When he lies, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

— John 8:44

Satan is a great deceiver. He first blinds his victims before he binds and leads them unto destruction. The great and mighty Samson discovered that. Before he could be bound and set to grinding in the prison house, he first was blinded. Gehazi saw only the shiny Syrian raiment; he didn’t see the leprous scars that would cover his face. Achan saw only the goodly Babylonian garments; he didn’t hear the execrations of the people and the lamentations of his wife and children or the crackling of the fires of the funeral pyre that would consume him and all of his. Judas saw only the glitter of silver; he did not see the darkness of remorse or the blackness of the pit into which he plunged.

The deception can be very small at first. At Stone Mountain in Decatur, Georgia, there is a warning railing that keeps sightseers from getting anywhere near the edge of that great rock. So gradually does it slope downward that if one were to get within 75 or 100 feet of the edge, he would already find himself slipping toward the precipice and would be unable to recover himself. With no way to stop, he would continue to slide downward until he plunged over the edge to his death hundreds of feet below. Sin, like this same slippery slope, pulls us down into things that we never expected we would do.

Question to ponder:
How can we be alert to the deceptiveness of temptation?