Counterfeits to Christনমুনা

Day Three - Blending Beliefs

Sadly it is quite common for Christians keep parts of their Christian faith and marry it with non-Christian practice. Some younger Western Christians do this in the name of love, tolerance, and reconciliation. Academics call blending beliefs syncretism. God calls it adultery.

Syncretism is what happens when we receive or seek to redeem things that we must reject. In second Chronicles, the children of religious leaders were promoting syncretism when “Jeroboam and his sons cast them out from serving as priests of the Lord, and he appointed his own priests for the high places and for the goat idols and for the calves that he had made.”

What You Can Do

1. Receive. Because people are made in God’s image, some aspects of the culture they create can be received by Christianity. For example, some cultures place a high value on family, which can be received by biblical Christianity as a shared value.
2. Reject. We must reject some things because they are against God. Examples include drunkenness, stealing, and all sex outside of heterosexual marriage—even if a culture widely approves of these things.
3. Redeem. We can use some things for God or Satan, and therefore Christians can redeem them for God’s purposes. One example is Christmas, which was a pagan holiday that the early Christians chose to celebrate as the birth of Jesus because we don’t know when He was born and we already had the day off.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is pristine, pure, and clean. The gospel of Jesus Christ was created by God. Satan counterfeits this gospel with unclean, impure, deadly false gospels that seek to do to the gospel what the algae is doing to the lake. This explains why Satan is always trying to contaminate what God created clean with his corrupting counterfeit. Thankfully, the kingdom of God will one day come and put an end to all counterfeits.

Was this plan helpful to you? It was adapted from our book Win Your War: For in the Realm You Don’t See For Freedom in the One You Do.