The image of God vs the Devil is how people generally view the struggle between good and evil, but the depiction in this image is far from reality.  These two are not even close to equals.  They both have power but the power of God is MUCH greater!  

Regardless of whether a person is aware of it, every living person is in a hidden lifelong battle between good and evil. This is more than just making good choices in life. This is a real spiritual battle between good and evil that tries to stay hidden so you and I won’t notice it.  It is not someone’s imaginations or mystic beliefs. Nor is it a byproduct of growing old.  So many people are not even aware this battle is going on. They are too busy dealing with what they think is life. But there are some who are very aware of this battle and they begin to realize over time it is actually a battle for life and death. If it has progressed far enough, they come to realize it has stolen from them.  It is subtly working to destroy them and its ultimate goal is to bring about our death. This battle is woven into the decisions we make based upon what we think, what we want and what we are feeling. It doesn’t matter where we live, what religion we currently ascribe to, or our education or social status. We all are in this battle of good vs evil. Since it is hard for many people to discern that each one of us are actually in this battle, let's look at it from a different perspective where it becomes more self evident.

As we look around at what is going on in this current world, what do we see?

We see that there is a lot of good being done. Good expressed as love, honesty, forgiveness, truth, quality work, sacrifice, grace, protection, giving, purity, etc., etc.  Yes, we can all experience good here on this earth. Yes, some seem to experience it more than others, but all of us both see and experience some of the good in life.

However we also see a huge ongoing barrage of evil.  We also hear about and experience evil almost continually.  We try to be careful who we trust. We turn on the news. It is rarely about any good things that are currently happening. Instead it talks about the evil going on. Theft, lies, murder, corruption, cheating, lust, manipulation and the list goes on and on and on. My entire lifetime I have watched a constant flow of evil reported from around the world. It never seems to stop.

We have to ask ourselves why is this happening? What can be done to change things for the better?

The number of people who focus their life on evil, is a very small percentage of the total population. These are the people that wake up each day asking themselves, who can they hurt, who can they steal from, who can they attack?  Yes, they are out there.  There are just some who actually do focus on doing all kinds of evil.  Some of them were powerful leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc who accomplished great amounts of horrific evil.  Again when you consider all the evil that happens all around us, year after year, those whose focus is on evil are still a small part of the total evil that takes place. Law enforcement deals with some of the evil, but many evils are never dealt with in court.

Who does these evils? What causes them to act this way?

Other than this small portion of people that intentionally are focusing on doing evil, the rest of us, all think of ourselves as somewhat normal. Some maybe a little more normal and some maybe a little less normal, but we consider ourselves as a normal person trying to survive and get ahead.  There are billions of us.  We range from the base to those who consider themselves highly sophisticated and educated.  Some are religious, some aren't.  We live, work, and play, all over the world.  We do not consider themselves as an evil person.  We instead basically consider ourselves as a normal good person.

Have we ever tried to buy something and the person selling it, lied to us? Maybe we were the person selling it and we lied to sell it. It is human nature to justify our actions as right, even if the other person considers our actions as dishonest or wrong. These evils and many others happen to those of us that consider ourselves as normal decent people. Some of these evils seem small and insignificant and others can provide us significant fun or gain at the expense of others.

So what we have is some evil that comes from people who intentionally are trying to do evil and we have the rest of all the evil in the world coming from people that consider themselves as good, normal people. If you would ask me or I would ask you, neither of us would consider ourselves to be the ones that open the door to evil. Now on the flip side we both likely know others, who consider themselves also as normal people, but we do see evil occasionally coming from them. The point here is, as normal people we typically don’t accept that we are the ones that open the door to any evil.  It doesn't matter of how many things we have done wrong. We are normal people. Where we have hurt others we have come up with many amazing logical and sophisticated justifications. Maybe they deserved it? Maybe we deserved the extra gain we got? Maybe we got something because we were stronger or more clever and that is just life? The list goes on and on.

Evil is like a stray dog. If you feed it, It sticks around and grows. Over time it can grow a lot bigger than we expect. What we consider as little white lies, over time if not corrected, become big black lies. Since we consider ourselves good normal people, correcting the problem should be just a simple solution. Over our lifetime we come to realize that the solution is more complex and difficult than we expected. So what do we think could be possible solutions?

