In this story God—the Father, Son, and Spirit God—is the protagonist. And the Son’s captivating qualities set the scene: to know him is to love him. The Father delights in the Son and wants him to have a Bride who can love and enjoy him as the Father does. The Spirit’s mission is to arrange the marriage: he sets up introductions.

God’s motive in this is love—a giving heart—and marriage is his venue for sharing. The story began before the foundation of the world as the Father, Son, and Spirit communed in a shared glory. It was in this period that the Bride was anticipated: “chosen” even before creation.

Of course this marriage transcends human marriage: it is neither physical nor temporal. Instead the Bride is the collective body of men and women who respond to the Spirit’s wooing. So the Bride is spiritual in the sense that she is “one” not in any tangible sense but in the reality of the shared Spirit.

How the divine Son can take a bride from the creation is central to the plot. First, humans were made in God’s “likeness” to be suitable candidates. But another step was needed. The Son had to join humanity: to share the tangible life of the Bride. And as such he became a bridge for the Bride to join the Father’s family. The Son was already united to the Father in his divinity and then by a physical birth he joined humanity to take his Bride. And all—Father, Son, and Bride—share the one Spirit. By this bond the Bride has eternal life.

This epic story explains both our creation and, for the Bride, salvation. Yet to many of us it sounds odd and unfamiliar. Why?

Because an antagonist muddles this true story with false accounts.

This is the Liar: an angel gone bad. In his beauty and free self-expression this figure became an arch-narcissist: loving himself in place of God. And with that he sought to take over the creation by forming a counter-kingdom: a realm of moral opposition.

He was, of course, only a creature himself and unable to form his own creation. Instead he plotted to take over humanity and through seduction to rule the creation through humans. His ploy has been to replace good with evil in every aspect of reality. This is the moral equivalent of making old-style film negatives: he converts light to darkness and vice versa.

In his plan he presumed God, as pure goodness, would lose access to all who were part of this morally-reversed realm. And when the Holy Spirit’s bonding love was quenched in Adam—and the Spirit now stood outside human souls—humanity as a whole turned instead to the reversed narratives offered by the Unholy spirit.

And this spirit—Satan—reconceived each element of God’s goodness by overt reversals. His new realm treats God as a disaffected singularity rather than a God who is love; it offered animated death in place of Life. It replaced love for others with a love of self; a devotion to light with a fascination for darkness; the power of love with the love of power; a proper form of marriage with improper forms; and much, much more.

So the Bible calls him the Serpent, the Devil, the Accuser, and more. The Son called him the Liar and the Father of lies. No truth will ever be found in him or offered by him.

His ultimate Lie is that we can “be like God.” As if humanity, apart from God, can do just fine. God may still be useful since he sustains the creation but he seems to be impotent.

The Bride in God’s story is gathered from those who accepted the Lie and were then devoured by Satan’s living death. But, in an amazing turn, the Son devours death for those who love him. He entered death to rescue us and to reverse our moral polarities. Satan didn’t anticipate this.

How did the blameless Son die? In the great exchange of marital properties he took on our evil; and we received his life. He, as God, swallowed our death and was raised from death on the basis of his unquenchable life. And so we now live in him by faith.

So the true Epic ends with the Bride returning to the Living Truth and sharing his glory—the glory of the Father—with the new life of the Spirit making it all work. The Unholy spirit, on the other hand, still has death—along with all who spurned the Son’s Life—forever.

It’s an epic reality that brings us to the one True Love worth living for.

The post Living Truth first appeared on Cor Deo.

As I ponder this idea I see more and more evidence to support the statement used as a title for this post. Sure, there is the obvious logical agreement: Satan hates God, the Holy Spirit is God, thus Satan must hate the Holy Spirit. However, affirming the logic of a statement is not the same as pondering the implications. So why does Satan hate the Holy Spirit and how is this seen in everyday life?

You can see the work of the enemy as you consider both the cults and secular society. In the cults there is always an undermining of the biblical doctrine of the Trinity – God is twisted from a gloriously loving tri-unity into a monadic power-broker (often seen as a devilish antagonist). In secular society the idea of God is also twisted into a perversion and caricature of reality and the convicting work of the Spirit is undermined by persistent indoctrination in the lie of autonomy and guiltless existence.

Now, what about in the church? Surely once people become believers the enemy’s attack on the Spirit becomes fruitless, doesn’t it? I don’t think that is the case. Does the enemy stop attacking marriage once we are saved, or does the antagonism increase? Are we not tempted to sin once we are believers? Of course not, so I suspect there is a consistency here.

So how does the role of the Holy Spirit suffer in respect to spiritual warfare? What is the enemy’s strategy to undermine the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives?

It seems to me that Christians tend to feel a pull in one of two directions, both of which are away from the reality of the Spirit’s work. Both pulls negate the fact that the Holy Spirit is a person rather than a force, and both distract believers from a wonderful and central element of the Christian life.

The first pull is to turn the Holy Spirit into a power-focused force. The Spirit becomes the fuel for Christian living and sometimes the fuel for spectacular displays of personal anointing. Undoubtedly there is truth in the mix here, but the corruption seems to come in respect to the emphasis and direction of focus. The power, or lack of it, tends to become the emphasis in Christian life and ministry. People caught up with a power-caricature of the Spirit tend to focus either on the Spirit, or on themselves.

The second pull is to turn the Holy Spirit into a silent and benign figure. The Spirit is assumed to be at work in the normal things of church life by means of, well, various means. Undoubtedly there is truth in the mix here as He is surely at work as we read the Bible, hear preaching, etc., but the corruption seems to come in respect to the emphasis and direction of focus. The emphasis in Christian life and ministry seems to shift to habits and personal commitments. People buying into a means-caricature of the Spirit might tend to be focused on themselves and their diligence.

