Day 3895 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Kings 22:22 NIV

A powerful delusion

Such is what defines a great many of the illusions that have already befallen a fallen and still falling man. And indeed, this is a fact entirely easy to see inside what are eyes that are, while perhaps still vastly blind to much of what’s become of this sullen and swollen mankind, still able to perceive at least some things that aren’t as they should be. Yet still we collectively opt for the blind-eye approach to both leading and being led in hopes that it won’t end up leaving us for dead.

But friends, it already has.

And why is that? It’s because such is what we deserve. We deserve to enter our demise as is designed, in part, in the many parties and priorities that we’ve come unto having in our lives anymore. We deserve to suffer far more than we are in fact. In fact we deserve not only what Christ took on our behalf but that spread across the entire length of eternity. Yes, we deserve His kind of suffering but endlessly. Why? Because such has our every foolishness and selfishness and sinfulness been.

It’s endless.

We are so clearly a people without limit in terms of how far we’re willing to go and what all we’re willing to do in order to continue living this version of life in which the perversion of life is all but so expected that it’s become exciting. Indeed, we are anymore ecstatic at every filthy pageant that’s put on for our entertainment. In fact, the vast majority of life has become about just that. We’re living in a world in which our being entertained and thus served and catered to is all but an expectation.

And one that had best be met if any are to avoid the very real and very clear consequences that we’re not even pretending we’re unwilling to wield.

No, this society has no qualms when it comes to all but dropping bombs upon those who are deemed to be so outside the vicinity of our chosen abnormalities that they’re simply not worth trying to save anymore. Can you imagine that? That, despite our every one of us having at least heard the term ‘salvation’ as well as our all having an at least passing understanding as to what sin is and the many ways in which it has and continues to manifest, we still seem to be this amazingly lost people who are impressively willing to personally revoke that opportunity for those who we deem unworthy of it.

Rather we just anymore resort to killing those with whom we disagree as we see doing so of such ease thanks to our now common and all but growing devaluing of life itself.

And we wonder why the Bible has to talk of hell as written at the inspiration of a God who must have then both created and allows to remain such a dreadful place. How could a God that loves let anyone proceed toward such a woeful demise? How could a God that’s just and fair and claims to care about those He himself has created create a place in which what’s promised to be a majority of His creation will suffer for eternity? Indeed, how could a God that’s good allow for a place so bad?

Because He is good.

Because He is just. Because He is fair. Because He’s gone to such extraordinarily unnecessary lengths to help us each become aware of both who He is, what that means, and too, what that deserves to be shown from those to whom said understanding and awareness has been given. Because for any to hope in His mercy as given in our salvation the same must acknowledge the need of the mercy that is His salvation as is needed because we’ve played the victim to what’s one of the oldest plays in the devil’s book of the same.

It’s that we’ve all fallen for what was and is and will remain for a least a while more what amounts to basically a warmup for what Paul warns of in 2 Thessalonians 2:11: A powerful delusion.

And indeed, starting in verse 8 of that second letter to the church in Thessalonica we read that “and then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

There we have our answer as to why such promises of hell being the outcome of many if not most as well as every precursor to that promised cursing such as this discussion in 1 Kings. It’s because we have fallen. It’s because such we have chosen. It’s because God knows all there is to know and this means that He knows the depths of the soul and thus too all that we’ve seen to believe in and follow through to what’s become who we’ve become in what’s a life in which we lie and cheat and steal and yet expect that none of those around us who live just like us would ever do the same.

Indeed, we are willful collaborators with the enemy’s conspiracy against God and all that He is as is done in trying to in every way undermine all that that means. Yes, the enemy exists to steal and kill and destroy, and well, we’ve all come to what’s become a life in which we know so much and so well to lie that we play the gullible victims of his deceitful intentions that are, get this, allowed by God.

Yes, God allows the devil to deceive and too then us to be deceived.

Why?

“Because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.”