Possible solutions:

• Learn to do the right thing.
• Works
• Law
• Religion
• Christianity

When we look at each of these in detail, we realize likely all of them don't work as we expect.  Lets look at them one at a time

Learn to do the right thing

Education is an important part of life. But education does not prevent a person from opening the door to evil. Yes it helps, but we have our human nature that will want to go its own way and sometimes reject or ignore what we have learned. In some cases people use their education to open the door to evil in a more sophisticated manner. Also not everything we have learned is true.

Works, Law, & Religion

These three, while separate, often operate together.

Works is doing certain things to justify ourselves.  Doing works is not a bad thing, if it is the result of our faith.  However if we are doing works as a means to justify ourselves our motivation is wrong.  

Law is you must do this, and not do that. It doesn't matter whether it is law from the government, a command from those controlling us or a law we make unto ourselves, such as I will never do that again.  Laws show us that we do wrong.  Life doesn't flow out of law, but it does flow out of truth.  It is easy to get confused on the purpose of each of them.  Law also does not change our hearts.  It just externally tries to force us to act in a certain way.  So if we mechanically live by law it is a dry life.  The results and justifications that law provides can look very effective and impressive.   But over time, one realizes our heart gets tired of living under law.  The laws we allow ourselves to come under, we often end up giving lip service to.  Is there life in giving lip service to law?  No, living this way is living a lie.  That does not mean that laws are bad.  What it does mean is we need to respond to them differently. 

Most religions uses works and or law to bring their subjects into compliance. These religions often use hidden and sophisticated methods people may be totally unaware of, to cause their people to engage in works or legalism.

Christianity

There are thousands of different religions in this world and they all claim to be the truth. They conflict in their doctrines so they cannot all be true, unless you want confusion as your god. The God of creation expects us to use real truth to determine what is genuine. Not truth because I say it or you say it. Not even because someone or an organization you trust says it. We cannot use any of that as a excuse when we stand before God in the final judgement.  It just won’t work. Not any more than when your children use such poor logic when you confront them for what they did wrong.  Can you imagine your response when your children have stolen family money to go buy street drugs. Then they offer works like maybe washing the neighbor’s car to appease you. Or they do the same deed because they tell you they had to do it because their friends had to have those drugs. In both these cases there is no repentance, just justification. What would be your response?

Some hearing all this may not be believers or they may be of a completely different religion. If I say something is right and something else is wrong it would be easy for you to reject that because of your current beliefs. However, if we go through the common daily struggles both you and I have, and show why they are happening and how to fix our problems in a manner that is so logically self evident, then you might consider believing in what you see as true. Just because someone recognizes that something is true, does not mean that they will choose to accept it. When we stand up for truth we often encounter strong oposing views. There are those that will seek out truth regardless of the cost and there are also those that are not willing to pay that price.

Christianity, while often called a religion, really isn’t a religion, it is life. If taken in proper context, it solves the problems works, law, and man made religion can't.  It is a real living relationship with the God of creation that made the heavens and the earth. If you are not a Christian, those words are probable offensive to you. However when you take the time to fully search it out for yourself, that is the conclusion I think you also will come to. We all have accepted things we thought were right and later come to realize that some of them were false. Learning we have been misled in what was supposed to have been God can be devastating. It can affect your friends, your income, your emotions, and your status. An intentional lie is a lie regardless of where it comes from. The God of creation expects us to treat a lie as a lie and act accordingly. We also understand that people are human and subject to error. But if we were intentionally misled, that is different than someone making a mistake.  Ultimately you and I are responsible for the decisions we make.

It is the same when we do wrong against the God of creation. Our self justifications don’t work. Only admitting directly to God we were wrong and asking God for forgiveness can we be truly forgiven. We all have done wrong against the real living God, regardless of who you currently consider him to be. All of us can be  forgiven if we have honestly repent and asked God to forgive us.

Since birth we have used our own standard of right and wrong or good and evil. But as we grow, we come to realize that there are many things we have considered as normal that the God of creation considers as evil.  It can take time for us to realize this as consequences take time to become apparent or visible.

In a real relationship with God, we also see a purity and a vibrant life bursting forth from our everyday lives.  We do have to be careful as there are many false religions that pretend to be true. This is truly a battle of good vs evil and we are the gate keepers.

We come to realize that as normal people we do evil often without realizing it or paying attention to the fact that others are also impacted by what we do. Our personal standard of what is good or evil is far different than the standard of the God of all creation.

So God gave each of us the life that we thought we wanted, from birth, a life without God.  Over time some come to their senses and realize there has to be more to life than a poor or polished existence.  We have lived according to what our self wanted, but still it is just an existence. 

How our life is lived out, is we make decisions based

upon the information available to us and those decisions

bring about the actions and events we see in our lives.

