Satan’s Traps!

Rabbits have been eating all the best plants in our garden. I love seeing the rabbits, but they are doing a lot of damage. So I went on-line the other day to look for a rabbit trap. I found exactly what I wanted – a trap that would lure the rabbit into a small cage, then a gate would spring into place trapping the rabbit inside. On the same website I saw a modern mouse trap. In this particular trap, some attractively smelling bait is used to lure the mouse into a dark hole. The bait is positioned on a spike between two electrified points and as the mouse gets hold of the bait with its mouth a powerful electric shock kills the creature instantly.

Both the mouse and the rabbit trap depend on the fact that neither animal has any idea what’s going to happen next. All they are doing is following their instinct to look for food – and unfortunately for them, they are looking in a dangerous place. If they knew what the end would be, they wouldn’t dare venture into such dangerous territory.

Proverbs 3:7 warns us not to be wise in our own eyes, thinking that we know what we’re doing and don’t need to take advice from others, and especially from God and His Word. The problem with human wisdom, that is separated from the wisdom of God, is that all too often we get it so very wrong. The enemy has had thousands of years of practice learning how to deceive human beings into his traps. If you’ve never read ‘The Screwtape Letters’ by C.S.Lewis, please get hold of a copy and read it carefully. It is an amazing masterpiece of very remarkable writing, which exposes the ways in which Satan lures mankind into his carefully engineered ‘people-trap’.

Being in the ministry of healing and discipleship has, sadly, given me many, many opportunities of hearing the stories, from men and women all over the world, of how they were lured into wrong relationships, or to put their money into crooked business deals, or into occult practices or dozens of other different possibilities. This is exactly how Satan works. He attracts us with something that seems good at the time, but which, in reality, is very bad. We don’t think carefully through what we’re doing, believing things are OK and suddenly we discover that our own ideas have let us down badly. Then Satan springs the trap.

May I urge you to always prayerfully consider the consequences of all the choices you make. I read recently the tragic story of a young woman who thought drugs were great ‘for kicks’. She knew what she was doing, she would say. But once she had tasted the soft drugs, she wanted the harder ones, then she started injecting, and today all her mother can do is put flowers on her grave. What seems right can, literally, end in death. But the death that is more to be feared than physical death, is that which comes when people are trapped by Satan for eternity. And that should be of the greatest concern to each one of us.

Prayer: Help me, Lord, not to think that my wisdom is greater than yours and as a result follow pathways that, as the writer of this proverb, indicates, will end in death. Today, I choose to follow You, Lord Jesus. I am so grateful that You are the way, the truth and the life. Amen.