By Bill Randles
Used with permission.
[E]ven him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of 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 strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)
Evil thrives on lies. The fall of man came about by the acceptance of a lie. Satan himself is the father of lies. Lying and evil are indivisible.
We are currently living in a time of the mass acceptance of evil. Daily the case is being successfully made for things such as homosexual marriage, abortion, pedophilia, the justification of Islamic terror. People are unwittingly being conditioned to accept the previously unacceptable through the various forms of mass media.
It is surreal to see otherwise reasonable people advocate what only a short while ago would have been unthinkable to them. How have we gotten to this point? Evil has been successfully marketed to mainstream America.
I remember the day after the 9-11 attacks, going to the post office to buy stamps and being handed a packet of Islamic “Eid” stamps that had recently been released by the post office. I politely asked for anything but Islamic stamps, only to receive this retort from the normally friendly postman, “Christianity has done just as much terror as any other religion, we don’t have any room to complain!”
We regularly receive the same hostility from otherwise normal people, whenever the subject of homosexual marriage comes up, as it has frequently lately. People who wouldn’t have dreamed of advocating any position endorsing so-called “gay rights” are now angry if such rights are ever so much as called into question. What’s going on here?
I believe what we are seeing here is the onset of something called “the strong delusion” warned about in the scripture above and other places in scripture. It follows upon and is a consequence of another phenomenon called “the apostasy,” that is the falling away.
Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition. ( 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3; bold added)
It is not only proclaiming Christians who will fall away in many cases, but the Judeo-Christian world is undergoing a departure from its Christian view and influence and is in a vigorous process of repudiating the religious bedrock of its own culture, as well as the institutions that sprang out of it. This is predicted in the second Psalm:
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us (Psalm 2:1-3)
The prophesied “great apostasy” includes the departure of much of the Christian church from the faith once and for all delivered. But it goes far beyond it. The “Kings of the earth and their rulers,” that is the leaders, educators, clergy, and opinion and culture shapers share a consensus that the influence of Christianity is bondage that must be cast off!
For example, by means of a constant stream of media propaganda and sophisticated marketing, homosexuality has been sold as a viable option to mainstream America. People are embracing the lie that has been sold to them. Without thought, they are parroting the propaganda. This is true even of many confessing Christians!
A particularly effective aspect of the marketing is the dishonest but deliberate confusion of the (valid) Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, with “homosexual rights.”
Shelby Steele
This has been effective because as authors like Shelby Steele point out, a constant drumbeat of “white guilt” heaped upon Americans by the media and academia for the legacy of slavery and racism has made us vulnerable to any accusations of that nature, whether true or false. The last thing anyone wants to be called in America is a racist.
By the time homosexual activists deliberately hijacked the civil rights movement, claiming to be the new victims of discrimination, too many of us had already been put on the defensive to raise an objection. Propagandistic programs in schools such as “Days of silence,” in which solidarity is created between gay and straight students by means of keeping silence, have been largely effective.
Seizing upon dubious martyrs, such as Matthew Shepherd,1 who was killed in a drug deal gone bad, has also played into our American sense of sympathy for the victims. This is the logic behind “Anti-bullying” campaigns in our schools.
When homosexual activists in the media realized that most Americans didn’t actually know a homosexual, they wrote them into the scripts of sitcoms and talk shows to “humanize” the perversion and break down resistance to it. Now through trash shows such as “Friends,” “Will and Grace,” and “Ellen,” everyone knows a homosexual and respects or accepts that lifestyle!!
Perhaps one of the greatest factors that has brainwashed our population is “Political correctness,” which is a powerful factor in both the suppression of truth and in the promotion of the big lies. Succumbing to political correctness actually causes on to hold to a cognitive dissonance, we cannot speak the truth we know.
Everybody knows the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but they can’t say it, they must praise the style of his “clothes” to stay on good terms with the emperor.
Everybody knows that Islam is evil, violent, and anti-American to the core, but few can say it. Everybody knows homosexuality is twisted and unclean but few dare say it. Honesty has been strangled to death in the political warfare of our times.
Instead, we are strongly pressured to corrupt ourselves and to literally sell our own souls in the service of the lie. We are in danger of becoming reprobate, no longer able to distinguish good from evil! Worse than that, we are in danger of actually being biased against good and in favor of evil.
Theodore Dalrymple is insightful here on how this pressure has succeeded in getting us to accept evil:
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. – Theodore Dalrymple
This is as good an insight as any I have heard yet, as to how many are losing their soul, accommodating and even championing evil. They have been conditioned by PC to first be silent in the presence of obvious lies, eventually to “assent to the lies,” and in many cases have been forced to repeat them over and over again.
Homosexuality is just one of the previously unthinkable “big lies” which we have received. There are many related abominations commonly accepted, which fly in the face of all reason, logic and experience.
People are being set up for the ultimate soul-destroying lie Paul warned about in the above quote. The lie is the old lie, that man can be “as gods,” defining for ourselves truth, morality, virtue, and meaning with no reference to the God of the Bible.
The rot of our society is almost complete; the only hope for anyone is to take seriously the once well-known promise of Jesus
If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (John 8:32)
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