Satan is Working Hard on Believers to...
1. Undermine God's Character (His Credibility)
He desires to undermine God. He wants you to doubt God. That’s the thrust. He did it in the Garden with Eve. “Hath God really said,” and then he impugned God’s motive by saying, “Well the reason God doesn’t want you to eat that is because God knows you’ll be like Him and God can’t stand the competition.” In other words, he wanted to ascribe to God a selfish ulterior motive. “You can’t really trust God,” he was saying. “You can’t really believe God. He may say one thing but down deep inside means something else. So His Word is not believable...”
He wants people to think God is the liar and he tells the truth. So while God tells us He is truth and Satan is a liar Satan tells us he is truth and God is a liar. “You can’t trust God. You have to doubt God. Doubt His Word, doubt His power.”
- John MacArthur
2. Make It Hard For Us To Live The Christian Life
[Satan] doesn’t want [the Christian life] to be easy. He wants it to be very difficult. To really live the Christian life he wants it to be hard and I think he attacks it three ways to make it hard to live the Christian life. One would be through persecution. That would be the most extreme way... Second to that I would say he makes it hard to live the Christian life by a lesser kind of persecution in a way that I call peer pressure. Some people don’t really want to come out for God because they don’t want to lose their friends, they don’t want to move out of the circle they’re in. They don’t want to be thought to be different. They don’t want to have to change their relationships with people. They’re very comfortable with the acceptance they have. They like being liked and they’re just not ready to take a different tack which may alienate them...
There’s a third way he makes it hard to live the Christian life and that’s by making it easy to live the Christian life... I think sometimes the hardest place to live the Christian life is in the easiest place to live the Christian life... It’s so easy now there’s no price to pay and maybe that’s what makes it hardest of all to live the Christian life. It seems as though we can react to peer pressure, we can react to persecution. The tough thing is to react to acceptability.
- John MacArthur
3. Confuse Us with False Doctrine
Satan confuses believers one way by presenting a plethora of interpretations that leave everybody kind of baffled. He also confuses believers by having false teachers move in and sowing all kinds of wrong doctrine. There are many Christians tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine. There are many Christians who are deceived by the false teachers who come in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves.
- John MacArthur
4. Hinder Our Service To Christ
He wants to stop effective service... He wants to stop my ministry and your ministry and the ministry of any eon who is serving Jesus Christ. He wants to do all he can and stop it and prevent it .
- John MacArthur
5. Cause Division In The Body
[Satan] works hard causing division in the body, fracturing us.
- John MacArthur
6. Urge Us To Trust And Depend On Our Own Resources
This is subtle... We can become so confident in our resources, so easy for us to lean on our own understanding, depend on our own knowledge, wisdom, insight, erudition, education. We fail to cast ourselves upon the power of God with the sense that Isaiah had when he said, “Woe is unto me.” He knew he had no resource apart from God.
- John MacArthur
7. Cause Us To Play The Hypocrite (Be Hypocritical)
Satan has literally populated the church... with people who are phony, not real. Even Christians can do that. We can go on smugly, glibly, with the smile, the mask, spiritually letting the whole world think that we’re fine and all we do is pollute the fellowship. And all we do is mask ourselves so well that we never deal with the real problem, we never let anybody see what we’re really like, we never open up and tell the truth so that nobody can every come and wrap their arms around us and help to deliver us from the problems, you see...
We hide behind respectability. We hide behind our hypocritical so-called spirituality like Ananias and Sapphira. We want to lie to the Holy Spirit because Satan has really entered our hearts. Satan has come and played something on us and told us it’s better to be thought respectable than be respectable. It’s better not to face your sin and deal with it, it’s better to mask it and cover it and play a game. Satan is so subtle and he fills the church with hypocrisy.
- John MacArthur
8. Make Us Worldly
The Church today is so worldly, affluent, materialistic, self-indulgent, self-satisfied, smug, so much like the system around it that it’s hard to even separate the two. And yet does John say to us, “Love not the world neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world. The world passes away and the lust thereof but he that doeth the Will of God abideth forever.” He’s saying, “Look, you have no business having anything to do with the world. The world is passing and you’re eternal. The very dimensions of life are incoherent, incongruous and can’t come together. What are you doing with the world?”
- John MacArthur
9. Act In Disobedience To God And His Written Word
This maybe is the pinnacle of it all. Satan wants us to act immorally. If God is moral and God sets the moral law then any act against God’s law is immorality whether it’s sexual or social, whatever it is. Acting immorally is acting against the moral law and God is the one who established it. So he wants us to disobey God. That gives Satan an opportunity. That gives him an advantage.
- John MacArthur
10. Cause Believers To Question And Ignore/Reject The Voice of God (added by Raimer)
The question, "Did God really say..." is the enemy's tactic to keep us from believing God can speak and has spoken to us. His plan is to keep us from being led by the Spirit and so the lingering questions of confidence in knowing that God has spoken, of accuracy in what we hear, of potentially being presumptuous, etc. are areas he targets. If satan can keep us questioning whether it is God or not, or our own imagination, or even satan himself, we will be more hesitant or unwilling to step into what we hear from God.
- Raimer Rojas
How are you going to resist all of these in all of their complexity? And with all of Satan’s subtlety and with all of his cleverness and with the wiles of the devil and the cunning craftiness and the deceitfulness being what it is, how can you deal with these?
...It doesn’t matter what tack Satan takes. It doesn’t matter what path he comes on. It doesn’t matter whether he’s crawling on his belly or flying over head. It doesn’t matter how subtle his attack of how blatant it is. If you’re ready when he gets there that’s all that matters. The believer with his armor on [The Armor of God - Ephesians 6:10-21] will stand whatever the attack. So having said all that I’ve just said to let you know where he comes from be aware of those areas. But the major issue is not whether [satan is] coming or what the attack is but, " Are you ready?" Because if you have your armor on you can handle it.
- John MacArthur