The book of Daniel reveals the ongoing battle between Christ and Satan, between holy angels and fallen angels (ch. 10), between worship of the Creator and idols, between love and fear, between pride and humility, and between God’s use of symbols to reveal truth and Satan’s “reimagining” and reinterpreting of those symbols to obscure truth.

Daniel 2 describes Nebuchadnezzar being blessed by a prophetic dream from God. But the king could not remember it, so he ordered the court’s wise men to tell him the dream and its interpretation under penalty of death. Daniel prayed to God, who revealed the dream of a multi-metal man with a head of gold, breast of silver, belly of brass, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay, and a rock cut without human hands; the rock strikes the image on the feet, destroying it and rising up to become a mountain.

Daniel then interpreted the dream as the rise and fall of kingdoms throughout history until God sets up His eternal kingdom. Daniel ends the revelation by saying, “‘The great God has shown the king what will take place in the future. The dream is true and the interpretation is trustworthy.’ Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell prostrate before Daniel and paid him honor and ordered that an offering and incense be presented to him. The king said to Daniel, ‘Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery’” (Daniel 2:45-47 NIV84, emphasis mine).

God had sent a message of truth to the king, who acknowledged it as being true. However, over time, the king forgot the message. If its truth had been remembered and followed, it would have led the king, and thereby his nation, toward worshiping God.

Instead, Satan used the opportunity to counter the revelation from God. He did not attack God’s message by outright denial or rejection of the divine dream, but instead by reinterpretation of the symbols within it. By reimagining and recasting the multi-metal statue as a solid gold statue, he appealed to the fear-driven, self-centered heart of Nebuchadnezzar—to his pride, arrogance, and self-exaltation—rather than humble surrender to God and His revelation of truth. And Nebuchadnezzar’s pride responded to the reinterpretation, despite having already acknowledged the truth of what God had revealed, and he ordered the construction of the golden idol and its worship.

With this act, the imagery, symbol, given by God to teach the truth of our Creator God was twisted to deceive, mislead, and turn hearts to self, to self-advancement, self-protection, and self-glorification, closing the heart and mind to God. After taking God’s symbol and reimagining it in a false light, Satan employed another of his methods—he inspired the advancement of his fraud through law. He inspired the Babylonians to make worship of the image legal; it was advanced through law and law enforcement!

Truth stands on its own; lies collapse under investigation. Thus, the false, the twisted, the reimagined will always resort to law, law enforcement, violence, coercion, and threat.

A Pattern of Behavior

This same method has been repeated over and again through history: God reveals truth, often through various symbols, metaphors, and parables, but also by real actions in human history—and Satan reimagines and reinterprets them in ways that appeal to the fear-driven, self-centered heart, and unconverted people eagerly embrace the reimagined symbol and then promote both the false reimagined message along with the false methods of God’s enemy: a lie enforced through law.

For example, God gave the symbolic system of sacrifices to the patriarchs, starting with Adam and Eve, but Cain chose to reimagine and reinterpret the sacrifice to be the fruit of his labor. Cain was not under some imperial law though which some inflicted punishment was meted out against him by God. God is Creator; His laws are the laws of reality, of life, and participating with God results in ever-growing love and trust, but rejecting Him results in ever-growing fear and selfishness, which leads the fearful to use violence to destroy those who disagree—and Cain kills Abel.

We see the same thing in the history of the Israelites. God gave them a theatrical system of ceremonies and festivals that was designed to teach them of His love, of the reality of the coming Savior who would “take away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) so that sinners could, through restored trust, be cleansed from sin and brought back into unity, at-one-ment, with God.

But Satan led the people to reimagine and reinterpret this beautiful symbolism to be a system of legal payments to an angry, authoritarian, rule-enforcing god who demanded the blood of an innocent be brought to him to pay him for their sins and appease his wrath, lest he lash out and destroy them. This fraudulent reimagining is based upon the lie that God’s laws function like human laws—Satan’s method and form of seeking control through punishment, which appeals to the carnal human heart.

But Jesus made it explicitly clear that His sacrifice was not made to be offered, presented, or applied to His Father or to some legal system in heaven, but that it is the gift of God to us, to be received by us and, in humble thankfulness, applied within us. Jesus said,

I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (John 6:53–56 NIV84, emphasis mine).

This means that Jesus’ sacrifice is God’s gift to human sinners and must be received and applied inside of us in order for us to be saved, healed, renewed, reborn, recreated, and restored to oneness with God! Jesus is the Word made flesh (John 1). We must partake of the Word of God, the truth, which destroys lies and wins us back to trust, and then, in trust, open our hearts and receive a new life, the life of Christ, which is symbolized by the blood of Christ (the life is in the blood, Leviticus 17:11). Then, as the apostle Paul wrote, we are reborn, and it is no longer our fear-driven, self-centered corrupt spirits animating and motiving us to action, but the Spirit of Christ who lives in us (Galatians 2:20).

But Satan’s reinterpretation of the symbolic animal sacrifices as a legal payment to a punishing god to pay for sins so that god won’t kill sinners became the dominant view—first through various pagan counterfeits, Baal worship, the various mystery religions, which was accepted by the Jews, who rejected Christ’s own explanations of what it all meant, leading them to use imperial law, imposed law, and law enforcement to punish Jesus and all His followers. Saul of Tarsus also used the imposed-law system with the temple guards to continue promoting the falsehood, the reinterpreted meaning of the sacrifices, through inflicted punishments—until his conversion.

We see the same dynamic regarding the Sabbath—a gift from God that was made for humanity and built into reality, into time, by God as proof, evidence, of the freedom we have in God’s kingdom. But the Sabbath was also reimagined and reinterpreted as a made-up rule enforced through inflicted punishments. And when Jesus came and freely healed on the Sabbath, demonstrating through action that God wants to set people free from sin, sickness, disease, and everything else that destroys, those who reinterpreted the Sabbath as a legal test, a rule enforced through punishment, accused Jesus of being a lawbreaker who deserved to be killed—which they eventually made happen.

Satan’s Reimagined Salvation

But Satan’s most diabolical twist of God’s revealed truth is his evil reimagined and reinterpreted view of the sacrifice of Christ, the cross of Christ. (For a deep dive into why Christ had to die for our salvation and what He actually accomplished, see our magazine, Salvation and You: What It Really Means to Be Saved).

The truth revealed through all Scripture is that sin changed Adam and Eve, not God; that believing lies about God caused Adam and Eve to be infected with distrust of Him; that their own fear and selfishness caused them to run from God, trying to hide from God, to cut themselves off from God, who is the source of life. The Bible is clear: God has been running after humanity ever since in order to save and heal us. He is for us (Romans 8:31); God so loved the world He gave His only Son (John 3:16); Jesus and the Father are One, and if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father (John 10:30; John 14:9); and the baby born in Bethlehem is Almighty God, Everlasting Father (Isaiah 9:6).

The truth of Scripture is that humanity was changed by sin, not God. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Hebrews 13:8)—therefore, God does not need anything done to Him to save us. But humanity is dead in trespass and sin (Ephesians 2:1; Colossians 2:13); we have a terminal sin condition that, without remedy from God, results in death (Romans 6:23; James 1:15; Galatians 6:8). Thus, God sent Christ to eliminate the cause of death (sin), “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and restore humanity to sinless perfection.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the only means whereby God could purge the death-causing spirit of fear and selfishness from humanity and restore a sinless spirit of love and trust into humanity—and, thereby, save the species He created in Eden. Thus, just as Jesus described in John 6:53–55, He sacrificed Himself and freely offers Himself to you and me, not to His Father! We must partake of His flesh, the Word of truth, because we are the ones who don’t trust God, who have minds infected with lies, and, therefore, need to have the truth set us free. The Father doesn’t need truth presented to Him! And we are the ones with a terminal sinful life, a spirit of fear and selfishness inherited from Adam (Psalm 51:5), and we are the ones who need the blood of Jesus, a new sinless life to replace the corrupt life. The Father does not need a new sinless life.

