First Truth Talk:
Alternative
Reality and the Warfare of the Mind
The Warfare of the Mind
“For though we walk in the flesh,
we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not
carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments
and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing
every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” (2 Cor. 10:3-5)
In the above passage Paul shows
the spiritual importance of the intellectual realm. If we look at the key terms
Paul uses, we see that they are all intellectual things: arguments, knowledge,
thought. It is these aspects which, according to Paul, form the ‘mighty’
weapons of spiritual warfare. The spiritual armoury Paul describes is, to a
large extent, an intellectual armoury, and these intellectual weapons are offensive
weapons: we cast down {offensive} arguments that exalt themselves
against the knowledge of God, we bring into captivity {offensive} every
thought to the obedience of Christ.
Just as God has offensive
intellectual weapons, so does the devil. In this talk we will be looking at
some of the weapons the devil uses to attack our minds, and in so doing will be
in a better position to “guard our minds through Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 4:7) In
understanding just how arguments and thoughts can function in undermining the
knowledge of God, we will be better equipped to take captive every thought to
the obedience of Christ.
The two paradigm examples of
how the devil attacks people’s minds are the temptation of Eve and the tower of
Babel. In this talk we will be looking at the former, which is the first
example of where the devil’s arguments and thoughts undermine the truth of God.
The story is well known but it will help to review the basic facts. Let us read
Genesis 3:1-6:
Now the serpent was more cunning than
any beast of the field which the Lord
God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not
eat of every tree of the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may
eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is
in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, now shall you
touch it, lest you die.’”
Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely
die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and
you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food,
that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she
took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.
Now it says that the devil was
very cunning. Satan’s cunning-ness is evidenced in how he goes about
undermining the truth of God. Let’s look at some of the specific tactics the
devil used to undermine God’s truth.
An Alternative Reality
In verse 1 Satan questions what
God has stated. “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree in the
garden?’” Questioning God’s truth is the first step in undermining it.
This does not mean that we
mustn’t ask questions about truth, but I think we all know the difference
between the proper kind of questions - where the asker sincerely seeks to know
- vs. the kind of question that the devil does here. We know something is amiss
with the devil’s question since his very question distorts the truth of what
happened. God had not prohibited them to eat from every tree in the
garden, only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, when
Satan asks, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree in
the garden?’”, the very question is based on a distortion of the truth.
In verse 4 we read, “Then the
serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die.’” The devil’s statement
here shows that he has set up an alternative system of truth. It is more than
just falsehood, more than just making an incorrect statement. It is what I
would call ‘anti-truth’ because it is a substitute to the truth God has already
established. God had said they would die when they ate the fruit – Satan said
they will not die. In this way, the devil sets himself up against God’s truth.
He had already tried to do this back in verse one where he distorted God’s
words, but now it is more explicit since he actually says that God has been
lying to Adam and Eve. This encourages Eve to place herself outside what God
has stated. People become open to deception as soon as they place themselves
outside what God has stated. This is just as true for us today as it was for
them back in the garden: our only safe-guard against Satanic deception is what
God has stated in the Bible. As soon as that safe-guard is removed, we are open
to deception – even open to the deception of thinking God is speaking to us
when it is really the devil speaking to us.
In suggesting that God has been
lying, Satan is redefining God. Having established a system of anti-reality,
Satan redefines others – in this case God – to fit the confines of his
alternative reality.
This becomes even clearer as we
move onto verse 5. “For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will
be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The cunningness is
that this statement, by itself, is technically accurate – however, it has a
spin on it which subtlety twists the truth. It is calculated to create a sense
of injustice about God, introducing the idea that God is withholding from Adam
and Eve something that they ought to have, namely knowledge. Satan is always
trying to create in people’s minds a controversy with God.
We also notice from this
statement that Satan is interacting with Eve within the framework of his
re-defined reality. By relating to others in terms of his false definitions of
reality, the devil is able to draw those who listen and talk to him into his
alternative-reality. Hence, “the woman saw that the tree was good for good,
that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she
took of its fruit and ate.” (vs. 6)
The result of being drawn into
a system of anti-truth is perversion. Evil does not obliterate truth; it twists
or perverts it. Put another way, the devil takes wisdom and corrupts it. (Ez.
28:17) We have already seen that some of what the devil said to Eve was true.
