God is warm. He is fascinating, exciting, and full of surprises. He brings peace, contentment, security, love, and meaningful answers. To keep distant from him is to condemn ourselves to remaining a pathetic shadow of the vibrant, complete, fulfilled, confident, knowledgeable people we were born to be. And yet there are dark forces that want us to miss out.
Astoundingly, some people have so closed their eyes to reality that they imagine that even if there really are spiritual powers, none of them could be evil. Surely, a few minutes of world news should tell us otherwise. And anything evil is likely to be deceptive.
The God of love and truth has spiritual enemies – non-human intelligences whose sinister purposes are furthered if they can discourage us from discovering how breathtakingly wonderful God really is, and from reveling in his goodness.
They long to coax us down the slide towards supposing that God is a cold, harsh, angry, boring, killjoy – someone we would shrink from. The aim of their deception is to paint in our imagination such a false picture of our magnificent Lord that instead of instinctively snuggling into him, we apprehensively keep him at arm’s length.
Should this deception succeed, God’s spiritual enemies would rob our loving Lord of his greatest joy, which is to lavish his blessings upon us. Hideous alien powers want to keep us weak and ineffective so that they can dominate us, rather than us rising up in the might of the Lord and thwarting their evil plans.
