A distinction must be made relative to the words “earth” and “world.”  The EARTH consists of the physical terra firma comprised of dirt, rock, vegetation, water, etc.  The WORLD consists of the creations of man–his cities, societies, nations, organizations, beliefs, religions, systems, inventions, methods, etc.  Though the Biblical God owns the earth, the world that populates it belongs to His enemy–Satan.  As we are told in 2 Corinthians 4:4, THIS IS NOT GOD’S WORLD.  God gave the earth to Adam with a perfect mini-world already created upon it which He called the Garden of Eden.  Adam and his descendants were to expand that world throughout the entire earth where they would live eternally.  Their only caveat was that they had to obey God.  However, Adam gave the garden, and with it the future world, to the devil by obeying him.  Since that time man has forced his way throughout the earth.  He has built his own world according to his own sense of right and wrong.  Man has no king to direct his path.  Having rejected King Jesus, he serves as his own director.  Or so he believes.  Self-serving man has done as he pleased while being GUIDED by his god who has given him what he wants in order to keep him from embracing the Biblical God.  Satan’s program is brought to light in Mark 8:33 where Jesus tells Satan that he (Satan) “savors” the things of man.  Satan knows that if he allows man to do what he wants to do, man will join him and remain with him.  Therefore he GUIDES man to do that which exalts and satisfies him (man), which is to sin.  Satan cannot FORCE man to what man does not want to do.  Man wants to sin.  But he also wants to live in paradise forever.  Satan offers him a way to do both.  To sin is to disobey the Biblical God by breaking His Law (1 Jn. 3:4).  Satan “controls” man by offering him a way to sin and get away with it.  Pretending to be the Biblical God, Satan convinces (not forces) man to do what is right in his own eyes with the promise that his (man’s) way will lead him to heaven.

The fact that God condemns man’s way is irrelevant.  As the Serpent told Eve, she and Adam could do as they pleased and, contrary to God’s death warning,  “You shall not surely die.”  And like their original parents, religious man has swallowed Satan’s words “hook, line and sinker,” emphasis on the “hook.”  Once Satan sets his hook in a man’s heart (mind), it is neigh onto impossible to extract it.  The more religious the “fish,” the more intrenched the hook and the harder it is to remove it.  When God made His ministers “fishers of men” He sent them out with His gospel.  Satan sends his ministers out with his gospel which, as Paul noted, is not a different gospel, but rather a perverted version of God’s gospel (Gen. 3:3,4/ Mat. 24:4,5/ Gal. 1:6-9).

Satan cannot prevent man from seeking God.  He can only tempt man to defy God by using a perverted version of GRACE which allows man to sin and still receive eternal life.  When working within professing Christendom Satan pushes the grace narrative far beyond its true meaning.  By perverting the Lord’s grace provision, Satan convinces church people that they can sin and still live forever in paradise.  Recall that he convinced Adam and Eve that they could sin and “… not surely die”–ever.  He does not need to deceive those outside the church in that they are already deceived.  As a result of Satan’s powers of persuasion, the world’s population consists of two groups of people: 1) God’s church consisting of the “few” who walk His narrow way (Mat. 7:13,14), and 2) Satan’s counterfeit church plus the unchurched.

The church has embraced Satan’s assurance that the Biblical God is in control of their circumstance.  The Biblical Truth is that man himself is in control of the negative situations in which he repeatedly finds himself.  Man charts his own life course and, because God treats all people in the same way, man determines whether he will be blessed or cursed.  As I have noted before, that Truth is best presented in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.  Written so that anyone can understand them, these chapters are like a recipe.  If one follows the recipe perfectly, one will be blessed with a positive product.  If one does not follow the recipe perfectly one will be cursed with a negative product.  God cannot make it more clear.

In Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 the Lord plainly lays out His recipe for happiness, health, good fortune, success, etc. in the first 13 and 14 verses respectively.  A careful reading of those chapters reveals that it is neither God nor Satan who controls man’s life.  It is man himself who determines whether he reaps blessings or incurs curses.  In summary, man is in control of his life at all times.  God commands.  If man obeys His commands he will be blessed.  If he disobeys them he will be cursed.  A positive or negative outcome depends on whose gospel an individual believes and obeys.  The authors of the two gospels promise eternal life to the one who obeys their respective gospel.  One of them is telling the Truth.  One of them is lying.  Man must determine which is which.  We find this Truth written about in the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the church in Galatia (1:6-9).  Many in that church had rejected God’s My-way-only gospel and had embraced Satan’s have-it-your-way version.  One will notice that Satan has hooked them with a slightly different (“perverted”) version of God’s gospel.  They have ignored Christ’s warning that false prophets would use just enough of God’s Truth to gain their trust.  Then, having done so, they would “deceive many” by luring them into Satan’s church system (Mat. 24:4,5).

When disaster arrives Satan convinces religious man that God is in control of his situation, that his (man’s) behavior has nothing to do with the problem he is facing, that this crisis, like all those that came before it, is “normal.”  As one person stated concerning the never-ending flow of sicknesses, wars, natural disasters, etc. that man faces: “That’s just the way life is.”  Instead of having to face yet another crisis “knowing” that God is in control of it, man should be asking himself, “Is this what God wants for me?  Is this what He promised me in His Holy Bible?”  From within that Holy Tome comes a resounding “No.”  So what is the problem?  As is always the case, we find the answer in the Garden of Eden.  Since then Satan has deceived 99.99% of  mankind the same way he deceived Adam and Eve.  He convinces church people that they can do what they want to do, and all will be well because they are members of “the church.”  As one bastion of “the church” said, “God doesn’t like sin, but He won’t do anything about it.”  Obviously, she was not a student of the Bible, even though she carried one to Satan’s church on the first day of each week when she and billions of others gathered to pay homage to the sun god on his day–Sunday.  A couple of months after making that Bible-defying statement the church bastion died in her sleep FOR NO MEDICAL REASON.  Coincidence?

When Adam and eve decided to disobey God He was forced to do what He had warned He would do–curse them.  Nothing has changed relative to their descendants.  What they sow, they reap.  God’s “cause and effect” principle applies to nations as well as to individuals.  When the Lord does not rule a nation, “every man does what is right in his own eyes.” In Proverbs 21:2 God says that “every way of man is right in his own eyes.”  In 12:15 He says that such a man is a fool.  For the fools in the world,  “That’s just the way life is” has become established “truth.”  As a result of this church “truth,” the multitudes of COVID–19 “victims” clutch their Bibles while assuring us that “God is in control.”  And Satan smiles. L.J.