2 Corinthians 11:3
But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

What was that conversation between Satan and Eve in the Garden of Eden?  He didn’t come along and present some totally new and outrageous idea.  He took the truth that was already there and tweaked it just a little.  He added one extra idea to it.  He got Eve’s thinking to go down just a slightly different track, but that was enough to lead her completely astray from what God had said.  The goal of Satan is to draw us away from the truth, to draw us away from Christ.  So we can’t let him get a foothold in our minds.  We can’t let his whispers of deceit cause us to doubt God’s absolute truth.

Because the truth is, those lies of the devil can sound so reasonable sometimes.  “Ye shall not surely die” sounded reasonable to Eve, just as, “There are many paths to God,” sounds reasonable to the world today, but that is the devil’s lie that is keeping people from trusting Christ alone for salvation.  When Satan works in his subtlety, it’s not going to be a major distortion that we’ll immediately recognize.  It’s not going to be something totally new, but a small change that sounds kind of the same and kind of right and like it could be true.

We can’t let the devil trick us into thinking Jesus isn’t enough.  We can’t let those doubts come in that draw us away from God’s established truth and our established faith in Christ.  God’s way is straightforward—dependent on Christ and His work, built upon His own righteousness, accomplished through His sacrifice, and enabled by His Spirit.  And when we try to overcomplicate it by adding to it, like Satan did when he misled Eve, we end up on the wrong track.  We end up farther from God, not closer to Him.

It is important not to get off track from the truth even a little bit.  Our disobedience is more often not what we would consider big sins or discretions.  The places we get mixed up are often not the major issues of doctrine, but the subtleties.  Where we can get off track is things that differ from the truth ever so slightly, but if we believe that one wrong thing, it can lead us a long way down the wrong path.  The importance of absolute truth is vital to our relationship with God.  And thankfully, He has given that to us in His Word, so may we not blindly accept any spiritual truth that doesn’t come directly from the Word of God, but make sure it aligns with what God has already said.