It was true that God knew that when they ate the fruit that their eyes would be
opened and they would be like God in terms of knowing good and evil. It was
part of the serpent’s craftiness that he took a bit of truth into his
substitute reality and perverted it.
Evil would have no sustaining
power if it did not feed on something real, just as rust or rottenness cannot
subsist in the absence of an outside object on which to work. Just as pure rust
is impossible – since rust always presupposes an object to rust – so
pure evil is also impossible. What is false is parasitical on what is real. So
evil distorts goodness as rust distorts metal, having no sustaining power of
itself. That is why, in his case against dualism, C. S. Lewis said that badness
is simply spoiled goodness.
Summary of the Devil’s Tactics
So we have four factors
operating here.
1.
Questioning
God’s truth.
2.
Setting
up an alternative system of truth.
3.
Redefining
others in terms of this alternative system.
4.
Truth
becoming perverted or twisted.
No Other Gods
If we were to reduce the
devil’s behaviour here to a single unifying principle, it would be that
everything the devil did was a violation of the commandment “you shall have no
other gods before me.” This is because what the devil is doing is essentially
to put himself in the place of God. Lucifer’s fundamental problem, as
exemplified in his conversation with Eve, is that he wants to be God. This is
also brought out in Isaiah 14:13-14:
For you have said in your
heart:
I will ascend into heaven,
I will exalt my throne above
the
stars of God;
I will also sit on the mount of
the congregation
On the farthest sides of the
north;
I will ascend above the heights
of the clouds,
I will be like the Most High.’
Now God is in control of
everything, and so in his attempts to “be like the Most High”, Lucifer tries to
control everything. However, since Lucifer is not God, he simply cannot be in
control of all reality whatever he may wish. Therefore, since Lucifer cannot
control reality, he creates an alternative reality that he can control. Not
being able to be in control of truth, he establishes anti-truth which he can
control.
He is the father of lies because he lives in a system where
everything is unreal. Now Satan’s relation to this anti-truth is the same as
God’s relation to real truth: God is the author of all truth, Satan is the
author of all anti-truth; God is in control of all reality, Satan is in control
of all anti-reality. Now since Satan believes that it is actually the other way
round and that his alternative-reality is actually the truth, this makes him
into God in his own eyes. Therefore, his system of anti-reality gives him a
structure which he can control, where he can be God.
Now because Satan is hungry for
control, he craves being able to draw everything into his alternative-reality,
for the pure truth which remains outside his system represents an area outside
his dominion.
There is, therefore, an enormous
battle going on – a battle, if you will, between two parallel universes. (Of
course, the analogy is incomplete because two parallel universes give the
impression of them being opposites, and we approach the heresy of dualism.
However, as I have already mentioned, Satan and his ways are not the opposite
of God and his ways. Satan is not the opposite of God, as hot is the opposite
of cold; rather, he is a parody of God. He does not want to be the opposite of
God – He wants to be God (2 Thess. 2:4; Isaiah 14:13-14). Hence we saw that
evil consists, not in the opposite of goodness, but in the twisting and
negating of goodness. It follows, therefore, that evil has no sustaining power
of itself. This is why evil must, of necessity, always self-destruct.)
Having made this
qualification, I think we may safely return to the image of two parallel
universes, which is still a useful model with which to work. (It is a
scriptural model, as well, in so far as it corresponds to the Biblical
categories of Jerusalem and Babylon.) Now imagine that the two parallel
universes – which we shall call reality and alternative-reality –that they
overlay the world, with some people belonging to the one while others belong to
the other, with others still fluctuating between the two. Now God is constantly
trying to draw people out of the alternative-reality into reality, while Satan
is constantly trying to draw people out of God’s reality into his
alternative-reality. Both God and Satan want their own universe to expand over
the whole world and squeeze into non-existence the other. So Satan is
constantly trying to enlarge his universe by finding more truths to pervert.
Every time Satan can encourage someone to take a bit of truth and twist it, he
diminishes the size of God’s universe, whereas every time someone rejects a lie
for the truth, the size of God’s reality expands and Satan’s diminishes. Now in
both systems, one victory breeds more. If Satan can get someone to believe a
twisted truth, then it is easier for them to go and accept more twisted truth,
of greater and greater proportions, until eventually they begin viewing
everything according to the criteria of the alternative-reality. It is as if
the twisting of truth starts a chain reaction which leads to more twisting. The
culmination of anti-truth on a person’s mind is that they begin to perceive
what is straight as being crooked or, to use the phraseology of the prophet
Isaiah, evil is exchanged for good, darkness for light, bitter for sweet. (Is.
