Gal 1:8 But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!

If your experience is at all like mine, and I am sure that it is when it comes to recognizing evil men or women, then your “awakening” to such evil was rather a long time in coming. Mine took over 20 years and even then I needed to see more clearly yet.

Evil, as God’s Word tells us, is shockingly deceptive. The beginning and fall of the human race began with the master deceiver luring Adam and Eve into sin. And that old serpent is still working today, sending his agents in among us disguised as “sons of righteousness” (2 Cor 11). In the opening chapter of Galatians, the Apostle Paul warned the gullible church there that we must always evaluate a person by their fruits, in that case, by what message they were preaching, supposedly in Christ’s name.

An angel! Satan can appear just like that – an angel of light. And if we go by appearances only, we are going to be in trouble. Paul tells us here that it is not by appearances that we must judge, but by the doctrine. Appearances really are deceiving and therefore it is all the more necessary for us to make our evaluations with a much more objective measure. The words preached, the doctrines proposed – how do they measure up to the plain standard of God’s Word? That is the issue.

So when it comes to recognizing evil people who so often disguise themselves as fine saints and creep in among us in the church, we must not base our judgments on appearances. And by “appearance” I mean the outward persona that these people present. In the case of a RASN (reviler, abuser, sociopath, narcissist) that outward persona is a mask designed to hide the evil beneath.

More objective is the “fruit” of a person. This is really different than what we mean by “appearance.” Fruit is the hard, objective observations we can make about the person’s behavior, about their words, even about the tone of their words. This kind of data is often very subtle. A brief second in which the mask slips. Our tendency is to ignore these things, suppress that unsettled feeling which they elicit in us, and to return to the appearance. So we don’t see the rotten, dead men’s bones inside the whitewashed tomb walls.

Typically then, we do not awaken to the evil in the RASN very quickly. Paul admonished the Galatians:

Gal 3:1 You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?

See it? Bewitched. Satan the great liar and deceiver, the master mask-wearer, enables his servants to cast a kind of blinding spell over others. The Holy Spirit in us sooner or later opens our eyes to this dark enchantment, but sometimes (if not often) the light doesn’t break through to us for a long time.

After we have been awakened to this evil, we can be pretty hard on ourselves. “How could I have been so stupid, so blind?” “And if that wasn’t so bad, I turned around and got duped again!” And some of this fault does lie with us. We can be careless and fail to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not upon your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths.” Leaning on our own understanding of things, we get duped. And we suffer for it. At the same time however, we do face a deceptive enemy. Evil is dark and deceiving. And usually it takes a long time for us to see it.