The flesh will get religious.
The flesh will do anything to keep us from God’s ultimate blessing. Our fleshly nature doesn’t want us standing in God’s presence listening to His voice and yielding in obedience to His Spirit so God can say His words and do His acts through us. In God’s presence, the fleshly nature gradually fades away if we yield to God’s Spirit in willing obedience.
The flesh will get religious. The fleshly reasoning will put the Bible in God’s place so we worship and revere the Bible rather than knowing Christ. It will twist Scripture that says we should listen to God’s word (meaning God speaking to us) and interpret it to say “Read your Bible and try to understand the Bible on your own without the miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit. It will take yesterday’s partial revelation, build a wall of protection around it, and fill in the blanks with many assumptions. It will direct us into a certain formula and convince us that the formula will bring us into the Kingdom. It will direct us to avoid all sorts of specific things, some of which are good to avoid. It will show us 6, or 8, or 10 laws to follow rather than walking in the Spirit. It will take a true prophecy and turn it into a law or principle. The thing it doesn’t want is our personal, moment-by-moment relationship with Christ. It doesn’t want God leading us. It doesn’t want us following God because that is a walk from glory to glory that destroys that rebellious fleshly nature and completes the work of forming Christ in us. It knows that self-righteousness is spiritually worthless, but the Holy Spirit will lead us into true righteousness and holiness.
“For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns—broken cisterns that cannot hold water. Jeremiah 2:13