To unbelievers on the Left they believe “all religions are about the same”, and “all religions have led humans to war, but there can be some good teachings to learn from all of them.” If you ask them about heaven and hell they might say, “all religions lead to heaven, they just take different paths to get there.”
Of course these are all lies and we know WHO the Father of Lies is! Jesus makes that very clear. So Satan loves religion because it leads people away from the truth of Jesus being the one and only way to gain salvation.
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It is a common misconception that Satan hates religion. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have been the driving force behind over 4,000 false religions. Yes, Satan loves religion, particularly when he can use it to counterfeit the truth of God’s Word and manufacture empty ritualistic faiths that are devoid of the soul-saving gospel.
In his book “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth”, C I Scofield warned that the church turned away from its appointed pathway of separation, holiness, heavenliness and testimony and instead appointed itself to the work of civilizing the world, building magnificent temples and acquiring earthly power and wealth. This was not the commission of the church. But as Oswald Chambers once aptly pointed out, “Satan’s great aim is to cause us to be devoted to the death to any cause, any enterprise, to anything but the Lord Jesus.”
You see, many churches congratulate themselves on not being persecuted by the enemy. Perhaps that is because they are no threat to him. After all, if you are not in collision with the devil, you may well be in collusion with him. Satan figured out long ago that he could never destroy the church. He does more harm by imitation than outright opposition and he achieves much in this world by peddling false doctrine under the banner of counterfeit Christianity. As Vance Havner used to say, “The devil is not fighting religion; he is too smart for that. He is producing a counterfeit Christianity so much like the real one that good Christians are afraid to speak out against it.” Part of that strategy involves planting counterfeit preachers in the pulpits. Adrian Rogers once said, “When you look for the devil, never fail to look in the pulpit.” That is a sobering thought. All of us would love to think that every church was led by a godly man who has been called by God into that position and has consecrated himself to the Lord’s service. However, I think it is apparent to all of us that there are many counterfeits who parade as godly men.
In Satan’s counterfeit Christianity, he has promoted opulence instead of obedience; money instead of a message; grandeur instead of grace; popularity instead of passion. A W Tozer used to say that he would rather preach to empty seats than betray the sheep of God. False teachers have no such conscience. As a result, every Sunday people are piling into centres of worship not to receive the tranquility of God’s grace and mercy but to be tranquilized by false doctrine. It is in counterfeit Christianity where you can expect to be comfortable instead of convicted, soothed instead of sanctified and pampered instead of pricked.
Charles Spurgeon once said, “We shall not get back a strong race of Christians till we get back such a sturdy band of outspoken men as dare their reputation, if not their lives, upon the unvarnished testimony they give to the Truth they know, the Truth as it is in Jesus, the Truth as it burns in their own hearts and fires their tongues, the Truth as it commends itself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” Notice the emphasis on truth! Great heroes of the faith in the past have died for the cause of it. But in our modern day, many believers don’t want to be inconvenienced by defending it.
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