in your notes? It's life. It's unstoppable. It's forgiveness. It's healing. It's grace. It's peace. It's removing shame. It's giving new life. It's doing something inside of you so that the love of God isn't just experienced, but it's shared. You're his ambassador.

You're his agent. Satan's agenda can be described in one word as well. It's death. He deceives, he lies, he corrupts, he brings shame, and then he brings temptations to you and me to get you to do something or to treat someone or try to get a good thing in a bad way or at a bad time that will kill relationships.

That brings shame to your heart, that makes you depressed, that ruins relationships, that divides families, that breaks up small groups, that ruins churches and business places. His is diabolical. It's not passive. It's not kind of bad. It's not something over there.

If we don't mess with it, it won't mess with us. No, it's diabolical. As I was studying these chapters and praying and came up with a lot of very bad titles, and then I said, Lord, I know those aren't ones, so will you show me? And early one morning, just as I was waking up, it's like the Spirit of God said, diabolical. And I don't know about you, but I don't use that word a lot. And so I went to Webster's, and then I went to a little Wikipedia, and here's what, between the two of them, this is what diabolical means. It means something extremely wicked or cruel, evil, fiendish, hellish, vile, vicious, satanic, infernal, demonic, despicable, deplorable. Those are like the worst words in the whole world. You need to understand that you're in a battle, and there's competing agenda, and God has won, and Satan has won, and your soul and your relationships and your life are constantly being bombarded by agents of grace and agents of evil. And you need to understand the lay of the land and what to do and when and how and recognize when it happens. When I thought of that, I thought if someone asked me to kind of draw a box and write in it things that I think are diabolical by that definition, I jotted a few things.

In fact, I'd encourage you, I left a few blanks. To me, genocide is diabolical. I mean, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Sudan, Stalin, 50, 60 million people, kills his own people, ethnic cleansing. It's diabolical.

It should never happen. The sexual abuse of children, slavery of sex slaves, it's diabolical. Betrayal.

Someone you trust, someone you love, someone who commits to you and then just lies and just does the exact opposite and you learn about it later. It's evil, it's fiendish, it's terrible. Abusing kids. Taking a prescription that you know secretly will cause certain side effects but you can get billions of dollars and passing it on through.

Knowing that cancer and death, even if it's just 1% of the people, it occurs. Diabolical. Taking resources and putting poison in water that destroys people down the road or downstream because you can leverage it here for profit. Diabolical.

What would you put in that box? What's the most evil, diabolical, terrible thing? I mean, axe murders, serial killers, kidnapping little girls and chaining them to beds and basements.

Horrendous things. There's evil in the world. This isn't philosophical.

This isn't metaphysical. There's evil. And there is evil pointed at that planet and there's an agenda to make it global and individual and pervasive. Let me give you just kind of seven things that the Scripture teaches that will give you a framework as we talk about this diabolical agenda.

Number one, precepts to remember. Good and evil are realities. They're not merely concepts or metaphors. It comes right out of the life of Christ. Matthew 4, it's Jesus faced to faith with Satan. This wasn't just some ethereal. It was a real angelic being who is evil trying to tempt our Lord to bail out on God's plan.

Very real. Second, God is the source of all good and Satan is the author of evil. James chapter one says, every good and perfect gift comes from above from the father of lights with whom there's no variation or shifting shadow. He says, don't let any man say when he's tempted, I'm tempted of God for God can tempt no one. Evil was introduced into our world system through our enemy Satan, through our original parents.

It's Genesis chapter three. Third fact, Satan is a fallen angel who led one third of the angels in rebellion against God. You can read about that in Ezekiel 28 or Isaiah 14. Sometimes with all the Hollywood and all the different TV shows and all the sensationalism, we get this idea that there's this gory, scary, crazy sensational and that's what Satan is all about. Actually, Satan was called Lucifer, star of the morning. He was the chief of all the cherubs, which were the highest level of angels. He served at the sight of God. He was the most beautiful of all the angels. He was the wisest, most knowledgeable of all angels. And his fall was, he got caught up in his own beauty and his own pride and he started a coup. He wanted to take, he wanted God's job.

