Then they may come to their senses and escape the Devil's trap, having been captured by him to do his will.
2 Timothy, Chapter 2, verses 25 and 26
Gwen, mother of the runaway bride, believes that the "devil's trap" was the engagement. She told me that her daughter, KatieLyn, had not been thinking straight for six months—basically the entire time that she she knew Joe. Here is the precise quote:
"Her mind is not tangled with lies, fears, or the devil. For the first time in six months, she is seeing and thinking clearly."Obviously, I do not concur. I would say that (back at that point in time) for first time in six months, KatieLyn cast aside her faith in God's plan for her life in order to have peace with her mother.
Either that, or KatieLyn deliberately lied to me, which truly seemed to be against her nature. It is a grave sin to destroy someone else's confidence in the Lord; and I believe that is what Gwen did to her own daughter. (To me, it looks like Gwen thought it was unnatural for this sensible daughter to be in love, so she thought KatieLyn must have been smitten-crazy and not in her right mind.) That, however, is a topic for a future post. Today we are looking at this passage from Second Timothy Two.
The Greek word used for "come to their senses," and translated "as "recover themselves" in the King James, literally means "to recover from drunkenness" or "to awake."
To me, it seems that KatieLyn was deprived of her own will and made subservient to the will of another, the devil. The sticky part, the elephant in the room so to speak, which is not acknowledged is that the devil used the person KatieLyn was closest to, her mom, to destroy KatieLyn's trust in the Lord. So from my point of view, she was metaphorically drunk and fell into the devil's trap when she ran off in the middle of the night; she has yet to awake and come to her senses.
If God had told KatieLyn to break off the marriage, then He'd have told her to do it in the broad daylight of his grace, and those who were also seeking the Lord would have been able to see that was, indeed, His will. That is one of several reasons that I believe KatieLyn was in the devil's trap when she broke off the engagement, and not as Gwen claims, when she accepted the proposal.
In this passage, the Apostle Paul was writing to Timothy about his hope that God would grant repentance. The people he was writing about had fallen into Satan's trap and were not thinking soberly; their actions were not truly of their own, but were done "under the influence."
(Another one of many reasons that I believe KatieLyn was in the devil's trap when she broke off the engagement is that the devil can apply more intense pressure upon a bride in the days before the wedding than he could when the question was first popped.) The devil uses pressure and coercion. The Holy Spirit does not.
A theological debate is set up with one side saying that sometimes it is God's pleasure, as in the Book of Job, to have people caught in the devil's trap. Someone who took this approach would say that it was God's will for us to all be tricked, that we never really heard the Lord's will for this marriage, or that if we did, then we didn't interpret it correctly and it wasn't what we thought. I do not take this view. Things changed after Jesus' resurrection. God equipped the Church to be able to see the schemes of the devil and to stand against them. Things changed after Jesus' resurrection. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit so that believers can hear the Word without having to go find a prophet to seek God for them.
The other side of the debate, and the one that matches other New Testament teaching, is that "His will" refers to the repentance, escape, and recovery; not "His will" that believers were captured! Using this interpretation, God's will is that a person repents of his error, which allows him to escape out of the live-trapping of the devil, that so he might do the return to the will of God, which is the Lord's sovereign good pleasure.
The first view leaves us with a cruel God who is just fine with having his children tricked in order to teach them something. The second view holds that the Lord has equipped us to deal with trickery and expects us to (a) stand against the devil and (b) be merciful and help those who do get trapped to recover.
The Jamieson Faussett Brown Commentary (1882) makes a note that, "There are here two evils, the snare and sleep, from which they are delivered; and two goods to which they are translated, awaking and deliverance." The snare and sleep are the spiritual intoxication of a loss of faith; the awaking and deliverance are the recovery to spiritual sobriety.
Now, here is another reason that Gwen is wrong in her interpretation: You cannot run away and leave someone else with your hangover.
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