Satan’s Strategies – Snatching

Powerpoint Pictures: Child snatching a toy; Dog snatching food of a plate; Thief snatching a handbag

Who is the church’s big enemy?

It is Satan or the devil.

And the devil wants to harm God’s people and has lots of different ways he tries to do this.

The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians writes about how we need to know what these ways, these schemes are, so that we are harmed by them.  *“…in order that Satan might not outwit us.  For we are not unaware of his schemes.” (2 Corinthians 2:11)*

Two of his schemes are LYING (saying that God’s Word is not true) and PRETENDING to be something he is not (by using false teachers who look and sound like true teachers of the Bible, but who are not).

Another tactic he uses is seen these three pictures:

A child snatching a toy.

A dog stealing from a plate of food.

A thief grabbing a handbag.

Jesus tells us that a scheme or strategy or tactic Satan uses is SNATCHING.

In a parable He told, the parable of the sower or the four soils, He describes some people who hear the Word of God as being like a path on which the seed a farmer sows lands.

He explains, “Some people are like the seed along the path, where the word is sown.  As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.” (Mark 4:15)

Satan is described as being like a bird that snatches the seed that has landed on a path.

He stops people from hearing the Word of God by snatching it away from them, so that as soon as they hear it, they forget what was said; or by distracting them, so that they don’t concentrate on what they are hearing.

It could be a cough.  As you are listening to a sermon preached or the Bible taught in Sunday School, someone coughs and instead of thinking about what the Bible is saying, we think about the person who coughed.  Satan snatched the Word!

It could be anything.  As you are reading the Bible at home, something you’ve done, the football results, a TV programme, comes to mind, and instead of focusing on what you are reading, your minds drifts to this other thing.  Satan snatched the Word!