What Would Your Community Look Like If Satan Took Over?

The article below offers contrasting results of Satan’s war on Christianity. The warning to us here is to beware of the cultural church as much as we would avoid the obvious sin. Michael S. Horton writes:

What would things look like if Satan actually took over a city? The first frames in our imaginative slide show probably depict mayhem on a massive scale: Widespread violence, deviant sexualities, pornography in every vending machine, churches closed down and worshipers dragged off to City Hall. Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his CBS radio audience a different picture of what it would look like if Satan took control of a town in America. He said that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full on Sunday … where Christ is not preached.

Not to be alarmist, but it looks a lot like Satan is in charge right now. The enemy has a subtle way of using even the proper scenery and props to obscure the main character. The church, mission, cultural transformation, even the Spirit can become the focus instead of the means for “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). As provocative as Barnhouse’s illustration remains, it is simply an elaboration of a point that is made throughout the story of redemption. The story behind all the headlines of the Bible is the war between the serpent and the offspring of the woman (Gen. 3:15), an enmity that God promised would culminate in the serpent’s destruction and the lifting of the curse. . . .

Satan lost the war on Good Friday and Easter, but has shifted his strategy to a guerilla struggle to keep the world from hearing the gospel that dismantles his kingdom of darkness. . . . Wherever Christ is truly proclaimed, Satan is most actively present. (Sermon: “Christless Christianity”)

The Center Of Living

Donald Grey Barnhouse

Quoting Donald Grey Barnhouse:

“Just as there can be no normal, healthy life without the proper kind of food, so there can be no normal, spiritual growth without the food that God has ordained as the nourishment of the new life. ‘As newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the Word that ye may grow thereby’ (1 Pet. 2:2).

If the Bible is not the center of the home, the home cannot be called a true Christian home, even though all the members of the household are children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. There is no spiritual life apart from the Bible, and the tragedy of the American home today is that so many people have abandoned the Book as the source of life and as the center of living.”