This will be a short one, but a good one. The reason that we are hear on the earth is to make a choice. We choose life, or we choose death. Pretty simple. Paul said in Romans 6:23, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Life and death - a juxaposition. Moses told the Israelites about this choice in Deuteronomy 8:2 (which the Lord had told him about in Exodus 16:4), "thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments, or no." That is the life and death statement: the blessing and the cursing. That's the point of this post.
Jesus said in John 14:6, "I am the life." Paul said in Hebrews 2:14, "... him that had the power of death, that is, the devil."
But there is one monkey wrench that I must introduce here. Satan, the devil, always, always, always is trying to imitate Jesus. Satan wants to be considered as God, and so he constantly tries to steal that title. It started in the Garden of Eden and has been the same ever since. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 11:14 that Satan tries to disguise himself as an angel of light (or, rather, the Angel of Light, Who is Jesus). So there is a bit of a tricky thing that happens when we read the Bible; we must learn to rightly divide the subject matter so that we know who the text is talking about. We need to know when it is talking about Jesus and when it is talking about Satan. Here are some of the times that Satan tries to imitate Jesus:
Both are spoken of as trees in the Garden of Eden (the Tree of Life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil)
Both are refered to as the morning star
Both are refered to as a rock
Both are refered to as lions
Both are compared to a thief (in the night)
Both are princes (one the Prince of Peace and one the prince of the world)
Both have marks that will be implanted in the minds of their disciples
Both have come to bring a fire in the earth
The list goes on and on, but the key is to be able to decifer which is which. It's not always easy, but always worth investigating the Word to find out. God bless.
