Exposing Satan's Playbook The Perry Stone

up was that often a feeling of guilt or condemnation arose in the person smoking, especially if he or she had difficulty breaking the habit. Also, at times it could cause a nonsmoker to be more judgmental toward a smoker, and this attitude of being more righteous than another person was certainly Pharisaical and not from the Holy Spirit. I also noticed that instead of a smoker being in church where he or she could receive help and freedom through the power of the Word, the person often felt so guilty that he or she never attended church for fear of being judged by the congregation as unworthy of God’s blessings. As a teen I heard ministers, when preaching against habits, announce that “God will destroy” the person who defiles his body. It was common medical knowledge that smoking for a long period of time could cause various forms of cancer. Certainly I do not take this verse (1 Cor. 3:16–17) lightly, and I understand that the human body is the dwelling place of God and His Spirit on earth. However, if a person eventually gets a form of cancer from smoking, it was not God who destroyed the temple; it was the chemicals in the smoke that caused the damage. In other words, God is not using a habit to take the life of someone early in their prime. When writing this manuscript, I was meditating on these verses with the emphasis on the phrase, “God will destroy him.” The word destroy is used in the 1611 King James translation thirty-two times, and the particular Greek word used in this passage is different from the other thirty-one times the word destroy is used. The common word for destroy used in