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Wednesday July 15, 2026

The Great Deception

“The main consequence of our yielding to Satan and the Fall was that he deceived us all (Rev. 12:9) into thinking that we have a human self which can operate and manage itself, even as he lyingly thinks he manages himself. In fact, we are only operated and managed by a deity self–the Spirit of Truth or the spirit of error (1 John 4:6)–who owns us. This was symbolized in the Garden by receiving the fruit of one or the other of the two trees. So when the Law, which is meant to expose Satan’s lie, comes to us in our deluded condition, Satan has the laugh on us. We obey his self-for-self sin laws, being his slaves, and cannot obey God’s laws.

We who are saved admitted our sins in their outer forms and received forgiveness and justification through our Lord Jesus Christ and the new birth of the Spirit. But we were still too blind to recognize the depth of Satan’s deceit in us. We thought that as saved and new creations in Christ we could still take a share in managing ourselves.

Paul explains the full meaning of redemption through our dying in Jesus’ death to Sin-Satan’s indwelling and becoming alive in His resurrection to God’s Spirit now indwelling us. But it is meaningless to reckon and say that we are now dead to sin and alive to God while that root deception is not yet out of us and we think we are more than a people managed only by the deity spirit in us as vessels, branches, temples, slaves or wives.

In order for us to learn this indwelling principle to its depths, Paul challenges, ‘Just try to keep the Law, and you’ll find the very opposite occurring. You have been a slave to Satan and sin and are now a slave to Christ and His righteousness. But that change of owner and indweller doesn’t truly lay hold of you in its reality while there remains some sense of self-relying self in you as if you are not just a slave. So just try to keep the Law and live the Christian life; and you will find you can’t, because there never was a ‘just you.”

Your trying is really the remnant of Satan’s deceit on you that you are an independent self. Then you will respond to his sin controls and fall on your face in your failures to keep the Law; and that failure will at last expose to you this lie that you can act and respond independently. There is no such thing. Your ‘I can’ is still Satan having his lying hold on you.

Then at last it can become real to you that Jesus’ dying for and as us, and His rising by God’s Spirit for and as us, means a change of ownership. But we never did own ourselves. Satan-owner is out for keeps and Christ-owner is in for keeps. Now we just know we are Christ-managed, never self-managed and no longer Satan-managed.

The outer law is now meaningless. We are dead to it because our ‘I’ is solely the expresser of God’s life; and He operates His laws and nature spontaneously in us, by us and as us. That is our answer to every false claim in this Satan-infected world that Satan has a hold on us. Christ in us is our law; and He fulfills it by us, just as Satan used to fulfill his by us. Satan is out for keeps, Christ is in for keeps, and now we can actually live what we said we do live in Romans 6:11–dead to sin and alive to God in our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:11).”

Taken from: Paul’s Key to the Liberated Life: Romans Six to Eight

By Norman Grubb

Pages 11-13