An iPhone, that’s the one device our grandkids just cannot be left without, being grafted to their thumbs. What Steve Jobs joined together let none put asunder. I’m so old I can remember when the thing didn’t exist.
In those long gone days a device was whatever you devised, whether a potato salad, poem, or parliamentary procedure. Or it was that popular proverb, the title of this article, that proclaims that curious inner power said to be bursting within every human being, empowering whosoever to do whatsoever he/she wants, or feels like doing, or feels good doing; that is, to have her/his own way.
“I did it my way,” was Frank Sinatra’s signature song back in my day. Long before Sinatra crooned it, however, “My Way” was already the opening hymn of the Laodicean church. Recently our own NAD president smugly hummed, “Days of Wine and Roses,” to make it clear that he would do it his way, regardless, leaving only the question of whether his wine and roses are literal or symbolic.
A Laodicean’s way is to have it both ways. A Laodicean rises from his seat during an altar call and marches forward but instead of witnessing texts his live-in.
In a transport of patriotic élan, Laodiceans boast that having it their every which way is the American way. But it’s neither patriotic nor smart, turning out to be Satan’s way, and the end thereof the way of death.
Now that sounds fatal, and is. Your devices are dubious; your death certain. We, the whole human race, are utterly doomed, thanks to Adam and Eve’s disobedience, that is, having it their, no, Satan’s, way.
But God the Father and God the Son had, from the foundations of the earth, laid a contingency plan to rescue mankind from Satan and Death. In the plan The Son would be crucial. Sin would close all communication between humanity and God, regardless of how painful this would be to God. God’s law requires both cutting of communication and death. But Christ would be the bridge, Jacob’s ladder, between God and Humanity. But to be so the Son would have to be simultaneously human and divine. The Son of God must take on human nature. As such He could sacrifice Himself for us by taking on our sins, and suffering the terrible death that violation of God’s law absolutely requires.
Christ Himself explained this plan to Nicodemus (recorded in the beloved verse, John 3:16), encapsulating in one sentence the whole plan: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
That promise is plain. Equally plain to those who have ears to hear is that it is offered only as the same choice as presented to Adam and Eve – the choice between believing God and believing Satan, between obedience to God and disobedience.
That’s always Satan’s cue to chuckle and start his long-winded schtick, as he did in Eden. “Did God tell you that? LOL! As lawful title-holder and sovereign of this world and everybody in it – that means YOU – I’m telling you that a choice between me and God is one thing, my very dear little friend, that you do not have. You sold that choice to me for a silly apple, like Esau his birthright for a mess of porridge and the NAD for a song. But what you do have is the vast cornucopia of choices that I offer, freely and for free. Just take your pick. You deserve anything your heart desires, anything you have a weakness for.
“You can have more wealth than Bezos, more power than Pelosi. You can party all night and boast of your hangover tomorrow. You can have the worthless good life of leisure or the worthless hippy life of idleness. You may pursue any crazy cause from social justice to woman’s rights and O what a lot of rights women can be told they have. But mainly girls just wanna have fun, as crooned by Cindi Louper in a counterpoint duet with Sinatra singing “My Way.” God doesn’t want you to have any fun. I, Satan, want you to have nothing but fun.
“You may have liberation any way you want to define it, freedom from or freedom to; academic freedom, homeless freedom, freedom from immigration laws, fentanyl freedom. That’s just a sample. I’ve got more devices than the EPA has regulations, than the Sahara has dunes, than China has people, products, and ploys.
“If you’re Laodicean I Don’t mind at all. I say you’re in great shape and in need of nothing. Would I spew you out? And if you’re LGBTXX all the better. I’ll stand at the church door and give you the glad hand of fellowship, and ordain you regardless of whichever sex you are at the moment. And marry you odd couples and go to court to fight for your rights. Would I be intolerant of you?
“Anyway, and with all due respect, that God person gets ridiculously overwrought about the least little thing. I ask you, is taking a wee bite of a nice apple all that big a deal? “Your own SDA scholars have shown hermeneutically that the whole story is allegory if at all real. Hear ye them!
“Might as well eat the rest of the apple, croon a little tune, fondle a long stem literal or figurative glass of Chateau la NAD, and be merry for tomorrow you die, er, live forever! Whichever. LOL!”
Initially chuckling, Satan is now laughing thunderously. Then abruptly he breaks off the merriment and dramatically pulls himself up to his full majesty, clears his throat and after a well-timed moment of silence, opens his mouth and speaks solemnly, “But seriously and all joshing aside, my precious sweetly quaking captives, what I’m building up to is, even if you wanted to obey God’s endless unwarranted commandments you just simply cannot. God says you can, but that’s not true. I hate to say this, He lies. Would I lie to you?”
