The Cruel Deception

Of all the painful experiences a fallen world presents, death might be the most cruel of them all. We spend countless years and expend unimaginable effort to improve ourselves, forever learning and acquiring new skills, but to what end? Eventually the light of life is extinguished, and the material we have so carefully enriched our minds with is lost—even the most diligent diarist will not have recorded every one of their thoughts.

The timeline assigned to us in our fallen state—a mere 70 or 80 years—is scarcely enough to satisfy the impulse we have to experience the world. Most of us will never see everything we wanted to see, or learn everything we wanted to learn. “The eye,” the Preacher warned us, “is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (Eccl. 1:8).

A young couple stands at the altar, promising to be faithful to each other until “death do us part,” scarcely imagining the impact of what they have just promised. For the next several decades they will invest very heavily in each other, their hearts becoming impossibly entwined . . . only to have it all taken from them suddenly when one partner dies.

Why is it that we feel so driven to live, when it will all be ripped away from us in a moment? Why do we put in the effort, when everything we are—and everything we do—will be reduced to a small wooden casket lowered into the dirt? For a few brief moments people will (hopefully!) speak kind words about us, but a few hours later our grave will be backfilled, and the people who came to mourn will get on with life.

There are very few things in this life that cause the kind of pain that death brings, and it would seem that the devil knows it—and plays it to his advantage. In almost every evangelistic meeting I’ve conducted over the years, I meet his victims. 

Elizabeth’s Husband

“Pastor, do you think I could talk to you?” I smiled and pointed Elizabeth to the two chairs I had set up near the stage entrance for just such occasions. As we took our seats, she let out a deep sigh. There was a brief silence, and then her voice quivered as she spoke.

“I don’t want you to think I’m crazy,” she said quietly, her eyes filling with tears. “But my dead husband visits me at night.”

A few nights previous, I’d presented the biblical view on death, and it had been bothering her. She wanted to believe what she’d heard, but of course it was difficult to reconcile it with the apparitions of her dead husband that took place regularly at her home. “I know what the Bible says,” she whispered, “but how do you explain Harold?” 

I paused and prayed for a moment. “Elizabeth,” I asked gently, “are you absolutely sure it’s Harold?”

“Oh, absolutely! Or at least, I was sure until a few days ago. And now I’m confused, because it seems so real. I can even smell his cigars when he shows up!”

“Tell me more,” I requested, silently praying that God would grant me the wisdom required to navigate this emotional minefield. If I said the wrong thing, I realized, it would only push a knife into her wounds and potentially shut down our conversation.

She sighed again. “Well, he comes only at night. I’ll be falling asleep, and he will suddenly appear at the foot of the bed to tell me not to worry about him—that he’s very happy on the other side.”

She paused again, working up the courage to continue. “But now I’m really wondering what’s going on, because what you taught from the Bible the other night seems so . . . well, completely clear. And now I’m really scared that I’m going to lose the only thing I have left from Harold—that he’ll stop coming to see me.”

There are very few things in this life that cause the kind of pain that death brings, and it would seem that the devil knows it.

The devil plays all sorts of dirty tricks, but toying with the grieving has got to be one of his worst ploys. Our need to know that the end is not really the end, to know that loved ones have not been removed from us permanently, is so overpowering that we instinctively want the lie to be real.

“Well,” I said, “I can understand why this is so painful. And what’s happening to you is clear evidence that you are destined for the kingdom of God and that the powers of darkness aren’t very happy about that. God’s got an enemy who never plays fair, and he knows full well where you are most vulnerable. He knows you’re going to want it to be Harold, because losing him was the worst thing that ever happened to you, and he’s not above playing those emotions in an attempt to pull you away from Christ. The devil knows how much this hurts, and to put it bluntly, he always plays dirty.”

Fortunately, I’d visited with Elizabeth often enough to earn her trust, and she was eager to continue the discussion. For the next hour or so, we revisited a lot of the biblical passages we’d studied at the meetings, and then we prayed. “Father,” I petitioned, “Your Word on this subject is so crystal clear—and the devil knows it. He can’t come after us on the facts—not on this front—and so he works our pain instead. There are dark forces at work in Elizabeth’s home, trying to cash in on her suffering. So in the name of Jesus, I’m asking that if this is not Harold, it stops at this very moment. Draw a perimeter around her house so that the fallen angels who are mimicking him will not be allowed to come back.”

I peeked up at her, eager to know how the prayer was landing. She nodded her head in agreement and, fighting back tears, uttered a soft “Amen.”

The visitations stopped immediately.

