Lies are rarely blatant, and they never end with us any nearer to God. More often than not, it seems that the lies which hit me the hardest are those which come in some vulnerable moment, when all I’m sensing is the emotion of some fear or dreaded insecurity which grips me powerfully enough to wrench my eyes from the truth.
It amazes me how quickly a lie infects: I started out yesterday morning with one nagging doubt (a fearful thought that God knew my inabilities, and set me up to fail), and by the end of the day, I had seen resurrected nearly every old battle I’ve ever fought, with lies pounding in from all directions!
One beachhead was all it took: a single foothold, and the enemy had enough leverage to start bombarding me with massive ammunition. I succumbed, not because that first lie was so overwhelming, but because I had opened a gateway by listening to a deception over the truth.
The heart of the matter isn’t that my mind doesn’t know the truth, but that I have a choice where I turn my eyes when waves of temporary emotion would skew my gaze. Do I give heed to the bombardment of doubt, or do I consciously choose to believe God will sustain and care for me, regardless of what panic says? Certainly a finite human being is dwarfed by the power of a deception, but the crucial factor is where I am fixing my eyes. Do I understand that the God who is greater than the lie is the One who holds me? ‘Thou dost keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusts in Thee’ (Isaiah 26:3).
Satan is well aware of our being liable to start looking “downward” at ourselves, and losing sight of God’s ability to work through us. In fact, one of his greatest schemes is to speak in his ‘native tongue’ in a way which pulls us from a clear-sighted vision of God, to one which causes us to question Him, then resort to ourselves. It is as if the greatest battle in getting us to sin is not in tempting us to do what we know is wrong, but only in prompting us to believe that God is not worthy of our trust, and that our own hands are more capable of carrying out our best.
What the Enemy ultimately wants is for there to be a wedge driven between our Savior and ourselves; for us to ‘reproach’ God, ‘exalt ourselves against Him,’ and lose that ‘sweet fellowship’ of being His ‘companion and familiar friend’ (Psalm 55:12-14). And when we retract ourselves from Him, and delve more profoundly into the darkness of lies, we are only securing more fully the rift between ourselves and the Truth incarnate.
Yet we’ve been called to ‘walk in the truth’ (3 John 1:4), so that “no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes” (2 Corinthians 2:11). God has given us tools to fight: we are to ‘take each thought captive’ (2 Corinthians 10:5), ‘not believing every spirit, but testing the spirits to see whether they are from God’ (1 John 4:1). We’re to hold up each thought to the Light for His examination. And in that offering we find, not that He is against us, or that He has led us astray, but that what we keep fumbling with is the breech we’ve created by recoiling at Him.
The unrest we experience comes because - in our presumption that ‘the way of the Lord is not right’ (Ezekiel 18:25) - we are still not reconciled to the Truth, still refusing to entrust ourselves to the only One in whom we can rest. It is only when that lie is cast aside that we are brought into close communion with Him again; that, in the potency of the Truth, the lies are banished and no distance between us can endure ~
