3 Ways to Avoid Deception

In these last days, the dev­il is do­ing his best to de­ceive us. How can we avoid his de­cep­tions? Here are 3 ways you can stay in the light:

1. Love the truth
2. Know how to prop­erly test the spir­its
3. Be hu­mble

1. Love the truth

Je­sus said something pro­found:

Je­sus saith un­to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh un­to the Fath­er, but by me (John 14:6).

We see here that the truth is not only what is true or in ac­cord­ance with fact or real­ity, but an ac­tu­al per­son. If we say we love Je­sus, then we love all truth and in lov­ing truth, we love Je­sus be­cause he is the truth. A per­son who shies away from the whole truth of a mat­ter be­cause it makes him or her feel bad is a per­son that will be de­ceived.

There are only lies and truth. If you move away from one you get the oth­er. Take Satan for ex­ample: a per­son who re­jec­ted God to the point that he be­came the ex­act op­pos­ite of God. He in turn was named the “fath­er of lies.”

Ye are of your fath­er the dev­il, and the lusts of your fath­er ye will do. He was a mur­der­er from the be­gin­ning, and abode not in the truth, be­cause there is no truth in him. When he speak­eth a lie, he speak­eth of his own: for he is a li­ar, and the fath­er of it (John 8:44).

So again, if we stay connected to Jesus Christ we can avoid deception. The more you hang around truth, the more you can detect lies pretty easily.

In second Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans chapter 2 verses 8-10, God has a strict warn­ing or proph­ecy for those who don’t love the truth:

⁸ And then shall that Wicked be re­vealed, whom the Lord shall con­sume with the spir­it of his mouth, and shall des­troy with the bright­ness of his com­ing: ⁹ Even him, whose com­ing is after the work­ing of Satan with all power and signs and ly­ing won­ders, ¹⁰ And with all de­ceiv­able­ness of un­right­eous­ness in them that per­ish; be­cause they re­ceived not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. ¹¹ And for this cause God shall send them strong de­lu­sion, that they should be­lieve a lie: ¹² That they all might be damned who be­lieved not the truth, but had pleas­ure in un­right­eous­ness. (2 Thes 2:8-10)

We see here that souls can be saved, but be­cause they don’t love the truth, God will give them over to a strong de­lu­sion. God has a prob­lem with people who don’t love truth and while he ex­tends grace and mercy, there will be a time where there will be no more grace and room for re­pent­ance. So, to avoid de­cep­tion and a strong de­lu­sion brought on by God him­self, we must al­ways love the truth, no mat­ter if it hurts.

Truth and Trust

We need to un­der­stand that just be­cause the truth is of­ten very ugly and hurt­ful, Je­sus has a solu­tion for every situ­ation. There­fore, trust in Je­sus Christ is es­sen­tial when relating to him be­cause without trust we wouldn’t be able to handle the relationship.

Know­ing that Je­sus has a rem­edy for the darkest rev­el­a­tions in this life keeps us calm and se­cure.

We must tell the truth

If Satan is a li­ar, do you think we can avoid de­cep­tion by telling lies ourselves? The an­swer is: No. The bible says that all li­ars will have their part in the lake of fire (Rev 21:8). A li­ar ends up des­troyed be­cause he/she didn’t be­lieve God re­quires hon­esty. We mustn’t tell lies. We must al­ways seek to be hon­est for the goal in this life is to be con­formed to the im­age of Christ Jesus who we know is al­ways hon­est.

2. Know how to prop­erly test the spir­its

Everything that seems to be true is not. Everything that feels good may not be from God. How we think God should be­have may not be the reality.

The bible says that in these last days, know­ledge would in­crease (Daniel 12:4). New things are be­ing re­vealed every day. Some are from God and some are not. There are doc­trines Christians held for cen­tur­ies that they’re now abandon­ing for con­tem­por­ary world­views.

There are “mani­fest­a­tions” that claim to be from the Holy Spir­it but are not. There are people who teach a lot of truth, but also mix in some lies. In or­der to avoid de­cep­tion, we need to know how to test the spir­its. What are “the spir­its?” These spir­its are the people, the vis­ions, the dreams, the doc­trines and the voices that we hear. These spir­its are de­liv­er­ing mes­sages and we need to know how to de­cipher between what is true and what is not.

The wrong way to test the spir­its

We get the com­mand to test the spir­its in 1 John 4:1-6. For some groups, they have used this scrip­ture as a for­mula to test all spir­its. Let’s read the scrip­ture and see what it says:

Be­loved, be­lieve not every spir­it, but try the spir­its wheth­er they are of God: be­cause many false proph­ets are gone out in­to the world. ² Hereby know ye the Spir­it of God: Every spir­it that con­fes­seth that Je­sus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: ³ And every spir­it that con­fes­seth not that Je­sus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spir­it of an­ti­christ, where­of ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. ⁴ Ye are of God, little chil­dren, and have over­come them: be­cause great­er is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. ⁵ They are of the world: there­fore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them. ⁶ We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spir­it of truth, and the spir­it of er­ror (1 John 4:1-6).

