There is a furious, ongoing Satanic assault aimed at the target-rich spiritual lives of distracted and preoccupied modern men and women for control of their minds. The weapons employed are ideas, values and principles that wreak as much devastation inwardly as bombs, bullets and pandemics do outwardly.
The prevailing secular worldview has clouded the mental perspective of many people of faith, sowing widespread confusion, especially among the young.
This is similar to when an airplane pilot falls prey to what is called a “whiteout” — a weather condition that causes disorientation and low visibility due to snow, overcast clouds, or fog. the pilot loses sight of the horizon because of the snow-covered terrain against the backdrop of a similarly colored sky.
Disaster inevitably follows.
Caught in the crossfire of competing worldviews, we can easily lose sight of our critical need for absolutes, truths and fixed principles — like the pilot’s horizon.
Many have bought into the relativistic mishmash of “making it up as we go along,” and no longer believe the gauges on their God-given “spiritual instrument panels.” No wonder they have lost their way.
In a 2015 article in Christianity Today Magazine, author Ed Stetzer wrote:
“Christians claim to believe the Bible is God’s Word. We claim it’s God’s divinely inspired, inerrant message to us. Yet despite this, we aren’t reading it. A recent LifeWay Research study found only 45 percent of those who regularly attend church read the Bible more than once a week. Over 40 percent of the people attending read their Bible occasionally, maybe once or twice a month. Almost 1 in 5 churchgoers say they never read the Bible — essentially the same number who read it every day.”
The Apostle Paul warned in Ephesians 4:13-15 that we “are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of people, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, that is, Christ.”
And if we don’t even know what God has promised us, how — as noted in James 1:5-7 — can we “ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind.”
We were warned 2,000 years ago by the Apostle Paul, in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, “But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, slanderers … lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness although they have denied its power; avoid such people as these.”
How do you think our present world got there? S-L-O-W-L-Y. One godless idea at a time.
In his satirical novel, The Screwtape Letters, author and theologian C.S. Lewis wrote of the fictional demon “Screwtape,” who is training his novice nephew “Wormwood” in the fine art of tempting humans:
“Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts … Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality, our best work is done by keeping things out.” (like the Bible)
Screwtape concluded, “Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them … the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.”
The most effective technique for squeezing good knowledge out of one’s mind is to consume its “bandwidth” with so many distractions that nothing else can get in. Those distractions don’t need to be particularly bad (or good for that matter), just compelling enough to hold the subject’s attention.
How About You?
Feeling a bit disoriented lately? Are you being guided by an internal moral compass that is referenced to immutable truths? Or are you trying to follow the “weathervane” of your feelings and emotions that get blown in all directions by the erratic “wind” of human opinion?
Will you consider turning a deaf ear to the nonstop “news” juggernaut and its slick influence peddlers, and pick up a Bible to get the real scoop, commercial free?
— D.C. Collier is a Bible teacher, discipleship mentor and writer focused on Christian apologetics. A mechanical engineer and Internet entrepreneur, he is the author of My Origin, My Destiny, a book focused on Christianity’s basic “value proposition.” Click here for more information, or contact him at don@peervalue.com. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.