Christian Philosophy: Everyone Has a Philosophy. It's The Lens Through Which They View The World and Make Decisions. (5 page)

Is the Bible True?

…for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.

1 Samuel 16:7

A
lthough people focus on behavior and appearance, the Bible approaches change from the heart level. Humans want to deal with external things, but God’s way is to deal with the heart. The heart is the source of your external behaviors; it’s where your speech and actions come from (Luke 6:45). Men put emphasis on cleaning up the outward appearance, but God says clean the inside and the outside will be clean also (Matthew 23:26). If you want your external circumstances to change, you have to go to the heart and change your philosophy. The way you do that is by meditating on the Word. Religion consists of man’s thoughts about God, but the Bible isn’t a compilation of men’s thoughts—it contains God’s thoughts and His philosophy for us.

Satan has been pretty successful in robbing many Christians of the blessings that God has provided. The reason he has been so successful is that our philosophy is wrong. We have developed philosophies based on our upbringing and the ungodly influences of this world rather than on the Word of God. Satan comes to steal and to deprive us of what God has given by challenging the way we think. This is evident even from his first dealings with mankind. Concerning the dangers of wrong thinking, the apostle Paul said,

But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

2 Corinthians 11:3

The way Satan came against Adam and Eve is the same way he comes against us today. The devil doesn’t have any new tricks; he’s still doing the same old thing. It’s not like he has a million different ways of tempting people. His only method always boils down to lies and deception.

Temptation falls into just three basic categories: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). Those are the areas in which Adam and Eve were tempted (Genesis 3:6), those are the areas in which Satan tried to tempt Jesus (Luke 4:1-12), and they are the same three areas in which the enemy is trying to tempt us today. You’re being tempted in exactly the same ways that Adam and Eve were tempted. The devil just takes the same old stuff and repackages it, which is helpful in a way because we can avoid making the same mistakes Adam and Eve made by looking at the tactics Satan used against them.

The first thing we notice is that Satan is subtle. Scripture says, “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD
God had made” (Genesis 3:1). We know that Satan was behind using the serpent to lie because the Word says that Satan is the father of all lies (John 8:44). The devil created lying, and every time someone lies they are under the influence of the devil. So this serpent came and lied to Adam and Eve.

I already pointed out that Satan didn’t use some huge animal to intimidate Eve and force her to eat the forbidden fruit. He didn’t have any power whatsoever to force Adam and Eve into disobeying God. Instead, what he did was choose the most subtle animal—the most cunning, crafty, and sly creature. Why? Because it was a battle of wits. The battle against temptation has always been waged in the mind.

You’ll sometimes hear people talk about “spiritual warfare” in the sense of going out and doing battle in the heavens. This is based in a misunderstanding of a verse that says we are battling evil powers in heavenly, or high, places (Ephesians 6:11-12). People have actually chartered planes so they could “take their prayers to the sky,” or they have gone to the top of skyscrapers to do battle “in heaven.” That isn’t what this scripture is talking about. The battle against the enemy isn’t somewhere out in the atmosphere; the battle is right between your ears.

Satan comes at you through your thoughts with lies and deception. It’s the same way he has always operated, and that’s the reason he chose the serpent to speak to Eve. It was the most cunning, crafty, and sly creature. It was able to twist and to deceive better than any other animal, so Satan motivated the snake to go and tempt Adam and Eve.

This is really significant. It shows how deception was Satan’s only weapon. It demonstrates that he doesn’t have the power to make people do anything.
Satan can’t do anything without your consent and cooperation.
You have to reject his lies. Quit consenting to his deception, quit cooperating with him, and you’ll leave him powerless. He won’t be able to steal your health, your finances, or your peace of mind.

When Satan came against Adam and Eve through the serpent, the conversation started like this:

And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

Genesis 3:1

Satan’s primary method of attack is to challenge the Word of God. “Did He
really
say that?” Satan asks, “Are you sure He didn’t mean something else?” Satan always challenges the Word, he always asks, “Is the Word really true?” The answer is YES! If Adam and Eve had responded, “Yes, God did say that, now get out of here”—that would have been the end of the story. There would have been no Fall, no sin, and suffering wouldn’t have entered the world.

This reveals a fundamental principle of establishing a Christian philosophy, or a Christian way of thinking: Never forget that God’s Word is always true. If you compromise on this point, Satan is going to rob you blind and nothing else is going to work. God’s Word is the only sure foundation upon which to build a Christian philosophy.

Here’s another tip. You can save yourself a lot of trouble by not even getting into conversations with the devil. When he attacks the Word, don’t bother arguing with him, just state the truth and move on. But Eve didn’t do that; she decided to have a chat with the serpent and said,

We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

Genesis 3:2-3

The problem with what Eve said is that God never said they couldn’t
touch
the fruit; He said don’t
eat
it. Eve added to what God had said, and she thought that if she even touched the fruit she would die. When she was enticed by the lust of her eyes and flesh to reach out and touch the fruit and nothing happened, she thought maybe nothing would happen if she ate it too. She discovered that the thoughts she added to what God had said were false—she didn’t die when she touched the fruit—and it tempted her to question all of what she believed about God’s commands.