And a third of the angels followed him and when angels, that's what they are, when they turn evil, they're called demons. And so there's a battle that's very real. For we're in invisible war with temporal and eternal consequences. I want you to step back from emails and voicemails and work issues and relationship issues and realize you are in today an invisible war and a battle for your soul and the souls of people that's real. Ephesians 6 will tell you very clearly the armor that you have, the protection that you have. You're being bombarded by lies, by condemnation, by feelings and senses that you don't measure up, by relationships where you think it's all your fault. There's something behind evil that provides all the resources for us to hurt one another in relationships. We own and realize that we do things wrong but there is a tempter and you need to be very aware and you also need to know how to address it. Five, we face a formidable but defeated foe.

I just want you to know as we're going into this, I don't want anybody going home with bad dreams, you know like, ah, okay. He's formidable, he's a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour but he's defeated. Colossians 2 15, he was defeated at the cross which leads to the very next point. We don't fight for victory. We're not trying to figure out who's gonna win this. We fight from victory not for victory.

Greater is he that is in us as followers of Christ than he that is in the world. This is still a real battle. You need to know who you are in Christ. You need to know how to do spiritual warfare. You need to identify is this just me? Could this be demonic activity? You need to understand all that because the very last point is that ignorance is lethal.

I mean lethal. You are so set up to get hurt or to hurt others or to have everything that God wants to do in you and through you thwarted if you're ignorant. When the apostle Paul wrote about these issues, he said it like this to one church. He said you are not ignorant of his schemes.

We get our word strategies. You're not ignorant of Satan's schemes or strategies the way he divides and the way he condemns and the way he lies and the way he deceives. I don't think Paul could write that to most churches today.

I think most churches, most people are absolutely ignorant of his schemes. Now I don't know what your expectations are but this will not be a series about kind of overt sensational spiritual warfare. We're gonna look at behind that the subtle agendas.

But if these seven things that I've outlined as a quick review are foreign to you, you'll notice I put a little asterisk at the bottom. We have a study called the invisible war. We have it in a book form. We have it in a small group form if your small group doesn't know what you want to do yet.

You can get it on CDs or go to Living on the Edge at MP3s real cheap but you need to be aware of how that operates because we're not gonna talk about that side. I'm gonna talk about huge subtle agendas and movements that are wrapped in goodness, that are often wrapped in religion, that are wrapped in practices that you and I unconsciously accept that ruin us and ruin other people. So first I just want you to get, here's some precepts you gotta remember. Here's the framework of what we're talking about. The second thing before we dig in is there's some perceptions I want to challenge. I mean when you talk about Satan, when you talk about the devil, you know we all have some background and pictures pop up.

I love C.S. Lewis. He said there's two great errors when you talk about Satan. One is you think too much about him.

The second is you think too little. I mean believe me, this is not a church and we're not a place where everything is Satan. There's a demon behind every bush. I'm driving my car, I got a flat tire. Oh no, it must be the flat tire demon.

No, it might be an ale. Spiritual realities are real but so are everything else. Everything isn't demonic. Sometimes I have really bad situations because I do really stupid stuff. Sometimes I do sinful stuff and its consequences. So I want you to know that we don't assign or think he's behind everything but there's others.

You don't think about him at all. You don't think why do you have these unexplained waves of depression every time you want to get in the Bible. If you're working on your marriage and you go to counseling and you're making some real steps, why are you having more fights than before? You know you finally decide you go to a small group and someone in that group says something that really offends you and you just feel pushed away.

Why is it every time you take steps toward that which is good, things start to fall apart? Well then, you know what? Maybe you need to understand there's an enemy of your soul. Second perception is when I thought of this term diabolical and I thought well I'm going to name this series Lord because you, best I know that's what you want to do. I think we have a view of diabolical and as I've been studying, God has a different view. It's not that he doesn't think that axe murderers and serial killers and genocide, that is evil for sure.

You know we think those are those diabolical evil terrible things out there that can, that's not us. I've been reading through proverbs and as I've been reading through proverbs this little phrase the Lord detests and then it'll say this, the Lord abhors, God hates and as I was reading through pretty soon I thought I start in my Bible, I put a little box about the Lord detests or every time he hates this or he hates that and I came up with a list. And I thought to myself, you know it just dawned on me as I was studying, if God hates something it must be diabolical right?

