Systematized Deception
by George Davis and Michael Clark
from www.stormharvest.com
In Ephesians 4:14 and 15, Paul sets forth a contrast of truth and
deception. Truth is represented by the following words, ".[that]
you may grow up into [eis] him in all things." Deception is
described by the words, ".tossed to and fro, and carried about
with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning
craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive." The words,
"by which they lie in wait to deceive" take on an entirely
different meaning in the Wescott-Hort Interlinear.
[TOWARD]
[THE] [WITH-WAY (systematizing)] [OF-THE] [STRAYING (deception)]
(Ephesians 4:14 Westcott-Hort) Ephesians 4:14. This passage would
more correctly read, "so that we may no longer be minors, tossed
to and fro and being carried about by every wind of teaching, by
human caprice, by craftiness with a view to the systematizing of the
deception."
Darby translates this passage similarly.
In
order that we may be no longer babes, tossed and carried about by
every wind of *that* teaching which is in the sleight of men, in
unprincipled cunning with a view to systematized error. (Ephesians
4:14 Darby)
Vincent's Word Studies captures the entire thought
in two words, "Error organizes." The King James rendition,
"lie in wait," is represented in the Greek text by the
compound word methodeia, which means "a deliberate planning or
system." Our word "method" comes from this Greek
word.
Kittel comments, "It first has the sense 'to treat
methodically, to handle according to plan. . .'" Through 1900
years of ecclesiastical conditioning, we have come to view order as a
key component of truth. Along with the extra-biblical axiom of
"cleanliness is next to godliness" we have placed
"orderliness is next to godliness." We often hear that God
is not the author of confusion, but error and deception are not
random or chaotic. In fact, organization is the chief power of
deception.
According to Jesus, everyone who is born of the
Spirit is like the wind (John 3:8), not subject to systematic
control, but into the flow of the Spirit. In countless verbal and
practical ways, religion daily declares Christ's teaching here to be
false, instead teaching that adherence to rigid denominational
teaching is the only safe way to avoid deception.
Order is no
indicator of truth. In fact, deception is more structured than truth.
Russia under Stalin and Germany under Hitler had rigid order and
systematic teaching under the systems of Communism and Nazism. Both
claimed to exist for the good of the collective masses.
Error
always organizes and the greater the deception the more systematized
it becomes. It is no wonder that as we near the end of all things, a
global government is emerging that by all appearances will make
Hitler and Stalin look like choir boys. Phrases like global
sustainability, global economy, and global warming are driven into
our heads by the controlled media.
Carnal men take the
dynamics of the Spirit and make a static, systematic organization out
of it. What starts out as a dynamic life force becomes a hollow form
of godliness. This sham displaces the power of God to bring about a
true inward change in the individual, the only starting place. You
cannot force men to make moral decisions by writ of law. It is in our
Adamic nature to systematize legal structures so that we can cast off
the restraint of the Spirit of God! David wrote, "But you have
cast off and abhorred, you have been angry with your anointed. You
have made void the covenant of your servant: you have profaned his
crown by casting it to the ground" (Psalms 89:38-39 KJ2000).
Hosea wrote, "Israel has cast off the thing that is good: the
enemy shall pursue him. They have set up kings, but not by me: they
have made princes, and I knew it not: of their silver and their gold
have they made them idols that they may be cut off" (Hosea 8:3-4
KJ2000). This is why the living word of God is constantly cutting
away the soulish counterfeit life that seeks to replace the true life
of the Spirit.
Which will it be--the soulish counterfeit or
the true life of the Spirit? One will displace the other.
The
Underlying Misconception
The foundational
misconception behind all systemic deception is the idea that order
brings life. We see this lived out all around us in religious circles
today. You can hear it in virtually every sermon. If you do the right
things passionately enough and long enough God will see your
faithfulness and bless you. Everything is about achieving the proper
God-pleasing form-building according to the pattern, yet they reject
the one Pattern that the Father as set before us. Jesus is the
Pattern! Order does not bring life. Divine life brings God-pleasing
form and functionality that is consistent with His nature.
John
put it this way, "In him was life, and the life was the light of
men" (John 1:4 RSV). The life is in Him and that Life is the
only Light that men can accurately see by! Out of Life comes light.
He has been made unto us wisdom (1 Corinthians 1: 29). True wisdom
and knowledge flows, moment by moment, from divine life. There is no
other source for it. All so-called "wisdom" that does not
proceed from the Father of light is not light but is artificial,
earthly, sensual and ultimately, devilish (see James
3:13-15).
Source determines everything. If the source is the
souls of men the best you can have is a poor counterfeit of the Real.
"Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a
bramble bush" (Luke 6:44 NRSV). Or as Gerhard Kittel succinctly
put it, "Life stands always under the question of its origin and
goal."
The Soulish Counterfeit
The
Pharisees give us a clear example of the cause and effect of the
soulish counterfeit.
Under the old dispensation the law was
binding but it was not binding enough to suit the Pharisees. No. They
set themselves to give the demands of the law an even greater
structure and definition as it applied to the daily life of Israel.
At the heart of this effort was the twofold lust to distinguish
themselves and control the people in the name of God. Soon they had
written volumes of commentaries that they placed on the shoulders of
the people-heavy burdens that they refused to remove-systematized
error. What was the end of this error? Error always results in one
thing-shutting up the kingdom of heaven against men. Jesus addressed
this deception head on. "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! Because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for
you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go
in" (Matthew 23:13 RSV).
What this deception amounts to
is simply the replacing of one order with another-the replacing of
divine order (the rule of God) with human order- the true life and
leading of the Spirit vs. the soulish counterfeit enforced by men.
Human order always has the affect of shutting people away from God's
rule through intermediary interference. Though the Bible has much to
say about the necessity of living by and walking in the Spirit, these
self-appointed mediators will not permit something so haphazard to
occur on their watch. They are not going into God's kingdom and
neither is anyone else! Though they speak of God and His kingdom in
glowing terms they are the enemies of the direct rule of
God.
Everything that man does in the name of religion is
diabolically designed to supplant the order of God's Spirit, to
replace the order of life with another system, order and head. In
this carnal order all things are held together organizationally, by
ecclesiastical heads in a diocese system governed by a religious
hierarchy. Judaism and Islam have their own counterparts as well and
are equally as hateful in their orthodox form to all who do not
believe as they do. The wars that are being waged on the earth today
are powered by systematized deception. The very definition of the
word religion-to rebind-is what drives these religious sects.
The
early church lived by a different order altogether. In God's order
Paul wrote, "And he [Jesus] is before all things, and by him all
things are held together" (Colossians 1:15-17 KJ2000). The whole
universe is held or bound together by Jesus alone, not men. Carnal
men seek to rebind them to another, the master of systematized
deception.
God's Respect for the Human Will
At
the heart of God's order is a respect for the human will. God does
not impose or force his will upon anyone. The height of the human
will is willingness, not reluctance, not begrudging-ness but a
voluntary response to His love. Through sharing His perspective and
communicating His passion by His Spirit, He seeks to bring believers
into His viewpoint until both wills become one. "Come now let us
reason together says the Lord." In short, He works in us both to
will and do of His good pleasure and when His work in us is finished,
His good pleasure is our good pleasure. The order of God is based on
union ("Emanuel - God with us") and revelation, not a
mindless objective obedience. We will know if we press on to know the
Lord (see Hosea 6:3). In other words, if we know the Lord, we know
all we need to know. Truly the gospel of the New Testament is God
introducing Himself through His Son. It is through contact with Him
that we learn Him and come to know our Father in a greater and living
way. As we are in union with Him we are taught by Him. Anything else
is deception because it leads people to think that they have a
relationship with God when they do not. They have a purely platonic
understanding of God-not founded in reality. So much of what goes on
in the name of preaching and teaching is nothing more that theorizing
what God is like and what His will is. Instead it should be
encouraging people to seek our Father with all their hearts. Jesus
taught the disciples to pray, "Our Father," not "Great
God in heaven." All through the gospels the orthodox Jews used
the phrases "our father David, our father Abraham, our father
Jacob," but in their deception they could not conceive of the
God of the universe as their Father. And because Jesus referred to
God as His Father they wanted to kill Him.
The order of the
kosmos (the rudimentary principles of the world) is designed to
manipulate and bypass human volition. Though God holds the human will
in the highest regard, man does not. In man's mind the bottom line is
always the chief consideration. Therefore the end justifies the
means. He wants results and so tends to despise what God values,
running rough shod over the wills of his fellow men.
The point
we want to make here is simply this, methodology and systematizing
are not "next to godliness" but rather man's soulish
substitutes for life and growth-growing up into Him. We say
substitutes because methodology and Divine Life are intrinsically
opposed to one another because of their entirely different origins
and births. You cannot mix the two. The former is of the world and is
controlled by its mode of government--the rudimentary principles of
this world. The later is of a heavenly origin and is exclusively born
and guided from heaven through God's Spirit. We see this dependency
upon the Spirit lived out by the early Church in the Book of Acts.
Before long, though, they began to leave the divine order and turn
again to the rudimentary principles of the world. Remember the Greek
word for world is kosmos which means a system. Paul addressed this
carnal tendency to leave the divine order and return to the governing
principles of the world in virtually every one of his letters. He
asked the foolish Galatians, "Who has bewitched you. . . Having
begun in the Spirit, are you now completed in the flesh?" (See
Galatians 3). These foolish Galatians were trading life for
systematized error, the overtly rigid order of the Judaizers.
We
get an even clearer perspective from Paul's warning to the
Colossians. Please note the contrast.
"Let no one rob you
of your prize by a voluntary humility and worshipping of the angels,
dwelling in the things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his
fleshly mind, and not holding firmly to the Head, from whom all the
body, being supplied and knit together through the joints and
ligaments, grows with God's growth. If you died with Christ from the
elements of the world, [kosmos - system] why, as though living in the
world, do you subject yourselves to ordinances, (21) "Don't
handle, nor taste, nor touch" (all of which perish with use),
according to the precepts and doctrines of men? Which things indeed
appear like wisdom in self-imposed worship, and humility, and
severity to the body; but aren't of any value against the indulgence
of the flesh." (Colossians 2:18-23 WEB)
The general
direction of error is always toward rigidity, captivity, tyranny and
loss. It is diabolically designed to keep you from something-to shut
up the kingdom of God from you. Hence Paul's exhortation, "Let
no one rob you of your prize." He goes on to say what the prize
is and the method that the thief (Satan) uses to rob believers of
that. The prize is Christ and involvement in His Body. His Body is
divinely knit together and as a result, grows with God's growth. What
does the prince of this world use to rob believers? He tries to
separate us from divine life by subjugating us to ordnances and in
doing so he entices us onto earthly, unholy ground controlled by men
in league with Satan. He deceives us into living by our soul-life
(psuchikos) and attempting to finish what God has started in us by
means of the flesh.