Satan's Masterpiece, And The Way To Freedom

By William G. Chipman

A man said he was a backslider because of a question: If God knew what Satan was going to do before creating him, but God created him anyway, doesn't that make God more evil than the devil He created?

With two verses, in less than 10 minutes he was ready to rededicate his life to

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Dec 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781684860081

William G. Chipman

Mr. Chipman was a missionary in southern Africa with The Children for Christ, an interdenominational children's mission. While there he taught at YWAM DTS in southern Africa. He is now retired in Petaluma, California where he serves in the local Salvation Army Church as Sergeant of Evangelism. Since 2008, he and his wife lead an Awana club for kids. Chipman also does prison ministry. Though born in 1939, he with his wife still love hiking and camping. In both 2005 and 2010 they hiked the entire 2650 mile. Pacific Crest Trail, and in 2016, the 3000 mile Continental Divide Trail. When covid is over, they'll spend their summer on another long hike.

Book preview

Satan’s

Masterpiece

And The

Way To Freedom

William G. Chipman

Satan’s Masterpiece And The Way To Freedom

Copyright © 2021 by William G. Chipman.

[e-mail]. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of URLink Print and Media.

1603 Capitol Ave., Suite 310 Cheyenne, Wyoming USA 82001

1-888-980-6523 | [e-mail]

URLink Print and Media is committed to excellence in the publishing industry.

Book design copyright © 2021 by URLink Print and Media. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021922088

ISBN 978-1-68486-007-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68486-008-1 (Digital)

07.10.21

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Satan’s Masterpiece—A History

Chapter 2: Balancing God’s Love With His Omniscience

Chapter 3: Why the Cross—God’s Dilemmas and Solution as Revealed in History

Chapter 4: How God Decides Whom to Save

Chapter 5: What God Is Like

Chapter 6: Saved to Fit Into Christ’s Kingdom

Chapter 7: Secular Thinking in the Church Invites Criticism of God

Chapter 8: Deceptions that Limit Our Understanding of God’s Love

Chapter 9: Hell—Judgment, then Punishment, then…?

Other Books By William G Chipman:

Preface

We would like to think that Satan never has a victory, but history shows us otherwise. Before Martin Luther rediscovered being saved by grace through faith, Satan was able to keep that glorious truth from mainstream Christianity for 1,100 years. Even now, it’s still common to find people who believe they are saved because they were baptized.

And that’s not all. Around the same time that saved by faith was lost, the truth that Christians can live in victory over sin also disappeared. Sadly, it’s still lost to mainstream Christianity. Consider these Bible verses:

Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:11)

For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness. (Romans 6:19)

Many of today’s Christians wonder what these verses are talking about. They ask, How am I supposed to do that? All I know is I keep messing up. Why the puzzle? Why the wondering? Why do so many have no victory over the sin they know about in their life? Because they have been deceived into taking part in what I call Satan’s Masterpiece.

Ephesians 4:12 tells us we are in a wrestling match, not with ourselves, as Satan would like us to believe, but with spiritual adversaries.

We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

I wrote this book to expose Satan’s deceptions and to clarify the truth. What freedom from deception looks like is to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:19)

Although this is a collection of essays, and each chapter stands on its own, together they form a picture that provide a path to walk away from Satan’s Masterpiece and start walking with God, into His joy, His love, and His transforming power.

1

Satan’s Masterpiece—A History

After a long tough climb on the John Muir Trail in the High Sierras of California, I sat down on a log to take a break and ended up talking with a friendly young Jewish hiker who was also out on a backpacking adventure. Part of the conversation went like this:

Me: So if God is the Creator, what does He want out of the deal? What do Jews believe is the reason God created people?

Jewish hiker: Well, the rabbis are kinda vague about that. It seems we really don’t know.

I thought to myself, Every Sabbath, all religious Jews recite You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. (Deut 6:5) I wonder if they ever add to that this thought: just as He loves us? After all, God loves us with all His heart, soul and strength.

