Satan's "Finest" Creation

All Is Well

Co-incidental surveys have been conducted in New Zealand and the United States showing that "religion" amongst the population is declining.  In our capital city, Wellington a survey has reported that fifty percent of people deny the existence of any god whatsoever.  This is not at all surprising.  New Zealand is one of the most secular countries in the world.  Similarly the number of Unbelievers is reported to be increasing in the United States.

None of this catches us by surprise.  Atheistic secularism is Satan's last throw of the dice, his greatest and most powerful achievement, as it were.  When a country is oppressed with evil spirits, evil is tangible.  It is felt. Fear--genuine, righteous fear--drives many people to Christ.  But the culture most under the control of the Great Dissembler, the Liar from the beginning, is the culture which denies the very existence of  the Devil.

Vern Poythress puts it this way:

God speaks to everyone through creation.  Does Satan also speak?  Modern snakes do not speak in audible voices.  Eden was unique in that respect.  But Satan is "the deceiver of the whole world" (Revelation 12:9)  Deceiving involves language or something analogically akin to language.  According to the Bible, when we rebel against God, we end up in "the domain of darkness" (Colossians 1: 13), under the kingdom of Satan. [Vern Poythress, In The Beginning Was the Word: Language--A God Centered Approach  (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2009), p.109.]

One aspect of the darkness to which our secular culture is subject is an ignorance of spiritual beings far, far more powerful than human beings and human cultures.

Think about it.  In our present cultural circumstances, why should Satan go to the trouble of speaking through a serpent, with all the suspicion and fear and creepiness that it might create, when he can so much more easily and inconspicuously speak through his own human agents?  Several people, including C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, have observed that in a modernist culture given to materialism and disbelief, it may be against Satan's own interests and strategy to make the existence of a spiritual world of demons conspicuous. [Ibid.]

Because Unbelief is so pervasive and all-controlling in our day, people are content.  They believe they are "in the right" in their unbelief.  It is reinforced a thousand times and ways every day.  Christians, they tell themselves, are the stupid, foolish, and superstitious ones.  Secular society is now content and comfortable in its skin of Unbelief.  We are called to eat, drink, and be merry--for tomorrow we may die--which is merely to cease to exist.  The West is the most pervasively epicurean culture in human history.  

For maximum contentment in deceit, we do not need the blatant lie, but we need a whole culture that has corporately drifted and led itself along through a whole series of half-truths into a situation of self-deceit.  Then it can be content, because everyone is deceived in the same way, and each assures his neighbour that all it well. [Ibid., p. 110]

Above all, there is no true moral guilt, no sin, and no judgment to come.  The modern secular age is the most self-deceived of all.  It is Satan's "finest" creation.