What could be wrong with that?

God is perfect. There are no lies or deception found in Him. God desires us to experience real life and if we will draw near to the God from which real life comes, we can have this new life in abundance. Real life is not a cleaned up version of our old natural life. That is according to His definition, not ours. It is only when we acknowledge the shortcomings of a life apart from God that we start to appreciate the goodness of God. God cleans us up from the inside out.  We have lived with our soul processing information the way we wanted for our own gain or survival.  Would it not be better for our soul to process information for truth? Reasonable gain is not wrong if done righteously.  Instead, it is a healthy reward for hard work. It is when we push aside real truth for more gain, or to get what we want, that is when our actions become corrupt.  It is easy to say everyone else is doing it, so we need to also do it to compete, to survive. Such a view shows no trust in God. If the God of creation was dead then such conduct would be acceptable.  However, everyone knows that truth ultimately wins in the end.  It may not appear to win every battle, but it definitely wins the war in the end. Truth is part of the character of God. It is the character of God that we should make the foundation of our lives.  God's living truth is not a dead philosophy or cold hard facts.

God made us of five parts; 1.) a physical body, 2.) a soul which processes information (of our thinking our emotions and our will plus information from our five senses; touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell) 3.) a human spirit, sometimes called the breath of life 4.) our flesh (what we normally consider as our self including our ego and personality)  5.) our spiritual heart which is our innermost motivation controlling our flesh.

Our soul processes information. The information we get includes truth, lies, temptations, fears, images, lusts, and the list goes on.  With the flesh, the me, the self in control we choose the information that benefits us that we feel we can get by with.  We, our self, or as the Bible calls it, our flesh, works to influence and control what kinds of information our soul processes.  Because it is self serving, we use choose to use corrupted information along with the truth to get what we want.  Our definition of good or evil is dependent upon whether or not something is good for us. Many times regardless of how it affects others, and even ourselves long term. We see all this as normal, and we see others all around us also doing the same thing.  living this way causes us to sin.  We have some control over this process but overall corruption is the motivator for this system works. 

It is here where God starts to work in our hearts, our innermost motivation, after we invite Him in.  Since God has given us a free will, we have to invite this Jesus Christ into our lives, if we want God in our lives.  No inviting God in, no God. If you want to God in your life it starts with the Snner's Prayer (click link for it to open in a new window).  Being religious or nice to people isn't what puts God in the center of our lives.  God does not force Himself upon us. This is done by our inviting Jesus Christ, the only begotton Son of God, into our lives and us making the decision to believe God at His Word.  Every religion claims to have the real God however only in the God of creation will we find the real life our soul has been searching for.

How God changes our lives

We think, we believe, and we know. They are all different. Thinking and believing happen in our mind. Our mind is that nonphysical part that functions with in our physical brain.  Thinking is our thoughts and considerations. Believing is where we choose to accept something as true that we do not yet know is true. We should make our decisions, first on what we truly know and then on what we believe.  Our natural man often makes its decisions on what feels good and what he wants. This is where corruption enters our thinking.  Here we push aside truth for what we want.

God is working to correct all this by telling us to first seek and follow what we know is really true. Many things we conside as true, but we don't actually know if they are really true. There are many things that we don't know so then we choose to believe the precepts of God's Word and then our decisions will be framed by what we believe. Our belief needs to be true believing not mental ascent. But to do that correctly, we choose to believe the entire Word of God.  It is impossible for us to believe it all at once, so we take it in precept upon precept, line upon line. Believing God as our new heavenly father, while good, does not teach of the Godly precepts we should live by.  It is by studying and believing God's Word that this sanctification process takes place.

When our human spirit bears witness, that is knowing.  It is even better when the Holy Spirit bears witness with in our human spirit. There is a great amount of confusion on this topic.  One of my college professors was teaching that you had to believe something before you could know it.  Totally false.  You can believe one thing in your mind while at the same time truly know something completely different in your spirit. 

Take for example someone who declares that they don't believe in God. Is this a logical decision based upon careful consideration of the facts?  You decide.  Consider this; God has placed in the heart of every person the knowledge that there is a God. We know this because these same people when they get in impossible horrific events like war, cancer, car wreck, etc, each of them will cry out to God. Some will beg for mercy and some will spew hate towards Him.  Either response confirms that they know God exists. They may not know who God is, as that is something we all have to learn, but they do know that there is definitely a God.