And now sure, that seems like a really stupid decision to make, does it not? To be saved seems like a fairly reasonable no-brainer regardless of whatever the event or outcome from which one might need be saved might be. Indeed, I don’t care what anyone may say but if the gift is to be saved then I’m taking it. I don’t even need to fully understand what it is that I’m being saved from. No, if someone I can trust, though there be scant few of whom such is truth, if someone I can trust tells me that I need to be saved, then save me!

Help me. Lead me. Do whatever it takes to get me either through or elsewise past whatever this event or outcome might be that could otherwise so clearly amount to my very demise.

And this seems like a pretty standard understanding in life. Or at least it should be. And indeed, we should have seen that this Jesus guy who came telling no lie, doing no wrong, hurting no one but rather speaking only in such kind eloquence the truth which we could see and now have seen has set captives free could thus do the same for you and for me. But instead we’ve chosen to continue in this path in which we refuse to the love the truth and thus do too to be saved.

In fact, anymore almost all of society all but vehemently if not in fact violently hates the truth as it dares, He dares still claim that we are captives unto anything who thereby need to be saved from whatever are these things to which we’ve hitched everything from our wagons to our hopes to our joy to our eternity.

Yes, we still walk within a world that still hates Jesus simply because He still cares to free us from what is an enslavement to he who is rather our enemy as is still at the work of deceiving any and all who might continue to enjoy the fall both away from God and thus from life.

And why would God allow such a work to be done unto His creation, His children, His daughters and sons?

Because we ain’t been living like we are!

And indeed, He did come in Christ to lay down His life in what remains the greatest gift any could ever either give or be given. For honestly, who lays down their life for those who’ve lived as their enemies? No, that’s insanity and thus perhaps why so many still don’t believe. Rather instead of laying down a life we seem more apt to take a life. Just turn on the news and you’ll see what I mean all the time.

We are a fallen mankind and that because we’ve both fallen away from God’s call to be image bearers of the image in which we were made, a city on a hill kind of thing, and thus, because of our having all but demanded our light go out so as to not offend those who’ve already chosen to exist in the deepening darkness of sin’s depravity, we’ve too thus fallen for the very same lies that those living without light have chosen to serve.

Meaning then that we all deserve that demise which is here defined as God’s allowing the devil to go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouths of those deemed to be prophets by those who simply ache for someone else, always only another human, to tell them what to do, where to go, what to say, who to be, and mostly what to or not to believe. Indeed, all of us want that someone else to stand in the fray in our stead so that we needn’t welcome the risk of being wrong.

As if our choosing to listen to liars and deceivers is of any less consequence that our struggling and stumbling to uphold our own life’s responsibility.

You ever think about that? Sadly, judging from the ways in which all of us have lived down here, no, it in fact doesn’t seem like something we give much thought to. In fact I think it’s safe to say that we all but utterly hate the mere suggestion of personal responsibility. That’s why so many are so happy with all this ai nonsense and these weight loss drugs that achieve the desired result without any of the needed change to lifestyle or self-control.

We hate responsibility and that because we’ve been taught by those who we’ve allowed to act as our leaders that such a thing is unkind and not caring and thus something that both can’t come from anyone who does care and thus is grounds for our to hate those who do ask that we do care just enough that we welcome unto us the carrying of our own crosses as are weighed in our life’s losses of everything from moral competency to our thus widespread agreement with social degeneracy.

This is perhaps the greatest deception of all as it’s the one that’s easiest for a fallen man to believe. Because looking around it’s easy to see that the entirety of society is falling apart in the doing of things that even just a few years ago would have been absolutely unthinkable. And yet, when paired with our personal preference for our to ourselves deserve no punishment, well then we eventually arrive upon this place in mind in which even a fallen and still falling mankind doesn’t deserve to be judged either.

That is the powerful delusion.

It’s this idea that’s always spread like wildfire and indeed continues to do the same even still today. And that idea is that there is no deception, there is no depravity, there is no danger of anything in the way of any consequence nor comeuppance as there is no sin. Indeed, we are a people who so clearly believe so little in wrongdoing simply because if we did believe in it then we’d have to admit that we ourselves have too done wrong.

But that would mean that we too deserve to be punished.

And we don’t much like that idea.