God created us for relationship

We learn from the early chapters of Genesis that right from the beginning, God was affectionately working at building a relationship with Adam and Eve. He personally walked with them every evening and talked with them. He loved them, trusted them, and expected they would do the same for Him. He even gave them a way to show their love for Him that went beyond mere words, by giving them an obedience project to do: Don’t eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, By their obedience to this command, Adam and Eve could actually demonstrate that their love for God was real.

God’s goal in this was not just for the sake of Adam and Eve—He was thinking of all of us. His goal was to have a real relationship with us, where we would be His obedient, mature children who share His values, and He would be our Father who would care for and love us as a loving father would. Not only that, but all together we would be a Bride to the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Words fail to express what was on God’s heart for our good.

And that is the answer to the question, What does God want out of this deal? Why did He create people? He created us for a deep love relationship with Himself.

But……Satan was equally determined that none of this would ever happen. So in Genesis 3 we read of the first step he took in his ultimate goal for us, to make God look bad so we will not trust Him or want a relationship with Him.

To accomplish this goal, Satan made his first use of his favorite weapon—deceit. Did God really say… was his opening ploy to Eve, and then he proceeded to twist God’s words to make God look bad, implying that God was not being truthful and open, but was hiding something good from them. It worked. Eve’s budding love for God and her trust in Him were shattered. How do we know? Because she blew off this wonderful opportunity to show God she trusted and loved Him. She ate the fruit God had told her not to eat. Adam, who was standing right there watching all this, may have initially been horrified, but he did not interfere and finally even he joined in. Satan’s deception stirred up in them a desire to be independent from God through the knowledge they would gain from eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. This desire in their heart for independence only added to the effect of their sin of disobedience as they took one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind away from God.¹

Satan gets to work on his masterpiece

Michelangelo is famous for putting in many years of work on one of his masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel, but Satan had now embarked on a plan that would take centuries to complete. In the many years that went by after the events of Genesis 3, he was very busy. Perhaps he may have thought he’d succeeded in Noah’s time, when out of millions on earth, only 8 people still had a relationship with God. But his timeline got a setback when God cleansed the earth with a Flood. Then came another setback at the Tower of Babel. Satan’s plans were running into some roadblocks.

But like any army general, Satan pushed his plan ahead on a number of fronts. And if he wanted to keep up the morale of his own fallen angels while impressing God’s angels, it might have sounded something like this:

Satan: God runs His kingdom by the rule of humility and serving others.²

Fallen Angel: That means the strong serve the weak. And eventually that won’t work. Thanks to us, His kingdom is already falling apart.

Satan: Exactly! Now in my kingdom, we are into looking out for our own interests first, and being proud of our strength and accomplishments.

Fallen Angel: Right! That means the weak serve the strong, as it should be.

Satan: Now, I need to embarrass God and make it really hard for Him. Then He’ll compromise His principles and not be so humble and loving.

Fallen Angel: Yeah! That would make God look like a hypocrite! Then more of His angels will doubt Him and there will be a lot of them who in their heart turn away from Him and toward us.

Satan: Humm. The problem is, that Lake of Fire is what keeps them away. And the bummer is God’s promise to throw me in the Lake of Fire. As long as I can make Him look bad, and keep people doubting, that will never happen.

Fallen Angel: I see your point. He won’t get rid of us without first demonstrating to His angels that His lovey dovey kingdom is better. And we’ll make sure that never happens.

Satan: So keep up the bad work, and we’ll soon see Him acting like a prideful tyrant. Hah, that will prove I’m right, and my kingdom is better. It’ll be a cold day in hell before He can throw me into the Lake of Fire!

Satan and the fallen angel would have had a good laugh as they imagined how easily their plan would go.

So later on, when God raised up the nation of Israel, Satan immediately went to work in every way he could think of to make God look bad and destroy what God was doing. Just as he does today, his aim was to see everyone either denying God’s existence or ignoring Him, keeping Him at arm’s length, (while legalistically trying to live a good religious life), or make Him look like a mean, sadistic tyrant.

