The patient attack of the Enemy...
I've been doing some reconnaissance on the Enemy. The Bible clearly states that he has schemes which means he has schematics. And if you watch long enough, you can pick up and pick apart the patterns on how he maneuvers and manipulates in order to take people down and out.
He usually starts softly and subtly so as to not be detected. But over years of attack, his tactics become more aggressive and obvious. As I've watched and listened to people describe their stories of demise, I've noticed a progression starting from latent moving to blatant...
1. Deception - Most of the time you don't even know you're dealing with the devil in the early phases of attack. He tends to try to simply confuse 3.9 with 4.0. If 4.0 is truth, he wants you to concede that 3.9 is just as true. He wants to get people to round things up a fraction at a time. If you can rationalize small deviations, he starts there. He won't abruptly move decimal points because we're smart enough to know the immediate difference between .01, .10, 1.00, 10.00, and 100.00. But if he can shift a 1000th or 100th of a percent...he'll take it. He works toward shaving off a tenth of a percent at a time and eventually we don't notice our values and virtues are being stolen away with every "fraction transaction". It sometimes takes decades to get someone from 4.0 to 2.4...but he shares one character trait with God, patience. He has the longsuffering of a sloth, perfectly content with slow movement as long as it erodes a person's center of gravity, absolute truth. If he can change your mind, he changes your mindset, then you mentality, and then your motives, and then your mouth, and then your motion. It starts with attitudes and ends with actions. It's deception at it's finest..."frog in the kettle" kinda stuff.
2. Distraction - This might be his new favorite sleight of hand. He takes your concentration, your focus, and gets you to lose your attention because of the flurry of options and alternatives. The confusion in the congestion works like a charm. It's not even temptation in the tradition sense of the word, it's diversion from the meaningful, the things that really matter. Before we know it we're lost in Netflicks or sports or hobbies that are amoral in and of themselves. They only become moral issues when they become idols, but much like Deception, these distractions seem harmless at first. "Once in a while" goes to "most of the time" and before we know what happened we are far from home. Things that are everlasting are traded for superficial and temporal pleasures, and hedonism kicks in taking us from hit to hit. If we stood still and turned around, we would see that we've drifted off course and lost our way, but we're caught in a stampede of sorts violently caught up in the current of culture's assortment of meaningless drivel that becomes our new normal over time. We forget the "high calling" and the most important things as we're sidetracked and sidelined by society's endless buffet of "shinny new experiences". The enemy gets us drunk on nonsense until we're in a stupor. The stupor softens us up to the stupid and then, bam, we're trapped. The formula hasn't changed since I John 2 was written..."lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life". We are suckers for pleasure...and we we eat ourselves sick without the Spirit's gentle nudges to discipline ourselves and sometimes die to ourselves. If he can't get you to do something wrong he sure as heck wants to keep you from doing something right. If he can't get you to participate in something bad his next tactic is to keep you from doing something good. Distraction is killing redemption like nobody's business.
3. Disruption - As Deception and Distraction make us vulnerable and susceptible, then he moves in with more blatant attack. He loves to create chaos at first and then move toward calamity. Chaos, confusion, and conflict begin to weaken our defenses and we begin looking for outs. Easy outs. Like anything that will take away the immediate ache of the moment, even if it's against our belief system. We begin to compromise in disruption trying to flee the fear or numb the pain, whatever it takes to make it stop. Suffering and struggle, sorrow and sadness, these things are like jabs to the kidneys in boxing...it's not a knock out punch, but every blow breaks us down until we drop our hands/guard. Once the compound effect of disruption turns to desperation...he is only a breath away from dominion. He will own you if you let the circumstances trump the truth. Once you think what you feel is what is real, he dangles the clickbait and waits for you to bite so he can set the hook. It's still not over, but most people who get this far don't turn around without the intervention of another caring soul who intercepts them from the Enemy's trap. If a person has fallen pray to years of deception, or months of distraction, they are sitting ducks when the disruption hits the fan. Here's why. They go to lean back on the truth and it's eroded into a figment of what it used to be. What once was solid rock is shifting sand...and so truth and wisdom are compromised. They look around for friends and family but long seasons of distraction have pulled them into virtual values and counterfeit companionship leaving them isolated and alone. When they are most in need of the meaningful fixtures of life, they have long abandoned them making disruption almost impossible to bear up under. The pressure becomes unbearable and panic sets in. Decisions are made in this stage of the Desperation that you would never have made years ago, but these are the choices that lead to the ultimate destination the Enemy has always desired for you.
