By Gustav Kros
I have preached many sermons on Matthew 24:1-14 due to its relevance to the vision of INcontext. Wars, natural disasters, and persecution are all part of the weekly news that we report on from a Christian perspective, but lately the Lord has been laying another aspect of this passage on my heart; the issue of deception.
In verses 4,5, and 11 Jesus tells His disciples the following. “Watch out that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many… 11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Then in verse 24 and 25 He says again, “For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. 25 See, I have told you ahead of time.”
When we read these verses it is important to remined ourselves that Jesus is speaking about the Church. He is speaking about you and me. He is warning us, that as we move closer to His second coming, deception will increase within the Church, and ultimately many of us will be deceived. Now I don’t know about you, but I know that I surely don’t want to be part of the ‘many’ that will be deceived, and so I take this warning very seriously.
As a first step in protecting ourselves from being deceived I believe it’s important that we understand that this forms part of the spiritual battle (Eph 6:12) we are in, and the devil is thus the source of all deception. When we know who our enemy is, we can better prepare ourselves according to our knowledge of his tactics.
Take the following scriptures into consideration within this context:
2 Corinthians 11:13-15: “For such people are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. 14 And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15 It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.”
Acts 13:10: “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?”
2 Thessalonians 2:9-10: “The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, 10 and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.”
1 Timothy 4:1: “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.”
It is important to acknowledge that deception is purposefully made to look like or sound like the truth. It is not easily identifiable. It is purposefully orchestrated in such a way to mislead you. If you are thus not going to be on your guard and look out for possible deception, you run a very high risk of being deceived. That is surely why Jesus warned us against it. The question remains, are we taking heed of His warning?
Another question we need to consider is how easy is it to be deceived?
A simple response to the question might purely be, ‘easy’. It is easy to be deceived, but we can’t really quantify the answer. But since deception is based on truth, we can change the question to, how much does it take for something to be not true?
Truth, in essence, is viewed as a whole, same as holiness. Even if a person is 99.99% holy, he/she still gets classified as being unholy. The same goes for truth. Even if something is 99.99% true, it can no longer be identified as truth. That is why we get asked to testify to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
If we thus look at truth in this way, and we ask ourselves again, how easy is it to be deceived, we see it is extremely easy to be deceived. The devil can quote something to us that is 99% true and just omit 1% that can cause us to be deceived.
How then should we go about protecting and defending ourselves against deception?
As in all things, we should look to Jesus’ example. When Jesus was tested in the wilderness, the devil tried to deceive Jesus by quoting Scripture out of context, but Jesus refuted him by quoting Scripture back to him (Matt 4:6-7). It is important to notice that in all three tests Jesus answered the devil by quoting Scripture to him. It therefore makes sense that within the Spiritual battle that we find ourselves in, the Word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit and that it hangs on the belt of truth (Eph 6:11-17). Therefore, if we are to defend ourselves against deception with the Word of God, we need to ask ourselves, how well do we know the Word of God? Or, how well trained am I in handling my sword?
Here are a few further Scriptures to take into consideration as you contemplate the question.
Deuteronomy 6:5-9 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
Acts 17:11 “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.”
2 Timothy 3:14-17 “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
2 Timothy 4:3-4 “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”