So if we all know that there is a God, why would a person, choose to believe that there is no God?  Wouldn't it be logical to choose what we know over what we believe?  Of course it would. This is how all the false input we get from the world corrupts our thinking.

I can see two reasons a person would make that mistake.  First is mankind's natural rebellion to do things their own way.  And second that people have lost their connection with what they truly do know. Academia often teaches that you know something if you have heard it from a supposedly credible source.  It doesn't work that way. God restores one's ability to separate what they think and believe from what they know if a person is willing to take God seriously.  This is a detailed topic that we have plans to do a separate lesson on. Choosing something we want to believe over what we know is one of the many ways we corrupt truth.

There is only one standard of truth that is above all the imaginations of mankind. We confirm that it is the right one as it leads us into a pure rightous life and we through that life can prove much of God's Word is true. There comes a time in our life where God has proven Himself so many times that we don't question what He is saying.  Instead we seek out the correct context, then it will usually logical.  This can take years. Biblical truth is contrary to our natural life we have had since birth which was based on our flesh (self) and the dictates of this fallen world. They are separate kingdoms that war against eash other.  In the end there is only one winner.

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God tells us in the scriptures that evil is caused by sin. Christianity is the only religion that addresses mankind’s sin problem. Sin is a topic many want to avoid. Experience has taught me that the best way to handle issues is to face them head on and overcome them.

Two lessons that are very informative and usually not the answers people are expecting is our lesson on Sin and the lesson Who Really is Jesus Christ?  These are listed in the menu under Bible Studies as Jesus Christ.

When we actually get into studying the Bible, one realizes that God's purpose is to take us from living a natural existence, to living a completely new life as a new creation in Jesus Christ.  Even though we only have a vague understanding of what that means, we know down deep inside of us that it is true.  We may have considerable conflict with what we believe.  The reason for this is we believe in the mind and we know in our spirit.  There is a battle between these two and it is a battle we probably don't understand.   

God places all of humanity in either of two categories.  Either they have man (mankind which usually means themselves) at the center of their life or they have decided to make the God that created the heavens and the earth, the center of their life.  Just because someone is religious or associates with a church or religion does not make them God centered.  There are thousands of religions, all with different and often opposing doctrines.  The only true religion is the one that focuses on real life, and we are not talking about our natural life pretending to live we are religious.  It is God's purpose of every human during their lifetime, to find true life amid a sea of imposter beliefs and religions.

Before we go deeper, it is important that each of us needs to understand that God deeply loves us.  He is not a distant God or a God not familiar with our weaknesses and infirmities.  Yes God personally loves you and He personally loves me.  Since many do not understand God's love or how God could possibly love us, we don't recognize the love God has for us. He cares about each and every detail of our life, yet he is also a true gentleman.  He does not intrude or force Himself upon us.  He has given us a free will.  He is always present, He will not run when troubles arise.  It is so important that we embrace the concept that Jesus intimately and personally loves us.  It is an absolute fact, regardless of how we feel about it or what we have previously believed about God.

So how does changing us from a man centered person to a God centered person reduce or stop the evil in this world?

Some evil is readily apparent and some is deceptively hidden like a trap.  We cannot see all of it by looking at the people living around us.  Many of them appear to be nice people and often do nice things. 

Evil is born in some of the decisions we humans naturally make.  It is pretty obvious we all make good and bad decisions. 

We want to believe that our own decisions are based on logical thought and truth.  We don't like our decisions or motivation to be questioned.  Most of our decisions are made based on what we want and what we believe.  Yet those decisions are affected by many influences.  Influences that work to sway our decisions for both good and bad.

The fact is, most people make a substantial number of their decisions based on their emotions, lust, or greed. What is interesting is, the older we get the more sophisticated we tend to get at justifying these decisions.   This is how our natural life lives.

To recap: 

Living a natural life, a man centered life, or what the Bible calls living after our flesh (what we feel, what we think, & what we want), is living a life where it is easy to make some decisions that work to destroy real life either in us or others, or both.  

Three issues here. 

First, our decisions are likely based on the belief that our natural life is the only life available, but its not, and

Second, sometimes we desperately want to believe that this natural life will work for if we just get it right.  We find that this natural life has its own will to survive that we mistakenly think is our will. this natural life is deeply embedded into our hearts. 

And third it is scary to give up control of our natural life.  We don't know what the future holds if we give our life to God.  However the quality of life the Bible tells us that is in Jesus Christ, is a quality overcoming life that our natural life could never match.  Even the most polished natural life doesn't compare when a person understands that the true living God is with always.