I mean he hates it. But I don't have any verses like he hates serial killers or he hates genocide or he hates infanticide or although those things would certainly be true but can I just give you a highlight of this is just what Proverbs says is diabolical in God's eyes. Chapter 3 it says God detests perverse men, perverse women and then so what is a perverse man? Well the passage goes a perverse person in this passage, one who withholds what is good when it's in your power to repay.

In other words you owe someone money, you got the money, you don't pay them. God hates that. He thinks that's diabolical. It's when you plot to harm someone else. It's when you accuse someone for no reason. It's when we envy violent people. God says he hates that. Later on it says he hates and detests haughty eyes, a lying tongue, the shedding of innocent blood, a heart that devises evil, feet that rush to evil and people that stir up dissension. People that gossip, people that take a little thing and divide, people that make you think less of other people, people that mess with, God says he detests it, he hates it. Haughty eyes thinking I'm better than other people, a proud heart, arrogance, God says he hates it. All of a sudden I realize I need to get my little box into a much bigger box because all of those, those who oppress the poor, he abhors. Those who have different weights, business deals where you put stuff on Craigslist, you know it's worth this and you lie a little bit about it, he detests it. And all of a sudden what I realized was it's in the lying and the scheming and the deception that happens in small areas in our hearts, God detests and the things that we call diabolical are just what happens when they bloom and they multiply over time.

C.S. Lewis in his book The Screwtape Letters, if you've never read it, it is a classic and it's placed as an older demon coaching a younger demon about how to deceive God's people. And if you ever want to learn the subtlety, because see this is not going to be about demons and they have big eyes like this and there's manifestations like that and this might happen.

There's a time and place for kind of spiritual warfare, I'm going to tell you 90 plus percent, maybe 99 percent of all the demonic activity that you'll ever face will come packaged so sweetly, so subtly and so deceptively that you'll be on course moving in a direction that will bring ruin to your soul and to your relationships and those around you and you'll never know it. In fact, most of the ways we're going to talk about were accepted. We have unconsciously accepted some things and you'll look at them and I'll look at them and we'll realize why so many marriages don't work, why so many kids hate their parents, why so many churches have so many factions. We're going to see these big subtle ways that his agenda for this planet, he is happiest when what he is doing to us we're oblivious to.

So you ready? We're going to go on a journey. Open your Bibles to Acts chapter 6 and we're going to learn a pattern to recognize. The churches exploded for five chapters, 3,000 come to Christ, 5,000 usually only count the initially the men then their whole families, then the Lord's adding to their number every day. So maybe we have who knows somewhere between 20 to 50 maybe 80,000 people in these first few months the church is exploding and the church is inside Judaism right now.

So all those that are coming to Christ in Jerusalem are Jews. Now I want to give you a little context here. Write down the context is rapid growth or change. I want you to get that. So what's happening now is that there's tens of thousands of people and the market places are full and Peter is you know he's John and James and boy there's all these demands and organizationally it's growing.

They never expected something like this. The second thing I want you to notice is the complaint. A complaint is going to come up of unmet needs.

When things grow rapidly or if there is change in your world and my world it almost always surfaces unmet needs. When there are unmet needs in a marriage, unmet needs in a friendship, unmet needs in a small group, unmet needs in the church, our tendency is to look at the differences and begin to blame the other person and that's where the enemy causes division. Here's what I want you to recognize. Here's agenda number one. Satan wants to divide and conquer. He wants to divide you from your friends, he wants to divide you from your mate, he wants to divide you in your small group, he wants to divide you with your parents, he wants to divide you with your kids, he wants to divide you at work. His agenda, this is the agenda. He'll use lots of different ways and temptations and peoples and personalities and backgrounds and differences but the goal is to divide you and the easiest place to divide us is when we have differences.

Because left to ourselves we move from we're different but I'm right and they're wrong. Now what I want you to do as I read the passage is notice how the early disciples dealt with the differences and the complaint, how they didn't allow the superficial issue to be. They went to the core and how they address it.

