Y'all talk of satan and god as if they are your landlord or the like. Yet if you don't believe and act a certain way then your afterlife will suck because of that. I don't know any landlord with that type of power.
Being somebody other than yourself is just another form of death. The biggest trick Satan ever pulled is convincing everybody they're not worthy -- that God's love is conditional. It's exactly this feeling of lowliness that causes people to act lowly in the first place.
You are correct God's love is unconditional but many have no clue what love is and wouldn't know it if they saw it.
I think it's a far greater mistake to "see" Satan in everything. To base your religion on fears of, and defenses against, an Anti-God is to remain forever ignorant of the Divine. It makes one miss the sublime entirely and become very frightened, paranoid and combative rather than joyful, inspired and enlightened.
Evolutionary man has had a difficult time understanding the ramifications of the Lucifer rebellion. Indeed, many humans maintain that Lucifer, Satan and their minions do not even exist. Much of this is due to the fact that earth was placed in isolation following the rebellion. But the divine endowment of freewill choice eventuates in the divergent realms of sin and righteousness. The persistent pursuit of divinity (not deity, mind you) leads to the kingdom of God as contrasted with its continuous rejection, which leads to the domains of darkness and death. Ultimately, this was the simple choice that Lucifer (not an ascendant being) made in the negative, in the depths of his mind. Lucifer could not divorce the idea of false (total) liberty with no responsibilities from the concept of true liberty. And when, after 500,000 years, Lucifer finally chose to rebel, he drew more than a third of the spiritual world into rebellion with him in his cabal (John referenced this symbollically in passing, Rev 12:4). Historically, Lucifer is one of only three beings of his sovereign order to rebel in the annals of his universe. Potential evil is time existent in a universe embracing differential levels of perfection meanings and values. The deliberate choice of evil constitutes sin and leads to destruction. Of all the problems arising from the Lucifer Rebellion, this is the one that most affects man. Lucifer rebelled in favor of a false liberty with no responsibilities, no fraternity and no fellowship. True liberty is the quest of the ages and the reward of evolutionary progress. False liberty is the subtle deception of the error of time and the evil of space. Enduring liberty is predicated on the reality of justice--intelligence, maturity, fraternity, and equity. Liberty is a self-destroying technique of cosmic existence when its motivation is unintelligent, unconditioned, and uncontrolled. True liberty is progressively related to reality and is ever regardful of social equity, cosmic fairness, universe fraternity, and divine obligations. Liberty is suicidal when divorced from material justice, intellectual fairness, social forbearance, moral duty, and spiritual values. Liberty is nonexistent apart from cosmic reality, and all personality reality is proportional to its divinity relationships. Unbridled self-will and unregulated self-expression equal unmitigated selfishness, the acme of ungodliness. Liberty without the associated and ever-increasing conquest of self is a figment of egoistic mortal imagination. Self-motivated liberty is a conceptual illusion, a cruel deception. License masquerading in the garments of liberty is the forerunner of abject bondage. True liberty is the associate of genuine self-respect; false liberty is the consort of self-admiration. True liberty is the fruit of self-control; false liberty, the assumption of self-assertion. Self-control leads to altruistic service; self-admiration tends towards the exploitation of others for the selfish aggrandizement of such a mistaken individual as is willing to sacrifice righteous attainment for the sake of possessing unjust power over his fellow beings. Even wisdom is divine and safe only when it is cosmic in scope and spiritual in motivation. There is no error greater than that species of self-deception which leads intelligent beings to crave the exercise of power over other beings for the purpose of depriving these persons of their natural liberties. The golden rule of human fairness cries out against all such fraud, unfairness, selfishness, and unrighteousness. Only true and genuine liberty is compatible with the reign of love and the ministry of mercy. Indeed, Lucifer dared to encroach upon the rights of his fellows in the name of personal liberty even while the Supreme Rulers of the universe stand back in merciful respect for these prerogatives of will and the potentials of personality! No being, in the exercise of his supposed personal liberty, has a right to deprive any other being of those privileges of existence conferred by the Creators and duly respected by all their loyal associates, subordinates, and subjects. Evolutionary man may have to contend for his material liberties with tyrants and oppressors on a world of sin and iniquity or during the early times of a primitive evolving sphere, but not so on the morontia worlds or on the spirit spheres. War is the heritage of early evolutionary man, but on worlds of normal advancing civilization physical combat as a technique of adjusting misunderstandings is not accepted. Indeed, when John referred to "war in heaven" in Revelation 12:7, he was not speaking of physical war but more a war of ideas and arguments. But make no mistake, the war John referred to was very terrible and very real! While displaying none of the barbarities characteristic of warfare on immature worlds, this conflict was far more deadly. War in heaven is fought in terms of life eternal. With the Son and in the Spirit did God project eternal Havona, and ever since has there obtained the eternal pattern of co-ordinate participation in creation--sharing. This pattern of sharing is the master design for every one of the Sons and Daughters of God who go out into space to engage in the attempt to duplicate in time the central universe of eternal perfection. Every creature of every evolving universe who aspires to do the Father's will is destined to become the partner of the time-space Creators in this magnificent adventure of experiential perfection attainment. Were this not true, the Father would have hardly endowed such creatures with creative free will, neither would he indwell them, actually go into partnership with them by means of his own spirit. Lucifer's damaging enterprise was an attempt to do the nondoable, to short-circuit time in an experiential universe. Lucifer's crime was the attempted creative disenfranchisement of every personality in Satania, the unrecognized abridgment of the creature's personal participation--freewill participation--in the long evolutionary struggle to attain the status of light and life both individually and collectively. In so doing this onetime Sovereign of your system set the temporal purpose of his own will directly athwart the eternal purpose of God's will as it is revealed in the bestowal of free will upon all personal creatures. The Lucifer rebellion thus threatened the maximum possible infringement of the freewill choice of the ascenders and servers of the universes--a threat forevermore to deprive every one of these beings of the thrilling experience of contributing something personal and unique to the slowly erecting monument to experiential wisdom which will sometime exist as each perfected universe. Thus does the Lucifer manifesto, masquerading in the habiliments of liberty, stand forth in the clear light of reason as a monumental threat to consummate the theft of personal liberty and to do it on a scale that has been approached only twice in all the history of this local universe. In short, what God had given as a gift to men and angels, Lucifer would have taken away from them, that is, the divine privilege of participating in the creation of their own destinies and of the destiny of this local system of inhabited worlds. No being in all the universe has the rightful liberty to deprive any other being of true liberty, the right to love and be loved, the privilege of worshiping God and of serving his fellows. The Lucifer Manifesto was issued approximately 200,000 years and the rebellion continues. At some point, when all offers of mercy have been spurned by the transgressors, as they have been to this point, the rebellion will be ended. Subsequent to the resurrection, all power in heaven and in earth is placed in the hands of the Universe Creator, Michael (Jesus of Nazareth) by the Universe Father (Matt 28:8). While such was not necessary to bring about the end of this unfortunate chapter of universe history, it was apparently the preference of Michael. :cheers2:
It's sometimes useful to see the effects of Satan on the world and to separate that from what God does. Satan = War, Famine, disease, destruction which is all guided by hate. God = Peace, prosperity, health and creation which is all guided by love. Creation versus entropy.
Yes! Peace, Love, Truth, Wisdom, Consciousness, Creativity, Compassion, Unity, Transcendence . . . Allow yourself to experience these expressions of the divine. If one does not experience these directly, then "Satan" does not need any tricks.