God, meanwhile, kept steadily at work on His own project, to send His Son into the world at the right time, to provide a way to set us free from Satan’s kingdom and bring us back into relationship with Himself. Christ’s atonement would establish forever that God is better at living by His own principles of humble service than any angel or man could ever be, and His ways are right and good. While Satan worked through deceit and manipulating others to serve him, God worked through love and truth. He always respected our free will, and allowed us to face the consequences of our choices, trusting that we would learn from them and repent. And His Holy Spirit was always at hand to strengthen and sustain every person who repents and wants a relationship with God.

After God chose Israel to be the nation through which He planned to bring the Savior into the world, they followed Satan’s deceitful ideas and fell into extreme wickedness. The fate of humanity rested on how God would respond. Finally, after much patient sending of many prophets to call the nation to repent, God acted decisively. He allowed first the Assyrians and then the Babylonians, to take Israel into exile.

Who felt the greater pain—the Israelites who were being chastised, or God who chastised them? The Israelites loathed themselves but God was crushed.³ In Lamentations, we read that God …does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men. (Lam 3:33) What we see from the very beginning of history is that whatever pain we feel, He feels far more, earnestly desiring we repent so that He might grant us mercy. And God rejoices when we receive His mercy.⁴

Satan was probably rejoicing at the pain of God’s people as they stumbled away into exile. And he was probably exulting at seeing God’s deep sorrow.

Daniel and the Greeks

Around 550 B.C., while the Jewish people were still living in exile, the prophet Daniel was given a vision of God’s plan, and what lay ahead in history. You can be sure that Satan immediately took an intense interest in this, so that he could lay his own plans.

In reading Daniel’s prophecies, one thing that stood out was the fact that the Greeks were going to play an important role. Through a vision, God told Daniel:

…a male goat came from the west, across the surface of the whole earth, without touching the ground; and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes. Then he came to the ram that had two horns…,and ran at him with furious power…he cast him down to the ground and trampled him; and there was no one that could deliver the ram from his hand. (Daniel 8:5-7)

The ram with two horns represents the Medes and Persians. The goat who trampled them was Alexander the Great.

Look, I am making known to you what shall happen in the latter time of the indignation; for at the appointed time the end shall be. The ram which you saw, having the two horns—they are the kings of Media and Persia. And the male goat is the kingdom of Greece. The large horn that is between its eyes is the first king. (Daniel 8:19-21)

Daniel continued to write what the angel in his vision told him,

Three more kings will arise in Persia, and the fourth shall be far richer than them all; by his strength, through his riches, he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece. ³ Then a mighty king shall arise, who shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will. (Daniel 11:2-3)

Again, the mighty king the angel spoke of was Alexander the Great. You can expect that Satan began to watch carefully for the development of this people called the Greeks. As soon as the Greek civilization began to arise, Satan, knowing that they were destined to play a pivotal role in God’s plan for history, turned again to his favorite tactic—deceit. So he began with the Greek thinkers.

He found a great opportunity in the rise of philosophy in Athens. After much philosophical debate and discussion, (with Satan cleverly adding his own input) the Greeks concluded that there was a Supreme Entity which was pure spirit and completely perfect. This Entity, made up of forms of goodness, then created a lesser deity who created everything else, including Zeus and his friends, to rule over the rabble of the earth. This Supreme Entity, logically, could not be influenced by anything because that would move him from perfectness. Therefore, the Entity could not be influenced by love, mercy, compassion, or anything else. The Greek Supreme Entity was thus very remote and aloof. Perfect! Satan probably thought.

The Greek philosophers then took it a step further and reasoned that the Supreme Entity, unable to be moved from perfectness, could not be limited by time. Therefore, he/it must live outside of time. Satan would have been very pleased with this development; one wonders if he even instigated it.

