Transcript
Welcome to Dispatches from the Spiritual Front. I’m Alan Wartes.
Whoever you are I’m glad you found your way here. It’s worth repeating that I’m no expert. I have no degrees or credentials to set me apart from anyone else.
If you have found your way to these videos, which I don’t promote in any way, I’m betting it’s because the Holy Spirit knows you are as tired as I am of swimming in a toxic ocean of lies. You’re tired of pretending there is nothing wrong with the world. You are waking up to the lies all around you suddenly aware you are starving for the truth.
That’s hard enough, but if you are like me, you are even starting to feel angry that Satan’s program of lies includes much of what you’ve been taught about what it means to follow Jesus. You know in your soul that there is far more to the life Jesus won for you on the cross and in His resurrection than you’ve ever been taught in church.
Paul wrote in Galatians chapter 5:
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”
Galatians 5:1
It’s astonishing to read that and realize you don’t feel free. You don’t feel empowered as a new creation in Christ. You feel constantly off balance, afraid, guilty and even ashamed because all of that must be your fault. Jesus said the truth will set you free, but you don’t feel any nearer to really knowing what truth He’s talking about than when you first believed.
Am I the only one who has experienced this? I don’t think so.
The part that makes me angry is realizing this is no accident. What I’m describing is the mental and emotional state of someone who has been psychologically abused, subjected to evil gaslighting on an unimaginable scale. In these videos I’ve set out to face this fact, as uncomfortable and controversial as that may be. There’s nothing easy about that. Along the way I’ll probably get some things wrong, but I can’t keep pretending and looking away.
In a moment, I’ll share how I’m being led to consider a much deeper understanding of what the Bible teaches about these things. The truth is not new; it’s been there all along in plain sight. Most believers would recognize and agree with it — superficially, at least. Genuinely living by this truth is a different matter entirely. Layer upon layer of deep deception has kept us trapped, as the Bible says, in an intellectual form of godliness while denying it’s power.
But we don’t have to stay there.
Before I get to that, however, here’s a quick recap of ground I’ve covered so far.
First, repentance is an ongoing way of life for followers of Jesus, not just that first moment when we confess our need for salvation from sin. It is the daily process of disentangling ourselves from Satan’s world — Babylon — and coming out of her as we are commanded to do.
“Come out of her my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven and God has remembered her crimes.”
Revelation 18:4-5
That’s repentance. But many people who identify as Christians aren’t used to thinking this still applies to them. It does.
Second, repentance is a radical thing to do because it is nothing less than giving our consent to die rather than remain in slavery to our old sinful nature. It’s what Jesus was talking about when He said:
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
Matthew 16:24-26
From the world’s point of view, that’s the most radical thing ever spoken.
Next, we can’t come out of Babylon without being brutally honest about all the ways we are still in it. This world IS deception, I have said. We must open our eyes to the multitude of Satan’s lies and admit how we still believe them, live by them and even defend them. The purpose of that is to reclaim what the lies have taken from us — the true knowledge of God and of ourselves as His redeemed children.
This is hard work because it challenges everything we think we know. It’s no small matter for us to question things we’ve religiously believed since birth.
And yet, aggressively confronting this deception is exactly the task set before us. Paul’s description of that is downright militant.
“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We 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 Corinthians 10:3-5
This phrase, “every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God,” describes everything in our world. Everything plays that role to some degree.
Let’s get more specific about that. Keep in mind that all deception has a single goal: to hide God from us. To sow doubt about His sovereignty and even His existence, if possible.
Let’s start with science. I have a degree in geology and was trained to “trust the science.” But I now see that, taken as a whole, modern science presents the universe as cold, dark, empty, random, mechanical and dangerous. It teaches that the earth is a meaningless speck of dust in the vast void of space. It enshrines chaos as the engine of creation. Our fate, science preaches, is governed by vague, impersonal forces like gravity, thermodynamics and the random hand of evolution across practically endless amount of time.
And it’s all a lie. Or rather a multitude of them which all originate in the big one, the Big Bang of modern lies, to borrow their term. That’s when so-called science enthroned the sun at the center of our existence. To explain that they imagined that a mysterious force called gravity is what holds things together. To this day no one can prove what it is or where it comes from.
That done, science then imagined many planets in orbit around the sun and gave all of them the names of pagan gods. The sun, itself named Helios after the Greek god, is said to orbit the center of the Milky Way, which is one of billions of galaxies barreling through the cosmos at a million miles per hour.
