Satan
has many lies for many people. Each kind of person can buy a different lie. One
of the most potent lies that the devil has is that God is all about us—humans. If you take the Bible and remove the supremacy
of God from it, you could still have the message “love one another” and “love
fulfills the law.” Loving other people is important and beautiful and enriching,
but loving God is incredibly more important since He alone is the all-worthy Creator. The prevailing,
implicit message of NDEs (Near-Death Experiences) is that God cares only that
we love other people. The first commandment to love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, and mind (Mt. 22:37-37; Deut. 6:5) is nowhere to be heard. This implied
message is a blatant heresy straight from the pit of hell. Do not be deceived:
Satan will gladly preach a message of human-to-human ‘goodness’ as long as God does not end up in any of our thoughts.
I’ve heard it again and again in my research of NDEs. People “come back” from
their near-death experiences as changed people. They often seem to become so loving and
selfless and thoughtful. One could reasonably ask, “If Satan is behind (most) NDEs,
why would he make people become so good?” But what does God consider goodness?
Jesus said that even the wicked are able to love those who love them (Luke 6:32).
There is a natural, human love that is not especially pleasing to God. Even a
kind of selfless love is not necessarily unheard of among humankind (Rom. 5:7),
but this love is not the essence of goodness, either. Loving other people does fulfill
the second tablet of the Law—the laws pertaining to how we deal with other
people. Yet, even if we somehow did nothing but good to others (including our
enemies), we could still be rotten in God’s sight. How? If we loved others but despised
God, we’d be acting unrighteously before Him. (It is notable that despising God means that we wouldn’t fully love other people, since if we loved other people perfectly we’d desire
for them to find their true, full joy in Him.) God is the One who deserves our
love, worship, and service. You might say that He is infinitely worthy. Speaking in perhaps crude human
terms, even if we are finitely good towards other people, we would be ‘infinitely’
unrighteous toward God. All the human goodness we might claim would be nothing
compared to the God-ward depravity. So, to claim that people become so ‘good’
after NDEs is to completely misunderstand what is the essence of goodness. The essence of goodness is acts of thankful service to the One God, springing up from fervent love, fear, and worship of Him.
With that in mind, is it any wonder that Satan would love to transform godless,
selfish people into godless, ‘selfless’ people? This transformation seems to
validate the idea that worshiping and loving God is not critical to being holy. “Surely, a good and loving person is headed for heaven!” That is
what the devil would love for people to believe. To reinforce that message,
these NDEs often include trips to ‘heaven’ or an embrace of love from ‘Jesus.’ Again, the
devil is all too happy to encourage an apparent high sense of morality as long
as God isn’t central to it. Apparently Satan knows more about what truly pleases God
than the average American. Don’t be impressed by this kind of shallow, human goodness.
—
One has to wonder how Satan manages to make NDE-ers become so loving. I have an
idea. I believe one of the main reasons that people are naturally so selfish is
because they are living for this life and what they can get out of it. In these
deceptive NDEs, people end up believing confidently that they have hope beyond this
life, that life goes on after death, and that God loves them unconditionally
even without repentance (another important point of deception here). This false
hope of eternal life—having nothing to do with the precious sacrifice of the
Lamb of God slain to atone for the sins of the elect—begets an apparent change
of heart to not be so selfishly materialistic. It’s a relatively small, down-to-earth
change that is founded on a lie from hell.
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