The Shrewd Deceiver
IGNORANCE
“And the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
Psalm 2:1, 2 (NRSV) says, “Happy are those [whose]…delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.”
It suits the Dragon’s purposes to keep us stupid and to keep us narrow. It is part of his agenda to keep us ignorant of the depths and riches of our faith. He would like us to feed on scraps and growl over the same well-gnawed bones; anything, as long as we stay out of the depths of biblical truth because there is a real danger that we might see something that would transform our lives forever and turn us into enemies he would rather not have.
Whatever power he has and however he impacts our world, he is bent double in his efforts to keep us from knowing the riches of the gospel that work their own moral magic and generate noble thoughts and glorious dreams. It is true that mere dreams and noble thinking are not enough to transform us or the world but then we are not talking about mere dreams or merely thinking. In one movie version of the Columbus saga, an official who was overly conscious about money was berating the dreamer about the impracticality of it all. He reminded him of the cost and the fact that dreams were without substance, little more than vapor. Columbus takes him to the window overlooking the city and asked him what he saw. He said he saw great buildings, church spires, courts, massive cathedrals, wide streets and tens of thousands of houses. The explorer passionately hissed at him, “You only see these things as realities because someone dreamed them. These once were dreams.”
If people will not dream great dreams and speak great truths and develop a rich theology, humanity will settle down to mere activity and narrow deeds. Ideas have consequences. We know that some massive lies distort the world so you can be sure that massive truths will shape the world for the better. “Truth will set you free,” someone said and tens of millions of us have been blessed to believe him. All truth is important but some truths are more important than others and will have a greater impact than others. “If they must have truth,” someone hisses from the shadow, “let them have some but make sure they aren’t big truths. Failing that, make sure they don’t understand the big truths they’ve been given. See to it that they don’t think.”
People are more than what they do. They dream lovelier dreams than what they can execute but they do us a service beyond measuring when they tell us their thoughts. It is only another form of sinful snobbery that dismisses those women and men whose noble thoughts far exceed their capacity to act. The English poet Robert Browning saw this clearly; he knew that the greatness of men and women could not and should not be assessed simply by what they do. In his “Rabbi Ben Ezra” he spoke of it this way:
Thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
Think what Paul did with the doctrine of monotheism. In Romans 3:29-30 he argues from the truth that there is one God to the claim that the whole world can be saved. “Is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles too? Yes, of the Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.” You see what he did here! He looked at the Shema, recited by the Jewish nation several times every day without fail, and saw that if that confession was true then the whole world had hope.
For him, believing monotheism was more than intellectually storing up the truth, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” He had drunk deeply from his own scriptures that proclaimed to all the nations that they could rejoice because Yahweh was God (see Ps. 67 for example). But in the light of Jesus Christ he saw even more clearly that monotheism was joy for the world; it meant God who made us all cared for all and therefore Jesus died for all. In 1 Corinthians 8-10 he again introduces monotheism and reworks the Shema (8:4-6). Because there is only one God and He has shown Himself in Jesus Christ as someone who forfeits rights in order to bless the weak, then God’s children should do the same. If there is one God then there is one humanity and all that are part of it are loved by God (Rom. 3). If there is one God then there is one way to live as His people – to minister to the weak instead of despising them (1 Cor. 8-10).
It takes more than intellect to see massive truth in and behind massive truths. It takes a heart that is shaped by a spirit other than the one that now operates in the children of disobedience (Eph. 2:2 and 3:14-19). The real threat to biblical monotheism is not some theological polytheism so much as it is some crass and barbaric paganism or racism. Is the one God the God of the Afghans and Iraqis? Is He the God of us all? To read the Parable of the Good Samaritan and to be racist or radically nationalist is to be blind.
What the Dragon would have us do is to learn a formula of words, recite them mindlessly and be content that if it ever came to it we could pass a religious quiz with flying colors. Sin is in its element when we learn the meaning of words without knowing what the words mean. “Anti-Semitic” is only a phrase, “racism” is only a word but the reality, what the words really mean, is an obscene and horrifying reality.