5:20-23) In short, the person begins to perceive the real universe as being the
alternative-reality. When this happens, it can be futile to try and point it
out to the person who has been deceived, for such a person does not want to
give up their thought patterns and move into the real universe because they
perceive the real universe as being the twisted one.
In such a case, the
ways of Satan are thought to be the ways of God, and Satan is able to sit
enthroned in the temple of God pretending to be God. (Remember that in the New
Testament, ‘the temple of God’ is God’s people.) This enables him to exercise
the control he desires - a control that is at the essence of his desire to be
God. This is how the control works. As truth draws a person closer to God,
because truth has it’s home in God, so anti-truth, wherever it is believed and
practiced, draws people closer to Satan, since anti-truth has its home in him.
Therefore, by drawing people into his alternative-reality, Lucifer creates a
class of people he can control. Just as the devil is given power when
practitioners of black magic invert holy words like the Lord’s prayer to recite
it backwards, so he can get a handle on a person whose thinking and life
becomes twisted out of true. Just as the devil’s power in black magic is
proportionate on the holiness of the words being twisted, so his influence over
a person’s life is made more acute when spiritual holy truths are what is being
twisted. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the devil is so keen to
corrupt the thinking of Christians.
Okay, so far we
have looked at the way the devil tempted Eve, and this led us into a
consideration of the unifying principle behind all evil, which was that the
devil and his ways are a parody of God and His ways, the root of which is the
devil’s desire to be God. Now it is time to build on this information and
consider some of the practical applications this has in the every day life of a
Christian.
I hope that already
we may be beginning to see how the battle between light and darkness is one
that begins in the mind. All evil results from thinking that there is a
better way to God’s way, from twisting truth (truth being a property of
the mind). Therefore, when the apostle said to cast down arguments and every
high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, to bring every
thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, he was addressing the very
essence of the spiritual battle. This is a battle that, as Christians, we must
fight daily. Just as the devil gave to Eve his own twisted re-definition of
truth, so the devil tries to get at us in exactly the same way.
We saw that in the
garden of Eden the devil gave
a redefinition of God, a God who wanted to keep Adam and Eve in ignorance of
good and evil, not because this was best for them, but because He had his own
selfish agenda. Furthermore, this was a God who manipulated Adam and Eve by
lying to them about death when they would surely not die.
So the devil put into Eve’s
mind the idea that God was not the kind of Being she had previously believed
Him to be. Right from the beginning Satan tried to redefine the character of
God.
Satan has continued to redefine
God to this very day. Hence, the numerous groups, such as Sonship, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, etc., where their notion of God is contrary to the God presented in
the Bible. But not completely contrary, for just as in the garden of Eden,
there is always plenty of truth in the mix, such as true scriptures, twisted
and misused. (One is reminded of the time the devil tempted Jesus in the
wilderness, since then he also used scriptures as his ammunition to attack
Jesus.) It is only when we approach the scriptures under the guidance of the
Holy Spirit that we have a defence against the lies of Satan’s
alternative-reality.
In addition to
redefining God, the devil likes to make us accept a redefinition of ourselves.
One of the main ways the devil does this is by being the accuser of the
brethren. He likes to get us to accuse ourselves in our own minds. The reason
he loves to do this is because, if he can only get us to accept his accusations
of us as truth, then we immediately become subject to his definition of us
rather than the Lord’s. He does this by taking something that is true about us,
something we know and accept, and then using that truth as the basis for his
accusation. Perhaps it is a weakness that we have known and acknowledged that
he then exploits in his case against us.
The devil can never
work with original materials because he has none, but it is sufficient for him
to twist what is true in order that we may accept a false definition of
ourselves – a definition which denies that Jesus’ has saved us from our sin or
which denies that the Holy Spirit has been at work in our life. Once we accept
these false definitions of ourselves, we become vulnerable to all manner of
Satanic abuse. When we forget that His blood has washed us clean from our sins
or when we begin to doubt the Lord’s work in our life, we are, like Eve,
placing ourselves inside the anti-universe of the devil.
The solution is
very easy. All we have to do is to make every thought captive to the obedience
of Christ.
