Eye on the Sky

Then Nahash the Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh-gilead, and all the men of Jabesh said to Nahash, “Make a treaty with us, and we will serve you.”  But Nahash the Ammonite said to them, “On this condition I will make a treaty with you, that I gouge out all your right eyes, and thus bring disgrace on all Israel.” – 1 Samuel 11:1-2

The right eye represents wisdom whereas the left eye speaks of knowledge.  Jesus talks about having an eye that is “single”, clear in its vision and balanced.  Spiritually speaking, a lot of us have a much better left eye than right eye.  We acquire a lot of knowledge.  People think we are smart.  We even think we are smart.  Yet our eye for wisdom is short-sighted.

The world and the devil are not enemies of knowledge.  The natural order is not threatened by information or even by cunning and cleverness.  We are told, though, that the fear of (i.e., respect for) the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  Godly wisdom will mess up our relationship with the world system.  We may end up seeming foolish, since the wisdom of God is foolishness to man.  Our thinking and behavior will not always line up with the logic of the Flatlanders because we are operating in additional dimensions. 

Nahash typifies the devil in desiring to blind us to those divine, vertical realities.  He states his case plainly and reveals the enemy’s plot throughout the ages:  to enslave humanity to the material and deny us access to divine revelation, wisdom and understanding. 

All the “Left Behind” scenarios and typical evangelical thinking and descriptions of the beast and the mark of the beast and the antichrist always rang a little hollow to me.  If you want to see the beast at work, turn on your television.  The news is mostly partisan propaganda.  Commercials play with our lusts, our fears, and our appetites to control our habits.  Some of the programs numb our minds and anesthetize our thinking allowing still others to perform the surgery necessary to render us blind to truth.  

The beast is not in retirement.  The antichrist is not in hiding, waiting for some snatching away of the righteous that he might be revealed.  The enemy adapts new methods but never a new end.  The history of the one-eyed is a bloody history.  Those who could see only with the eye of knowledge have dug mass graves and slaughtered their fellow men by the millions in the last century alone.  We do not need to fear them, but we cannot trust them or submit to them.  We need both eyes.  Open.

Selling the Lie

For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. – Genesis 3:5 (ESV)

I suppose something Gagdad said the last few days got me on this track. Though I may have mentioned it in passing before, I don’t know that I’ve told the whole story. I was thinking about it while riding the tractor last evening. It is a cautionary tale.

We had this friend named David who called us one Saturday and invited us to his house the next morning for a sort of Bible study. We had met him, his wife, and their son at a church near where they lived. We had since moved across the Metroplex, so it was a good, long drive from our house north of Dallas to beyond the southwest corner of Fort Worth. David was pretty adamant, though, that he wanted us to meet a man who had become, as he said on the phone, “a spiritual father” to them. We arrived the next morning at the appointed hour and took our seats in the very small living room of their house. In a few minutes, two men entered. One was average size. The other man was above average height and extremely obese, but quite well-groomed and well-dressed in upscale casual clothes that managed to fit him despite his enormous girth. The men sat down opposite my wife and I.

With no prayer or preliminaries, the fat man began to speak. He was articulate. There was an air of intelligence about him, but nothing he said was very deep or penetrating. Within a couple of minutes I realized what he was saying and what he probably was. Glancing at my wife I saw that she was puzzled and confused. She had not been able to follow the fat man’s rhetoric.

Honestly, if the man had come up to me on the street with such ridiculous banter I would have laughed in his face or called the cops to pick him up before he got himself in trouble. But I wasn’t on the street. I was an invited guest in the home of a good friend who was buying into the fat man’s story. Somewhere along the way, the fat man had picked up quite a bit of Christian, evangelical jargon. He may have even been a sincere believer at one time or another. Perhaps the truth he heard was twisted by his mind. Perhaps he saw an opening, a way to be “as God”, to draw love and attention, even devotion to himself.

