The Grand Delusion

In these last days, God has sent a strong delusion to the fools of the world for not accepting the truth. According to Plato, the worst kind of lie is the "lie in the soul". This believes a lie when deep down you might suspect the truth but you resist and believe in that lie anyway. No one really wants to be deceived and a person doesn't deceive one's own self on purpose, but the fact remains that self-deception is the most common type of delusion.

Saint Paul wrote of the grand delusion in his second letter to the Thessalonians. The day of the Lord shall not come, except there come a falling away first, the Anti-christ be revealed and,

With all deceitfulness and unrighteousness in them that perish because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them a strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

There is a definite relationship with the Grand Delusion and Babylon. Think of God sending the Christian church a strong delusion for worshipping the image of the beast instead of His true nature. Would not that delusion be an illusionary mark of approval from God Himself? At any rate the delusion is very strong and includes the unbelieving world as well as Christendom.

It is up to each and every one of us to break through these false illusions. In order to make that breakthrough, the truth must be available and understood. This is the gospel of the kingdom that will be preached to the poor and that takes action beyond what the church has been doing, but it is more than that. Babylon must be exposed, the true nature of the beast and its image must be known and oppression must be recognized and denounced. Then the Bride of Christ can speak as one and become holy. This is the wisdom of the prophets. Martin Buber writes of causality and "only two are left alongside each other, delusion and task. But now the actualization commences within me."

A good example to be found of the grand delusion is in the McCarthyism of the fifties. This type of paranoia viewed communism as the world of the Anti-christ and the World Council of Churches as the false prophet. The delusion had been described by one writer as "the Multiple Untruth", a technique comparable to Hitler's Big Lie. The Multiple Untruth created for McCarthy an audience he would not have had if he had been a more simpler or more modest liar. One or two communists were not enough of a lie to gain credibility, so the paranoia was blown into hundreds of communist infiltrators invading the State Department and was eagerly believed. The church, rather than standing up for truth, chose the lukewarm materialist gospel of free enterprise to justify exploitation of the poor, the suppression of the social gospel and the oppression of the third world. The god of self-interest helped them to delude themselves and they taught the very lies that they believed from the pulpit. Those who disagreed were blackballed, branded bleeding heart heretics, traitors, fellow travelers, pinkos and such, discriminated against and exploited further. And the poor suffered as the social gospel was repudiated and the prophets despised.

"If an American is concerned only about his nation," wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., "He will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?"

Judgment is coming for those under this delusion. David Wilkerson warns us that "the false prophets that now preach the worst deception are economists, government statisticians, politicians, experts, and slumbering shepherds. God will allow them to be deceived and be deluded by lies. He will blind their eyes and send upon them helpless bewilderment. They will be the benign agents of satan to deceive and mislead this wicked nation. With distortions, false predictions, lying promises, they will lull the nation with a false sense of security."

Suzanne de Dietrich writes of the Old Testament prophet Amos and his denunciation of the vices and prosperity of Israel destroying what was previously simple and unpolished. "A nation is very sick, a government is very weak, when neither the one or the other can bear to be told the truth. And the word of the desert prophet whose voice had so long been silent will resound in men's hearts as a word of God, a word of judgment and a word of liberation - a word which is strong and encouraging. It sounds like the wind of the desert, the roaring of the lion, and still has the power to awaken us after two thousand eight hundred years."

Ignorance, pride and delusion are the cords that bind the church to Babylon. Hireling preachers have for too long deceived their parishioners with soothing words of peace and safety and deluding them into thinking that they will not see judgment. They have preached prosperity in the Lord for so long that the church has become too comfortable to notice the signs of the times or have ears to hear the voice of prophecy to flee from Babylon so they will not come under condemnation. "For they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord. They wanted none of my counsel and they despised all my reproof, therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices."

It is not an easy task to buck tradition and go against what you have been taught from good people that you trust. The restoration principle would be to break that delusion by an open mind to a divine influence, a liberal heart of love to reach out to others and a sincere effort to try to find the truth for yourself. This is not what many expect from truth and will willingly believe the lie out of pride and blind allegiance to a doomed religious system.
[136, 139, 176, 190, 204, 224, 250, 270, II Thessalonians 2, Proverbs, Jeremiah]



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