DON’T BELIEVE THE LIES OF THE DEVIL

He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love…

Colossians 1:13

Many years ago, I watched a movie about a pastor who did not believe in the infallible Word of God. The passages he deemed irrelevant, he instructed his congregation to cut out of their Bibles. By the movie’s end, the Bible was in rags, and when trials and tribulations came, those divinely inspired passages that the people needed were no longer in their Bibles.

If my pastor said during a Sunday morning sermon, “I think this Bible passage is wrong, and I will change it to…” I’d be looking for another church.

Anyone who tells me the Scriptures are flawed is not someone I would seek counsel from. We can only see through a glass darkly now, and while there are many things I don’t fully understand, I know God will make it all clear on the last day.

While the movie was a fictional example of how the serpent can cause deception in a leader’s understanding of Scripture, it’s even more treacherous when the leader is the head of the Roman Catholic Church, including 1.2 billion Catholics.

For those unaware, Pope Francis in June 2019, officially approved changing the translation of the Lord’s Prayer given to us in Matthew 6:13 and Luke 11:4: “And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”

To quote Pope Francis: “A father [doesn’t lead his children into temptation]. A father helps you to get up immediately. It’s Satan who leads us into temptation. That’s his department.”

The Pope’s new rendition of the Lord’s prayer to His followers is: “Do not let us fall into temptation.”

This stunning proclamation by Pope Francis leads to other significant questions at the Gospel’s core. Would a perfectly loving and Holy Father offer up His only begotten Son to be tortured, crucified, and killed as a sacrifice for humankind? Or what about when God commanded Abraham to offer up his only son, Isaac, as a sin offering?

What kind of example is Pope Francis setting when he says the Bible needs to be changed to comport with his understanding of what Jesus meant?

Examples abound in the Bible where Satan succeeded in his deception. Perhaps the most well-known is in Genesis 3:1: “…And he [the serpent] said to the woman, ‘Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”

In another example, Satan misallocated Scripture when he tried to tempt Jesus three times in the wilderness. Jesus countered the serpent’s false accusations by proclaiming, “It is written…”

In Matthew 24:35, Jesus says, “Heaven and earth will away, but My words will by no means pass away.”

By believing the Scriptures, even those parts that are difficult to understand, we can escape any temptation to reject or retranslate God’s Word in a way we find palatable.

The Bible predicts that this is what will happen in the last days, that people will not be able to hear the truth or accept it. Timothy 4:3 states:

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables”

The Lord’s prayer means what it says: “And do not lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.”

We can be sure whatever temptation we face, God will provide “the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it” (I Corinthians 10:13). None of us are equal to God or have the wisdom of God—including the Pope. Even if we try to remove or change something in God’s Word, His Word will never pass away.

PRAYER: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.