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We are created in the image of God so His description also describes how we are designed.
Lucifer was the closest created being in the universe to the presence of God so he know God's description (the law) better than anyone else.
When the law is divorced from its source, it loses its connection to life. That is why it is impossible to keep the law by trying, just like it is impossible for a branch to grow and thrive without connection to “perform as designed” as he moved away from close relationship to God. So the substitute power he attempted to use was force. Since being close to God while not in sympathy and submission to Him was found to be impossible, Lucifer began to weave more and more force into his “theology” of government that he was developing among his subordinate angels. What he discovered in the process of using force on others was the new reaction of fear, the unholy kind, that was elicited in their hearts. He was familiar with this fear because he had begun to experience it himself more and more as he fell out of harmony with God. He also discovered that fear was a powerful motivator and seized upon it as a most valuable tool in the formulation of his “alternative” plan of living that he was piecing together.
The recipe he developed was designed to achieve most wonderful results of perfection apart from dependence on God. He claimed that beings had inherent life enough to achieve the external results of “law-keeping” without being subjected to the “humiliation” of submitting all rights in worship to the Son as well as the Father. As rebellion quickly grew like a cancer hidden deep in his heart he moved to infect as many as possible to share his feelings and convince them of the superiority of his new “insights”. Since he had been God's appointed being to be the chief revealer of Himself outside of Christ, the deception was intensely overwhelming and confusing to all the intelligent beings of the universe. There were now conflicting assertions about how to live and how to relate both to each other and to God. Lucifer's arguments were forceful, logical and very appealing in some respects. But something inside felt strange and dissonant like a warning light. But to complicate things, warning was itself something new and strange since there never before had been anything evil to be warned from.
The basics of Satan's government relies on these counterfeit principles from God's government:
Prideful independence, force or control and fear. The counterpart of these in God's family-based government is selfless love, faith and hope. Satan's government found it necessary to admit that rules were needed to keep things functioning so it launched into the throes of legalism, his attempt to achieve “perfection”, utopia, outside of a relationship with God. Since his emphasis was on externals, due to his new-found infatuation with himself and his beauty, he combined his tools of force, pride and fear in a claim that these would be the necessary elements that would provide everything needed for life apart from God. Of course the use of deception was growing exponentially to keep all of this intact. And by the time critical mass was reached in his campaign to convince the universe of the merits of his alternative government of force, one-third of all the angels of heaven had been convinced that his plan was viable and they would buy into his grand scheme.
In his now intense pride that had its unquenchable appetite for attention and worship, Satan launched the great war in earnest. One of his key points for success was to divorce the obvious need to “function as designed” (law-keeping) from an intimate connection with God, the Source of all life. If beings were to do this it would take away from Satan's source of worship and control. Since control by force was foundational to his legalistic philosophy of life, then all who understood the need for “law” would be steered to achieve that end by control and force. They would adopt not only heroic attempts to force themselves to be like God (keeping the law), but given the unavoidable failure that would bring they would then take stringent measures to control everyone possible around them by fear and force to make them feel more fulfilled. This would perfectly mimic Satan's own history and mirror his own intense emptiness and dissatisfaction. By imposing force on those under their control through abuse, guilt, violence or any other means, they would be in essence trying to induce worship to themselves thereby following Satan's example and suggestions.
The essence of worship is making something or someone of highest value above other objects of attention. The Great War is all about worship. Satan craves our worship, and when we follow his example and suggestions we give him the worship he craves and give him momentary pleasure. But because he has no life to give in return for worship we then find ourselves in a deficit situation in the economy of life itself. The absence of life is death. The wages of sin is death. That is not a punishment, it is merely a statement of reality and fact.
The great discussions of Paul in the Bible about Law and Grace are often confusing because we do not understand them in the context of the bigger picture. The law is a description of God, sort of like a picture shows us to some extent what someone looks like. But any attempts to become like that description ourselves will short-circuit our designed mental apparatus just like the debilitating effects of pornography addiction degrades and destroys the systems of those trapped in that imitation of intimacy.
Humans were designed first and foremost for intimate relationships. This must be understood clearly as foundational to any other proposition about life. Ignoring this fundamental fact of life is what enrages and frustrates millions who reject God and Christianity as a fraud. Inherently and intuitively they understand that they need meaningful relationships far more than they need rules and control by some outside meddling, threatening force. They are absolutely right in this assessment. This is the most misunderstood element in religion today. Because we have bought into the lie of law divorced from its source we reject everything having anything to do with all of it. Our society reinforces this lie by producing millions upon millions of laws divorced from relationship with their source that are mostly not only ridiculous but often pernicious in their nature.
But the mountain of lies that keep us in dense darkness still do not change the real facts about God and life and how we are designed. Our hearts still crave satisfaction and fulfillment and real love. We cannot escape our design anymore that a computer can function without its circuit-boards. What we desperately need is a fresh revelation and re-connection to the One who designed us this way. He is the great socket that has the correct configuration for our plugs to connect into. Though nearly every representation of Him has been severely distorted into grotesque pictures of fear and disgust by the lies of the enemy, often through the channels of our parents, our churches, our abusers etc., the truth still stands unaffected and undisturbed outside of all that, waiting for any opportunity to break into our emptiness and ravish our hearts with the affection and joy that we so deeply crave. There is no heart so damaged or ravaged that there is not healing and grace more than enough to restore it to wholeness and beauty. There is no history to dark and full of shame or fear that cannot be filled with light, hope and peace. The lies about God must be shattered by the exposure of His perfect and never-ending love. Every attribute of God's true character has been slandered, and every slander has been subtly incorporated into various aspects of religion to keep us from knowing Him as we should. We must challenge every assumption, every rendition, every rehearsal of God's acts and attitudes to discover the real truth and consistency of the real God.
Every one of us carries latent lies in various ways about who God is and how He relates to us. But if we give Him permission He will reveal Himself to us progressively and draw us into an amazing intimacy with himself that surpasses any intimacy we have ever know as much as the sun surpasses the moon in brightness and more.