American preacher, Harry E. Fosdick, rehearsed the story of a certain anti-Semitic Frenchman who was there when the Nazis walked into Paris as conquerors. When he saw what they did to the Jews it dawned on him what anti-Semitic really meant; saw where it really led. Soon after the war had ended, on meeting a Jew he knew he greeted him with warmth and said, “These Nazis have taken everything away from me, even my anti-Semitism.” Racism is not what we find in the dictionary, it is not a formula of words, it is a black family (children and all) hanging outside their burning home, it is a little girl and her mother being raped on a daily basis and it is a satanic little sign above a public water fountain: Whites only. Racism and all forms of elitism are denials of monotheism because you can only be elitist if you practice a denial of the Shema as reworked by Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6, “We know…that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods…(as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’), yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”
And while it is right and proper for the elect of God to think they have been privileged, the Dragon rejoices over every hint of elitism there. When Christians cluck their tongues at the religious snobbery of ancient Jews and practice the very same you can be sure that Mephistopheles beats his shield in excitement along with the other satanic servants in the great sulphured city of Pandemonium. Elitist doctrines whether they are held in arrogance or not, must be thought suspect in the light of the truth that there is one God. We have been given sound advice by Don Miller who has taught us that when we are worried over the “eternal decrees” and the “foreordaining” work of God we need only to remember that He is “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” therefore some things cannot be true.
And if indeed the Holy Father loves us all without exception, then the elect need to remember why it is they have been privileged to be called into God’s grace and service. God called no elect to make them think or behave as though they were the elite. Election is to salvation in Jesus Christ, of course, but it is also election to service, that the whole wide world should know that God has not abandoned His creation. The elect are a community of witness to the universal and holy love of the Father for all His wayward children. It serves only the Dragon’s agenda to proclaim a God who is as sectarian as we are in our worst moments. How it must please Satan to see us ridicule believers who stand apart from each other (without rancor) because they think it pleases God while we calmly teach that God has created millions for no other purpose than to eternally torment them because it pleases Him.
The God who created us in love (Ps. 8; 136) and continues to give us life through development in the womb surely has a quarrel with all who callously make war against those who are in the womb. And if God has a quarrel with those who make war with humans growing in the womb would He who created us all make war against multiplied millions of His children before they ever reached the womb? The doctrine that God lovingly atoned for some of us while predestining the rest of us to eternal conscious torment because it gives Him pleasure is not the monotheism of scripture. And who can know what social effects such an understanding of scripture has had down the years presuming it has shaped the subconscious views of millions?
It suits the sinister one’s agenda to have us live decent and upright lives while holding doctrines that splinter humanity while giving approval to harsh convictions we have not searched out. It suits him to keep us from thinking noble thoughts of God. “Don’t think too seriously about teaching or doctrine or theology,” he would urge us, “after all, it’s being nice to one another that counts, isn’t it?” But we need to remember that it was in the middle of a thoroughly doctrinal section that Paul warned, “Bad company corrupts good character” (1 Cor. 15:33). We prefer to think of this warning as a merely social observation but ideas have consequences and Satan wants to keep us ignorant. That is part of his agenda.
Paul knew that and would have none of it. He ran all over the world proclaiming truths that had changed the universe. He did not only live uprightly, he spoke profound truths that ripped the shackles off entire nations. He saw his mission and destiny to be one who was to “demolish strongholds…demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:3-5). How tragic and pathetic it is for “ministers of the Word” to reduce their call and ignore this truth. It is not only bad deeds Satan loves to see; he exults in profoundly bad thinking and stupidity because when he gets that he gets vile behavior that often looks respectable and he gets bad religion that suffocates and perverts; one that has otherwise kind people sitting in an assembly and nodding approval at someone who says God creates billions of their fellow-humans for no other reason than to torture them eternally because that is what pleases Him.