Yet the Bible identifies this old natural life as separate from the "real" us.  This comes as a shock to many.  Even almost unbelievable.  Yet it is true as as we study it we be very evident.

There is definitely a new life available to us.

The Problem

Living a life centered on man's ways without God, we can and often do make decisions that are evil and are justified by our lusts or our perceived gain. Yet this evil, is fixable and the fix starts with us.  As we have discussed, law doesn't fix it.   Neither does works, nor dead religion.

God's fix is totally different.  God changes the person from the inside out.  As our heart changes  we learn to recognize evil more and more.  The closer a child of God is to God, the more they will abhor evil.  Religion and a life in God are not the same thing.  The evils "religious" people have done are many from all faiths. 

Does that mean that Christianity is also evil?  Absolutely not.  While it is called a religion because it talks about God, Christianity re-arranges the parts that a person is make of  and adds something new.  The architecture of how God re-arranges the parts we are made with is incredible.  It gets complex so take the time to build your foundation on what is solid.

When we discuss evil we have to define it.

Evil = morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked  (Dictionary.com)

Not everyone agrees on what is evil.  Some things you or I call evil, others, because it's what they want to do, or it provides them some sort of advantage, would say is not evil.  This is one of the reasons the Bible uses the term sin.  It is God's standard of what is allowed by us that will bring about evil.  It works to destroy life, even when there may be short term benefit to the doer.  The life affected may be the life of others, it may be the perpetrator's, or it may be both.  There is a common worldly concept that says "to take advantage of others, is how to succeed in life.  It is a common concept held by all types of people, from the poor to the rich, regardless of culture or status.  It is common for people to despise it in others while they practice it themselves.  It is just part of mankind's sin nature.  That said, it is not a sin to make a profit.  A reasonable honest profit is necessary for a society to flow smooth.

How We are Made

When we understand how we are made, we start to see how evil so easily can worm its way into our lives.  The Bible describes how a person is made up of five major parts. 

1.)  Our flesh.  The Bible uses two different definitions for the word flesh and this causes an incredible amount of confusion.

2.)  Our heart.  Again, the Bible uses two different definitions for the word heart.  The world uses those same two definitions.

3.)  Our human spirit or as sometimes called the breath of life. 

4.)  Our soul, sometimes interpreted as our being, which is the part of us that processes information like our emotions, our thinking, and our will.  It also processes information from our 5 senses, our touch, our hearing, our vision, our smell, and our taste.  We need to differentiate between the soul that processes information and the information it processes.

5.)  Our physical body, which is pretty self evident.  Our bones, muscles, hair etc.

Some of the bigger mistakes people make are falsely assuming:

1. The soul and spirit (human spirit) are the same thing.
2. Our spirit and the Holy Spirit are the same thing.
3. That the devil has access to enter into our spirit.
4. That our soul or soul and spirit disappear at death.
5. That the term "flesh" only refers to the physical body.

There are other common mistakes, but we see these above quite regularly.

Our flesh is explained very well in the Who Really is Jesus Christ lesson.  Rather than repeat it we would encourage you to study that lesson as well. 

Our spiritual heart is our innermost motivation.  It resides in our flesh and can be fed by our soul or our spirit.  When we invite Jesus Christ into our hearts, what we are saying is "Living word of God, come and abide with me and be my lord and savior in my heart, my innermost motivation".   It doesn't just happen, we have control over our heart and it is our responsibility to direct it and guard it with all diligence.

The three parts: the human spirit, soul, and body sometimes appear to be inseparable parts but they are three distinctly different parts of the person. 

Our soul and our human spirit are both is eternal.  It is important to understand that the body is temporal.  Upon death, our body is designed to decays and return to the earth.  The human spirit at death returns back to God.  The soul is eternal, it has two possible destinations upon death.  Heaven or Hell.  There is pure life in Heaven and no evil.  But in Hell there is no life, just an existence, with no love, peace, joy etc. People often try to blame God thinking He will condemn them to Hell, but the reality is, it is our own choice to accept or reject the life that is in Jesus Christ, that determines where we end up eternally.   The decisions of our heart will dictate whether we go to Heaven or Hell.

From birth we exist in our body following the dictates and influences of our flesh from information processed in our soul.  For many that is all they know.  This is our natural existence, not real life according to God.  However when someone ponders their existence,  they eventually realize something is missing.  There has to be something more.  And there is.  God has placed in every person the knowledge that there is a God, regardless of whether that person chooses to believe in God or whether they ever attempt to find out who He is.  The Bible says God is found of those that diligently seek Him.

