As the perennials grow and spread, I’m often left with huge clumps to divide. Friends have learned to stay away in spring if they don’t want me trying to give them plants. If anyone so much as shows her face, I’ll probably try to find a way to foist some green and growing thing upon her.
One year early in my garden venture, I found several small rosebushes volunteering for duty in my flower beds. Despite their contrariness, I love roses, and I hadn’t known they would reseed. So these miniature bushes were welcomed. I admired their distinctive rose leaves and wondered what color they would bloom.
“Here’s a little rosebush,” I told a friend one day as we, armed with shovel and pots, walked along paths and searched for plants for her flower beds. “I don’t know what color it will be, but you may have it, if you like.”
Certainly she liked. We dug it out and she hauled it home. Later that year I achieved enough horticultural knowledge to realize two things. One: roses don’t reseed. Two: those rosebush look-alikes had a striking resemblance to an ugly, prickly, and hated multiflora rosebush that was growing to mammoth proportions in another corner of our property.
I have since, I think, lived down the humiliating memory of the day I dug out that counterfeit rose for my friend. I assume she has also forgiven me for so misleading her.
But it reminded me how often Satan counterfeits God’s love and divine plan and promises people many things if only they’ll serve him as the prince of their world. His imitations are passed off as genuine, but Satan comes with the intent to deceive, and by the time we realize that his glittering promises conceal many death snares, we’ve already fallen for his lies.
Studying the Scriptures and keeping our hearts in line with God’s words, as well as heeding the still, small whisper of our conscience, makes us less susceptible to Satan’s counterfeits. We learn that the roses he would like us to believe are genuine will quickly flourish into ugliness that invades our hearts and grows by evil leaps and bounds.
If Satan can’t foist his lies upon us, he has another method of luring us away from God. In C. S. Lewis’s words, “If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?”33
The seeds of Satan’s imitations begin as the tiniest of suggestions, a sibilant whisper today and again tomorrow tempting you with something he assures you doesn’t matter. But the more aware we become of his counterfeits, the easier they are to spot.
Don’t become discouraged when you discover Satan has deceived you. Just turn around and rush back to God as fast as you can. He knows those who are his, and he rescues all those who call on his name. He delivers us out of countless temptations.
“Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Timothy 2:19).
Satan’s cheap imitations soon tarnish and sicken. But God’s genuine love promises to eventually bloom into a fragrant and beautiful rose.
| Prayer | Reflection |
| Show me where I might still be believing some of Satan’s lies, O Lord. Show me where his deceptions might be making inroads in my heart. | Am I listening to any of Satan’s counterfeit promises? How can I tell? |