Temptation & Forgiveness

“And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
---Matthew 6:13-15

Christ teaches us to forgive our neighbors and our brethren that trespass against us. Trespasses typically occur out of ignorance or naivete. We are taught to correct those who violate our boundaries, and we are taught to forgive the trespass if the behavior is corrected.
 
Christ also teaches us to love one another and hate evil. That said, there can be no forgiveness for those who repeatedly violate our boundaries. These people are evil doers. Even if they deny it, recidivists know exactly what they do.
 
For evil doers, there is an old saying that rings true: “Give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile.” Another old saying also rings true: “The first time a wrongdoing occurs, shame on you. The second time, shame on me.”
 
Tolerating evil is a sin unto itself. Evil metastasizes if left unchecked. What’s to say a person who violates your boundaries will not go on to violate another’s if they are not called out? Worse still, they could go on to perpetrate far greater acts of evil.
 
Christ spoke in parables, and He once remarked that if a person should strike you, you should “turn the other cheek.” This was not about tolerance, but rather about passive resistance. He was addressing a crowd that included Roman slaves, and Roman law at the time mandated that if a slave was to be freed if his or her master flogged the slave twice.
 
The Old and New Testaments are steeped with scriptural answers for combating evil. Christ himself demonstrated this when He was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness. There, He was confronted by both Satan and Lucifer and rebuked them repeatedly with scripture:
 
“The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of Christ, tell these stones to become bread.’ Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’
 
Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down. For it is written:
 
‘He will command his angels concerning you,
    and they will lift you up in their hands,
    so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’
Jesus answered him, ‘It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matthew 4:3-7)
 
Every day we are gifted with the opportunity to share the gospel with believers and unbelievers alike. We are also gifted with the opportunity to move in the face of evil. We can shun idolatry and wrongdoing in all its forms and shine light on those who perpetrate evil before evil metastasizes even further. Today this is far more challenging than it seems.
 
Christ warned that His followers would be hated and persecuted by those born of the flesh. Modern society has reached unparalleled heights in technology, and we live in a hyperconnected world. Temptation is everywhere and global elites allow cancers to thrive. It’s little wonder that drug use, pornography, violence, and human trafficking are epidemic.
 
Sons of Israel and second sons of Israel should take heart. Christ sounded the Clarion Call on Thanksgiving Day of 2018. He gave an audible signal to His faithful and His true that the Book of Life had closed and that His return is imminent. In a very real sense Gabriel blew His horn.
 
That signal was picked up by astronomers’ deep-space sonar stations around the world a little more than a month later. The signal defied physics and baffled the world’s top scientists and astronomers. Reports of that signal were largely, and deliberately, ignored by the media. Power brokers and sycophants that long ago abandoned Christ’s commands buried the story so as not to alarm the public.
 
It is paramount that we shun temptation and combat evil like ever before. Global elites plan for a third global war and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have mounted up. Caving to evil and surrendering to demons means sure death.

“I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and the one who sat on it had the name Death, and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, and famine, and [b]plague, and by the wild animals of the earth.”
---Revelations 6:8


CHRIST TRANSLATES FROM BEAST TO YEAST.
​CHRIST RETURNITH.

Author: Erik Gagnon - Managing Partner, Chi Rho Consulting