God’s warning through Paul the apostle is clear about the matter. The endtime generation will experience a great increase in false doctrines that seduce the people of that era.

“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth” (1 Tim. 4:1-3).

We remember the book, The Da Vinci Code. Of course, the blasphemous blockbuster novel was purported to be no more than fiction. Fiction, however, can provide venues for the devil to get across to the totally gullible generations alive today the not-so-subtle proposal that Jesus was a charlatan. And people today definitely have “itching ears” wanting to be scratched by the deceivers and lust for fables rather than for God’s truth (read 2 Thes. 4:1-3). The Da Vinci Code certainly filled the bill, according to sales and public clamor wrought by the attention it received.

Satan didn’t confine his assault to one frontal attack, in the case of The Da Vinci Code, but to two. The first attack was presented as fiction, with the underlying Luciferian question: “Yea, hath God said?” The second was also fiction, but presented as fact: an alternative history of things involving Jesus Christ. The second of the two-pronged assault brings to mind the old Indian saying, “you speak with forked tongue,” does it not? That is the satanic attack we will look into a bit further.

As example of the Luciferian method of assault, “The Gospel of Judas,” was an attack on the veracity of the Bible and upon the Lord Jesus Christ that I want us to look at in this limited space. The seducing spirits have used this false gospel to have a field day inflicting hellish havoc upon non-Christians and Christians alike. Tragically, the weakness and apathy within Christian seminaries, pulpits, and pews make the Christians mentioned susceptible to the lies wrapped up in “The Gospel of Judas.”

Rather than going into the historical archaeological find surrounding this artifact, let’s look at its spiritual roots. The false belief comes from the Gnostic religious form that sprang up shortly after Christ’s ascension. Gnosticism is the belief that salvation comes through gnosis, the Greek word meaning “knowledge.” Gnosticism puts forth that one must be an insider of the secrets of the universe in order to be saved. The Jesus of the Bible is very different from the Jesus of the Gnostic’s. In the Gnostic view, Jesus did not come in the flesh to die on the cross in order to make atonement for the sins of the world. He, according to this false gospel, came to reveal the secrets concerning higher knowledge about the existence of the unknown God. Gnosticism puts forth that each and every person has a divine spark of this God in them.

Herein lies the power of seducing spirits –the minions of Satan, who once whispered to Eve, “…ye shall be as god…” The fallen human being finds this to be quite soothing to “itching ears.” This means people can each–as their own god– “do what is right in their own eyes.” Lucifer told Adam and Eve that they would be like God, or know as much as God knows. This is to the fallen human being what Dr. Henry Kissinger said great political power is to those who wield it: “the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Gnosticism is a philosophical religion emphasizing redemption through knowledge.

As my good friend Dr. Larry Spargimino said: “In ‘The Gospel of Judas,’ Jesus sounds more like a New Age guru than a Galilean fisherman.” The Gnostic version of Jesus says the same thing Lucifer told Adam and Eve –that the power of knowledge is salvation, because it establishes the human being as worthy of salvation and godhood.

Judas, in this blasphemous gospel, is identified as the thirteenth spirit, who was appointed by God to be the agent of releasing Jesus from His physical body, in which He was trapped since the incarnation.

Dr. Spargimino says about this Hell-sent gospel: “Gnosticism has some very aberrant beliefs about God. In Gnostic thought there is a dualism. There is a good God and a bad God. And they are in a continual struggle against each other. In some forms of Gnosticism, the bad God is equated with the God of the Old Testament. One of the allegedly evil things that He did was to create the world” (Dr. Larry Spargimino, Southwest Radio Church Ministries).

This equating God’s creating the world to evil is based upon the Gnostic proposition that the world and all material things are evil, i.e., God is blamed for the sinfulness of man. From whom should we suspect such upside-down thinking comes?

Again, as well outlined in the Scripture given above (1 Tim. 4:1-3), this is a departure from the faith, and is giving heed to seducing spirits!

“The Gospel of Judas” glorifies Judas, not Jesus. One professor of religion–who is in no way a proponent of fundamentalist-evangelical thought—pointed to the devil in the details of “The Gospel of Judas.” “The idea of this gospel is that Jesus, like all of us, is a trapped spirit, who is trapped in a material body. Salvation comes when we escape the materiality of our existence. And, Judas is the one who makes it possible for Jesus to escape, by allowing for his body to be killed” (Bart Ehrman, religion professor, University of North Carolina, quoted by Larry Spargimino, Southwest Radio Ministries).

Again, I ask the question, from whom should we suspect such upside-down thinking to come? We are living at a time when people will not endure sound doctrine, but give heed to all sorts of feel-good, do-good doctrines that do not have the true Gospel at their core– another sure signal of where this generation stands upon God’s prophetic timeline.