Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.

• 2 Corinthians 11:3

If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves.

• Galatians 6:3

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

• Revelation 20:7-10

“Evil is easy, and has infinite forms; good is almost unique.  But a certain kind of evil is as difficult to find as what we call good; and often on this account such particular evil gets passed off as good.  An extraordinary greatness of soul is needed in order to attain to it as well as to good.”

• Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (thought number 408)

Blaise Pascal, in his book, Thoughts (Pensées), is not saying that this certain type of evil can be attained along with the good.  Nor does he say that the two are mutually exclusive.  But he is edging up next to the latter.

This thought is in a chapter entitled, “The Philosophers.”  Pascal is speaking of false teachers, false prophets, and the like.  They look good.  They have these huge churches with great sound.  And they promise you riches beyond your wildest imagination.

I like what C.S. Lewis said.  Many people see themselves finding their way in this world, but really the world is finding its way in them.

I heard a wise sage in my youth say that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I could go on with old adages, but the point is that we do not hear the warnings when they come.

I moved to a little former coal-mining town outside Pittsburgh, PA thirty years ago.  We live about four or five blocks from the Volunteer Fire Department.  For the first few months, we would hear the alarm in the middle of the night.  We would awaken.  We would pray for the well-being of whomever called 911, and after the alarm stopped, we would drift back off to sleep, if we could sleep at all.

After thirty years, half the time, I suppose, I do not even hear the alarm.  Sure, my hearing is not what it used to be, but after a while, your mind filters out certain noises.  I am never awakened in the middle of the night by the alarm.  And the half of the time that I hear the alarm is when everything else around me gets quiet.

But when it comes to heresy filtering into the church, do we hear the alarm bells?  When a preacher gives a sermon on how all religions are just as good as Christianity, do we hear the siren?  When our denomination declares that certain sins that are identified in the Bible as an abomination are no longer sins, do we show any sign of alarm?

Pascal did not want to say that certain evil can be attained while still clinging to the good.  Maybe he was thinking that once you are saved, God does not let you go.  But if we allow these secular concepts to overrule what is in Scripture, our witness to those around us is tainted.  We become ineffective.  And we lose our Heavenly rewards.  God does not let us go, if we truly believe, but can we truly believe and put up with the heresy in the church all around us?

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.