“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5)
If there is one thing the devil does so well but yet so badly it is the act of counterfeiting the acts of God with an intention to deceive and ultimately destroy men.
For example, God is a Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Satan’s counterfeit has himself, the beast, and the false prophet. (Revelation 20:10).
For our own use, we can draw more lessons from the counterfeiting work of the devil.
The Christian baptism of immersing believers in water symbolizes regeneration, the burial of old and sinful lifestyles, and the beginning of a new life in Christ.
In a deceitful manner, the devil will always try to “baptize” men’s thought life into the water of unbelief, sin, fear, and with an intent to destroy them. (John 10:10).
In a sense, the Baptist of the devil produces all manners of fruits of sin and has nothing to do with the benefits of a new life in Christ. The sole purpose is to hold the thought life of man in bondage to sin whose end product is death.
Even among Christians, only those who have mastered the act of taking gasps of fresh air through a daily and vital intake of the word of God can escape this deadly baptism of the devil.
The devil knows that the thought life of man is everything, it is where the battle is won or lost, he will therefore deploys all his deceptive tactics to ensure that he drowns men in unregenerate thoughts.
What are unregenerate thoughts? They are thoughts from unregenerate hearts. This is aptly captured by the Bible thus: “ “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9).
The whole world feels the impact of the devil’s immersion because out of the heart of unregenerate men proceeds a continual stream of pollution which currently holds the world in bondage to terrible sins of greed, sexual perversions, and materialism.
Commonly around us, we see an intense love for sin and a preference for logical reasoning that opposes everything that professes faith in God. We can also observe an increasing hatred for regenerated men even by those who claim to be Christians.
Working intently through the minds of unregenerate men the devil is increasingly submerging the whole world into the baptism of death and destruction and only the word of God can rescue men from his grip.
In the Bible water is a prophetic symbol for people or nations and it is not surprising that the Bible reveals that the devil’s agent, the prostitute, sits on many waters, submerging the whole world in sexual promiscuity.
Wherever we look, be it music, movies, and dressings, sexual immorality has submerged the whole world and it now appears as a normal culture.
The big question is how do we posses a regenerate heart in order to escape the baptism of the devil? The only solution lies in accepting and applying the word of God to our life.
When we accept the word of God to heart and apply it to our lives in simple faith, our escape from the baptism of the devil will be sure. We will be transformed from within (Luke 4:4), and the word of God will begin to deliver us from all forms of unregenerate behaviors (Thessalonians 2:13).
Revelation 17