The Libido Dominandi
Perhaps what occurs more frequently than being directly
approached by the devil’s false definitions of reality is that he will interact
with other humans who, having been infected with the alternative-reality, will
potentially suck us into that system if we are not careful. Because we live in
a world in which two parallel universes are constantly waring, it is inevitable
that we will be encountering others who think according to the structures of
anti-truth.
I have heard many people complain that, when talking to
certain people, they feel that their words are constantly redefined and twisted
to mean something they never intended. I remember that when Esther was being
interviewed by court workers, she would say that even as she spoke her words,
she could feel them being twisted and redefined as soon as they left her mouth.
This sort of thing, trivial as it may seen, should usually alert us that
reality is being subverted by Satan’s alternative-reality.
In her book Controlling People, Patricia Evans has
commented on this phenomenon from a purely secular point of view. Even without
the Biblical framework, Evans observations completely fit into the model we
have been considering. She mentions how rampant is the neurosis (she calls it a
‘spell’) which takes some people over and almost compels them to falsely define
other people’s experience for them. Many people will constantly tell others
what they are thinking or what they are like. They may relate to other people
or group of people in terms of their own definition of that person or group.
They may never really hear or listen to you, but interpret everything you say
in light of their own definitions of you.
All these aspects, and many others, are symptoms of a
controlling mentality at work. It is interesting that even without the Biblical
framework, Evans noted that when one becomes subject to another’s false
definitions one begins to feel surreal, like one is entering into a false
reality or a dark abyss. Often the result is a feeling of constantly being
annihilated. One feels annihilated because the truth about you is substituted
with an anti-truth.
Redefining the Self
It
can often be the case that a person redefines themselves in a way that deviates
from the person God has actually intended them to be. This can happen for a
variety of reasons, often because the person has not been raised in an
environment that nurtures proper growth, or because they have a false idea of
who they are as a person, or because they desperately
don’t want to be a certain way, or because they are running from something,
etc.. Whatever the cause, the result is that many people are not themselves - they project a pseudo–self and then
live in that condition, denying the instincts of their true self in favour of a
false definition of themselves. As Michael Foucault has put it,
Modern man…is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.
When someone is
living in a false definition of themselves, they often react against someone
who addresses them on the level of reality. They may feel negated or
invalidated, not because the person has really negated them, but because
the person has undermined the false structure by which they have defined
themselves. If you struggle to relate to such a person on the level of reality,
you become the enemy. You make the person feel undermined, frustrated and
disoriented because the light of what you are saying is threatening the
pseudo-self to which they are so desperately clinging. The person struggling to
maintain the falsely defined self will naturally be hyper sensitive to threats
against their individuality. In so far as this ‘individuality’ is a projection
of their own false definitions, the perceived threats are real. When the person
feels undermined, invalidated and negated, they are feeling something that is
real, for their false self is being negated by the reality of the other
person. It is very easy to incite these feelings of negation, for the pseudo
self is an extremely insecure construction since it is in constant tension with
the true self – a true self that can never be killed, only stifled and
repressed. Because the pseudo self is extremely fragile, any slight challenge
to it causes internal trauma in the person, since this challenge excites the
internal polarity that already exists. Therefore, as soon as you struggle to
relate to such a person on the level of their true self, you become the
enemy. The only way to remove this threat is to interact on a purely
superficial level. For this reason, superficiality is a thing that a person in
this position will crave.
Another consequence of someone
living with a false definition of their self is that if anyone expects anything
of such a person, that expectation is met with resistance. Such expectation
produces a sense of obligation which they want to throw off. The reason such a
person will hate externally-induced obligation is because the model their life
is unconsciously following is to autonomously make themselves who they want
to be. This is undermined by obligations and sacrifices that are suggested or
arise from outside sources, for in so far as the false self is something they
are making, there isn’t a role that other people can play in that process
unless they can control how it affects them. It is only natural that such a
person will tend to be defensive about anything which might undermine that
control. Whereas with one’s true self, we are constantly enriched, strengthened
and made to grow from outside stimuli, the false-self views outside stimuli as
a threat. Consequently, they feel compelled to frantically defend their ‘self’
against any obligation that arises externally. That is why such a person may
create all manner of obligations, sacrifices and suffering for themselves while
running a hundred miles from possible obligations, sacrifices and suffering
that arise from external sources. Suffering that arises from the false self can
even become an addiction since it feeds the false self.