"But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him."   [Hebrews 11:6].

How Sin Enters In

Even though most of mankind considers themselves to be normal their existance from birth is just a natural life.  more accurately described as a natural existence. God does not consider our natural life as anything even close to true life.  God considers us to be spiritually dead to real life until we are born again.  To understand what God calls life, we need to define what our existence is and compare it to God's design of life for mankind. 

Our natural existence is centered on the impulses and dictates that come out of our soul and body with other influences pressed upon us from other people and society.  This includes influences like greed, lust, pride, fear, etc, etc.  Our natural existence is a life where our fleshly nature is our king.  In America we don't think in terms of having a king, but that is what it is.   This natural life does not consider God in it's affections or decisions.

So many believe or want to believe that a natural life is all there is.  To the person who believes that or who has never considered there might be anything different, their decisions will be as though that is all that there is.  Often short sited and self centered.  This natural life will cast aside truth to get it's own way and will justify it without a second thought. 

This is how sin starts.

We have been living under the direction of our flesh since birth.  Our flesh does not have the ability to truly save us.  There comes a point in our lives where we want the life that God has designed for us.  We likely don't articulate it that way, but that is in reality what we are yearning for deep within our hearts.  So we direct our flesh, our hearts and our soul to find out who this God we know exists is.  If we are wise we will carefully continue on that path and then give our life to Jesus Christ when we realize that there is no God above Him.  If we stay in the scriptures we will come to realize over time that was to wisest decision of our entire life.  It is the very reason for which we were born.  Because God is perfect we come to realize God saved us by His grace.

Our flesh will cleverly fight God to keep us living an old natural life.  God did not design our flesh to rule us.   Yet much of the population refuses to consider that our flesh is a lousy king.  Many colleges and universities believe and teach that the mind (part of the soul) is the most noble part of a person.  This false concept is fueled by pride and is subtly woven into the beliefs of much of acedemia. 

The scriptures say that the Holy Spirit indwelling in our human spirit is the most noble part of man.  Our human spirit without an indwelling of the Holy Spirit is a life dead to God.  Our soul is designed to be a servant informing us what is Godly and directing us to reject what is worldly.  A servant is not to be above his master.  In other words, God designed our soul not to lead us as our king, but to serve us revealing the love, truth and power of God.

Our flesh that our soul has programmed, doesn't know everything.   Our flesh has its entire focus on its self, no matter how sophisticated we have been to make it look otherwise.   Our flesh has naturally fed on lust, greed, hate, rebellion, fear and many other evil influences.  The supposed benefits of these influences are often powerful motivators.  At different times, people come into opportunities to do things where these influences are very present.  Each person responds different, but the motivation of the natural existence , our flesh, remains until crucified.  We cannot retrain our flesh.

It is from all this that normal people do things that creates so much of the evil we see in the world.  While these actions may seem innocent at first, over time they can progress to extreme evil.

The Answer

God has to change each of us from the inside out. He does that by working with what we know and what we believe.

God has given mankind a free will.  A free will allows us to choose right or wrong.  It allows us to accept or reject deception, even deception that we are not aware is deception.  Our free will is also influenced by our desires, our thinking, and our emotions, and indeed it needs to be.  The final result is our free will only stay free if we make choices based on real truth.  Our free will can be captured through deception so that it is no longer free.  It is easy to understand how a smoker or drug adaict has that part of their life under the control of the addiction, but what about you and I being controlled by fear, anger, hate, greed, lust etc.  The truth is, this concept of us being enslaved to deception is far more widespread than we realize. 

We have to give consent to a lie in order for deception to enslave us.   That can be a conscious or unconscious consent and can be given in many ways.  God's plan changes our heart, the innermost motivation of man.  To fix mankind, God gently leads us on a path that make us a new creation with a new heart or innermost motivation.  He allows us to grow at our own pace, yet our decisions often force us into areas of growth we would like to avoid. God leads us by pure truth framed by love and righteousness.  We may not initially believe the Bible to be true, but when we study it in context, over time we come to realize it is pure truth.  It may sound weak and ineffectual, but don't kid yourself.  It is, in the end far more efficient than the ways of the world.

We are not to live in fear, but we do have problems in this life and a very real adversary trying to destroy us.  

We need to understand how God has set all this up.  God desires us to come into His kingdom. It will only happen when we do it God's way.  Then there is a beautiful relationship between God and man, which is us.  Some of this information may seem dry until a person starts to connect the dots.  Then it gets just absolutely amazing.

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