“But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.”  2 Thessalonians 3:3

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”   (Psalm 91:1)

First a couple of apologies.  One, in last week’s devotion talking about Slenderman, I didn’t mention that the little girl who was stabbed did survive.  As depressing as the story was, that was at least a little bright spot, and I left it out.  Not good.  Secondly, sorry this is late today, but the good news is that it will be shorter than most of these novelettes that I have been putting out lately.  Unfortunately I have been taught (and have taught the same thing) that we should write like we talk- and you know how I talk.

Last week, I told you about the influence the internet and this new age of technology has on all of us.  It can be dangerous, but the key to recognizing any danger that lives around us is to tune into the power that resides within us.   If we don’t keep a relationship with God and instead live spiritual  lives full of rejection, we will live spiritual lives void of protection.  We are embattled by the world, the flesh, and Satan.  It would seem we are outnumbered, but as Paul reminds us in Romans 8:31, “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”  Like someone wise once said, “God plus me makes a majority.”

The primary thrust of God’s Word is instruction on how
to abide in Him.   If we can begin to see His wonderful providence and His unfailing provision, we will begin to understand His unfailing protection.  The assurance that we receive from the Word can then be conveyed to others like our children, family, friends, and even strangers, so that they to can experience protection afforded in God’s perfection.   We need to be able to tell others, with confidence, that “[He is] my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust!”

That means that we have to sell out to a life that is full with Christ, not just occasionally touched by Christ.   The thing that I fear might be happening in our churches and families today is similar to what happens in medicine.   When we go in for  an inoculation, we get just enough of the disease to not receive it in full.   I think that often we receive just enough of God to inoculate us against experiencing Him in all His fullness.   We are satisfied with little doses of Him as though that is all that is necessary.  When it comes to God, we need to experience the real thing.  If we don’t, not only will we lose to evil, we probably won’t even recognize it.

Until we admit that Slenderman is just one of thousands of evil influences meant to infiltrate our families, churches, towns, and countries, we will not armor up.  We will float along until slowly, imperceptibly, we are taken over.  By the time that England’s Chamberlain saw the light, Hitler was so strong that it would take the rest of the world to bring him down.   We must keep our eyes open and examine everything through the glasses of God’s Word.

I was reading Ephesians 4:11-16 today and verses 13 and 14 say, “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.  Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.”  If we remain babes in Christ, not able to eat meat, we will be like infants.  We will be like those two 12 year old girls who were deceived by that which is not real.   We will be tossed by the winds of doctrine no matter where they blow and by the winds of deceit from whomever they come.

The well-known Puritan writer Thomas Brooks writes:

Satan promises the best, but pays with the worst; He promises honor and pays with disgrace; He promises pleasure and pays with pain; He promises profit and pays with loss;  He promises life and pays with death.

We can put the word always in these sentences above.   Satan never delivers on what he promises because he wants the worst for us and if we listen to his lies, the worst is what we will get.

The only way to protect those we love (and even those we don’t) is by not appeasing the enemy but by defeating him.  Satan laughs at our puny efforts if we try to stand up against him on our own.  He has thousands of years of experience, no moral obligation to do the right thing, and fights dirty.   His minions prowl around infiltrating our homes and churches.  We need to be like the FBI guys who can recognize counterfeits.  They don’t study counterfeits, they study the real thing.  They study it so closely that they will recognize any irregularities in a fake.  That is what we must do.  We must study Christ and the Word so closely that we will recognize any irregularities that confront us.

Those who are more mature in Christ are obligated to help protect those who are less mature.  That can be our kids, grandkids, new believers, slow maturing  believers and even unbelievers.  We can’t do that without be able to recognize the enemies ourselves.   There once was a man who had trekked through many miles of a snowstorm to reach his cabin.  The security of the cabin lulled him into a sense of safety, so he neglected to take off his wet clothes and just lay down to sleep.  His dog would not let it go, however, and pulled on the man until he awakened.  The man took off his wet clothes and built a fire.  The man had become numb and did not realize the danger of his wet clothes and except for his dog’s urgings, would have died in his sleep.

This story is the story of today.  So many lie down in the numbness of sin and  deception and think they are safe.  It is our job (if I can compare us to St. Bernards for a moment), to rouse them from their slumber.  It is up to us to point out the need to take off the cold and sinful attire that will eventually lead to their demise.   Of course, we cannot do that if we, too, are lying down ready to slumber in our own sins.  God is our protector and we are to be like Him.  That makes us protectors, as well.   If we are going to be protectors we must, “Put on the full armor of God so that (we) can stand against the tactics of the Devil.”  (Ephesians 6:11)  No need to appease Slenderman and his cronies.  Let’s just beat them.

“You are my hiding place; You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.”     (Psalm 32:7)

Last week I wrote a devotion that covered our responsibility as Christians to be role models.  I mentioned the internet in passing, but I would like to talk about something that I saw on TV a few years ago that has some relationship to what I talked about last week.  It was on a show called 20/20 (I am sure you are familiar with it) and as usual it was very well done both in information and production.   It told a heartbreaking story of two twelve-year-old girls who stabbed a good friend 19 times in the woods and left her to die.  The little girl, also 12, crawled out of the woods and was discovered by a bicyclist who called 911.  She said that her friends had stabbed her.  The ambulance rushed her to the hospital to try to save her life and the police began a huge man(kid)-hunt to try to find the two girls.

