Self-deception may be the worst kind of deception there is.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ways to be deceived, and all can result in grievous errors and long-term consequences that cannot be undone. The lies of a family member, partner or close friend can be exceedingly painful to discover. The lies of religious leaders or respected teachers can be devastating to one’s faith and deeply discouraging to deal with.
No, it’s not the degree of pain it causes that makes self-deception so awful, it’s the difficulty we have exposing it.
Reality Catching Up
External sources of deception have their cure built into them. Scripture will often uncover them, but that need not be the case. Almost anything will do. Logic, observation, gossip, bad luck or the simple unexpected revelation of a previously unknown fact — all these and many other perfectly ordinary events can easily stick a pin in the deception balloon and puncture it forever.
So when somebody tells you, “Diversity is our strength”, we may be fooled for a while, but as we have discovered recently, eventually reality catches up with a false narrative and the evidence against the magic wordspell becomes too strong to ignore. Cheating wives or husbands may pull the wool over their spouse’s eyes for a time, but as their unconscious changes in behavior multiply, we come to realize some sort of shenanigans are going on. We may not know precisely where the lie is located, but we know we’re being gaslit. In the case of infidelity, there is always a third party out there to spill the beans and no end of mutual acquaintances in possession of hard evidence or growing suspicions. Too many small cracks and the dam will spring a leak. Even the great Satanic deceptions of the latter days will eventually be exposed. Some deceptions take more time than others to uncover, but few lies can persist for a lifetime.
Self-deception can. The lie resides deep down in the heart, where nobody but God can see and diagnose it, and where every year it persists makes it harder to unravel because the deceiver/deceived becomes increasingly invested in maintaining it. Who wants to believe they’ve been misled their entire lives, and the culprit was … me? Only scripture can reveal self-deception and only the Holy Spirit can apply his word to our hearts as a remedy. If we’re not regularly exposed to the word of God, self-deception will simply self-perpetuate.
Self-Deception by the Numbers
Here then, in no particular order, are five of the Bible’s most common manifestations of self-deception:
5/ Keeping Laws Can Make Me Right with God
“For sin … deceived me and through it killed me.”
Paul is dealing with the question of how a good law can produce such awful fruit. Romans 7 describes a man dead to the law — freed from its penalty through faith in Christ — but constantly returning to it only to be devastated by his inability to keep it. He needs to learn the lesson that the law is a yoke no man can bear. So long as we seek in the tiniest measure to establish our righteousness before God through the law, we will always be in a state of self-deception and legalistic paralysis.
4/ Following the Right Man Will Get Me to the Right Place
“Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise.”
Beware of any man who offers you a system of thinking about scripture that appears to resolve every issue you’ve ever had with it. Every mature, serious Christian has some of the answers — the Holy Spirit makes sure of that — but no one man has them all. The world is full of helpful books, but all have their flaws and authorial blind spots. No single set of human ideas is worthy of becoming the lens through which we view scripture.
This was one of the major problems in Corinth. Each one believed following the right man was the key to a superior spiritual experience and as a result, the congregation was divided. Paul’s conclusion is “Let no one boast in men.” Such “wisdom” is not wise at all.
3/ I am Impervious to Temptation
“For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.”
The “something” in view here means impervious to temptation.
At one extreme in the Christian experience, there is the error of equating sins that are not equal. A gentle woman sees a man who committed adultery, and reminds us we are all sinners. Certainly this is true, but a failure of charity or the occasional harsh thought should not paralyze us when confronting evil that is taking over a friend’s life. A fellow believer in trouble needs our help, not our guilty excuses for bowing out.
At the other extreme lies the error Paul is addressing in Galatians. “Sure, I’ll help,” says the eager Christian friend, not thinking for a moment that he too might be trapped in the same web to which his fellow believer has succumbed. So he “helps” by policing his friend’s porn addiction for him in the name of “accountability”, and ends up viewing and thinking things that ought to be no part of his experience.
The need to “keep watch” is always with us. At the root of the problem is the self-deceived notion that “I am above this.” No, no you’re not.
2/ That Little Slip of the Tongue was Harmless
“If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.”
“Worthless” is a strong word but James is not wrong. Everyone slips from time to time in his speech, but a quick apology for lack of grace, a snarky comment or sharing a juicy bit of gossip can often repair the damage to one’s testimony. Acknowledging you are subject to the Lord’s standards and are trying to bring yourself in line with them can turn a few seconds’ loss of spiritual perspective into a teaching moment. My father’s timely apologies for things he said in error to a young man who often didn’t deserve them made me think more of him, not less.
But the man who justifies his sinful speech in his own mind and keeps silent about it associates his Lord with disorder, lack of restraint and gracelessness. Onlookers will disregard his acts of piety as readily as if he were Jim or Tammy Faye.
1/ I’ll Be Fine
“The pride of your heart has deceived you.”
The Edomites in Obadiah predate the Christian era, but they provide a useful illustration of the particular form of self-deception that believes safety and security are a result of anything we have done to prepare for disaster. “I’ll be fine,” said Edom from his perch in the cleft of the rock. “I’ll be fine,” says the Christian with a fat pension approaching retirement. Perhaps he’s invested wisely and the numbers in his account give him an unarticulated sense that maybe he’s managed his affairs with greater wisdom than the retired missionary to whom he occasionally sends a few bucks.
Just as the Babylonians brought Edom down to earth, history demonstrates that under the right circumstances even the greatest accumulations of wealth can vanish overnight. Believers who put their trust in it are building their house on the sand. On the other hand, even a worldwide financial collapse cannot hurt the man who looks to the Lord for his daily bread.
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