How God Gives Us Truths to Counter the Enemy’s Lies: Dr. David Jeremiah for Christian News Journal
It’s hard to know when someone is lying. Several ex-FBI or CIA agents have written books and developed seminars to help us spot lies by studying body language, eye flickers, facial expressions, voice pitch, and other things. But good liars can even fool polygraph machines.
Last fall Psychology Today ran a post by Christian L. Hart, a university psychologist who specializes in deception. Dr. Hart admitted, “There simply are no behavioral cues that reliably indicate when someone is lying. Researchers like myself have searched high and low for such cues for decades. The best anyone has come up with is a small number of behavioral cues that are extremely unreliable.”
“But don’t abandon all hope just yet!” Hart also wrote. “There actually are some fairly effective ways to really detect liars.” It’s not by trying to read body language. The real secret is to listen carefully to what’s being said.
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“Lying is nothing more than communicating false information,” said Hart. We have to pay attention to the information we’re told, see if it aligns with reason, with evidence, with what we know or can learn. We have to ask questions and see if the story stands up to scrutiny. That’s good advice when we suspect another person is lying. It’s also how to deal with the never-ending lies of Satan.
He is an expert liar, as Jesus pointed out in John 8:44, when He told His critics, “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He … does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.” The New International Version says, “When he lies, he speaks his native language.”
Satan never tells the truth, but he’s a master at twisting the truth. Lying is his native language, and it’s the language of his people today. If we aren’t careful, the devil even prompts us to lie to ourselves, often without realizing it. The devil is so cunningly deceptive that we instinctively believe what he whispers in our ears.
Here are four other lies he often tells us.
ONE: “God doesn’t want me to be happy.” One of Satan’s worst lies is telling us God isn’t the source of happiness; indeed, He’s a hindrance to it. Vocalist Andrew Cameron Cline has a song in which he says, “All that I really want is to be beautiful. I don’t care what it costs; I only want to be happy.”That’s the desire of literally billions of people.
How ironic! According to the Bible, God has made us in His image, He loves us, we are His handiwork and craftsmanship, and He longs to fill our lives with joy! Yet most people reject Him and go off looking for happiness on their own.
If you’re struggling with issues related to happiness and joy, I want to recommend Psalm 144, which begins: “Blessed be the Lord my Rock … I will sing a new song to You, O God” (verses 1, 9). The Psalm ends: “Happy are the people whose God is the Lord!” (verse 15).