You ready? Acts chapter six. In those days, in the days of this rapid growth, the number of the disciples was increasing. The Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebrew Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of the food.

So the twelve gathered all the disciples together and said it would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Now here's a solution side. So you have a complaint.

The complaint is rooted and here's the historical situation. Judaism is made up of three groups now. We read this and we kind of have our Christian eyes. Right now it's all Judaism. Inside Judaism you have the largest faction are people who do not believe Jesus is the Messiah.

You now have a growing faction inside this. You have one circle of people who speak Hebrew and Aramaic who've lived in Jerusalem, who've received Jesus as the Messiah and they're Christians. You have another group who don't speak Hebrew. They probably know some Aramaic to get around because it's the trade language along with Greek. But they're Greek speakers. They came from all around the area and when they came at Pentecost, they heard the message they've become Christians and now they're living in Jerusalem. So they speak Greek, they speak Hebrew. This group, because they've lived elsewhere, they look at the world differently. I mean people who speak a different language from another country, we all get along but we eat different food, we think differently, we have different values, we have different styles.

That's the situation. Now imagine now from 120 people to a few hundred to a few thousand to ten thousand, maybe forty, fifty thousand people and let's just say one or two percent of them are really poor and have needs. A complaint is now they're saying, wait a second, if you're a Hebrew speaking person, your widows are getting the food but ours aren't. Add to this, historically, if you spoke Hebrew and came from Jerusalem, this is well documented, you just look down your nose at every other Jew. You are of the pure, unmixed ancestry here in Jerusalem. Jews are God chosen people and you are the chosen of the chosen. And so you basically think these second class citizens, I mean you know they're okay, they believe in Jesus but we do know who is better. So that's the story, that's what's happening.

Notice what happens. The disciples say we've got a problem. They realize they're going to have to realign their priorities.

Here's the response. Brothers, choose seven from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and we will give our attention to prayer and to the ministry of the word. Well this proposal pleased the entire group and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit and also Philip and Prochorus and Nicanor and Timmon and Parmenas and Nicholas from Antioch who was a convert to Judaism. And they presented these men to the apostles who prayed, laid hands on them, basically delegated the authority.

Now if you had time to study this, all seven of these names, guess what, they're Greek names. So what the apostles basically said was, wait a second, this thing is growing but we've got to step back, not respond emotionally. I mean this is real stuff, they're complaining, what's wrong with you, hey Peter I thought you loved God, how come my, you know my aunt's a widow, what's the deal, right?

This is heavy stuff. They step back and they realize we're overwhelmed, we need to be servants but the ultimate goal, Jesus said what, go and therefore to all the world make disciples, we're overwhelmed. They listen and they say you know what, so they appoint seven of the most godly people who all have Greek names because they're closest to the problem and they come up with a solution. And it pleased the people and then look at verse seven.

So the word of God spread and the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith. And so notice on your notes here, you've got rapid growth, you have an unmet need and then here's the core. Differences are fertile ground for division when growth or change create real or perceived unmet needs. See the core issue is the disciples understood that when things grow and multiply, unmet needs accentuate the differences and when there's differences, that's where the enemy gets in.

Chip will join us here in studio with his application in just a minute. You've been listening to the first part of his message Divide and Conquer from his series Diabolical, Satan's Agenda for Planet Earth, Including You. Satan's mission for every Christ follower is simple, total destruction. Unlike God's plans for you, which are rooted in grace and love, Satan wants to wreck your relationships, isolate you from God and turn you into an ineffective Christian. But with God's help, we not only have the power to oppose Satan's tactics, we can actually defeat him. Through this series, Chip will teach us to recognize Satan's diabolical schemes and defend ourselves against his evil intentions. This is such an important topic, so we hope you'll make the time to be with us for this entire series. For complete series information and resources discounts for Diabolical, just go to LivingOnTheEdge.org or call 888-333-6003.

App listeners, tap Special Offers. Chip, we've just started this series Diabolical that comes out of the book of Acts. Would you take a minute and give us a little context for what you'll be talking about in the upcoming programs?