Living outside time, the Supreme Entity would therefore know the entire future. From this it was only a couple of baby steps to a philosophy of determinism. Unfortunately, this proved to be very popular to a point where later on, even the Christians were influenced by it. Using the same deceit he had used on Eve, Satan now had a prime way to influence people into doubting God’s motives. Using the ideas of Greek philosophers, Satan could set up a chain of logic that went like this:

l) (Greeks) God is outside of time so He knows the entire future.

2) (Extra bonus from Satan if you believe the Greeks.) So when God created Satan, He knew full well what Satan would do, but went ahead and created him anyway.

3) Therefore God must be very uncaring and unloving.

This end result would shake the faith of many people later on. But such a harsh view of God—that He would create Satan even knowing what would happen—worked just fine for a Greek, because Greeks believed that the Supreme Entity was an aloof god. The Greek answer to all the evil in the world was So what? Unlike the God of Israel, the Greek Supreme Entity was not expected to get involved or even care.

God does the unthinkable

Thanks to the Bible, however, the Jews knew that God is not distant and unaffected by anything we do. He is nothing like the Greek Supreme Entity that, though composed of perfect goodness, is aloof. God is personal and sympathetic, as in Isaiah 49:15-16, where He is speaking to Israel. Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion?….Surely they may forget, but I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands…. That does not sound one bit Greek!

Psalm 23 is another example of how the Bible describes God. What a picture it makes of His love, protection, and compassion! However, even for the Jews, things started getting muddled. Through the conquests of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., Greek philosophy was introduced to the world. And sadly, the influence of Hellenism was not insignificant in Israel, which Greeks ruled for 168 years until the Maccabean revolt gained them independence. And Greek deterministic philosophy was completely contrary to the God of the Bible, who is very real, personal, and loving.

But one good thing that Alexander did was to spread the use of the Greek language, so that it became the best known of the Mediterranean world. Then in 63 B.C. Israel was conquered by the Roman Empire with its amazing administrative web, and the stage was set for God to put into action His unthinkable and very radical plan: becoming one of us; becoming a man. God the Son came to live among us by being born of a virgin. Satan lost no time in trying to destroy Him, but thanks to Joseph’s quick and obedient response to God’s warning, Jesus, God the Son become a man, was safe.⁵

Finally the day came when Jesus began His public ministry. Satan was immediately worried and took a very bold step.

Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said to Him, ‘All this authority I will give You, and their glory; for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if you will worship before me, all will be Yours.’ (Luke 4:5-7)

Stop and think about this amazing scene. Satan had lifted Jesus bodily and carried Him up to a high mountain! There, before television or internet were invented, the devil displayed the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. Pointing out that he had authority over the world, Satan offered that authority to Jesus in exchange for Jesus’ worship. What an offer! Satan had easily persuaded Eve with the idea that she could know both good and evil, but this offer he made to Jesus went way past that. Satan was probably very hopeful that Jesus would give in.

But Jesus didn’t give in. Trusting in God’s word and totally trusting God the Father’s love, He stood firm, and Satan had to back off for a while. Jesus, living without sin, was an authority in the world over whom Satan had no power.

Satan knew Jesus was the Messiah, the Savior God had promised. But he didn’t know how Jesus was going to save. I suppose, to Satan, it looked like Jesus was trying to get everyone to behave themselves and follow Him, building an outward kingdom. So Satan stirred up leaders among the Jews to have Jesus put to death. And if it was an agonizing death, all the better.

The result was the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Satan was sure he had won—he had engineered the destruction of everything God had promised! But he didn’t know God would raise Jesus from the dead and offer humanity forgiveness and for Christ to be in us. Now Satan had to contend with thousands, even millions of people, with Christ in them! Imagine his dismay when he finally realized what he had done.

…the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints. To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:26-27)

Attack on the believers: thoughts and feelings

After the resurrection of Christ, I suppose Satan was in a bit of a panic. He already knew the physical size of the New Jerusalem.⁶ He knew that could mean a fixed capacity.⁷ So he moved quickly to make sure the number of people God wanted would not be reached soon (or ever!). An old hand at infiltrating God’s people, Satan quickly swung into