Tune in as Pastor Josh continues to teach from 1 Thessalonians:
“Today, there is a tendency to fall into one of two ditches when it comes to understanding the work of Satan: either we fail to recognize at all that we have an adversary who is constantly seeking to destroy us, or we give him far too much credit and assume he has far more power than is attributed to him in the Bible—as directly responsible for everything that goes wrong in our lives…The truth lies somewhere between these poles. Paul seldom attributes human fallenness to the work of Satan, while on the other hand, he is quite ready to see Satan at work in the kind of persecution that would thwart the furtherance of the gospel. The plain reality, which Paul knew well, was that the Thessalonian believers were being constantly harassed by their ‘fellow citizens’ (2:14). But from another perspective this harassment was being directed by Satan himself. Paul simply assumed that such ‘trials’ or affliction for the sake of Jesus and the gospel would be part of the common experience of Christians.”