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I wuz just think r we responsible for our own crimes or satan
@^Is satan really responsible for all crimes? writes OLU OSUNDE with additional reports from MODUPE OKUSANYA. On the judgement day, the devil may stand to refute some of the criminal allegations against him countering those who are fond of attributive statements like: The "devil pushed me", "it is devil's work"
One Tajudeen Abiodun (21) was arrested recently by the Ogun State police command for alleged rape.
Narrating the story of how he indulged in the act, he said “immediately I saw her, something inside me just suggested that I should seize the opportunity.” The girl in question according to the rape suspect was drunk making it easy for him.
'The devil pushed me"
Another gory story was that of one Emmanuel Benjamin who was caught making love to an insane woman old enough to be his mother in a back street. When caught in the act and beaten, he blamed the devil saying “the devil pushed me.”
Similarly, there have been several cases of immoral acts ranging from stealing, murder and obscene ones like a father sleeping with his daughter with the fault also attributed most often to the devil.
Recently, a military officer was accused of throwing his fiancee from a three storey building. Caught within the web of law, he also blamed the devil for using the woman whom he said threw herself down to put him in trouble.
According to Pastor ‘Kanye Kolade of the Word Impact Bible Church , the devil exists and the bible confirms it. He used to be an arch angel in heaven as the book of Isaiah and Ezekiel recorded it but he was cast down to earth due to his pride. He wanted to ascend to the throne of God but he failed and he was demoted; he lost his glory and beauty and he was left with deception.
However, the devil was defeated through the power of redemption by Christ Jesus. His major weapon is deception and this is what he uses to deceive us to do what God doesn’t’ want us to do, or bring us out of God’s protective arms. The devil sees himself as the ruler of day on earth.
Remotely, the devil is definitely behind all evil but we human beings are not absorbed from being responsible for our actions and inactions. On the other hand, God has created man as a free moral agent, having power to accept or refuse evil, and based on this power we cannot escape from facing the consequences if we do evil.
There is a story I heard about the devil, it goes thus, “There was a day satan went to God and said to God.
“Please warn these your children for me,” why are they always attributing all the bad things that happen in their lives to me, when I know nothing about 98 per cent of them.” The devil was trying to defend himself.
Talking about Joseph’s story, I would like to view it from two different perspective. Firstly, it is not every negative that is always negative – God works through negative situation, atimes; he works in strange ways.
Secondly, God takes the devil for a ride — this was revealed when the devil thought he had defeated Jesus, he did not know that God only allowed it because he was looking for substitute for His agreed justice. The devil did not know that he was playing along with God’s plan.
According to Romans chapter 8 verse 28, when we give room to the devil we become his lawful captives. Therefore, people should try not to always think that every negative, discomfort, inconveniences are from the devil; when we do, a times we may be fighting against God.
Finally I would like to say that , God exposes his children to challenges to test their faith, to make them grow, so that they can develop the capacity to handle situations of life.
For ArchDiocesan Linus Okonwo (OPL) of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal of Nigeria, the devil is wicked but every failure should not always be attributed to the devil. The reason why people attributed all evil to the devil is because they don’t know their right in God. People get into the trap of the devil atimes due to their lack of knowledge, ignorance and disobedience.
The devil is powerful, no doubt, but Christ has given us the power to resist him. Eph. Chapter 6: 13 says we have been given the whole armour to face the devil in battle, we’have not been given the power to fear or run from the devil. The devil has so much threatened his victims with fear and the fear has now taken the upper hand.
Yes, there is a devil because the bible says he is going round seeking whom to devour, but God has given us power to conquer the devil.
“In this perilous time, as the Bible stated it, more of such cases are bound to occur, said R.O Akande of the Celestial Church of Christ.
“If you want to know whether Devil exists or not, I implore you to go to any of the spiritual churches (white garment) and stay for sometime and you will see people coming to testify to devil’s works in their lives,” he said. “You may not find such in the new generation churches or the orthodox ones because they do not go into deep spiritism. Well, the case of those who engage in deliverance may be different because they equally experience the devil sometimes speaking out through its victim.”
“When a witch confesses, what do you think speaks within her, It is the evil spirit in her. If you are of God and spiritual enough, the spirit of God can also teach you how to push out evil diseases from someone like he taught me on AIDS, said Pastor Egharevba of one of the Evangelical Fellowships in Benin.
According to him, “The same way God speaks to His children to do good so the devil also speaks to those who open their hearts to him to do evil.”
“When a madman suddenly begins to dance and laugh to no one, isn’t it the spirit in him that issues command? So, there are evidence to prove that the devil can induce someone to misbehave. The Ogbanje, emere, I mean those possessed with water spirits which are ephemeral, where do you think they get their power? Pastor Egharevba asked rhetorically. It is from the devil who God himself created as a fine angel and drove to earth when it misbehaved in heaven.”
