When Satan quotes Scripture to Jesus Christ in His 40 days and 40 nights of testing in the wilderness, he uses exact
w-o-r-d-s to try and trick Jesus. He misquotes Scripture passages, a primary tactic
of his since tempting Eve in Genesis 3.
Satan and Eve subtract, add to and
distort the Word, resulting in the fall. But when Satan comes against Christ, there’s
no shaking Him.
In
Matthew 4:4, Jesus answered Satan, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Then,
in verse 7, He states, “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy
God.” Basically, Satan says, “It is written,” and Jesus comes back with, “Yeah,
but you missed a verse, brother. It's written again."
Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 6:16,
coming back at Satan the same way Satan comes at Him—quoting Scripture.
Jordan
explains, “There’s a reason for that. He's taking his place right where God is
working. God's forming that faithful remnant inside the nation, and Christ is
standing with that ‘little flock’ as the true vine: as the faithful Man in the
earth. And when He does that, the Adversary can't touch him.
“The
message for us is if you'll stand in what God's given to you today—not in
Israel's place but in the position God's given you in Christ today—you'll find
your ministry is attended with power when Satan tries to come against you.
“Satan
says, ‘C’mon, Son of God, be scriptural, do what the Book says, just don't do it
at the right time. Don't do it dispensationally.’ ”
*****
Of Hebrews 11:17 (“By faith
Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the
promises offered up his only begotten son”), Jordan says, “Boy, I tell you, folks, you could preach for a month off that one verse!
“There’s something extraordinary in that verse
about the trying of your faith; about the expansion of your horizons;
about taking that wonderful position you have in Christ and seeing it be a
living reality in your life day by day.
“The
whole issue in Hebrews is ‘by faith,’ and by believing what God said, Abraham
offered up his son. Faith is to believe what God says to YOU. You'll never have
faith if you don't have God's Word to you,
and that's why you've got to ‘rightly divide’ it! It’s essential!
“You
can't rest in something God didn't tell you in your dispensation to do, because if God didn't tell you to do it, it's unbelief. It's no more wrong for you to
operate on the basis of human viewpoint and go out into the unsaved world and
get its viewpoint and base your life on that—humanism, hedonism, materialism,
and all the rest. That's no more wrong before God, for if God never told you to
do the things you do...
*****
“Our culture today is totally
dominated by man’s viewpoints and philosophies. There’s a complete rejection of
God’s Word and God’s truth; human reason reigns supreme.
"People
argue, 'Certainly we’re making progress; we’re moving,' but it’s like being on
a cruise ship where you lose an accurate perspective on the fact you’re moving.
“Sure
it’s moving—the planet we live on is moving—but that doesn’t make it a good,
upward thing. Progress is automatic; it’s inevitable. But where science—or the
human ability to cognitively design and think about what’s going on—sees us
evolving from the puddle to paradise, the Bible says we’re ever-degenerating
from paradise to the puddle. You’re moving all right; you’re just moving in the
opposite direction!
“One
of the great warnings in all of Paul’s epistles is, ‘Beware of profane and vain
babblings, and oppositions of science falsely
so called.’ He’s warning, not just of quote-unquote ‘science,’ but philosophy,
which Paul calls ‘vain deceit.’
“The
Psalmist in Psalm 39 says that ‘man at his best state is altogether vanity.’
That means the best you’re ever going to do with your human thinking processes
apart from the Word of God, and what God has to say to you, is going to be
empty, futile and delusional. It isn’t going to work. God says in Isaiah 55:8,
‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.’
*****
*****
“The
19th century English
poet Matthew Arnold wrote, ‘What is the course of the life of mortal men on the
earth? Most men eddy about here and there—eat and drink, chatter and love and
hate, gather and squander, are raised aloft, are hurled in the dust, striving
blindly, achieving
nothing; and then they die.’
nothing; and then they die.’
“You
know what he’s saying? He’s saying exactly what the wisest man in the Bible,
King Solomon, is saying: I think the first two verse of Proverbs 18 are the two
most deadly verses in the Bible about the American education system: [1] Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and
intermeddleth with all wisdom.
[2] A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.
[2] A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.
“Americans worship sex, education
and religion, pretty much in that order. They’re the gods of America,
especially the education system.
*****
“Solomon
writes, ‘Through desire, a man having separated himself.’ When you separate
yourself away, and you seek and intermeddle with all wisdom, there’s a word
that comes out of that and it’s the word elitism.
Another word is egalitarianism.
“That’s
a way of saying everybody’s equal. That sounds good because, frankly, that’s a
good attitude to have except for the fact it just isn’t true. You know that everybody doesn’t have the same faculties in life about
different things. We’re not all equal.
“Of
course, we’re all equally human and in Christ we’re certainly all equal; nobody
blessed more than the other—but what egalitarianism is talking about is more
political and it means one culture is not better than another.
“And
when you hear people talk about multiculturalism, inclusiveness, pluralism, globalism, etc., those are all buzz words designed to say that the Bible is irrelevant; that God is irrelevant; that all
truth is relative and one person’s philosophy, and one culture’s ideas, is just
as good as another. And there’s no basis to decide that one thinking process is
better than the other if there’s no God and no absolute, identifiable truth.
“The
thinking is, ‘No, God, we’re going to decide for ourselves what we think is
good.’ Well, the problem with that is there are people who think they’re right trying
to blow other people up.
*****
*****
“If
deciding what’s right is based on some societal decision, which is the only
thing left when you don’t have absolute truth (saying we as a culture, or we as
a group, can come to a decision about what we think is good or bad), then
things we think are decidedly bad are decided by others to be good and there’s
no way to argue any of it if every process is just as equally valid.
“You see, the whole problem is
they don’t glorify Him as God—they throw Him off the table.
“He’s
going in, seeking and working with, studying, figuring out, interchanging with
wisdom. ‘A fool hath no delight in understanding.’ Solomon’s telling you the
guy in Proverbs 18:1 is a fool.
“What’s
the guy in verse 1 really want to do? ‘That his heart may discover itself.’ His
heart wants to have its own way.
“But
what does a fool say in his heart? Psalm 14 says, ‘The fool hath said in his
heart, There is no God.’ You see, the problem in Proverbs 18 is not
intellectual honesty; the problem is moral corruption. The problem is the guy studies for
just one thing: his heart to develop an alibi to do what he wants to do. That’s
God’s evaluation of what’s going on.
“Psalm
10:4 says, ‘The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek
after God.’ Verse 6 goes on to say, ‘He hath said in his heart, I shall not be
moved: for I shall never be in adversity.’
“In
his heart he’s saying, ‘Hey, nobody’s ever going to get after me! I can make
it.’ Verse 11 reveals, ‘He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he
hideth his face; he will never see it.’
“What
he’s saying is, ‘I’m gonna get away with it! God’s not looking!’ and that’s his
heart’s attitude. You see this
guy’s got a heart problem, not an intellectual problem?!
“It’s, ‘Get
rid of God and I don’t have to give account. Get rid of God and I can do what I
want to do my way.’ That’s who Paul’s talking about when he says, ‘Professing
themselves to be wise they became fools.’
“The alibi to live the way you want to live is to
convince yourself God isn’t real and that’s the whole push behind human philosophy—the
whole impetus for its perpetuation.”
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