Absolutely, Dave. You know, we did this series, I called it Unstoppable, and it was chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. And it was this amazing explosion of the church and the world's getting changed. And this series comes out of Acts chapter 6 through 10. And any time we step out and God is moving, there's always opposition. Satan steps in and there's opposition. And what we're going to see is division, persecution, prejudice. We're going to see all kinds of things he uses to try and trip up the church. Well, it seems like Satan's agenda is being played out very clearly. How is the church being attacked here in the 21st century?

Well, you know, a lot of things don't change. Satan's primary goal is to discredit God, and he does that by causing division. He causes that by getting us to get our focus off of God and onto, you know, secondary causes or one another. He does it by generating hate, division. Often he isolates people. Sometimes he gets us to look through a lens of our prejudice that we can only hear God's voice through our own lens, and therefore we become very ineffective.

And chapters 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 literally is, it's diabolical. It's the strategies. It's the schemes. It's how Satan attacks individuals, how he attacks small groups, and how he attacks the church.

And what we're going to learn is how to discover what those schemes are and what you're going to see each and every time. It's kind of what the Apostle John said, greater is he that is in you and he that is in the world. And Paul would say that we're more than conquerors in Christ. Chapters 6 through 10 are going to teach you and teach me and help us be those conquerors. You're going to love this series.

Thanks, Chip. Well, this series, Diabolical, is one you're going to want to hear again or maybe send to a friend. Let me encourage you to get the Chip Ingram app. It's an easy way to listen or share this message. For additional resources and more information about Diabolical, visit livingontheedge.org, or you can always give us a call at 888-333-6003.

App listeners, tap Special Offers. Now, here's Chip. As we close today's program, I just want to give you a little idea about what's going to be coming in the next two weeks as we look at Satan's agenda for planet earth, including you. And what I want you to know is some things that are so subtle, when you look at them through the lens of God's word, they're diabolical.

There are certain things that are so subtle, so accepted, but I mean they will ruin your relationship with God, with yourself, with your family, with your friends. And so today we begin, and we begin to talk about how he wants to divide and conquer. As we're going to go further, we're going to realize how we use traditions, things that your great-grandfather and grandfather and father, they were passed on from one person to another and in churches that we've come to just believe and accept, but some traditions actually pull us apart from God. And then we're going to look at things like religiosity and prejudice and areas that you're going to see right out of the text of Scripture that will absolutely pull you away from the things that matter most in your heart and your life.

And here's the deal, he's the deceiver. See, most Christians don't know his agenda, and if you don't know his agenda and you don't expose it, then bad things happen. In fact, bad things happen and you don't even know it's happening. As I taught this in our church, once we got into about the second and the third message, I mean, literally, okay, take this right, all hell began to break loose. People were having manifestations of evil.

They began to come to me afterwards and say, you know, I never ever thought that this issue in my marriage could have anything to do with his agenda or this big friction at work. I mean, little by little by little, staff members began to come to me and say, I'm having nightmares and satanic attack in the middle of the night. And when we begin to peel back what Satan was doing and what his agenda is, God began to intervene in new and powerful ways. And so what I want you to know is that great grace occurred, great healing occurred. God worked in an amazing way in the life of our church, and that's his plan for you. So let me encourage you, if you can't be here at this time every day, go to the website and each message will be on there.

Get the message notes, click them, get them for free, download them. But stay with me on this. Satan has an agenda for your life.

He wants to kill, to steal, and destroy. God wants the next two weeks to be an opportunity for you to see where and how that happens, and then protect you, deliver you, and make you a difference maker. Hope you can be with me for the next couple weeks.

It's going to be an exciting ride. You'll find the message notes Chip just mentioned in a couple of places. Go to livingontheedge.org and click the broadcasts tab.

App listeners, tap fill in notes. Just before we close, I want to thank those of you who make this program possible through your generous financial support. If you found today's program helpful but haven't yet supported us, there's never been a better time, because every gift we receive between now and July 6th will be matched dollar for dollar. To send a donation, just go to livingontheedge.org, tap donate on the app, or give us a call at 888-333-6003. And let me thank you in advance for your generosity. Well until next time, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.