Seeing Through the Illusions

The scriptures referenced to are 2 Corinthians 4:3-6.

You know that Halloween party trick where you reach into a covered box and are told you are touching someone's guts or eyeballs, when they are really just cold wet pasta or peeled grapes. Because you can't see what you are touching, you are drawing conclusions based on incomplete data.

Even when you see something you can jump to conclusions. Magicians know that they can make you think that you are seeing the impossible. But they don't let you see inside the box where a woman appears to be sawn in half or made to disappear. Again, illusions depend on you receiving incomplete or misleading data. Old radio dramas used a lot of audio illusions to make sound effects. In the famous War of the Worlds broadcast of 1939, the scraping, echoing sound of the large hatches of the Martian rockets opening was created by a technician with a mic in the men's bathroom, screwing open a jar held just below the lip of a toilet. Were the radio audience to see how it was done they would have laughed rather than have been scared.

Seeing something gives us information that our other senses just can't provide. A blind person may hear someone approach but unless their gait makes a distinctive sound they won't know who it is from a distance. And they may, by feeling your face, be able to tell who you are and even if your features are symmetrical and pleasing, but not that you have red hair or gray eyes. And yet, as in a magic trick, even people who see do not see everything.

In today's passage from 2 Corinthians, Paul says “the god of this world has blinded the mind of the nonbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” This sentence alone will take some unpacking.

Who is “the god of this world?” It seems pretty obvious that Paul is talking about Satan, which, in Hebrew, literally means “the adversary.” Yet isn't there only one God? Yes in the sense that there is one real God, who created everything. But people can and do make gods of anything they put first in their life. They needn't worship Satan. They may instead be ultimately committed to communism or capitalism or patriotism or self-sufficiency or art or science or power or sex or any kind of pleasure. It doesn't matter if it is an ideology or an economic system or a political system or an experience or a person. It doesn't matter if it is basically a good thing. If people put it before everything else, including God, it becomes their god, and therefore an adversary of the true God.

And the more false gods that are out there, the more they obscure the real God. Go onto the internet and you can choose from thousands of things to believe and follow. And like the idols of old, these false gods have their priests and promoters. They have websites and YouTube channels and Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. And they blind people to the gospel precisely by getting in the way of their seeing it. Like a magician, they distract people from looking where they should be looking. And they are sophisticated about it. When a magician calls up volunteers to look at all the sides of the magic cabinet or try the strength of the chains with which you will bind them, that is part of the illusion. They are having you look at precisely what is not relevant to how the trick is done. They will distract you from how the thing actually works. In the same way, the promoter of a pyramid scheme lets you think you are your own boss. He doesn't tell you how you are really earning money for him and that the whole plan is ultimately unworkable. It's appropriate that a recent miniseries on multi-level marketing was called On Becoming a God in Central Florida.

The prophet of a false god will have all the testimonials and quotes from great thinkers and lines of argument you could wish. But they don't want you to look at them too closely or think too deeply. They use jargon to derail clear thinking. As W.C. Fields said, “If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.” So they will use words like “freedom” but they don't let you ask “freedom from what?” and “freedom to do what?” Because no one is free from everything in the world nor are we free to do anything we wish. We are certainly not free from the consequences of what we do. We have seen that in the fallout from the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s: STDs and unwanted and neglected children. The only people who enjoyed this sexual freedom were womanizers, or as we now call them, abusers.

And these false gods don't actually offer you real freedom of choice. Magicians make it look as if you are choosing the card rather than that they are subtly forcing it on you. False gods make up the categories from which you choose to make it look like you are making a free choice. So they are selective and filter what you see and how you see it. They set up false dichotomies to make you reject one patently false idea while accepting its equally false opposite. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis points out that people today tend think of ideas in terms of whether (to update his language) they are either “nice in theory” or “practical,” “outdated” or “the latest thing,” “traditional” or “unconventional.” What they don't ask is if they are “true” or “false,” “good” or “bad,” “moral” or “immoral.” Thus Keith Ranier of the NEXIVM cult went from convincing his followers that negative thinking was not useful to arguing that there was no such thing as sexual abuse, not even of children. Of course such muddled thinking is useful if you want to justify terrible things. Contrary to popular belief, cult members are usually bright people, who are attracted to “advanced” thinking and conveniently ignore checking it against basic things like reality or morality.

