Death By Pride

“And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.” -Romans 16:20

This reassurance to the Corinthian believers is clearly only understood to a King James Bible believer. The promise to “bruise Satan”  echoes back from Genesis 3:15 where it is said of the seed of the woman “it shall bruise thy head.” The prophecy is still future (even at this present time) for the church triumphant will have its victory with Christ at the Second Advent, according to Habakkuk 3:13:

“Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people (the Jews), even for salvation with thine anointed; thou woundest the head out of the house of the wicked, by discovering the foundation unto the neck. Selah.”

The bruising defeat of the devil is yet future, set for after his rise to world domination as pope of all popes (aka father of lies) during the time of Jacob’s trouble: the Great Tribulation. All of this truth is laid ‘in the open’ for easy access in the KJV.

The blanket of intellectual darkness drapes over modern Bible versions  concerning a certain word that tells on the prejudice of contemporary translators. “Bruise” is confused with “crush,” as seen in this sample of a few per-versions:

ESV

“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”

NIV

“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”

NKJV

“And the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.”

CEV

“The God of peace will soon crush Satan[or the Adversary] under your feet.”

The Message

“before you know it the God of peace will come down on Satan with both feet, stomping him into the dirt.”

The King James translators certainly understood the implications of their choice in translation of this passage. What we see substituted here is not only a substandard choice in carrying the original sense, it is actually in opposition to the chosen definition.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘crush’ as: “to squeeze or force by pressure so as to alter or destroy structure”

The same dictionary defines ‘bruise’ as: “to inflict an injury involving rupture of small blood vessels and discoloration without a break in the overlying skin.” Bruising is a type of hematoma or bleeding that does not break through the skin, but rather produces pain with swelling.

When something is bruised, it is the pressure from the internal rupture after a  blunt force trauma that multiplies the damage done. More serious bruising can occur from tissues crushed against a bone. If a major organ is bruised, the swelling can be life-threatening. Wikipedia states: “impacts to the head can cause traumatic brain injury: bleeding, bruising and massive swelling of the brain with the potential to cause concussion, coma and death.”

“Crushing” is implosion, or collapse inward. “Bruising” is explosion, or blowing apart from the inside out.

In the Bible you will find that the most severe repercussions ever dealt upon man are when God gives man the full dose of what he wants. In other words, God judges man by allowing man’s sinful, self-destructive tendencies to take over. The Lord’s judgments are really catalysts to magnify the condemnation sinful living already produces.

Romans 1:28 “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.”

God declares through Jeremiah this same kind of judgement in Jeremiah 6:18-19

“Therefore hear, ye nations,

And know, O congregation, what is among them.

Hear, O earth: 

Behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their own thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it.”

The devil has made it his mission to intellectually undermine the words of God from the beginning. All those who have made their living off of messing with the pureness of God’s words have assisted Satan himself. The devil is a“king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:34).  In his conceit he pronounces: “I will be like the most High.” (Isaiah 14:14) He is not content to let truth alone, he will ever be adding to it, taking from it, twisting it, or changing it to spread spiritual darkness.  He (the devil) changed ‘bruise’ to ‘crush’ to divert you from this insightful lesson:

“A man’s pride shall bring him low:” Proverbs 29:23

So the devil, as many an acclaimed Bible reviser, will meet their untimely end with a swollen cranium: ‘death by swelling.’ The Lord will “bruise thy head” if you think you too can mess with any one of his words.