4. Destruction - This is when we feel unhinged. We are feeling things and doing things and saying things that are destroying everything that is sacred and true and valuable and good. We are self-destructing and destructive to almost everything we come into contact with. We don't trust ourselves or anyone else because we have lost our moral compass and have hitched our proverbial cart to so many untrustworthy lovers that have let us down that we don't know if there is anyone that loves us or anything worth loving. The Enemy loves to see us in this state, languishing and lost, threatened and threatening, deceived and deceiving, hurt and hurting. We want something real, something true...but in our delusion we aren't sure how to detect and discern what that is...so we embrace what is false and lash out at what is true. We sacrifice love for lust, need for greed, and fulfillment for pleasure. With every failed experiment we grow more and more jaded and cynical. We believe less and less that there is any meaning and if there is, that we deserve to experience it after all we've done. Guilt and shame and condemnation begin to gut us out heaping on insult to injury leading us more swiftly to quick fixes that result in long-term consequences. We can't see past the present moment we occupy, so there isn't any assessment of what the lasting effects will be of the actions we're taking. Violation upon violation occurs until our free will is eventually taken from us. People at their worst either end up in prison under the watch of guards or psychiatric wards under the watch of therapists. Both places govern your life because "Destruction" eventually makes a person's life unmanageable. People can pull themselves out of this dark place, but not until they regain consciousness and realize that their lives have become unmanageable and they need God to restore sanity to their soul. It is painful to see people in this place...most people never would have thought they could get to this place, but Satan is a strategic foe...brilliant beyond words. He loves to steal, kill and destroy. It's his mission from John 10:10. He lives for it.
So there you have it...my feeble thoughts on the Enemy's schematics. If there's something useful here, cool beans. If not, well, it's more for me to process my meanderings anyhow, so that's ok.
He usually starts softly and subtly so as to not be detected. But over years of attack, his tactics become more aggressive and obvious. As I've watched and listened to people describe their stories of demise, I've noticed a progression starting from latent moving to blatant...
1. Deception - Most of the time you don't even know you're dealing with the devil in the early phases of attack. He tends to try to simply confuse 3.9 with 4.0. If 4.0 is truth, he wants you to concede that 3.9 is just as true. He wants to get people to round things up a fraction at a time. If you can rationalize small deviations, he starts there. He won't abruptly move decimal points because we're smart enough to know the immediate difference between .01, .10, 1.00, 10.00, and 100.00. But if he can shift a 1000th or 100th of a percent...he'll take it. He works toward shaving off a tenth of a percent at a time and eventually we don't notice our values and virtues are being stolen away with every "fraction transaction". It sometimes takes decades to get someone from 4.0 to 2.4...but he shares one character trait with God, patience. He has the longsuffering of a sloth, perfectly content with slow movement as long as it erodes a person's center of gravity, absolute truth. If he can change your mind, he changes your mindset, then you mentality, and then your motives, and then your mouth, and then your motion. It starts with attitudes and ends with actions. It's deception at it's finest..."frog in the kettle" kinda stuff.