"The bible tells us of a riot in heaven but that the lamb at God prevailed. The devil is an evil angel that can use anything to entice you to do bad. Because it is beautiful and not the black way we portray it in pictures with horns, it possesses mostly the beautiful ones and uses them as instruments in its bid to destroy humanity by disallowing them entry into the kingdom of God,” he explained.
“Amongst the disciples of Jesus, was Judas whom the devil enticed with money so as to destroy him. He never used out of the money before committing suicide, that is the way devil works. He will speak to your mind if you open your mind to him and lead you to do evil that will lead you to destruction, at the end you go to everlasting fire. Said Pastor Taiwo of the Christ Trumpeters Church.
“So, if you are not careful, the devil can use what you love most to entice you to destruction,” he said.
By their explanations, the devil is a spirit that is also capable of speaking to the minds of the people the same way the spirit of God does, inducing one to perpetrate or do evil. But what is, however, not clear is the difference between the heart desires which could be evil or good and real actions like that in the garden of Eden induced by a physical devil which appears in form of a serpent.
According to one school of thought, without the eyes seeing, evil thought may not be easily provoked into causing the body to take unholy action.
The question now remains whether we can really attribute the eyes' provocative actions to the works of the devil or not.
To that, one Mrs. Idowu Adeyemi, a Sunday School teacher, explains that "the devil was created perfect and so always aim at those who have no deformity like blindness who he knows will not see the beautiful and the enticing things of the world; the type he showed Christ in the wilderness in a bid to destroy His ministry aimed at delivering the mankind."
“So unless you kill your physical eyes by choosing to see only what God wants you to see which anyway may not be physically beautiful, you may remain susceptible to devil’s manipulations,” she said.
Satan and the church
“In Nigeria today, she continued, we have allowed the devil to triumph." “Today most of the churches are in disarray because the devil has planted love for material things in the minds of the Pastors . Rather than live by Christ's example, they clamour for big cars, big houses, society women making the youths to believe that the church now is the cheapest avenue to make money. So they establish churches for devil to take charge. It causes them to fight over money most times killing themselves, she said.
“You can imagine that devil now leads robbers to churches to share from the material acquisitions that are now major features of most churches, a thing that was unheard of in the past,” she observed.
“You really might be saying that devil in the real sense may not be speaking to those doing evil but what is the root of the evil deeds? You may want to ask. It is indiscriminate quest for satisfaction mostly induced by the nasty environment we now live in. An environment where ladies walk naked to entice men for money is evil infected environment where rape, murder, name it, can take place.
And if the criminals are really sincere to themselves, most of them often come to the reality of what they do only on completion of the dastardly act." "In that wise, who do you want them to attribute such inducement to, it is the devil.”
Mrs. Adeyemi said, "haven’t you seen a woman who after killing her husband angrily grips the body and sobs uncontrollably claiming not to know what came over her?”
Some of the verses that back up the strong belief in the existence of the devil which has its root in the bible are Matthew 4:1. “Then Jesus was led up by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” The statement smarks of a predestined situation. It’s like the devil was placed there to tempt Jesus.
On the other hand, the wilderness being a quiet place could provide a room for streams of thoughts which if not guided could derail a hungry man from his point of focus. Going by the impulse of the statement, devil was not physically present. It was probably there in spirit dropping words into the minds of Christ, a word that contradicted His mission but which He resisted with the resistance spirit now lacking in many people today, the spirit, having been overshadowed by insatiable wants.
Again in Genesis 3:1, the bible presents devil in its physical form represented by a serpent. It states: “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman. Has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden.?
Then the serpent said to the woman, "you will not surely die.”
To that singular convincing voice of the devil the woman responded positively to the detriment of human kind.
That the devil was referred to as serpent gives a different perception about the devil and its form while on the other hand, the statement could also be said to be metaphorical considering the stinging nature of the serpent.
It is also possible for instance that the woman must have ruminated on the instructions of God allowing negative thoughts to stream into her mind since both of them had attributes of God which include ability to think. By her thought drawn by her admiration of the fine fruits, she must have inadvertently invited devil into the garden to lure her into completing the action by eating the forbidden fruit.
The adjective, beauty, attached to the forbidden fruit is essential in knowing some of the ingredients of disobedience to God’s injunctions which most times lead to moral decadence and eventual destruction.
Today, the bane of mankind spiritual development is unhindered craze for material beauty. The quest for it leads to unhealtly competition with the multiplier effects being envy and jealousy which are accessories to crime.
According to a school of thought, criminality is by necessity or choice not induced by any known devil but necessitated by needs
According to the school of thought, where there is growing poverty amid plenty, there is bound to be crime because crime “is almost a normal, if not excusable reactions to grinding poverty, instability and despair that pervaded (the criminals) lives.” It goes to say, therefore, that until we agree and prove that devil is a product of poverty and despair that most people can subscribe to the assertion that every evil act comes from the devil, otherwise, we might just be unfair to the devil in the attribution of our individual guilts
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