Lies and Camping

I've been thinking about the tree of knowledge of good and evil and about John 8:32. John 8:32 says you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. I am perplexed by sin. You would think if Adam and the human race gained this knowledge then we would know more truth and therefore be more free. Yet it seems that things became much worse after more knowledge came. It also seems ironic to me that the serpent was trying so desperately to use deception on Adam and Eve into gaining the knowledge of good and evil. Deception seems to be our enemy's most famous tactic yet the father of lies was trying to trick Adam and Eve into knowing truth. Because with knowledge comes truth. However, then I realized the devil was showing them the law. The wicked beauty of the thing to him was that not only was he tricking them into disobeying God and into following the evil desires forming in their hearts, but also the moment they bit into the forbidden fruit they would simultaneously know the law and already have broken it beyond repair. Knowledge of the law is a kind of truth, but there is more truth that needs to be known to be truly free. Knowing the law for Adam and Eve as well as for us now means being aware of your own wickedness. I believe I was thinking about John 8:32 out of context at first though. If you consider John 8:31 with it Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Jesus' truth was that the only way out of the devious trap laid by our enemy and that we ensnared ourselves in from the beginning was from God. More precisely, that the culmination of God's plan for our freedom was realized in Christ himself and his sacrifice for us. Only when we hold to his teaching will we live in an awareness of the truth that frees us. Old Testament heroes of the faith didn't know about Jesus yet, but they did realize this truth that their only hope from the condemnation in the law hanging over them was in God.

I find Jesus' statement interesting that the way to really know the truth is to hold to his teaching. So, if you hold to his teaching you will know truth which will set you free thereby giving you more strength and ability to hold to his teaching. The more ability to hold to his teaching you have the more you will be able to know truth. This describes the process of faith. It grows in degree incrementally. But ironically you must take hold of one (or both) to get a grip on the other and start the cycle of faith growing. Either you believe the truth and begin holding to his teaching or you begin holding to his teaching to see if it yields knowledge of the truth. Either way at some point you must have some faith to get more.

Lies are downright mean. In fact quite often they are more than mean, they can be cruel. The cruelty lies in the fact that a liar tricks the deceived into a false hope. He leads them into a faith based on ideas that simply aren't true. In a way it is a betrayal of the deceived's trust in the deceiver. Betrayal is at the heart of every lie and I believe is the real core of wickedness and treachery. I suppose that is why Judas' sin was so intense. He betrayed the savior from betrayal as well as all sin. You could say betrayal is fueled by selfishness, but really I don't think it is wrong to want good things for your self. The real evil is to trust a deceiver that leads you to think you can get good things for yourself by viewing everything in life through a self-centric lens and giving in to a lifestyle of selfishness. Our enemy the devil specializes in raw deals a.k.a. lies. He is also often stealthy enough to make us think his proposals were really our own thoughts and ideas. Granted we do have evil desires living in our fleshly bodies and these desires are sometimes the culprit behind sin, but you can bet that anytime we even remotely begin to toy with an evil desire the enemy or an agent of his is there trying to foster it and sometimes encourage it into existence. Imagination is the part of us that dreams about things that may or may not be true. It is the seed of hope and faith or worry and fear. You begin to believe what you imagine either is true and/or possible or very likely will be. Any sin begins with an imagination that dreams of what things will be like when the sinful thing is done and the dream is always a lie. What makes the dream and sin so deviously cruel and treacherous though, is that often times even after the sin has been committed we fail to see the lie and go on believing that the pleasure we found in the act of disobedience was a fulfillment of the dream we held in our imagination enabling us to want to do it again. Yet what we don't realize, the truth our enemy craftily shades us from, is that with each consecutive sin we slowly destroy our very hearts piece by piece until at some point we can't even recognize the wickedness and death it is so disgustingly full of. His highest hope for us is that we will go to our graves completely deceived having lost sight of the truth of the wickedness, pain, death and eternal condemnation that goes along with disobedience to God.

I can't figure out if I like camping or not. I know my wife really loves it and I have found enjoyment in it too at times. But there are also times when I don't enjoy it as much. It occurs to me that when we go camping we are no longer at home and we no longer have the comforts of home. I have to sleep on a bed that is less desirable than the one at home and I have to eat food that is different from the kind I would have at home. But at the same time I find that in that new environment I am a little closer to God's creation and often things are a bit quieter. It is more secluded which sometimes seems undesirable, but after a time of being there can seem desirable. The hypnotic dance of the flames in the campfire often lure my mind into a meditative state and sometimes I will begin to sing praises to my God there and remember who I am. I realize that in this world we are camping. Our home is in heaven and the comforts of that heavenly home will be great. They will be much greater than this world we camp out in for now. Paul refers to our earthly bodies as tents. Sometimes we forget that this world is just a campground and that the comforts our hearts long for are at home. Sometimes appreciating comforts of home only comes when we leave them and we never really have a comfort until we truly appreciate it.