Treating
Unreality as Unreality
I said that when confronted with the devil’s lies, we need to
reject them by making every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. When
confronted with people whose false definitions drag us into a system of
anti-truth, the appropriate response is essentially the same. If you must
interact with such a person, it should be done in a way that does not draw
yourself into that spell.
When another person approaches
you from the standpoint of anti-reality, it is easy it begin trying to defend
the truth, as Eve did when she corrected the devil. Recall that the devil had
said, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’”
The devil said something untrue, stating that God had prohibited the eating of
every tree, and immediately Eve corrected it. That was her first mistake. By
all means we ought to contradict anti-reality by stating the truth, but to try
to correct or argue against someone who is redefining reality can
immediately draw you into the false system. (Of course, sometimes a person can
do it without realizing it, and all you need to do is to simply point it out.)
The reason it is so easy to get sucked in is because as soon as you start to
argue against anti-reality, you are not treating it for what it really is: you
are not treating it as anti-reality. When a person approaches you from that
standpoint, it is fatal to treat their statements as something which can be
corrected through rational dialogue, for that assumes the other person is
operating within the context of a rational structure but has simply made an
error. In other words, it assumes that the orientation of anti-truth is an
orientation of truth, which is exactly what the devil wants us to do. So by
responding normally to the statements of the alternative-reality, we begin to
inadvertently validate their orientation. For we are putting across the idea
that their process of redefining reality is okay, but the content of that
definition happened to be wrong.
What Eve really should have
done was not to answer the serpent at all but simply to state the truth. When
dealing with individuals who have been taken over by the alternative-reality,
that is the only way to operate. You must break the spell of the lie, not by
arguing against the lie, but by simply stating the truth and refusing to be
subject to the lie. It’s exactly what Chesterton said you have to do with a
madman. Try to answer his arguments and he has already got the better of you.
On the other hand, to ignore anti-truth acknowledges what it fundamentally is:
unreality. In this way you also prohibit the lie from taking root in your mind
and from yourself becoming sucked into the suffocating bubble of an alternative
system. This is what we find Jesus doing when he answered the devil in the
wilderness. He didn’t respond to the Satan’s quotations of scripture by showing
how Satan was misusing the scriptures. He simply quoted other scriptures in
order to proclaim the truth. This is the example we should follow. Our simple,
straight-forward testimony to the truth is the most powerful weapon with which
to defeat the alternative-reality of the devil. Only in this way can we
effectively pull down strongholds, cast down
arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God,
bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
There is another
reason why we must be cautious in how we talk to those who have been influenced
by the alternative-reality. It is a function of the alternative-reality that
the anti-thesis between the two systems becomes blurred. (This will be dealt
with at more depth in my second talk.) Although it may be that a person in the
alternative reality sees two competing systems and believes that they are in
the correct system, more often than not the person in the alternative-reality
will deny the anti-thesis between the two systems. In a variety of ways they
will struggle to synthesize mutually excluding patterns of thought, minimizing
the polarization between the two. Black and white become grey, and distinctions
of division become fuzzy. This often results in the person adopting a framework
that is constantly shifting – a framework that allows them to entertain an
interface of inconsistencies that elude all attempts at refutation. The person may
adapt a certain context when making certain points, but then, when they want to
make another point or defend themselves against objections, the parameters all
shift again. In this way, refutation ceases even to be a possibility - as soon
as you think you have grasped something solid to attack, the solidity
disappears in an sea of floating criteria.
It is quite easy to maintain a
constantly shifting apparatus of belief when there are no consequences of those
beliefs. However, the work of the Holy Spirit is to bring an interface between
the practicalities of life and what one believes, making it no longer possible
to live in a dichotomy. The work of the Holy Spirit is to show that ideas have
consequences, thus creating an interface between one’s beliefs and the
practicalities of life. The main way that this occurs is through judgement.
When God’s judgements are in the earth, no longer can people treat ideas as if
they are benign and, therefore, no longer can the parameters of ideas be
arbitrarily made to shift. Such mental free-wheeling must come to an end
because choices are continually demanded and choices are, by their very nature,
solid rather than floating. This is especially true of the kinds of choices
that a judgement scenario demands - choices where the absence of a decision is
itself a decision (“if you are not for me you are against me.”)
Return to Robin Phillips HOMEPAGE
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