And so we continue to turn toward those who remain willing to do as the people demanded in Isaiah 30:10-11 in which they asked of the seers to “see no more visions!” and of the prophets to “give us no more visions of what is right!” but rather to instead “tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!”

Indeed, there are a great many who have so acquiesced to their request even in our advanced society of today.

Why?

Because most folks still want only to hear that they’re doing everything right and thus are in no danger of facing any cost or consequence.

Why?

Because most folks still refuse to “love the truth and so be saved.”

Why?

Because most folks have chosen to only listen to the deceiving spirit still very much alive and well in the mouths of those seen to be and thus considered as the religious and political and spiritual leaders of what remains a people vastly willing to be led but only by those who prophesy lies and tell them pleasant things and leave that path that’s spent confronting everyone with the Holy One of Israel.

Because the Holy One of Israel does confront us. He does bother us. He does weigh upon us within His standing request that we come apart from the world, touch no unclean thing and in doing so show Him that we both wish to be saved from who and what we thus must admit we’ve become.

For none can turn to God unless and until they come to see that it’s from Him that they’ve lived to flee.

And yet the vast majority will never so do because they rather continue to delight to listen only to those who continue to tell them what they want to hear never willing to imagine that it might all be a lie meant to help them die.

Because surely none would be so crass as to remain so cross as to deny the Christ who carried the same so as to save those who’d lived looking to, leaning on, learning from he who comes still only to deceive in order to eventually destroy.

Indeed, we still live as if those who tell us what we want to hear are the only ones around here that we can trust. And yet we never manage to see the irony in it. Never seem able to imagine the hubris in so doing. We never seem to realize the danger we’re allowing into our lives so long as we continue to only entertain those ideas that offer us pleasure or comfort or conceded to our endless desire for complacency. Yes, we want none to ask anything of us that asks anything from us.

Rather we want to do as we please and thus we need a host of those willing to tell us that that which pleases us is the same as what we should do. That such is what we’ve the right to. Yes, we love those who tell us all about these rights we have to do these things that we just ache to be right to do so that we don’t have to ever feel shame or guilt or regret or remorse.

No, rather we’ve affixed our horse to what is this hope that we’re doing no wrong and thus deserve no punishment.

But friends, just because we don’t want something to be there, well, that’s never really been able to fully erase that unwanted possibility. And that simply because we’re not nearly as powerful or important as our arrogance and ego so definitely loves to imagine.

No, instead what we are is a people so easily led astray that we shouldn’t be surprised when we eventually realize that such is what we’ve been more often than not. Indeed, we shouldn’t be so shocked when His Word reads of such things as deceiving spirits and powerful delusions and the promise of destructions levied upon those who’ve willfully left His path and gotten themselves tangled in the weeds of a world gone so wicked that wrong is held for right and right is seen as wrong and anyone who says otherwise is held in contempt in the court of public opinion and all but ushered right up the gallows.

Yeah, it doesn’t really pay to speak the truth these days as such remains but among the surest ways to be at best hated if not at worst ended.

All because still remains that deceptive voice in those we turn to to lead us toward what’s really only a way of life in which we delight to get nowhere.

Friends, my point is that we should always remain leery of any and all who only tell us what we want to hear. We should be slow to trust those who seem to always have all the answers and that offer up those answers in what are ways that seem to allow us to remain either who we are or where are doing what we’re already doing. Indeed, we shouldn’t be willing to just blindly believe anyone or anything but should rather, as we’re called, test everything via the Word and the Spirit that God sends to help us do just that.

And yeah, there are many here who will call that ‘judgement’ and tell us that we’re being hateful or rude or unkind in so doing. But friends, it’s better to be hated by those who are perishing than to be denied by He who made clear that He would do just that unto any who lived denying Him.

I’m just saying that while we do indeed have a great many voices to listen to and lean on to lead us, there’s really only One who’s proven willing to go to death and back to bring us back from the same.

Most of these other “leaders” are more than happy to just leave us on the path leading only toward what Jesus has already left empty.

Please don’t be left looking the fool when the adversary is proven to have succeeded in fooling many.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold