The Devil is no Fool

I suppose lately I have been on somewhat of a kick about my concern we could be in the end-times. Whether we are or not I can’t say for sure since “We don’t know the day or the hour” but there is one thing I am pretty certain about and that is Satan is definitely winning. True, he won’t win in the end, but he is winning now.

Take a look around at the violence, the hate, the greed, the corruption, the killing of innocent children who never even have a chance to live outside the womb, and more and more the killing of the sick, elderly and infirm.

I know in past posts I have quoted from C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters” well I won’t today. I hear a collective sigh of relief out there in cyber-space. Instead, I will quote from the book I am reading now, Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain“. The other day I went to a local used bookstore “The Book Bear” only a few miles from here and found a copy. And let me give them a free plug, if you love books, especially old books, this is the place to go.

Alright back to Merton. At the beginning of the book, he is talking about how his father didn’t particularly care for Catholics. This was in the 1920’s and there were many reasons. During Merton’s discussion about this he writes this paragraph:

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell.He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light, but by obscurity, not be realities, but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.

Satan is very good at distracting us, of convincing us that God is wrong, that somehow He is the evil one. The lines have become blurred. the world has been turned upside down. As we have heard so many times, what was once right is now wrong, what was once good is now bad. I truly believe it is the evil one who is behind this. And those of us who stood by and let this change happen are to blame for much of this.

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