How the "Gods" lied

The War Unseen - Part 2

This article is Part 2 in a series. Be sure to start with Part 1!

Author's Note: What follows is a personal hypothesis. While I am a devoted member of the Orthodox Church, this work does not reflect the official position of the Orthodox Church nor does it speak on behalf of it.

Rather, it represents my own synthesis and reflection on the long historical arc of spiritual warfare I believe has been waged against God, Christ, and His Church from the moment of the Incarnation until now. Ideas and concepts articulated within this article come from my own understanding of early church and reformation history, orthodox and roman catholic podcasts and some evangelical sources. (Where these types of views tend to be the most prevalent.)

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Demonic Strategy for a Counterattack

If Christ’s arrival exposed the enemy and bound the strong man (the Devil), what’s the enemy’s first move in the counterattack? Because he will counterattack. He’s not going to just sit back and let his kingdom be destroyed and usurped.

When the demons realized that they wouldn’t be able to outcompete the Lord’s gospel, they embarked on a two-pronged strategy: resist/suppress and distort/corrupt. They began by using their traditional “kingdoms”, the state-sponsored pagan religions, to try to resist Christ’s kingdom. But from the very beginning, the father of all lies embarked on a strategy of attempting to corrupt the Gospel from within.

The Devil doesn’t necessarily begin with an open-your-in-your-face confrontation; that’s too bold and risks galvanizing and building resilience. When he does this, he uses those he has deceived to do his dirty work. But first, he needs to weaken and distort to the point where things can more easily fall into his grasp. And we see this when we look at the rise of Islam and the Reformation wars. In my opinion, he doesn’t want to make people aware of his moves, so he’s going to try to play the game from the shadows, playing puppet master by pulling the strings, but never directly being visible on stage.

The Demons’ Greatest PR Win: Getting Us to Laugh at Them

C.S. Lewis nailed it in The Screwtape Letters:

“Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves… If people don’t believe in devils, we lose the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make magicians. But if people don’t believe in us at all, we have already won.”

The ancient world feared the gods. Ours just memes them. Some might say that’s enlightened progress. I say, that’s vulnerability caused by spiritual blindness. The less seriously we take the idea of spiritual deception and a war with unseen demonic powers, the more susceptible we are to them.

Instead of being overly creative, the father of lies uses a tactic that’s worked since Eden: imitate the truth closely enough to fool the undiscerning, then twist the results to his ends. The devil never produces something that is 100% a lie; that’s too easy for people to detect as false. Instead, he combines lies and falsehoods to mislead people while keeping them unaware.

I have often said in the past, when speaking to my children, that the most powerful lie is the one that contains the most truth. It’s worth remembering that counterfeiting isn’t about creating something entirely new. It’s about taking what’s real, then distorting it just enough to corrupt the source. That way, the victim thinks they’re still in the light while they slowly acclimate to the dark.

I’ve also heard it put this way. You can take the most wonderful and most valuable bottle of wine in the world, but add a couple of drops of poison to the wine, and it will still kill you.

Counterfeits Work Better Than Force

Open persecution can strengthen the faithful — history proves it. Counterfeits, however, lull them to sleep. It’s far easier to keep someone in bondage if they believe they’re already free.

In the centuries before and after Christ, this took the form of:

• State-backed paganism — the empire as a religious project, with loyalty to the gods equated to loyalty to the state.

• Syncretism and Heresy — absorbing Christian language into pagan frameworks, producing “Christianized” heresies that carried just enough truth to pass muster.

• Twisted asceticism — counterfeit “holiness” that fed pride rather than humility.

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The Gods of the Nations Were Real — Just Not Who or What They Claimed to Be