When put together with II Corinthians 2:11, Paul is saying that a godly sorrow unto repentance can actually give Satan the opportunity to turn a person's feelings about his sin into an abnormal self-pity, which will destroy that despairing person's relationship with the church and withGod. He can turn such a person into a bitter cynic. The Devil is that clever.
It does not end there. In addition, he can turn the righteous indignation of those who are offended by another's sin into bitter self-righteousness if they do not forgive and forget and move on. He gets people going and coming unless they are aware that he can turn something good into a ploy to destroy a person's relationship with God and the church.
These are not the only weapons that Satan has in his arsenal. Remember, we are involved in a war, and a general will employ every kind of ploy, device, tool, or contrivance to rout the enemy. He will use decoys, infiltration, subversion, propaganda, rumors, misleading leaks of information, and sometimes a frontal attack with diversions on the flanks.
Satan is no different. However, God makes sure to warn us of his subtlety. The Devil creates distractions and illusions to deflect us from reaching our goal. He has the ability to make things that are in God's purpose unimportant (for instance, material things or vanity) seem important, while eternal, spiritual things he makes seem unimportant, unnecessary, and unrealistic.
Knowledge of what he is like would be unnecessary if he could not affect us after baptism. Despite his earlier defeat at the hand of God as well as his defeat by our David, Jesus Christ, he is still seeking to destroy God. Even if he fails at that, he still wants to destroy God's purpose of having us inherit His Kingdom.
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“A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his finger, with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord; therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing. There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him” (Proverbs 6:12-16)
In a startling discovery released on June 2, Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson, prolific author and one of the world’s leading experts on Bible Codes (also known as Torah Codes), published a video on YouTube suggesting that ISIS will be destroyed between now and 2016 by the messiah, son of Joseph, known in Hebrew as Mashiach Ben Yosef.
Glazerson cautioned Breaking Israel News that these codes should not be understood as a prediction. “I found Ben Yosef appearing there next to [the code that ISIS will be destroyed]. This fits with the idea that Mashiach Ben Yosef will lead the wars against the enemies of Israel… As this is a known idea, such a table is not a real prediction.”
In Jewish tradition, Mashiach Ben Yosef is the predecessor of the messiah, son of David (Mashiach Ben David), the ultimate redeemer of the Jewish people. Glazerson explained that Mashiach Ben Yosef “will fight the evil forces against Israel”.
Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson describing his Bible Code discovery that ISIS will be destroyed by 2016.
The theory behind Bible Codes is that the 304,805 Hebrew letters in the Torah were written with Divine intelligence and contain hidden patterns and letter sequences that reflect important events in Jewish history. One technique used in locating Bible Codes is called equidistant letter sequences. This means that Hebrew words are spelled out by starting at a letter and repeatedly skipping an equal number of letters until a meaningful word is spelled. These words are referred to as Bible Codes. Computer programs such as the one Glazerson uses, help researchers locate significant codes embedded in the Hebrew Biblical text.
Glazerson credits Haim Sade, a fellow Bible Codes expert, who sent him the table in which these codes were found. In the 4-minute video released on June 2, Glazerson points out multiple encoded Hebrew words, all found within the same block of Hebrew letters taken from the Book of Numbers.
The most significant hidden codes are three Hebrew words that imply that ISIS will be destroyed by Mashiach Ben Yosef. By pointing out related Bible Codes, Glazerson hints that the dates of the destruction will be during the Hebrew years 5775 and 5776, which correspond to the secular years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016.
Of course, the word ISIS does not appear in the Hebrew text. Instead, ISIS is referred to DAESH, an acronym that stands for Dar al Islam al Sham. DAESH is the name by which Hebrew speakers refer to ISIS.
In the same block of text is the Hebrew word keitz, which refers to the End of Days. Also nearby, in equidistant letter sequences, is the word Mashiach. Within the span of letters that spell out Mashiach is the word that means “rise up”. The implication is that, just as the Bible predicts, Mashiach will rise up.
In another part of this same block of Biblical text, also in equidistant letter sequence, are the words Ben Yishai, the son of Jesse. This is an unmistakable reference to King David and to Mashiach Ben David, since the ultimate Jewish redeemer must descend from King David.
The table from which all of these Bible Codes were derived comes from the Book of Numbers which, according to Glazerson, is significant because the Book of Numbers is where we look for “the events which are going to happen before the coming of the Mashiach.”
The discovery of Bible Codes supports the traditional Jewish belief that the words of the first five books of the Bible were dictated to Moses by God, letter-by-letter.