sermonette: Guile

Intent to Deceive for Personal Gain
Bill Cherry
Given 12-Apr-04; Sermon #661Bs; 15 minutes

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greetings to you all. I hope you had a fine lunch and are ready for a good service this afternoon. Everybody please turn to I Peter 2 and 21. A lot of these scriptures have already been used and I think they have been used appropriately and I Uh, make no apology for using them again, especially since I'm not going to be able to go back and write a sermon yet again. So, um, as we read verse I Peter 2:21. It says, for even hereunto you were called because Christ suffered for us, leading us an example that we should follow in his steps. And then it says, who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. So we are to follow Jesus' example. He had no guile in his mouth. So we should not have guile in our mouth. And I want you to think of Gel as a huge chunk of spiritual loving that we should get out of our mouth and um think about it today. But what is Guile? What exactly is Gel? Well, the purpose of this sermonette, you probably know more than I did before I started studying anyway, but the purpose of this sermonet is to give you a clearer understanding of what Gile is. Now in my experience, guile is not a word frequently heard in our daily conversations. And Most of us have experienced the word guile in biblical youth. In other words, we see it in the Bible quite a few times, but um, We do not, do not hear it in, in our conversations. And some translations in this, this verse 22 translate the word disguile as deceit, and it is a quotation from Isaiah 53:9, and, and the word deceit is used in the Hebrew. So this same word, I looked it up in Strongs, I looked it up in, I looked up guile and I looked up deceit, and I looked up um guile in English dictionaries and They both mean, I mean, all, all three of these mean pretty much the same thing, but the word deceit to me does not convey the meaning of guile as it is described here. Guile is a much stronger word than deceit implies. And it is malicious, cunning, it's trickery, insidious cunning, fraud, deceit, treachery, evil intent. So the intent of guile is to deceive and in many cases to destroy and use and make merchandise of the victim of guile. Uh, let's look at verse 2 while we are still here in 2 Peter. It says, wherefore laying aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisies and envies, and all evil speaking as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby. So here you can think of this as a list of spiritual level that we should get out of our lives. And the second one is guile. We are told to lay aside guile. But as you look at the companions here with the word guile, these all are sometimes motivators of guile and sometimes products of guile. So malice and envy could, could encourage somebody to use guile to deceive somebody else and trickery with malicious intent, and they may use evil speaking. And certainly hypocrisy because guile is made, is the purpose of guile is to deceive or represent the truth in a different or represent yourself in a manner different from what you really are. Now please turn to 2 Corinthians. Chapter 11 verses 4 and 5. Uh, here the apostle Paul talks about Gel. And he uses the word beguile, which means that God was used. So he said in verse 3 in chapter 11, But I fear lest the serpentlest by any means as the serpent beguiled Eve through his ability your mind should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if any, for if he that comes preaches another Jesus. Whom we have not preached, or if you receive another spirit. Which we, you have not received. Or another gospel which you have not accepted, you might well bear with it. In other words, you may accept it because of the way it's presented here. And so Let's look at the way that Satan beguiled Eve. Um, well, I want you to first notice that Uh, Satan turned Eve's mind. He corrupted her heart. He turned her heart to another go. Another spirit. And remember we had the spirit talked about us talking about cable's spirit, so he turned from a spirit of, of obedience and zeal for God, but to another spirit. And another gospel or another message. So I want you to read, let's see, um, Unless they get I got page 5 next and it's page 3. OK uh. Alright Now, now David talked to us in, in his, in his sermon last Sabbath about false doctrine being spiritual Len, and so did Richard this morning. Spiritual Len, the Len of false doctrine, and this is what Eve in a sense did. But, but Satan through Uh, guile and through envy of God and maliciousness, he destroyed the relationship that Eve had with God or she was privy to have with God. So you do not need to turn there, but I will read the Some verses in Genesis 3, the account of Satan and Eve, but it says now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which God had made, and he said unto the woman, Y, as God said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden. And he said, And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit which the Lord has made. And he's it was, we made, we made the fruit which, which the Lord has made of of all the trees in the garden. And I can picture Satan giving her a look that says, every tree, are you telling me the truth? And then the next verse, but of the fruit of the tree, which is in the knowledge which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die. And then Satan says, the serpent said unto the woman, you shall not surely die, for God does know that in the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be open, and you should be like gods, knowing good and evil. So in essence, he was saying, I say that you're new here. You just arrived, but I've been around for quite a long time. And I know what God does and let me clue you in. I'm going to tell you the truth about God. And so in confidential tones, he told her, he let her know that God was lying. He will not, you will not die. In fact, you will live forever. And he knows that if you Eat of the tree that you will be like him, and you'll know just as much as God does. So, He was like a corrupt politician, which use, uses accusations and flatteries and fair speech and criticisms to create doubt and mistrust of, of his opponents. And he paints himself as a good guy, the one to tell the truth and to save the day. So we've accepted all this, and she said, In her own words, maybe. God has been lying to me, and this cute little talking, honest servant, serpent has told me the truth. I touched the fruit and I'm still alive. I ate the fruit, and I'm still alive. And now I know that I can be like God, and I can decide what's good and evil. And so she took the bait. And even like yesterday, We have celebrations which Celebrate in the name of God, but also have a name of a pagan goddess and fertility symbols and all of the things that are not uh. A part of God's true religion and part of God's instructionSo Paul feared. That the people would take a different Jesus, and a different gospel, and a different spirit. And I think the reason he did It's because the guile is from Satan, and Satan puts it there by guile, he does it by deception and malicious intent. But we can receive a wrong doctrine, a wrong understanding from people just like us that are sincere, that want to know God's truth and are jealous. And like David said, not just put out sin. But, but eat. The level of sincerity and truth daily and get a good dose of that and let that be the guard that guards you from accepting guile and being a person that is taken in by false religious teachings. So we can be. We can be taken in or else God would not have warned us that, that we could be. And So please turn to Revelation 14 and verse 5. The last scripture that Richard read this morning. But I want you to read verse 5 1st. It says, In their mouth was found no guile. For the, for they are without fault, fault before the throne of God. Now, you remember the first scripture we read, First Peter 2:22 says, Christ had no sin. Neither was Gile found in his mouth. And this is a description of the people in verse 4. He said they are not defiled by women, and we understand that to represent false doctrine and false churches, for they are virgins. And they follow the lamb wherever he goes, obedient to God now and obedient to God in the future, following him wherever he goes. These were redeemed from men, being the fresh fruits of God, and unto God and to the lamb. So we know that Gile is A part of Satan's character, it is malicious intent to deceive us. And We can be a part, we can be a part of God's special group. We can have access to God and God's throne if we guard ourselves from guile and the false teachings of this day by eating the sincere or eating unleavened of sincerity and truth.