A Difficult Doctrine

Evangelists will tell you that there are two key doctrines that usually prove to be major conceptual hurdles for most audiences: the Sabbath and the state of the dead. Ellen White has made it quite clear that these two issues will prove to be significant challenges for our mission in the closing hours of earth’s history:

“Through the two great errors, the immortality of the soul and Sunday sacredness, Satan will bring the people under his deceptions. While the former lays the foundation of spiritualism, the latter creates a bond of sympathy with Rome. The Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power; and under the influence of this threefold union, this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience.”[*]

Experience has taught me that of the two, the state of the dead proves to be much trickier to navigate. It is so fraught with overpowering emotions that the devil has actually made the truth seem cruel: those who had been clinging to the idea that death is not real have their hopes—as misguided as they are—suddenly dashed to pieces; their emotional coping mechanism has been suddenly wrenched away, and they are once again confronted with loss.

“He was a murderer from the beginning,” Jesus warned of the devil, “and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44).

What does this mean for our mission? We sometimes think our job is merely to inform the public of the truth, carelessly dumping the facts in their laps, leaving them to “take it or leave it.” But soul winning is far more than the mere conveyance of information; it requires us to invest in people—to join them in their trek toward the truth. We are to share in their joys, their fears, and even their pain as the scales begin to fall from their eyes and they learn to see Jesus more clearly. To simply drive the silver spike of truth into an interest’s heart in the hopes of killing the power of a lie is not enough. 
If you choose to go straight for the doctrinal jugular without regard for the pain someone is about to experience, you will generally find that emotions easily trump reason—and if they’ve been experiencing ghostly visitations, it’s going to be even worse. He was speaking of possession, but I believe Jesus’ words on the subject also apply to the way demons play our human emotions: “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29).

It takes an unusual amount of compassion and patience to lead most people through the dark valley of discovery about the reality of death. The lie about human nature—the pagan dualism that was foisted on the west by Plato and others—is so deeply woven into the fabric of human thought that removing it is like ripping away an encrusted bandage that has been in place for far too long. In a master stroke of deception, the devil has even convinced Christian churches to teach his position on death, and there is no shortage of clergy who will try to restore the false hope of consciousness in death to your Bible study interests.

It takes an unusual amount of compassion and patience to lead most people through the dark valley of discovery about the reality of death.

If someone has been dabbling in the occult, it becomes even trickier. Often, paranormal activity in the home will actually increase in an attempt to dissuade a person from accepting the clear teaching of Scripture.

Katelyn

“I can’t believe what happened last night,” Katelyn told me breathlessly at the door to the auditorium. She’d been a practicing occultist until the previous week, when she’d accepted Christ. “I heard what you said about death,” she continued, “and when I walked into my favorite restaurant last night, the ‘spiritual guide’ I used to rely on was there—sitting at a table, in plain sight. He sneered at me and said, ‘You’re going to be back.’ And when I muttered the words ‘God says this is a lie!’ he suddenly disappeared. Poof! Just gone!”

It’s just one more reason that there is no actual end to our evangelistic efforts. Soul winning is not four or five weeks of doctrinal exposition in an auditorium, as important as that is. When people have first heard the truth, the work for souls is just beginning. Leave new converts to themselves, and you will find that fallen angels are all too eager to reclaim what they’ve lost. This is one of the reasons I stopped having any kind of closing ceremony in an evangelistic campaign; it seems to signal to the congregation that their work is completed—when it is anything but.

“They know the truth” is not a sufficient response to people who struggle in their newfound faith. Of course they know the truth, but what they need is to know that they are not alone in living it. And living it with them is not a simple task; you will occasionally see and hear things that will make the small hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention.

But it is precisely at this point that God will use your faithfulness to help grow not only someone else’s faith but also your own. I’ve occasionally had people complain that we no longer see the kinds of miracles we read about in the book of Acts. I have always responded by reminding them that if we want to see such things, we need to show up where God is performing them: on the front lines of evangelism.

Jesus, the Bible tells us, did more than merely exist on Planet Earth in human form; He actually bore our iniquities and was numbered with the transgressors. He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (see Isa. 53:3, 11, 12). He immersed Himself in our experience without ever succumbing to sin. 

Can we do any less? Of course, we cannot bear someone else’s sin, because we are also sinners in need of a Savior. But we can choose to live someone’s experience alongside them, praying with them, tirelessly presenting Christ’s love, and holding their hand as they struggle to pull away from the devil’s most powerful—and most cruel—deception. Unusual cruelty requires unusual love and grace to conquer it.

The payday is worth it: the moment that they can finally rejoice in the truth about death—that it is rest from a wicked world, and will be completely reversed when Christ comes for His own.

[*] Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1911), p. 588.