They located them five hours later, still in the bloody clothes, still carrying the knife.  The girls readily admitted what they did and why they did it.  The shock of the crime spread quickly and for the first time most of the adult world learned of a fictional internet character called Slenderman and the strange influence he had on thousands of young people.  As I watched, I was sickened but not surprised.  I was not surprised because the pace of technology has outpaced  most adults.  This is the first era of teaching where the students are ahead of the teachers and kids are ahead of their parents.

Yesterday in class I asked a student to go to a site on the computer to use a fairly sophisticated tool for creating 3D plans for woodworking projects.  As I watched, he quickly went to the site, did a few mouse clicks, and was full-speed-ahead on creating a project.   Naively, I said that he must have already been familiar with the site.  He said that he wasn’t and, in fact, didn’t even have internet at his home!  It took me hours to negotiate the site and complete a project and he was doing it in minutes.  It is as though today’s kids have developed intuitive skills of computer principles that they cannot explain, but just know.  They are old enough to negotiate any game, site, or activity on the net but are too young to make wise decisions about what to do with what they find.  A very bad combo.  How can these kids be so smart about stuff?  Probably because the average students spends 7 1/2 hours daily on electronic media.  Young teens send an average of 15,000 texts a month.   Ninety-five percent of parents are completely oblivious to what their kids do on the net, who they text, or what they text.   No wonder they are so much brighter than us. No wonder we see so many negative repercussions from their activities.

Back to Slenderman.  The best I can tell, he is a character that was created on the net through drawings and photographs and is presented as real, but of course, was not.  He had almost a cult following of thousands of young people who followed him on the net, contributed to the stories of his sightings and actions, drew pictures of him, sent in supposed photos, and often supported his true existence.  Although his was not real, he had become real.  He was like a shadowy Sasquatch who lived in that mystical world that some say exists and some say is, well, mystical.  He was influential and scary and hardly any adults even knew he “existed.”  The two little girls conspired to murder their friend and spent months planning it. Why? It was to prove that Slenderman was real. When police arrested them, they were on their way to a patch of woods where his mansion supposedly existed, and where they would live with him forever.   The attack was their way of proving loyalty to him so that he would invite them into his home.  It is almost too fantastic to believe.

To check how prolific this Slenderman phenomena is, the producer’s of 20/20 picked out 10 families at the local school and with parent permission interviewed the kids and parents.  Not a single parent had heard of Slenderman, not a single 12 year old had not.  All of the students had visited sites, played games, and listened to stories about his existence.  Only one student was sure that he was not real. The others were unsure.  None of the students had shared their internet “relationship” with this character with their parents.  In fact, when asked, every student admitted that they frequented sites that their parents did not know about.  Some admitted that their parents don’t even ask about their internet exploration. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but if I wanted to take over the the mind of the world, all these changes in young people would be a great place to start.  They are being molded , some a little, some a lot, but molded just the same.

Okay, I have ranted about the “evils of technology” long enough.  What does this have to do with God’s Word where technology wasn’t even a glimmer in the eye?  A lot, I think.   We are in a battle for our kids and for this world and we don’t even know it.  I am afraid we are pulling a Neville Chamberlain.  Chamberlain was the prime minister of England during the years previous to WW II.  He ignored the rise of Hitler, appeased him at every turn, and denied the possibility of war- that is until Hitler had overrun several countries, was firmly entrenched, and was so powerful that the battle necessitated a world war.

Today there is a group that wants us defeated, wants to capture our kids, who wants to see us all dead and gone.  I am not talking about Hamas or ISIS or Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group in the news.  I am talking about who Paul wrote about in Ephesians when he said,  “For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world powers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens.”  (Ephesians 6:12).  Satan is real and he is on a roll right now.  Unbelievers fall to his possession and believers to his oppression daily.   I know this smacks of the outlandish, but that was exactly what Neville Chamberlain said in the months before Hitler had taken over half of Europe.  He made a treaty with Hitler, trusting that it would result in peace.  In the meantime, Chamberlain threw several countries under the bus, Hitler broke the treaty anyway, and continued his quest for world domination.

Here are a few quotes from Chamberlain and his successor Winston Churchill that explain their opposite attitudes toward the rising unrest around them.  Chamberlain said, “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”  

On the other hand, Winston responded with,  “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.   We cannot rest easy in our beds.  We are surrounded by crocodiles and if we continue to feed them, we will insure that they will eventually feed on us. “

The question is this.  How are we to approach the rising unrest around us?   Well, today was the current events and historical perspective of our problem.  Next week I will let you know how we as Christians should respond to the war-torn culture we live in. This part was obviously too long on its own, so I will finish up with “chapter 2” next week.

Here is a hint:  “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”   (Psalm 91:1)