Recently, when visiting my son’s family, I was quizzing my two-and-a-half year old grandson about the color of each family member’s hair. After asking about several family members, I asked him, “What color is Grandma’s hair?” he paused for a moment and then said, “Gray!”
Inwardly, I was somewhat shocked! I don’t really think of myself as having gray hair. When I look in the mirror, I see light brown! OK, to be honest, I see little tinges of gray around the edges and some gray hairs sprinkled throughout, but not enough (in my opinion) to consider myself gray.
Children, however, are usually pretty honest in these things. So, I began to wonder if it’s really true that my hair is turning gray. Do my friends and other people see me as gray?
After careful examination in front of the mirror, and outside in the sunlight (the sunlight is painfully revealing) I have to confess, “Yes, I’m getting gray.” I guess I’ve just been deceiving myself!
In considering this interaction with my grandson, I’ve realized just how subtle deception can be, and that I’m not immune to it. It has caused me to reflect on how I, as well as all mankind, live in the danger of falling prey to the trap of deception.
Throughout history, men and women of great intellect have lived in deception. Preconceived ideas, based on how we want things to be, can cause us to deceive ourselves into believing something is true just because we want it to be true.
One example is the commonly held belief into the Late Renaissance that the sun and planets rotated around the earth. The authorities of the Holy Roman Empire firmly embraced this view because it conveniently fit their view of the universe, and it made sense to the church authorities that the Earth should be the center of all things. However, when astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo, and the mathematician, Johannes Kepler began to prove through the use of telescopes and mathematical calculations that the sun was the center of the solar system, and that the planets (including Earth), rotated around it, their discoveries were rejected by the church because the authorities at that time wanted to believe that the Earth was the center of all things. As we know, they were living in self-imposed deception.
Conversely, we can deceive ourselves into believing something isn’t true because we don’t want it to be true. I see this playing out continually in conversations I have with those who don’t want to believe in the God. As long as they don’t believe there is a God, they don’t have to answer to Him.
The great mathematician and master of probability, Blase Pascal, stated well the consequences of belief or unbelief in the God of the Bible through what has become known as Pascal’s Wager:
If you bet there is a God and you are right, you stand to gain everything.
If you bet there is a God and you are wrong, you lose nothing.
That’s one side of the wager: the possibility of infinite gain and no loss.
If you bet there is no God and you are right, you gain nothing.
If you bet there is no God and you are wrong, you lose everything.
That’s the other side of the wager: the possibility of infinite loss and no gain.
On the one side is the possibility of infinite gain and no loss; on the other, the possibility of infinite loss and no gain. What does one have to lose by believing there is a God? It only makes sense to explore who the Bible says God is, and in so doing have the possibility of infinite gain!
In whatever way we’ve chosen to think about God, there’s one thing we can’t do; we can’t change the truth. One of these scenarios is true. We can decide in our own minds who we think God is, what He is like, or if He exists at all, but that doesn’t mean we’re right. God is who He is; we can’t change that simply by choosing not to believe it.
How easy it is to become trapped in deception!
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