Paul emphasizes this in Romans as the reason Christ had to die:

But now God’s way of putting people right with himself has been revealed. It has nothing to do with law, even though the Law of Moses and the prophets gave their witness to it. God puts people right through their faith in Jesus Christ. God does this to all who believe in Christ, because there is no difference at all: everyone has sinned and is far away from God’s saving presence. But by the free gift of God’s grace all are put right with him through Christ Jesus, who sets them free. God offered him, so that by his blood he should become the means by which people’s sins are forgiven through their faith in him. God did this in order to demonstrate that he is righteous. In the past he was patient and overlooked people’s sins; but in the present time he deals with their sins, in order to demonstrate his righteousness. In this way God shows that he himself is righteous and that he puts right everyone who believes in Jesus (Romans 3:21–26 GNT, emphasis mine).

Notice the emphasis: God’s means of setting people right, of saving them from sin, is to reveal the truth about Himself, that He is righteous—why? Because lies about God are what caused Adam and Eve to distrust God, and the only way to restore trust is by the truth—and that truth is the truth that God is righteous. Thus, we sinners must first partake of the flesh, the Word—the truth and be won to trust. And then when trust is restored, we open our hearts and receive the indwelling Spirit, who brings us the life of Christ, and we are reborn with His sinless Spirit. This is reality, a reality-based change in the actual operations of the human being through the victory of Christ being experienced within when we are restored to trust through the truth and love of God as revealed in Christ.

But Satan has reimagined and reinterpreted the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ from God’s gift to us, to restore us to trust and recreate us in perfect righteousness, to instead being a legal payment of an innocent human sacrifice that is paid to the Father to keep Him from killing us. Satan’s reimagined view of the cross teaches a god who is unsafe, untrustworthy, a being who is the source of pain, suffering, and death, one who uses his power to inflict punishment for wrongdoing and who must be appeased by a blood sacrifice to restrain and propitiate his wrath. And this reimagined, twisted perversion appeals to the carnal heart; it is the “righteousness” of the wicked, selfish spirit that demands vengeance, demands punishment, that feels incensed and outraged when it is devalued.

And billions have been indoctrinated into this twisted penal/legal system that teaches theologies that function to hide and protect the sinner from God, rather than reveal and connect them to Him. Such beautiful symbols like the robe of Christ’s righteousness that we possess when we are reborn and Christ lives in us are reimagined to fraudulently teach that our corrupt and unchanged hearts are covered over by the robe, so that the Father in the judgment can’t see how corrupt we actually are and, because we claimed the legal payment of Jesus, He will declare us to be righteous, even though we are not.

And then, just like Nebuchadnezzar used the death penalty to force worship of the golden idol, just like the Jews killed Christ, stoned Stephen, and persecuted the apostles for rejecting their penal/legal theology, so too the history of Christianity is filled with so-called Christians who, having embraced the reimagined legal view of the cross, burned people at the stake, went on Crusades, carried out the Inquisition, conducted witch trials, and burned crosses in the yards of people of another race—all the while telling themselves they are just and right, for they are doing exactly like the god they worship.

So sinister, diabolical, corrupt, and destructive! This reimagined view of the cross is all based upon the lie that God’s law functions like human law and, therefore, God is required by law to use His power to kill sinners.

It is time for God’s people to reject the lie, to return to the truth, and to again worship God as Creator, the One who is love and whose laws are the design laws of life built into the operations of reality. He is the One who never changes and who, when Adam corrupted himself, loved us so much that He sent Jesus to purge sin and restore in humanity His sinless life. Embrace the truth, open your hearts in love, partake of the Word (flesh), receive the Blood (life) of Christ, and be fully restored to image of Christ, for “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV84, emphasis mine).