The enemy's lies have become prevalent among the people of the world, and some Christians buy into them and wonder about the goodness of God. I know this because I was one of those people.
One particular lie from the enemy that I'd love to expose is that you only become Christian if you live in the Western world, or if a human being has told you about Jesus Christ. From this mistaken perspective, God is not fair because people can't help where they're born, and if Jesus is the only way, people who have never heard of him will go to hell just because they were born in the wrong place. I'd like to refute this kindly.God will come to a person even if Jesus was never preached to them. In the Muslim world, there have been documented reports of hundreds of thousands of people coming to Christ, not through hearing the Gospel preached by a man, but by supernatural dreams and visions. It is a trick of the devil to declare that God is unfair and anyone born in the wrong place will go to hell for lack of knowledge. This is the excuse of many atheists who bash Christianity for declaring Jesus as the one true path. The truth is, God will come to you if you seek him. If a Muslim terrorist in prison who is worshipping demons and cursing people through Islam, as I saw him testify about, can find Jesus supernaturally with no human help, anyone can. God will come to all people who call out to him, no matter who or what they’re currently worshipping. The ways of God are above my understanding, but I know one thing: He is fair. His judgment is just, and anyone who goes up to heaven deserves it, and anyone who goes down to hell deserves it. It is a lie of Satan to say that hell is not fair. The scriptures say that Jesus went down to hell and preached to the spirits chained there to bring them up to heaven. That takes away another lie perpetrated by the devil and repeated by atheists – that anyone who died before Jesus was born went to hell. That’s not how it works.
God is fair. Jesus gave everyone a chance to come to heaven, where all their tears would be wiped away and their past torments forgotten, and even used for their good. Anyone and everyone can come to Jesus, and the scriptures say that no one has an excuse – creation is beautiful, so we inwardly know that it was created by a beautiful God, not a God who is evil and has sex with humans then leaves them, as the Greek myths dictate. And not a God who demands sacrifice of children in the fire, as many ancient religions dictated. When we observe the beauty around us, even the beauty of a flower in the middle of a wasteland, we can see that God creates beauty, and that He must be good.
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Another trick of the devil is that God MAKES us worship Him or we go to hell. Well, that's not exactly true. In fact, the opposite is true. When we are far from God, the devil holds us captive to sin and attempts to conquer our will by making us think we NEED to sin or we won't be happy. He puts us in chains while warning us that Jesus (who sets us free from our chains) will make us slaves.
We are born with free will, but it's not totally free when we reject God. The devil attempts to conquer our free will, force evil actions, and possess us against our will. That is the power we are subject to when we reject God's power in our lives. We have free will, but we are in chains when we are far from God. We are slaves to sin who move about in our chains, thinking they make us free. This is the devil's deception. There are so many people in the world who reject God because the devil and the world have told them God will force you to obey. This is not true.
God will never violate our free will. That is a lie straight from hell. The great deception is that God will never force us, but the devil ALWAYS will. God will never force us to do anything. God will open our eyes and set us free from our chains. God loves us very deeply. He wants to free us, but we have to agree to let Him. This is why not everyone accepts God - if God forced people to do things, why is everyone not Christian? God always gives us totally free choice. When we are far from God, we use our free will to enslave ourselves to sin and death, because the devil has told us that freedom to sin is the object of our lives. That is the devil's agenda because unrepentant sin foments total rebellion against God.
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A third deception of the devil is that the failures of church leaders are God’s fault, so God must be imperfect or evil. We see this as recently as the Ravi Zacharias scandal. Ravi was one of the most prominent evangelists in the world, but he fell into sin by sexually abusing women at massage parlors that he owned. The devil infiltrates God's churchmen and church women through sin. Because when churchmen and church women have unrepentant sin, their failures will eventually become public failures that rile up unknowing people to blame God for their actions. And people believe it, that God is responsible. The devil also did this in God’s servants through the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. Christians tortured and killed because of the pride in their hearts, and the devil's influence over them was substantial due to their pride. But the point is, the devil is the author of sin, so the devil and humankind are ultimately responsible for the evil in the church - not God. The devil tempts church leaders, then when they fail because of the temptation, the devil blames God. God is not responsible for sin and death. The devil is, and that is why God sent Jesus to humankind and not to the fallen angels - God knows the devil tempted us, so He sent His son to redeem. Let's remember that the past failures of the church are not God's responsibility, but mankind's, and ultimately, the devil's. For our enemy is not flesh and blood, but powers and principalities in spiritual places.
You might ask, “Why didn’t God stop the failures from happening? How can a good God allow evil?” God has given humankind a sovereign will that He will not violate. As stated earlier, God will never force us to do anything. When human beings decide not to listen to God and rebel, God will inspire them to stop but will not make them stop. There are many things that God sovereignly prevents (like the Cold War not turning into a nuclear disaster), but He always inspires us to do right, and never forces us. He inspires through love and does not force through power. He could force through power, but His great love for His children (even the evildoers of the world) compels Him to respect their free will. There is a verse in the Bible about God not pulling up the weeds in the field until the wheat is harvested. This means that God will not totally stamp out the weeds (evil people) until the wheat (God’s people) are ripe (ready to withstand the judgment). God is worried that some of His people will be caught in sin if He were to bring judgment early, and so He spares them until they become ready. It is out of His mercy that He delays the judgment of the evil people in this world – He is not slow in stopping evil, only merciful to us sinners who would be caught up in the judgment if He were to come right now.
In summary, we've gone over four of the main objections to God as being totally good: being born in the wrong place and going to hell (Jesus can come to anyone at any time), God making us worship Him (it's the devil who tricks us into thinking we need sin and chains - chains that we think make us free because we "need" them), the failures of God's churchmen and women (the devil tempts them then blames it on God when they fail), and God being responsible for evil in the world (humans have a free will that God will not violate, but that the devil try to take hold of when we let him). I hope this has been educational for anyone doubting the goodness of God. I know all these arguments so well because I have been scared by them in the past. People told me that God could not be good because of these very things. God has been revealing to me the lies I was told and is helping me to refute them in my own life and hopefully in the lives of those who will read this. If you have any questions or comments, you can post them below! God Bless you and God love you!
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