Isaiah 33:1
"1 Woe to you who plunder, though you [have] not [been] plundered; And you who deal treacherously, though they have not dealt treacherously with you! When you cease plundering, You will be plundered; When you make an end of dealing treacherously, They will deal treacherously with you."
These verses indicate a very interesting law in the Bible. The law is that if you steal from or deal with people immorally when you have not been treated that way and then you finally cease that behavior, you will be stolen from and you will be treated immorally.
I personally have experienced this law in my own life. When I was younger I was extremely disrespectful and if I could get away with something then I would. When I began to truly serve God and stopped that wrongdoing, I received hell on earth. When I sought Christian counsel regarding the situation, I was told that I was under attack because of the abundance of revelation that was given to me. Essentially they were saying, “New level, new devil.” I remember hearing that and an alarm sounding in my heart. That alarm sounded like a question being posed over and over in my heart. Was God so weak that He could and would only protect me from the wicked one up to a certain point or was it that God was allowing all of this sorrow in order to ‘grow me up’?
Although I did not answer the question immediately, God, in His faithful loving kindness highlighted the above verse to me in order that I might understand clearly what was happening. I was under the twisted mindset of the abuser.
You see, God is a good God and the devil is a bad devil so when you are behaving the way the devil wants you to behave you will have the opportunity to reap benefits from immoral actions. Basically you are being rewarded by the devil for being a loyal member of his cause. However, when you decide to actually follow the Lord with your actions, then the devil begins to turn up the heat. The wicked one wants you to come back to his camp, so he makes it hard on you not to. This is typical of an abuser. They make you believe that you “deserve” to go through the hell that they put you through so that you will "behave" and then they change the acceptable behavior. Our study verse indicates that you have treated people treacherously through no-fault of their own and thus it is implied that you did not “learn” to deal this way with them. This in and of itself is conclusive evidence that you are being taught by another source. Since the actions that you are taking are not godly, it is correctly established that the other source for your actions is the wicked one.
In conclusion, it is profound to understand that the devil will influence you to misbehave and then when you heed the voice of the living God because of the accuser, then he {the accuser} will bring all manner of destruction upon you. But God is good and has given us enough grace to command the attack of the enemy to stop- no matter the cause.
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