We see here that if a spir­it con­fesses that Je­sus Christ came in the flesh, it is of God, but if it doesn’t, then it is not of God. I’ve heard people ask teach­ers wheth­er or not Je­sus came in the flesh to de­term­ine if they were true or false.

It has been also taught that if you think you’re hear­ing the voice of God, you should test it by ask­ing it if Je­sus came in the flesh. If the voice con­fesses that Je­sus came in the flesh, then that spir­it is a good spir­it—one from God.

A prob­lem­at­ic for­mula

The prob­lem with this test is an evil spir­it can lie. I’m sure that some evil spir­its won’t con­fess that Je­sus came in the flesh, but oth­ers will. I be­lieve this for­mula which, based off scrip­ture, was in­spired by the dev­il him­self.

You see, the evil spir­it can trick a per­son in­to be­liev­ing that the for­mula is work­ing by con­fess­ing that Je­sus didn’t come in the flesh, and at that point, the per­son would dis­miss the evil spir­it. But at oth­er times it would con­fess that Je­sus did come in the flesh and the per­son would be­lieve the evil spir­it and po­ten­tially be led astray.

The reas­on why I can say this is be­cause the bible nev­er says that their is some creed that pro­hib­its demons from ly­ing about Je­sus or any­thing else for that mat­ter.

A test for the gnostics

If you un­der­stand 1 John chapter 4 in the con­text of the time, you know that the writer was com­bat­ing gnosti­cism. Gnostics were people who were teach­ing that Je­sus didn’t come in the flesh; and they were adam­ant about it. So the best way to know if they were deal­ing such people was to ask them this ques­tion.

However, what about people who do be­lieve Je­sus came in the flesh but teach oth­er her­es­ies? This for­mula will not work on them, nor the demons they’re in­spired by. This is the weak­est for­mula for er­ror de­tec­tion that I ever heard of in my en­tire life; and for a short time I used to ac­tu­ally be­lieve it.

So if you use this for­mula, don’t aban­don it, just don’t rely on it solely. It only works on gnostic spir­its and the sim­il­ar.

The right way to test the spir­its

The best way, along with 1 John 4, is to see if what is be­ing com­mu­nic­ated by a par­tic­u­lar spir­it aligns with the bible. Search the scrip­tures, is it in there? I searched the scrip­tures to find un­con­trol­lable laughter, gold dust fall­ing from the church ceil­ing, and mys­ter­i­ous gems ap­pear­ing from nowhere all in the name of God to be ab­sent from scrip­ture. With that said, I don’t ac­cept these phe­nomen­ons as godly mani­fest­a­tions but rather something sinister.

I’ve done the same thing for teach­ings such as: “men have no sin nature”, or, “men can’t lose their sal­va­tion,” or “keep­ing the laws of Moses will save you.” When a per­son hon­estly searches the scrip­tures and aligns what is be­ing taught with them, the truth will be re­vealed. It’s just that simple.

Us­ing the gift of dis­cern­ment of spir­its

An­oth­er way to test the spir­its is to op­er­ate in the gift of dis­cern­ment of spir­its. This is a gift from the Holy Spir­it and it just gives you an un­der­stand­ing of what you’re deal­ing with. If you don’t have it, talk to someone who does. When you have it, you’ll just know when you’re deal­ing with something from God or not. However, I wouldn’t rely solely on an unc­tion if you can help it, but the scrip­tures as well. The gift, the bible and con­firm­a­tions from God all work to­geth­er to help you de­term­ine whether you’re dealing with truth or error.

3. Hu­mil­ity

Pride will pre­vent a man or wo­man from ad­mit­ting when they’re wrong and ac­cept­ing the truth—we all know this. Pride makes you be­lieve that you can’t be wrong about cer­tain things in life. Gods don’t make mis­takes and this is the es­sence of pride—a god­like think­ing about one’s self. There­fore pride keeps a per­son in de­cep­tion.

We must guard against pride. We must un­der­stand that we are only hu­man and we are deceived on oc­ca­sion. Somethings we just didn’t know and we were lied to early on. Once something that is con­trary to our world­view is presen­ted to us, it’s our job to judge it ac­cord­ing to the gift of the dis­cern­ment of spir­its, and the bible with con­firm­a­tions from the Holy Spir­it.

There is no ex­cuse for any man to walk in dark­ness when one of the Holy Spir­it’s work is to guide men in­to all truth (John 16:13). God doesn’t want any­one de­ceived and so if they are, it’s be­cause they’re not ready to handle truth, or they’re too proud or God has giv­en them over to a strong de­lu­sion.

We can nev­er be people un­will­ing to be corrected just be­cause something is con­trary to our views. If we want to avoid de­cep­tion we must al­ways be open to the truth, no mat­ter if it hurts, and trust that Je­sus has a rem­edy for the situ­ation. We can­not think we know it all or that we could nev­er be wrong in an area—when we do, we’re open to de­cep­tion.

At the end of the day it comes back to lov­ing the truth more than our cir­cum­stances, bi­ases and per­son­al feel­ings. Then and only then can we avoid de­cep­tion and walk in the light.

This ministry is no longer in service. I left the Christian faith and no longer agree with some of the content posted here. However, this website will remain available for archive purposes. Read the details in my last post.

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