HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 16, 2025 – Eve didn’t know that the devil was lying when he told her that eating from the forbidden tree would be good for her. Eve didn’t know the devil was lying because no-one had ever lied to her before. She’d never experienced deception. She took what the devil told her at face value because she had no reason not to take it at face value. Lies and malicious intent were not yet part of her life experience. And because they weren’t yet part of her life experience, she wasn’t hardened to them. She had no battle scars. She had no personal repository of lie-related hard-learned lessons to draw from.

And so, in her naivete, she ate the forbidden fruit, and finding it tasted good, she went running to Adam and repeated the devil’s lies and he ate the forbidden fruit.

And their world came crashing down.

As born-again believers, we have no excuse for not being aware that someone might be lying to us. We have ample life experience, and even more crucially we have discernment through God’s Holy Spirit and his written Word. While having these resources doesn’t mean we won’t be lied to (we will), it does mean we’ll be better able to know when we’re being lied to.

Like Eve, people sometimes lie without knowing they’re lying, because they too have been deceived. The world and the worldly church are full of such people (both the deceived and the deceivers; the sheep and the wolves), and so we need to be careful when interacting with them. We not only need to bring the repository of our hard-learned life lessons to all our interactions, we also—and more importantly—need to run everything past God and compare it against his Word, even when what we’re being told is allegedly from God. Not to do our due diligence in this regard would be a profound failing on our part.

I thank God I’ve been lied to, and lied to copiously and mercilessly, throughout my life. I thank God, because I’ve learned from these hard lessons not to take people and what they say at face value. When scripture warns that Satan can appear as an angel of light, we need to take this warning to heart. Jesus calls Satan the Father of Lies because lying is Satan’s nature: It’s who and what he is. Satan cannot not lie (except when he’s in God’s presence), as truth is entirely absent from his being. And if he does on occasion slip a fact or two into his lies, he does it only to bolster his deceit.

We’re constantly being bombarded by lies from the devil and his followers, most of whom don’t even know they’re followers of the devil (or that they’re repeating his lies). Many of the lies concern God and Jesus, especially Jesus’ return to Earth in bodily form. If it sometimes appears as if the lies are a coordinated effort, it’s because they are a coordinated effort. It goes something like this: Satan gets permission from God to release another zinger, he relays the lie to his followers, and his followers launch the lie campaign.

One of the most prominent lie campaigns in the worldly church is “Jesus is coming back soon”. It’s been making the rounds now for nearly 2000 years, waxing and waning according to the “signs of the times”. The direr the times and the more glaring the signs, the more widespread and hysterical the campaign. We’re in the midst of another blitz now, only this time the devil has upped his game by preying on children or better said weaponizing children to deliver his message. Most children are very much like Eve in the Garden of Eden in that they don’t know when they’re being lied to. Certainly, children can learn to lie at an early age, but they’re unlikely to recognize they’re being lied to when the lie comes from an adult or an adult-like figure.

Enter the adult-like figures of the devil and his demons. Shimmering like angels of light, these deceivers come to children in their dreams and in visions, whispering beautiful lies. The children relay what they saw and heard to their parents, who then proudly repeat the dreams and visions to others, usually by recording what the children have said or what the children claim to have seen and heard. The devil’s followers pick up the recordings and spread them far and wide. And yet, through all this, no-one appears to question the source of the revelations. No-one appears to suspect that what the children saw and heard might not be coming from God.

Which is why we born-again believers need to ask the hard questions and apply our experience and God-given discernment without discrimination. This may earn us the ire of the proud parents and make us targets of the deceivers, but we still need to do it. I don’t mean we should confront the people pushing what may in fact be lies (nothing can be gained by confronting them); I just mean we need to discern for our own purposes and not contribute to the devil’s campaign.

As born-again believers, we can’t take at face value what children claim to have seen and heard. They’re like pre-fallen Eve in their spiritual gullibility, and we need to recognize that. I find it interesting that the promoters of the children’s dreams and visions invariably quote the scripture about God pouring out his spirit in the end times so that “your sons and daughters shall prophesy”, as if to imply that questioning what the children saw is the same as questioning God’s Word.

I’m not questioning God’s Word here (I would never question God’s Word); I’m questioning whether the latest phenomenon of children having dreams and visions of Jesus coming back soon is a fulfillment of prophecy or a lie of the devil. We need to question the spirits, meaning we need to question whether they’re from God or not. We need always to question the spirits, even in our own dreams and visions. Not to do so would not be doing our due diligence as followers of Jesus, making us as vulnerable to the devil’s lies as Eve.