One of the false dichotomies that is popular today is based on the idea that belief in God is evil or that it makes people do evil things. So the only real choice is not to believe in God. Practically every time you see an evangelist or preacher in a TV show or movie he is up to no good. Very religious people are usually depicted as hateful and harmful. It's a trope so embedded in our fictions and even serious discussions that nobody seems to realize that 85% of the people in the world claim a religion. That would make the vast majority of people evil. Yet, according to a study from the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice from Old Dominion University, “...more than 40 years of empirical scholarship suggests that religion suppresses criminal behavior.” As a jail chaplain I've found that 64% of inmates, or nearly 2/3s, claim no religion. And according to sociologist Rodney Stark, the higher a city's church membership rate, the lower its rates of burglary, larceny, robbery, assault and homicide. Religion restrains evil.

Again by directing the public's attention to the small percentage of religious people that do bad things, the false gods distract them from the overwhelming majority of believers who don't. It distracts from the food pantries and homeless shelters and literacy programs and refugee programs, not to mention the hospitals and schools, that churches run throughout the world. Religious people are more likely to be volunteers even in secular organizations. They are more likely to give blood. Religious people are more likely to be pro-social in their behavior.

But we are not merely concerned with religion in general. We are looking at the gospel, or as Paul calls it here, “the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” And the chief way that the things put forward as rival gods block that light is by not focusing on Jesus at all. Because it is really hard to say God is evil if you acknowledge that Jesus is the image of God and reveals what God is really like.

When he was a chaplain at Oxford, scholar N.T. Wright would speak to students during orientation. And after his talk students would tell him that they were unlikely to come to chapel because they didn't believe in God. And Wright would say, “And what god is it that you don't believe in?” And they would stammer out something about a cruel god who didn't want anyone to have fun. And Wright would reply, “Well, I don't believe in that god either. I believe in the God of love revealed in Jesus Christ.”

Once you put a face on God and that face is that of Jesus, it's hard to believe all the bad things the world says about God. Jesus was selfless, healing people, going without rest and sometimes without meals, traveling without a place to lay his head. His message was that God is incredibly loving and unbelievably forgiving. The whole of the law he summarized as love: love for God and love for other people, including one's enemies. And yet he was condemned and executed by the religious and political leaders.

And rather than giving up on Jesus or finding another wannabe Messiah, his followers came out of hiding and faced the very people who had Jesus killed, saying he was alive again. They didn't take it back even when condemned to death themselves. In fact, their chief persecutor saw the risen Jesus and became his foremost missionary. He himself became the object of persecution and yet held to Jesus' ethic of repaying evil with good. He too died for his faith, saying. “For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

This is the glory of the gospel. It is Jesus. It is what he said and did and how it has inspired others to follow in his footsteps. If he is what God is like, why would anyone seek another god?

And if people just look beyond the false gods and their prophets, they will see the light of this gospel, this good news. And its piercing light will expose the deceptions that come from putting other things before the God who is in Christ. As I said, even good things make inadequate gods when elevated above the real God. Instead they are out of their proper order in the hierarchy of values and thus cause many of the disorders we see in this world. Rather than pursuing them, our ultimate goal must be to get closer to Jesus, both in our relationship to him and in our emulation of him.

Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.” (John 8:12) But he knew he would return to his Father and so he also said to his followers, “You are the light of the world.” (Matthew 5:14-16) We are to reflect his light in all we think and say and do and thereby show up the illusions and tricks by which false gods keep folks in the dark. We are to be beacons, leading people out of this benighted realm to the true light that enlightens the world, Jesus, the very image of the God who is love.