The fat man had a day job. Care to guess what it was? If you guessed car salesman, you are correct. Every car salesman – any good salesman, really, knows all too well that the world is just overflowing with sad, hungry, vulnerable people who will buy whatever a person is selling to make themselves feel loved and accepted and important. Though the fat man was making an outrageous claim about himself, he wasn’t really selling himself.

My friend, David, was an engineer as well as being a licensed minister. His wife had a degree in music and was an accomplished classical pianist. Their son was a near-genius young man who was entering a prestigious university early, with academic scholarships. These were not stupid people. Nor were they people unfamiliar with the Bible. David had been preaching and teaching for a number of years as had his wife. If the fat man had simply made his claim like a madman, they would have rejected it as the utter madness it was.

Instead the fat man had told them that they were chosen to be part of his inner circle. He said, yes, I am God the Father (it makes me shudder just to write that), but you are the foundation of this new revelation. The fat man did what every successful cult leader does. He sold them an inside line, a valuable connection, status, and position. We look at someone like this or Jim Jones or Father Divine, even the lesser offenders like Robert Tilton or Benny Hinn (by the way, David and his wife were, prior to this, financial “partners” of Hinn’s ministry and had reserved seating at his events), and we wonder how people can be fooled by such blatant falsehoods. The trick is not what we believe about the salesman, but what we believe about ourselves.

David told me after this, when he was involved in a movement almost equally ludicrous, that he had always felt that he was destined to be someone great, to be world famous and renowned. That was about the last conversation I had with him. Some people just won’t learn.

Why was I not drawn in? Part of the credit undoubtedly goes to my wife. If she had been more sympathetic to the fat man, it would have been harder for me to do the right thing. Adam’s love for Eve was a critical part of his decision to reject the truth. Another part is my sense of humor which helps keep things in perspective. I do not take myself too seriously. That was the main difference between David and me. Credit for that goes to my parents. And one more thing -- the temptation wasn’t really aimed at me.

Very little credit goes to my native skepticism. Skepticism has no truth in it. As a defense against deception, it is more like barbed wire than a wall. It slows things down, but it will not hold up against serious bombardment. People who are merely skeptical are almost as easy to fool as those who will believe anything.

In the end, David’s wife decided to become the wife of the fat man. At that point, David had a sudden flash of insight -- too late. Their lives were torn apart and shattered. Their son was thrown into confusion and destruction. The fat man gathered a few more followers. I don’t know what happened to him, or my friend’s wife. Perhaps the fat man had a heart attack and died before he could really get going. Or, perhaps, he is still out there somewhere, deceiving and being deceived.

I mentioned that the fat man didn’t really target me with his temptation. I am vulnerable to other deceptions than the one that destroyed my friend. Mine run more along the lines of the material. I have no room to sit in judgment on another’s weakness. I simply point out that there are spiritual temptations that ensnare spiritual people. Just because someone is advanced in the spiritual realm does not mean he or she is in the clear.

Before I close an overly long post, I will add that there wasn’t much I could do to confront the problem. I tried when we went to lunch with David and his wife after the fat man and his associate left. I voiced my doubts and pointed out some of the contradictions, but they were already intoxicated by the prospects of being part of a new work of God, elevated to the status of the Twelve Disciples of Christ. When the break came between David and his wife, we once again made the long drive down. This time, I spoke very plainly about what was taking place. It made no difference to the wife or to the additional followers who surrounded the fat man. They responded by saying that I did not understand, that I was rejecting the new revelation as the Pharisees had rejected Christ. They proved to me that ultimately we deceive ourselves.

Rock, Razor, Remnant

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. – 1 John 4:1-6

All of human history comes to a point at the Cross. It is both the end and the beginning. What ultimately matters is what we do with Jesus. If we grasp that Christ came from the Father and walked the earth as God in the flesh, we cannot help being transformed. It may take years and struggle; we may never be able to fully articulate why it has such a powerful effect, but this truth will give us eternal life.

