“Satan’s plan was to distort God’s character and incite Adam and Eve to distrust God. Satan knew once they stopped trusting God, they would be powerless to overcome his temptations”, writes Brad Cole in the fantastic book, “Servant God”. Ever since that initial deception, God has been at work revealing His true character to humans, and Satan has continued to try to twist our perception of it. As long as we don’t trust in the integrity of God, we can never experience the fullness of life He intends for us. We have bought the lies of Satan that convince us we need the things of this world to fulfill the desires of our hearts. We have become blind to the fact that all we need is Jesus. Worse still, we have come to distrust in the promises of God, and ultimately in His character.
When we no longer believe that God is who He says He is and will do what He says we will do, we are lost, destined to flounder and drift through life with no clear purpose. Nothing matters more than understanding the character of God. It reveals His heart, His love, His mercy, compassion, and grace. If we don’t believe these things about our God, we have no God left in whom we can believe. It is for this reason Satan works so hard to get us to doubt the character of God and to strip glory from His name.
Satan wants us to believe that Jesus is not able to deliver us from any situation, that God causes evil in our lives and in the world, and that the Father is always looking for an opportunity to unleash His wrath upon us because we have failed Him in some way. None of this is supported by the picture of God we see throughout the Bible. Remember, Jesus came to reveal exactly what God looks like. He came to set the record straight about the character of God. Satan has been deceiving the world for 10,000 years, sullying the impeccable name of God. We have become so indoctrinated in the lies that even we who follow Jesus can still believe wrong things when it comes to the character of God.
The character of God is this: He loves you with an unconditional unsurpassable, unimaginable love. He desires nothing but the best for you and is eternally merciful when we fall short of His standards. Each of us has been created with a unique combination of skills, abilities, and desires; the purpose of these gifts is so that we might honor God by doing the work of His Kingdom. He equipped us with everything we would ever need to do the job He designed us to do. God desires us to love Him the way He loves us and that every human would return to their Creator in awe, love, respect, and worship. He is constantly working on our behalf to see that come to pass. That is the character of God revealed in the pages of Scripture and through the life of Jesus Christ. Never let Satan convince you of anything else.