Devotionals

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Sometimes I believe that some people can initiate an evil without the devil directly getting involved but because he fathered evil—in fact “evil” is one letter short of “devil”—every act of wickedness, directly or indirectly, is attributed to him.

It is in this wise: Recently, as I was writing a manuscript, I formulated an idea that I thought was original. I thought no-one had ever formulated it like that before. I was, however, surprised when I coincidentally picked a book where somebody had given an exact formulation. Boy! That was close! I could easily have been accused of plagiarizing. I didn’t drop the idea and the formulation but I attributed it to the person who went to print with it before me.

Even if you can come up with your own idea, it will only be yours if someone had not come up with it before you. If it had been articulated earlier, it becomes the ‘property’ of the person who first came up with it.

The devil is ‘rightly’ blamed for all evil. He has the copyright and evil is his registered trademark.

The Bible is explicit that Satan is the author of all evil. The package of sin that the devil initiated carried all manner of sins you could think of. This is why any evil people make are all referenced back to the devil. So, we can go ahead and blame the devil but we have to know for sure that we’ll be busted for all that we allow him to accomplish through us.

He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work. (1 John 3:8 NIV). See also John 8:44.

Whether we ‘initiate’ evil or get ‘influenced’, we must know that blaming the devil or people who seem to have power over us does not mitigate our responsibility over our involvements. The blame game only complicates things.

But we can do better: we can desist from evil as we resist the devil.
“Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” (James 4:7 NIV).

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