People don’t stumble over Jesus, the compassionate teacher. They stumble over God in the flesh because the concept is simply impossible. The more we know about the universe the more impossible it appears. The greater the scope and expanse of science, the more incomprehensible God becomes. The view from the summit of Olympus would seem to make nonsense of gods in human form. How in the vastness of a billion galaxies, flung across distances beyond calculation, how could there be a Creator? And how, if there is, could He possibly be contained in human form? And if He were, why would He appear and live among an oppressed people in a backwater of civilization? Why would He have a brief ministry of teaching a few rejects of questionable character then allow Himself to be arrested and put to death in agony?

These are not modern questions whatever the sophisticates of our day try to claim. You can hear them in the who-do-you-think-you-are taunts of the enemies of ancient Israel. They are the barbs in the sarcastic questions the religious leaders hurled at Jesus, in the mocking that He endured from the soldiers and the crowd. Even in the early days of the Church, there were those who wanted to temper the truth, make it a little more flexible, a little more palatable by backing off the most outrageous assertions. A softened blade may bend more easily, but it bends in the wrong places. It doesn’t hold the same edge, the edge needed to separate joint from marrow, soul from spirit.

No, the truth must cut and it must cut clean. Anything that takes the edge off and makes it easier to accept is not from God. We are the edge of the sword. The spirit of antichrist was on the loose in John’s day, and it runs rampant throughout the world today. The Kingdom has grown, but the anti-kingdom has grown as well. Antichrist holds sway in politics, art, academia, and pop culture. The truth in us is assailed daily from every side. It is easy to believe, as Elijah, that we are the only ones left. Even the churches seem to be under the spell of marketing and manipulation.

Yet, there is a remnant. The Lord told Elijah He still had seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal. There remain those who have faced the questions and answered still, “Jesus is Lord.” Not everyone will hear us, but we know one another when we meet, and we are all known of God.

Deception, Demons, and Details

"Get away from that wheelbarrow, James Louis! You know you don't know nothin' 'bout ma-CHIN-ery!" -- Brother Dave Gardner

The coming of the lawless one is based on Satan’s working, with all kinds of false miracles, signs, and wonders, and with every unrighteous deception among those who are perishing. They perish because they did not accept the love of truth in order to be saved. For this reason, God sends a strong delusion so that they will believe what is false, so that all will be condemned – those who did not believe the truth but enjoyed unrighteousness. – 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12

I think I can handle too much. My most common error in life is the failure to see every battle as a spiritual battle, from the most trivial to the most profound. Let me see if I explain well enough not to sound like a complete flake.

The other day my straight-shaft Stihl Pro trimmer didn’t want to run. This thing is the Mercedes-Benz of trimmers. It has run for years. I was in a hurry and trying to get stuff cleaned up (when am I not in a hurry?), and it just quit. My very first inclination was to grab the end and smash it against a corner post. I do not like things that thwart my will, especially inanimate objects that are supposed to make my life easier.

For once, perhaps because of the influence of the coonosphere: QP, Ben, Julie, Robin, Rick, River, Walt, et al, it dawned on me that this was a spiritual battle. I wasn’t dealing with a demon-possessed trimmer, but a demon-oppressed thought process. I put the machine aside and picked up the pathetic little Ryobi to get as much done as I could. Of course, it picked just that moment for the throttle cable to stick. With no third string trimmer (forgive me, for I have punned), I took a deep breath and, through gritted teeth, explained to my wife that I had no choice except to fix the Ryobi. I sat down and opened the housing, got things loosened up, then correctly reattached and re-assembled. An hour or so later, I had it going again.

When I had time, I went back to the Stihl and pondered its behavior for a few minutes. I decided it was the plug and started looking for a socket to fit it. All the ones I have are either the wrong size or not deep enough. I could feel the frustration rising so I set it down and stepped back again. It actually made me smile because I realized that I was hunting for something I didn’t need. Like chainsaws, the Stihl come with its own specialty combination tool. It changes the plug as well as fitting the nut for the brush-cutter head, and had a star-driver head at the other end – everything you need in one place. I got the plug out. There was a tiny round bit of something closing the gap – no possibility of a good spark. Once I cleared that out, the Stihl started up with a couple of pulls and has been running just fine.

