OVERVIEW. An essay on religions. This article focuses on the purposes for which Satan has created religions.

“I must admit that I am doctrinally weak.” These were the words that Elisabeth said to me when I had mentioned that some of the beliefs of the Mormons were a bit strange. Elisabeth and I were dating at the time. She was a Mormon, having recently come into that group through her sister’s influence. Through a couple of Mormon “missionaries,” I was being exposed to this group’s teaching and found it pretty hard to believe. And so I made my comment to Elisabeth.

This anecdote serves as an introduction to a series of reflections I had recently about religions and about how these philosophes gain and then maintain their control over men and women. This article is a record of some of these reflections.

BASICS OF RELIGION

Before we get too far along, it will be helpful to establish some basics about religion. All religious systems are conceived by the prince of the demons and are brought into the world as Satan insinuates his ideas into the minds of sinful men.

THE PURPOSES OF RELIGION ARE TWO-FOLD. Since the fall in Genesis 3, when sin entered the world (Romans 5:12-14), all mankind has experienced two great problems from their sin: guilt and death. Religions are Satan’s response to these two great problems, because religions are intentionally designed to deceive people about their guilt from sin and to deceive people about death.

GUILT. One of the purposes of any religious system is to provide its adherents with a way to ignore their conscience so that their guilt is assuaged. Because all men have a conscience and because a complete copy of the Law is written on every man’s conscience (Romans 2:14-15), all people experience guilt every time they violate the moral Law of God. The only way to truly remove the guilt from your sin and to rid your conscience of its shame is by true repentance and by faith in the Lord Jesus. But religions are designed to provide a man-made counterfeit that pretends to remove guilt through man-made works and efforts or through man-made ideas with the result that the religious adherent is deceived into believing their guilt is no more.

DEATH. The second purpose of religious systems is to deceive their adherents regarding the nature of death.

When the LORD God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, He warned the man with the most terrifying prohibition possible. The LORD God warned man by threatening death as the consequence of disobedience (Genesis 2:17). Death is the most severe threat man can experience. Thus, the threat of death should be the most terrifying threat to us.

But Satan is the deceiver of mankind. What the LORD God threatens for our good Satan twists so that we will be deceived. And so he said to the woman, “You surely will not die!” (Gen. 3:4). The talking snake convinced Eve that there was some wiggle room in what God had commanded. The snake was persuasive, so the woman was persuaded that the threat of death was not that bad. And, ever since, the serpent of old has been persuading fallen mankind that death is not really that bad and deceiving them that God does not really intend to destroy some of His creatures in the lake of fire. Religion is one of Satan’s primary tools for deceiving man about death.

OBSCURING CHRIST AND THE CROSS

To this point we have spoken of religion as Satan’s means of deceiving mankind about the peril of his situation before a holy God. When presenting the gospel to unbelievers, this explanation of religion as putting a veil over the realities of guilt (sin) and death can be a helpful introduction to proclaiming the atoning death of the Lord Jesus and how it solves our two great problems. So certainly, Satan has created religions for deception and distraction.

But there is an even more significant purpose for the invention of religious systems and philosophies. Satan’s primary purpose for religion is to obscure the cross of Jesus Christ and to remove the glory of the Lord Jesus. Consider 2 Cor. 4:3-4:

³ And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, ⁴ in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Paul expressly teaches that “the god of this world” (Satan) has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the glory of Christ. Satan hates Christ and he hates the cross and therefore his primary goal is to bury Christ’s triumph on the cross in the deepest depths of Sheol. Religion, consisting in fallen man’s pathetic and futile efforts to achieve his own righteousness, is Satan’s primary means for obtaining this goal. So, religion in all its myriad forms is never a way to gauge your goodness but is, in fact, the primary way Satan blinds your mind and obscures the cross of Christ, which is the only way of salvation (Acts 4:12).

In a future post I will continue my musings about religion and will consider the effects of religion on fallen man. We will also consider ancient religions and “next gen religions.”

Soli Deo gloria            rmb                 5/22/2025                 #717