God's power vs. Satan's power, can you tell the difference?

Shayrah, my partner, made me go to Subway to get her and my brother sandwiches, and on my way there and back I was listening to the radio. I was tired of NPR though and decided to go wild and change the station to something that wasn’t in my presets!

First noticeable thing that came up, that wasn’t Spanish-only radio, was 91.3 FM KDKR, a Christian radio station. Now, I have passed by this station before and didn’t pay any attention to it, as I would much rather listen to KEGL (the Eagle, rock), KDGE (the Edge, alternative), or KERA (NPR) than some self-righteous, holier-than-thou Christian talk about how he is the right kind of Christian and everyone else is not, even though they say the same thing about him.

Lo and behold, that’s what Love Never Fails Radio was talking about for the majority of the, what I assume, half-hour broadcast on March 5th. However, for a good portion of the broadcast, which is titled “Exodus 7 The Spirit of Jannes & Jambres Pt 2″ on their website, it was about the story of Exodus and the Ten Plagues of Egypt.

When I first tuned in, Pastor Bill, the host and founder of the show, was going on about how Moses and Aaron, in Exodus 7, turned a staff into a snake. The context of this chapter is that God gave His powers to Moses to perform miracles and Aaron, Moses’ brother, would be his prophet. With these powers, Moses was to show the magnificence of God, and Aaron was to demand that the Pharoah release the Israelites from their servitude in Egypt.

Exodus 7:1-2

Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his country.

After being commanded by God, Moses turns Aaron’s staff into a snake in front of the Pharaoh and his council, and so the Pharoah summoned his sorcerers who, with their “secret arts,” also turned their staves into snakes, but they were swallowed up by the snake created by Moses. The Pharaoh though, whose heart had been hardened by God (something I will get to soon), did not listen to Moses and Aaron, as God told them he would (Exodus 7:8-13).

Pastor Bill said that those who do not follow God can make miracles happen too, like creating snakes out of a freaking piece of wood somehow, that look exactly like the miracles done by those who do follow God, and they can be just as convincing.

This brings up the interesting question: if God’s miracles and Satan’s miracles are almost identical, how do you know which ones are those of God and those of Satan?

No, seriously.

If you are a Christian who claims to have experienced a miracle from God, how do you know it wasn’t Satan? If you have spoken in tongues (scientific term being “glossolalia”) and claim that Jesus or the Holy Spirit entered you, how do you know it wasn’t Satan trying to fool you?

It just as easily could have been Satan speaking to you to fool you into leaving your current denomination for another or to make you do or think things that are a sin, like the people who kill their children, because “God told me to.”

To get back to the snakes real quick. Pastor Bill, when I got back in the car after getting the sandwiches, said that when Moses created the plague of gnats, the Pharaoh’s sorcerers tried to replicate it, but “when the magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, they could not” (Exodus 8:18).

The reason the sorcerers could not do this, according to Pastor Bill, was because Satan and his followers cannot create life. Apparently, he wasn’t listening to what he himself said just a few minutes earlier when he said that these same sorcerers created snakes. I guess snakes don’t count as life or something like that. But whatever.

Then there is the issue of God hardening hearts.

God explicitly states in Exodus, numerous times, that He will “harden Pharaoh’s heart,” and God does this to justify the escalation of the severity of His “signs and wonders in Egypt,[because Pharaoh] will not listen to [Moses and Aaron]. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites. And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it” (Exodus 7:3-5).

Yes, God made the Pharaoh do something and is going to punish him and his people for it. So because God made the Pharaoh not listen to Moses or even his own council, all of the first born in Egypt get to die (among a whole host of other terrible things). I’m sure it wasn’t a painful death though, because that would God look like a terrible being that shouldn’t be worshiped, even if He were real and the whole story of Exodus weren’t contrary to all historical evidence.

This is the kind of immoral filth that is openly broadcast on radio and television stations across the country, and is taught to children as if it were the absolute truth and the most profound of any moral teachings, and no one bats an eyelash at it, because they’re good Christian people with the best of intentions.

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