And Satan, believe it or not, is just getting started. In mercy the mike is yanked from his grasp.
Now then, in saying man cannot obey God, the father of all lies utters a truth. He kids us not. For Satan is echoing God’s own warnings more vehemently than God Himself. And Satan rubs it in. As Paul laments, “O wretched man that I am!”
It’s the truth, but only part of a truth, just a half-truth. It doesn’t take a meta- or nuclear-physicist to discern that a half-truth is a deception. On this planet deception first occurred in Eden, and in the Endtimes deception will be out of control and so forceful that – if possible – the very elect, even – all too possible – our own emergent degreed thought leaders. And as to you being beautiful, flattery works every time.
As to that truth about our being unable to obey God, that’s a half truth, the most disheartening, wretched half.
Here is God’s whole truth including the most heartening, exciting, game-changing half. Unable are we indeed to obey God if, if, if we try to do so by our own devices. We may and must – the joyous part - use His devices, only His. God’s devices are immeasurably stronger than Satan’s, all because of the contingency plan of salvation laid before the foundation of the earth by God the Father and God the Son, who sacrificed Himself in our behalf. Satan’s saying that God is really demanding too much of us to demand our all, is the lie, and all-out total lie, from start to finish. God cannot lie.
At the fullness of time, Christ, according to plan, is in this God-forsaken, desiccated surreal wilderness to face Satan. For this cosmic faceoff Christ has shed His equality with God the Father to become one with fallen humanity and less fit than Adam in his prime.
For forty days Christ has not eaten a crumb. He is drained of physical strength while gaining spiritual strength by unceasingly praying to His father, as we must.
Far more devastating than anything with which man can ever suffer, this mystical ordeal leaves Christ’s visage so marred and distorted as to be hardly recognizable as human. In this condition Christ will now face a Satan who, for the contest, is again disguised, but not as merely a talking serpent but as a shining angel excelling in power, sent from God.
Christ’s infinite and agonizing come-down demonstrates among so many other things His unbelievable love for fallen unworthy humanity. He is willing to do anything to save us. That he is filled with vengeance and not compassion and mercy is an awful Satanic deception. God cannot lie.
Christ’s having to die for us also makes manifest Satan’s lie in dismissing an iddy-biddy bite of the proscribed apple as beneath notice and unreasonable. So crucial is obedience to what might seem trivial that Christ was willing to sacrifice Himself as propitiation for us who bought into that deception.
Now Christ is pounded by the three of Satan’s most deceptive, perfected, fail-safe temptations. Christ’s defense is not His own devices as Adam relied on his own, and not His own veiled potential or His Father’s ready infinite power, nor by line- by-line theological rebuttal, nor by hermeneutics and doctoral discussion, but simply the Word of God, available as a precious gift to us all.
By the Word, every word from the mouth of God, Christ meets Satan, and conquers. Satan is conquered! By the Word of God Christ has regained title to his earth and to us, and the right and obligation to terminate Satan. The Great Controversy between Christ and Satan is won.
Whereupon an angel, a true and glorious angel whom the loving Father truly sent, ministers to the humanly frail but conquering Christ. It is the same angel who will later welcome Him as Conqueror out of the grave and back to heaven to be our mediator and to sit at the right hand of His Father in glory for having redeemed fallen man that God so loves. This angel was sent to succor a human Christ just as the risen and glorified Christ is ministering to, and mediating for us in the heavenly sanctuary as we face Satan’s overwhelming deceptions.
And likewise shall Christ come again, this time in His full divine glory to receive us unto Himself to be where He is, and to personally welcome us with gladness to a feast such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor entered into the stomach and heart of man. As host and our own ideal elder brother and our high priest, he shall exalt over us with loud singing, not just crooning. (Proof text: Zephaniah 3:17, ESV)
We thus shall enjoy Eternal life with Christ and God and fellow saints many of whom lived millennia ago, and our immortal guardian angels who heretofore had been invisible.
And O what blessed, blessed relief. Satan is no more. At long last we are liberated from Satan’s tedious monologues and chuckles and eyeball-rolling and his fiendish laughter and jokes at our expense, and his fatal deceptions, his overwhelming devices.
But to obtain all this we must now indeed surrender all, especially our devices which have proven so disappointing, and take hold of Christ’s strength. For He says, “without me ye can do nothing.”
That sounds like an altar call, with organ background, also harps and hallelujahs and loud triumphant singing. Let us eagerly take this opportunity and hurry to the golden rostrum, put the iPhone and all devices aside and cast our crowns at His feet and shout His glory.
Dr. Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.