All of it is conjecture. None of it is proven fact. I know this is tough, because we’ve all been conditioned to believe it’s true, but believing doesn’t make it so.
Allegedly, it was the leadership of the renaissance-era Roman Catholic Church that pulled the trigger on all of this. They had three goals in mind:
• Discredit God as the supreme creator of all things
• Question the Bible as the ultimate source of truth
• Oppose the growing protestant reformation working to put the Bible into the hands of everyone, not just an elite priesthood.
Why would they choose this as a way to accomplish all of that? Because the Bible describes the origin, shape and nature of our universe very differently and in no uncertain terms. If you could get a competing lie this big to stick, then you could cast doubt on everything else the Bible has to say.
This was a religious and philosophical choice, not a scientific “discovery.” It is pure deception that has spawned a flood of supporting lies over the centuries, right up to today. I’ve included a link to an informative documentary film on this subject.
Moving on, the lies of science have enabled deception to infect everything else.
In one way or another, the picture that science paints of a universe that can be explained without the need for God, of humanity without divine origin and worth and of life without meaning or purpose has corrupted everything in the world.
• Health care
• Government and politics
• Money
• Education
• News media
• Entertainment
• Churches
That’s a mouthful, I know. There’s a reason why most of us will plug our ears rather than listen to it. Many will fight with religious zeal to defend it. Because naming the lies inevitably puts us in serious conflict with people and institutions committed to Satan’s deception. That even includes people we love. It’s not safe, and what we stand to lose is real. Jesus told us this would happen when we follow Him.
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’”
Matthew 10:34-36
This doesn’t happen just because someone suddenly professes belief in Jesus. It takes more than that to make enemies out of members of your own household. It’s the result of radical repentance, of calling lies what they are and refusing to live by them any longer.
So where does that leave us? I’ll tell you. It brings us to the threshold of a profound choice. It’s not new, it’s just been obscured by the deception.
Because Satan’s deceptive world is all I’ve ever known and because I can’t hope to come out of it quickly or on my own, in my last Dispatch I shared that if feels like I’ve come to the end of my ability to cope. I said I feel God has put me in spiritual rehab.
After hearing that, one subscriber wrote that the idea of rehab is a comforting one because it implies being under the constant care of the Great Healer Himself. Rehab is a place where we can rest and be guided, if we are willing.
The key words there are, “… if we are willing.”
Anyone who has ever struggled with addiction, or watched as someone they love does, will tell you that healing never happens until the addict is ready to receive it. I think that’s just as true of someone who comes to the cross but hesitates to lose their life even in order to save it.
The writer of Hebrews echoes this idea.
“Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory.”
Hebrews 3:6
That made me wonder why do we ever resist the redemption that God so clearly promises to anyone who believes? One element in the clinical definition of addiction is that an addict persists in behaviors or beliefs they know are causing them harm. Why? What keeps us trapped in the obvious self-harm of living by and for all of Satan’s lies in this world?
Some people simply love the darkness and have no desire for anything else. But that’s not true for those of us who are hungry to follow Jesus. Why do we so often continue to be ruled by the lies and habits of the old way, even though we are sick of eating its rotten fruit?
This brings me to the powerful insight I teased earlier. One answer to that is that we approach repentance without first settling a matter of vital importance:
Who and what do we trust? God or a world built of lies?
I told you that’s a statement that most Christians will hear and say, “Oh, yeah, sure, I know that.”
But here’s a hard truth. Almost no one has any idea what it really means to trust God. And that, more than anything, is why believers stay stuck in a world built of lies. It’s why we fail at radical repentance. It’s why the call to abide seems just out of reach and why the Bible’s promises can feel meant for someone else.
Imagine checking into a rehab center where you don’t trust your basic needs will be provided. You feel afraid, unworthy and unsafe most of the time and you don’t trust anything that the care givers tell you.
Under those conditions, could you reasonably expect to succeed?
And yet, tragically, that’s how most of us approach Christian life. Deep down we believe the lie that how we live now is the only way it’s possible to live and survive. We can’t escape our conditioned trust in false hope promised by the false gods of this world. Healing is impossible until we trust God instead.
In my next Dispatch I will unpack all of this in more detail. What does radical trust look like in daily life and how does it lead us closer to the freedom we are promised in Christ?
Until then, God bless you and keep you.