2. Distraction - This might be his new favorite sleight of hand. He takes your concentration, your focus, and gets you to lose your attention because of the flurry of options and alternatives. The confusion in the congestion works like a charm. It's not even temptation in the tradition sense of the word, it's diversion from the meaningful, the things that really matter. Before we know it we're lost in Netflicks or sports or hobbies that are amoral in and of themselves. They only become moral issues when they become idols, but much like Deception, these distractions seem harmless at first. "Once in a while" goes to "most of the time" and before we know what happened we are far from home. Things that are everlasting are traded for superficial and temporal pleasures, and hedonism kicks in taking us from hit to hit. If we stood still and turned around, we would see that we've drifted off course and lost our way, but we're caught in a stampede of sorts violently caught up in the current of culture's assortment of meaningless drivel that becomes our new normal over time. We forget the "high calling" and the most important things as we're sidetracked and sidelined by society's endless buffet of "shinny new experiences". The enemy gets us drunk on nonsense until we're in a stupor. The stupor softens us up to the stupid and then, bam, we're trapped. The formula hasn't changed since I John 2 was written..."lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life". We are suckers for pleasure...and we we eat ourselves sick without the Spirit's gentle nudges to discipline ourselves and sometimes die to ourselves. If he can't get you to do something wrong he sure as heck wants to keep you from doing something right. If he can't get you to participate in something bad his next tactic is to keep you from doing something good. Distraction is killing redemption like nobody's business.
3. Disruption - As Deception and Distraction make us vulnerable and susceptible, then he moves in with more blatant attack. He loves to create chaos at first and then move toward calamity. Chaos, confusion, and conflict begin to weaken our defenses and we begin looking for outs. Easy outs. Like anything that will take away the immediate ache of the moment, even if it's against our belief system. We begin to compromise in disruption trying to flee the fear or numb the pain, whatever it takes to make it stop. Suffering and struggle, sorrow and sadness, these things are like jabs to the kidneys in boxing...it's not a knock out punch, but every blow breaks us down until we drop our hands/guard. Once the compound effect of disruption turns to desperation...he is only a breath away from dominion. He will own you if you let the circumstances trump the truth. Once you think what you feel is what is real, he dangles the clickbait and waits for you to bite so he can set the hook. It's still not over, but most people who get this far don't turn around without the intervention of another caring soul who intercepts them from the Enemy's trap. If a person has fallen pray to years of deception, or months of distraction, they are sitting ducks when the disruption hits the fan. Here's why. They go to lean back on the truth and it's eroded into a figment of what it used to be. What once was solid rock is shifting sand...and so truth and wisdom are compromised. They look around for friends and family but long seasons of distraction have pulled them into virtual values and counterfeit companionship leaving them isolated and alone. When they are most in need of the meaningful fixtures of life, they have long abandoned them making disruption almost impossible to bear up under. The pressure becomes unbearable and panic sets in. Decisions are made in this stage of the Desperation that you would never have made years ago, but these are the choices that lead to the ultimate destination the Enemy has always desired for you.
4. Destruction - This is when we feel unhinged. We are feeling things and doing things and saying things that are destroying everything that is sacred and true and valuable and good. We are self-destructing and destructive to almost everything we come into contact with. We don't trust ourselves or anyone else because we have lost our moral compass and have hitched our proverbial cart to so many untrustworthy lovers that have let us down that we don't know if there is anyone that loves us or anything worth loving. The Enemy loves to see us in this state, languishing and lost, threatened and threatening, deceived and deceiving, hurt and hurting. We want something real, something true...but in our delusion we aren't sure how to detect and discern what that is...so we embrace what is false and lash out at what is true. We sacrifice love for lust, need for greed, and fulfillment for pleasure. With every failed experiment we grow more and more jaded and cynical. We believe less and less that there is any meaning and if there is, that we deserve to experience it after all we've done. Guilt and shame and condemnation begin to gut us out heaping on insult to injury leading us more swiftly to quick fixes that result in long-term consequences. We can't see past the present moment we occupy, so there isn't any assessment of what the lasting effects will be of the actions we're taking. Violation upon violation occurs until our free will is eventually taken from us. People at their worst either end up in prison under the watch of guards or psychiatric wards under the watch of therapists. Both places govern your life because "Destruction" eventually makes a person's life unmanageable. People can pull themselves out of this dark place, but not until they regain consciousness and realize that their lives have become unmanageable and they need God to restore sanity to their soul. It is painful to see people in this place...most people never would have thought they could get to this place, but Satan is a strategic foe...brilliant beyond words. He loves to steal, kill and destroy. It's his mission from John 10:10. He lives for it.
So there you have it...my feeble thoughts on the Enemy's schematics. If there's something useful here, cool beans. If not, well, it's more for me to process my meanderings anyhow, so that's ok.
Comments
Post a Comment