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THE SCIENCE OF GRACE #22
FAKING THE FLICKERING FLAME
Every once in a while here on the Voice of Prophecy, we like to play devil’s advocate . . . and today we want to do that regarding the Devil himself! Here’s our battlefield question, then: are there things that Satan would like for us not to know? We all realize there are things he DOES want us to become familiar with: sin, sadness, cemeteries, death. He promised Eve some new knowledge there in the Garden of Eden, and we have enough mortuaries around today to realize that in a macabre kind of way, the father of lies was true to his word.
But when it comes to the reality of grace, the power of Calvary, I can guarantee you this, friend: Lucifer would like to keep us in the dark. If you’ve tuned in to these programs the past month, that’s been a major foiling of his plan. If John Newton’s great gospel song, Amazing Grace, has come into your life and heart, it’s only because God powered it past Satan’s cement blocks and barbed-wire fences. If he can keep you away from Ephesians 2:8, 9 . . . boy, he’s going to do that any way he can.
There’s a rollicking good story in the otherwise dark war chronicle, Their Finest Hour, written by Winston Churchill. This very detailed volume describes just the year 1940 part of World War II. After most of Europe capitulated so quickly to Hitler’s forces, it was obvious that England and then the United States were about the only things standing between Nazi Germany and world domination. And this was no Risk board game; this was the real thing.
Soon the Luftwaffe air campaign began, the dreaded “Battle of Britain.” Churchill observed, somewhat ruefully:
“The largest city in the world [London] . . . did not require much accuracy to hit.”
Then in the next chapter, there’s a reason why the British Prime Minister titles it “The Wizard War.” Now that the German forces were ruling most of the continent, he writes, they had erected radio transmission towers all over the place, and their dive bombers were using them for navigation. However, the English forces surreptitiously figured out how to beam up their own signals, from their own stations, and throw the German Messerschmitts off course. The R.A.F. was rather pleased one day when a German bomber confidently “landed in Devonshire thinking it was France.”
But when Side A gets smarter, Side B usually retaliates. I think Satan’s forces are equally cunning; wouldn’t you agree? In June of that same year, a scientist named Lindemann told Churchill he was sure the German high command had come up with a new tactic. And sure enough. Berlin had developed a radio system which would permit the Axis pilots to hit England in any kind of weather. The moonless nights and London fog would no longer be any protection.
Churchill explains, as best he can in layman’s terms, the “Knickebein” strategy Hitler’s scientists had developed. Now, instead of a single radio beam, which tended to spread and distort, Germany was going to be sending out a “split beam,” two parallel signals. Both flickering, but in an alternating pattern. The right would be on while the left was off, and vice versa. As an attacking aircraft flew toward its target between the two beams, and got off course slightly to one side or the other, the flickering would become visible and he could quickly correct. Right down the middle meant steady illumination, no flickering . . . and a straight path to Harrod’s Department Store or whatever the target of the night would be. Two beams from two towers could both fix on a selected city or targeted town, and Hitler’s flying aces could go straight there almost blindfolded.
Ironically, with this new trick up their sleeve, the German pilots didn’t bother to learn any other kind of navigation. While Royal Air Force flyers were skilled at using both radio and conventional by-the-stars methods, the Luftwaffe pilots were depending on those radio maps.
“The German pilots followed the beam,” Churchill writes, “as the German people followed the Fuehrer. They had nothing else to follow.”
But once again, the James Bond-types working for Churchill’s Number Ten Downing Street came up with an ingenious solution. They could jam the beams, but of course, Berlin would figure that out immediately. A better plan was to subtly boost, using a repeater signal, just one of Germany’s two parallel beams. That way, the hostile pilot would constantly be veering away from that stronger signal, and would go off course every time.
And you know, it worked. For two full months – the crucial September and October of the Hitler air campaign – “German bombers wandered around England,” Churchill writes with evident satisfaction, “bombing by guesswork, or else being actually led astray.”
The nice irony is that some of the German pilots kind of figured out that their bombs were just hitting a bunch of abandoned cow pastures. But for those two full months, no one had the guts to go and tell Hermann Goering he was being duped. The high command kept insisting that the twin beams were infallible and that anyone speaking words of doubt would be tossed out of the military or shipped with Colonel Klink to the Russian front. And Churchill concludes:
“The whole German system of bombing was so much disturbed by our counter-measures, added to the normal percentage of error, that not more than one-fifth of their bombs fell within the target areas. We must regard this as the equivalent of a considerable victory, because even the fifth part of the German bombing, which we got, was quite enough for our comfort and occupation.”
Well, friend, in the game of cat-and-mouse, sometimes the mouse actually wins. But in the great galactic war between Jesus Christ and His archenemy, Lucifer, I say again – there are certainly some things that Satan would not want for you to know. He doesn’t want for you to know his plans, and he certainly doesn’t want for you to become aware of God’s power. Or His love. Or His plan to redeem me and redeem you.
The other day one of our staff members was down at LAX airport to meet a relative, and streaming into the Northwest Airlines terminal, late at night, were a whole bunch of young men with shaved heads. These fresh-faced kids were new Marines, getting ready to fly over to Iraq and face the determined bullets and bombs of the enemy. What a hard thing to realize that there are people in this world who WANT to shoot at you, WANT to blow you up and see you bleeding and dead in the dust. And friend, it is a hard reality that the same is true in the domain of spiritual darkness. The Devil’s hellfires of eternal destruction are not meant for us – but he’d love to have us join him there when Revelation 20 comes to fulfillment.
Let’s think for our final moments – and again, just devil’s advocating here – about Lucifer’s wish list. Obviously, he just plain and simple wants to keep you away from God’s Word. I’m sure the top four entries in his daily Palm Pilot read as follows: “Keep So-and-So away from the book of Romans and Paul’s teaching about grace. Keep the four Gospels and Calvary off the horizon. Keep the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah beyond reach. Keep good Christian sermons about grace out of this person’s ears.”
What if you’re like my faithful mom and dad, who have been sitting in Christian pews for about eight decades now? This fallen archangel has a plan there too. He’d like for you to go down the road of his fallen gospel. If you’re in the church and reading the Bible, he still wants to get you off track, trapped in legalism, earning your own way, focusing on behavior. Or ending up in subtle competition with Jesus, who has already paid the price of your heavenly home. Again, he’d like to keep you from reading Galatians chapter one, where Paul writes compellingly about this very danger. There’s a section there entitled “No Other Gospel,” and I can just see Satan with a mountain of Magic Markers, perspiring as he tries to cross it out of every Bible, in every language, in every country of the world.
There’s a great line that’s been sustaining people in my own faith community for about a hundred years now. And the tragedy is that we slide so quickly into the “Galatian error” of thinking our own righteousness is somehow part of the equation. But listen to this from an old Adventist journal dating clear back to 1908:
“The thought that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us, not because of any merit on our part, but as a free gift from God, is a precious thought.” And now get out your spy scope and listen to this great promise: “The enemy of God and man is not willing that this truth should be clearly presented; for he knows that if the people receive it fully, HIS POWER WILL BE BROKEN.”
Isn’t that great? Listen, friend, I don’t want to just preach and understand the doctrine of grace – I want to know and live it FULLY. I want to behave as if I understand it and love it. I want to treat my fellow Christians, my fellow workers, my fellow sinners with the kind of embracing, no-grudges-held forgiveness that will demonstrate the powerful, devil-destroying, Satan-sabotaging, Lucifer-liquidated effectiveness of Calvary’s amazing gift.
Grace is heaven’s own radio signal, its beam of eternal security and freedom. Let’s never let Satan use us to shoot up a counterfeit.
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