You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Matthew 7:5

The Principle of the Enemy: There is only one enemy of the church and he hates unity.

It is a time-tested battle plan.  One of the most effective weapons in defeating an enemy is to blind him…prevent him from seeing the truth about what is in front of him.  Control how he perceives things and you can control his very behavior.

In Spiritual warfare (if you are a follower of Christ, you are in a war, whether you know it or not) our enemy is a master of this technique.  He is fully capable of blinding us to the truth about things.  He causes us to see things and to believe things which simply are not true.  Moreover (and this, to me, is the scariest part), we usually are not even aware that we have been blinded.  We usually are quite insistent, in fact, that we are NOT blinded and that we DO know the truth.  That, of course, is part of the enemy’s plan, it is part of the deception.  He wants us to believe that about ourselves.

Searching scripture, there are at least four ways the enemy blinds us to the truth.  Test yourself and see if you can relate to any of them:

1. He blinds us to the truth about God.

It is what he did to Eve in the garden of Eden.  She protested, saying about the fruit with which he tempted her, “God said ‘you must not touch it, or you will die.”  The enemy responded to her, “You will not surely die.”  The enemy convinced her that God was either wrong or He had lied.  Either …