This same thing is happening today. Religion has added to the Word of God and nullified it in order to hand down traditions. This is exactly what Jesus accused the scribes and the Pharisees of doing (Mark 7:13). Religion is always adding rules and regulations to the Word of God. It is saying, “Don’t even touch it or you’ll die!” Religion creates manmade traditions, and when people break the manmade traditions and don’t die, they go ahead and break God’s Word also, thinking that everything was just a hoax.

For example, some religious systems today are saying women shouldn’t wear makeup or jewelry—which is a misunderstanding of the scripture that says women shouldn’t be concerned with outward adorning, but rather be concerned with the beauty of their hearts. The scripture says don’t be concerned with the “outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; But let it be the hidden man of the heart…” (1 Peter 3:3-4). If you interpret this to mean that there should be no plaiting of the hair or wearing of gold, then you have to say there shouldn’t be any wearing of apparel either. Obviously, God doesn’t want you running around without any clothes on. The intent of this scripture is to encourage people to focus on the condition of their hearts instead of their outward appearance.

Preaching that women should wear their hair in a certain way and dress a certain way or God won’t love them anymore isn’t true. When a young girl who has grown up hearing those things fails to live up to the supposed dress code but doesn’t feel any different—because God
does
still love her—she calls into question everything she has ever learned about God. This is how religion and the traditions of men can nullify the Word of God.

Satan didn’t come right out and say, “Hey, Adam and Eve, eat this forbidden fruit.” No, he craftily attacked the Word by asking, “Did God
really
say…?” He cast doubt by criticizing what God had said. Similarly, Satan’s biggest triumph in recent centuries has been to make it unfashionable to believe in and trust the Word of God. The world system, inspired by the devil, has come against the Word and put doubt in people’s minds about its accuracy and relevance, so the majority of society is now off doing their own thing. But the doubt and uncertainty Satan has raised are all lies and deception.

Christians have to establish in their hearts that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. As I will show later, the Word is accurate, it is God-breathed, and it is God-inspired. If you ever start thinking the Bible is merely a book written by men
about
God, Satan is going to eat your lunch and pop the bag. You’ll be in serious trouble if you ever adopt the mindset that the Bible has some truth in it, but it also has all kinds of error—leading you to go through and only pull out the parts that
you
think are relevant. If you do that, Satan will have you as surely as he had Adam and Eve.

I think the reason Satan tempted Eve instead of Adam was that Adam heard God’s command directly. Genesis says, “And the LORD
God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17). The next verses describe how God decided Adam shouldn’t be alone, so He created Eve to be a companion for Adam and instituted marriage between a man and a woman. So God gave the command not to eat the forbidden fruit before Eve was even formed, which means she might never have actually heard God give the command.

Any time you have one person repeating what someone else has told them, there is the possibility that they won’t repeat it correctly. They might leave something out or add something that the first person never said. I remember playing a game like that as a kid. A bunch of people would line up in a row, and the first person would whisper a phrase to the next person in line. The message was passed down from person to person until you reached the end of the line, but each person only spoke the phrase once; you couldn’t repeat it to make sure someone heard it correctly. By the time the last person in line spoke the phrase out loud, it wouldn’t even resemble the original statement.

Similarly, Adam heard God in an audible voice tell him not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but Eve got her information secondhand from Adam. It would have been much harder for the serpent to convince Adam of what God did or didn’t say because Adam heard God directly. So it was easier for the devil to make Eve doubt that Adam had repeated God’s command accurately than it would have been to make Adam doubt what he had heard.

This story shows that we need to get our philosophy from God directly, and not depend upon other people to repeat it for us. You need to personalize the Word and make it real to you. It can’t be just a book written to men in general, but not necessarily to you in particular. You have to believe the Bible is God’s Word to
you
. The majority of people read the Bible like it’s an interesting book about God, but they don’t read it like it is God speaking to them. The Holy Spirit will use the words in the Bible to speak directly to you, and you have to read the Word with a sense of expectancy that God is going to speak to you through it.

I can’t tell you how many people I have dealt with over the years who knew what God’s Word says, but they were leaning on their own wisdom. They thought their opinion was better than God’s, and they were doing things their own way. Some of those people had to crash and burn before they recognized that God was right, but you don’t have to learn by the school of hard knocks. You can just believe the Word of God. The Bible says,

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

God has spoken to me through thousands of scriptures as I have prayed and asked Him for wisdom. He has used what is written in the Bible to speak directly to me. For instance, God has shown me how Moses’ desire to accomplish God’s plan in his own strength cost him forty years in the wilderness, and the nation of Israel spent an extra thirty years in bondage. Those things happened to Moses, but God has taken the scriptures and spoken them to me; He brought the words alive and gave me revelation knowledge that impacted my heart and shaped part of my Christian philosophy. The Bible is a book
from
God, He speaks to me through it, and I believe in the inspiration of Scripture with all of my heart.