Living in an age of deception

Deception: hiding the truth, especially to gain an advantage. Maybe your favourite Disney movie villain comes to mind – Ursula’s conspiring pact to steal Arielle’s voice, or Cruella, scheming to get her hands on those adorable Dalmatians for her fur collection. With self-deception, however, the waters are murkier. It’s defined as the process of rationalising away the relevance of opposing evidence, leading individuals to convince themselves of a false belief or reality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that philosophers divide over the question of self-deception’s intentionality. Are self-deceivers morally responsible for their state? Can collectives be self-deceived, and how so? Is our bent toward self-deception social, psychological, biological or simply an inadvertent byproduct of evolution? 

A Christian might link this back to the original sin. Perhaps when Adam and Eve agreed with the serpent’s deception over and above the truth of God’s word, the innate ability for humans to succumb to our own self-deception became part of the fabric of our fallen being. As it says in the word: 

“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? But I, the Lord, search all hearts and examine secret motives. I give all people their due rewards, according to what their actions deserve” (Jeremiah 17:9-10, NLT).

Desperately deceived

As a teenager, I struggled with a very serious eating disorder. At the root was a dark depression – the product of my parents’ early divorce. And my mother had recently been divorced again – this time from my abusive stepfather. We’d moved across not only houses or neighbourhoods but states for my final years of high school, and my beloved grandfather had died unexpectedly, all during the same tumultuous season. My heart’s secret motive? Ending my own life seemed like the simplest way to avoid my pain. I began severely restricting food and, in months, deceived myself into thinking my underweight body was overweight. 

You might say I was the victim of bad circumstances. No matter the root, the truth remains: humans are vulnerable, fallible and able to fall prey to self-deception as easily as sheep scatter without a shepherd.

Jumping on the deception bandwagon

This morning, I read in Numbers about Korah’s rebellion, where jealousy led to grievous group deception. In chapter 16, Korah and some of his mates conspired against Moses and Aaron for their God-ordained place in the priesthood. Moses and Aaron tried desperately to talk sense into them, but the men were totally convinced in their conclusions, to the point of a violent ending. The earth opened up and swallowed the three men and their households into it, along with their tents and all their belongings. The Bible says the earth closed over them so that they completely vanished, and their screams could be heard as they fell, frightening those around them. Immediately after this, 250 men were physically consumed by the fire of the Lord, again concerning Moses and Aaron’s appointments (see Numbers 16:31-35). 

The magnitude of this harrowing scene hadn’t fully hit me until I read a few verses further down. “The next day the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. ‘You have killed the Lord’s people’”(v41). You can read for yourself how that worked for them.

There are many biblical examples of humanity’s scary capacity for deception

There are many biblical examples of humanity’s scary capacity for deception. In Matthew 27, the angry crowd before Pilate demanded the “well-known prisoner” Barabbas be set free, so the sinless Jesus could be crucified, their deception fuelled by the devious leadership of religious false teachers (Matthew 27:20). Later, it took the visual presentation of Jesus on the cross, a physical earthquake and dead bodies raised to life, appearing around Jerusalem, to awaken many around Jesus to His true, sinless nature and holiness (Matthew 27:54). The apostle Paul hated and murderously persecuted Christians before encountering Jesus on the Damascus road (Acts 9) and becoming the most prolific apostle. His deception had been spearheaded by wrong religious zealotry, and only righted by his Damascus road experience – a one-on-one encounter with the resurrected Christ.

The truth that breaks the power of deception

Have you looked on the red carpets lately? You’ll find a more socially relevant self-deception, rooted in vanity. Beautiful stars, male and female alike, appear before the masses, nearly emaciated; their heads look large, lips huge, cheeks gaunt, skin seems to hang from their personages. It’s like they’ve all been given the same secret sauce to svelteness, but didn’t get the memo that a little goes a long way. They seem to look the same, but, on the outside looking in on celebrity, most of us have the same reaction – these poor people are deluded.  

Since the Garden of Eden, we’ve been fearfully, wonderfully made, but the Devil knows that we are also vulnerable to deception. Like Paul and those early Christ followers, personally meeting Jesus was what pulled me out of the wayward, forlorn depression that plagued my life for years. When I learned the gospel, that sin leads to death but the free gift of life is found in Jesus Christ, our Lord, I fell in love with the Bible, devouring it and its teachings, a hungry soul feasting on her first true meal in years. 

Jesus said: “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32, NLT). Life is found in the truth of God’s word, which is able to break the plague of sin and deception over the world. Dark mistruths – like one can be born in the wrong body, lust equals love, and light can be found in darkness – can only be dispelled when Christians lift up Jesus, the light of the world and the Bible, the word of God.