One of the touristic highlights of visiting China is to walk on the Great Wall. Six thousand kilometers of wall with ten thousand strategically placed towers stretch across the north of China, reportedly the only man-made object observable from space. Construction of various sections began back in 770 B.C. when rival feudal kingdoms built walls around their territories to keep out invading nomadic tribes from the north. These were eventually joined into one wall. The wall averages eight to ten meters in height and five meters wide.
When you walk on the wall, two history lessons make the visit somewhat somber. First, the wall was built at great cost. Prisoners of war, convicts, soldiers, civilians and farmers provided the labor. Some estimates say “millions died for this cause”. Their bodies were buried in the very foundations of the wall or used to make up its thickness. You walk on top of a cemetery.
The second lesson is that the wall was reportedly breached by Mongol soldiers disguised as peasants pretending to be gathering firewood and leaving behind pieces of fruit when they left the area. The guards decided to go out and retrieve the tempting fruit. This was repeated over time. Eventually the guards were compromised and overpowered and the Mongol army streamed through that tower thereby breaching the Great Wall. So after all the effort to build such an amazing structure for protection, it was rendered useless through simple deceit.
One of Satan’s favorite tactics against believers is deceit. Earlier I shared about Brother Chen, a cultic preacher in China who talked about heaven being a city of gold. He said, “Jesus needs your gold to build your mansion in heaven and the more gold you give him now, the bigger your mansion will be.” He left the group to open the gate of heaven for them on a donated motorcycle. He took most of their savings and he hasn’t been back.
In the mid-1990’s, a more insidious persecution threat came to Christians in China in the form of a deceptive cult known as “Eastern Lightning.” Its members try to destroy the church through infiltration, deception, entrapment and even physical violence. Attractive young women are sent out to sexually entice and blackmail male Christian leaders and missionaries. Those who cannot be attracted by deceit are kidnapped and even mutilated.
Tony Lambert recounts in his book, China’s Christian Millions, how a charismatic preacher in rural Henan province convinced gullible peasants to sell everything they had and wait all evening for Jesus to appear out of a local river. When the peasants waded into the river, they were all swept away and drowned. Satan’s deceit can be as deadly as physical violence.