The pre-eminent role of the Spirit is that of a communicator, specifically, relational communication between the Father and the Son, between God and us, and between us in the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit is primarily concerned with the power of love, not some sort of love of power. He pours out God’s love into our hearts and baptises us into Christ. The fruit of the Spirit is profoundly Christlike. He gifts us to build up the body of Christ that we might point each other to the head, who is Christ.

That’s the key issue with the Spirit – he wants to lift the eyes of our hearts to Christ. And that is why Satan so despises the role of the Spirit. By forcing the focus onto ourselves, or even onto the Spirit himself, the enemy seeks to undermine the Christ-ward gaze of true Holy Spirituality.

Perhaps this a factor in the strange phenomena of otherwise great Christian writers offering solid and helpful books, yet somehow many of them seem to remain blind to the importance of the Spirit in their discussions of living the Christian life, pursuing sanctification, living out Christian marriage, parenting or church ministry.

The Spirit seems to be a blind spot for many. And where the Spirit is relegated or twisted in some way, then the bottom line will always be a drift towards an autonomous and self-driven “spirituality” (which was The Lie back in Genesis 3, of course).

Perhaps we would do well to ponder the spiritual attack against the Holy Spirit. I suspect that if we were to ponder this, then we would find our hearts drawn to Christ. This is the goal of the Spirit, as well as the great fear of the enemy!

The post Satan Hates the Holy Spirit first appeared on Cor Deo.

But, as I enjoyed the innocence of my son, I started to ponder the reality that I don’t think much differently.  Instead my thoughts aren’t communicated out loud so directly, they’re a whole lot sadder, no less ironic, and far more deadly. They go something like this, “I’m the weakman, and I can do anything!”  While, I might not consciously include the “weakman” part of the sentence, it’s there nevertheless.

Why do I say this? Well, when fear, false-humility, etc. begin to bear fruit in my life, I know my thoughts have been abiding in the silly notion that I can do anything on my own.  That I, as an individual, can direct my own steps and I have no need of anyone else. Yet the fear that comes from this pride is rooted in something false.

One of the warning signs that anyone is living in the lie of Satan (that God can’t be trusted, and I’m my own god) is their internal conversation.  If you find that your self-talk is a single voice, odds are its self-concerned and self-protective. Your thoughts are rooted in the lie “I can do anything” while protecting yourself from your inability to do so.  This often manifests itself in constantly comparing yourself to others, “I’m better than…” or “I’m not as good as… ” These comparisons can lead to perfectionism, panic-induced paralysis, or prodigal licentiousness. The differing behaviors are only symptoms of the same disease, someone’s habitual value that they are God.

Let’s return to my son’s insightful declaration. It’s essential to abide in the reality that we can do nothing on our own – that God is God, and we are not.  Now our flesh will immediately make this statement primarily about power.  I don’t think it is, however.  It’s a love issue. It’s a trust issue. These are intimate companions, but for the sake of clarity let’s talk about each one separately.

When living in the lie we believe that we’re not loveable, and that God doesn’t really love us. The truth, however, is that God does loves us and therefore we, the unloveable, are made lovely.  This love is not some cheap, fluffy, marshmallow love given to us from a transcendent distance.  No, its the God who stoops down to give us life in his Son, and to give us his Spirit who testifies to this by pouring God’s love into our hearts.   When we respond to him with love, he abides in us and we in him.  And as our triune God is an other-centered communion with an eternal conversation between the Father and Son by their Spirit, it should be no surprise we should start to converse with him by his Spirit.  Our internal conversation becomes a true conversation with our Father and our Bridegroom.   It is a conversation based upon the delight that God is God and I’m not, and my God loves me unfailingly.

We, however, don’t trust this enough.  I find that in 1 John 4:16 we miss the full-stop after “the love that God has for us.”  We tend to do the Step Toe On the Pedal and roll by that God loves us onto what we need to do next, i.e. prove that we are lovers of God.  When we do this, we tend to read in 1 John that it’s our responsibility to love our brother and to love God.  Now I wouldn’t want to give the impression that these aren’t important, they’re vital to John’s epistle.  Yet, John doesn’t see these as a responsibility we have to force ourselves to do, rather he emphatically states we respond in love because God first loved us.  If we don’t abide and dwell in the goodness of our God who is love, we can’t help but make love a responsibility because we trust the statement “I can do anything on my own” rather than “I’m deeply loved, and I can do nothing on my own.”

When we wholeheartedly trust that God is for us we’ll begin to hear another voice in our internal conversation.  The voice will direct our gaze onto God’s beauty. The Spirit will bear his fruit.  And we’ll discover a desire to give ourselves away to others in the way God gave himself to us.

Here the internal conversation changes from being self-concerned, self-protective, or even self-determined.  Rather we’ll depend on God for all things we do. We’ll constantly ask God to join us in our daily activities. We’ll ask God for help in every circumstance, difficult or easy.  We’ll confidently take risks knowing that our identity isn’t wrapped up in our performance or others’ opinions, but upon God’s testimony of us, the God who’s walking with us.   The possibilities are endless when our focus is upon the glorious love of the Trinity, which is manifested in Jesus depending on the Father for everything while fearlessly giving himself away.

I’m thankful my son was right, with one major addition, in Christ I am the strongman, and I can do nothing without him.  Let us confidently depend on Him, even in our internal conversation.

The post Superhero? first appeared on Cor Deo.