Were it not for Christ, I would be a sucker for the lawless one. He isn’t (necessarily) a politician. I know the lawless one very well. He will tell me that every minor inconvenience is a catastrophe. He insists that a mechanical failure is a malicious act. He doesn’t even mind if I think it is a demon that’s taken over the device. He might go so far as to encourage such thinking. He lives by the false and the deceptive. He enjoys bouts of foolish, pointless rage and acts of destruction. I am ashamed to admit some of the things he has told me that I have accepted and acted upon.

I’m not worried too much about the antichrists on the outside. The one that troubles me is the one that doesn’t even have to whisper in my ear to make his subtle voice heard.

Don't Get Fooled (again)

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to determine if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

This is how you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. But every spirit that does not confess Jesus [to be the Christ come in the flesh] is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist; you have heard he is coming, and he is already in the world now. – 1 John 4:1-3

When I was reading on the metaphysical materialism Wiki article yesterday, I was particularly struck by one argument against the supernatural and spiritual. That is, the materialist argues, if spirits do exist they exert no influence on the natural or it is too weak and insignificant to be tested.

As Jesus said to the sons of thunder, “You do not understand what kind of spirit you are.”

From God’s perspective, the spirit is willing but the flesh is the one that is weak. The truth is that Reality is spirit and what we see, the temporal, is derived.

Not all spirits, John tells us, are from God. If you have trouble with the Bible, read the depiction of creation in Tolkien’s Silmarillion. He does a magnificent job of showing how and why God allows those rebel spirits to exist.

Whether we know it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we all deal with spirits and the spiritual on a daily basis. I need to be able to determine if I am hearing from a true prophet, a false prophet, the Spirit of God or a deceiving, antichrist spirit. John tells me how to do that. Does this spirit witness of Christ or of something else?

I heard a guy casting out “demons” on the radio one time. He supposedly contacted some spirit and was asking it, “Did Jesus come in the flesh? Is He the Son of God?” That is a misunderstanding of what John shows us. I do not recommend having conversations with demons. Jesus says that Satan is the father of lies, so it is pointless to engage in a discussion with the devil, demons or materialist magicians. They will lie to us.

The Spirit of God and the spirit of prophecy speak of Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, or, as it says in the Revelation, “the testimony about Jesus is the spirit of prophecy”. Antichrist spirits can speak glowingly of “Jesus” as the master teacher and incorporate certain of His sayings into their canon, yet they are not testifying about Christ but about themselves.

For the Christian, the death, burial and resurrection of Christ changes everything. For the antichrist, the Gospel needs to have something added; the Cross is not sufficient; Christ really didn’t die; He was not raised physically from the dead. To the deceiving spirit, Jesus is useful, even interesting but not the Alpha and Omega.

I recall C.S. Lewis talking about the error of “Christianity and ____”. There’s the antichrist. The Black Liberation theology of Wright that Obama listened to for twenty years is just such an antichrist message. The white supremacist message that travels under the guise of the Christian Identity movement is another. Preachers who get too carried away with “faith teachings” are in danger of channeling an antichrist spirit. Islam is an antichrist religion.

That does not mean we reject those people and refuse to love them or engage them. As Paul told us in Ephesians chapter 6, we are not fighting flesh and blood enemies. Our battle is with “world powers of this darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavens.” People are enslaved to antichrists, to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. The most vital thing I can do is be a vessel suitable for the Master’s use, a clear channel for the Holy Spirit to be poured through, a purged, fruitful branch on the Vine.

I pray today, Lord, that my mind would be renewed, that I would be transformed and not conformed to the world’s fashion and image. I pray that I would be filled with the Spirit, covered with the whole armor of God and able to stand firm against the spiritual assaults that come against me. By faith today I put off the old man and with it the deceptions of the enemy. By faith I put on Christ to the glory of God.