joyindestructible

Every little boy and every little girl dreams of being someone important with magical powers to create and control their own special world. In childhood, we imagine ourselves as knights, kings, queens, and princesses, rulers over all we survey. Magic is what we long for because magic can make what we dream of real, or at least, imitate reality and be believable. This common longing for control and power is the seed of all sin; it is the foolishness that inhabits every child heart. This is the birthplace of all the lies, in every form, that human beings naturally utilize to survive and thrive in the world. Though children are innocent, they are born fallen and each child born is subjected to the same temptation that caused Eve and then Adam, to fall. The need to control and transform the world around us drives all of us and the magic we embrace to accomplish it is the lie. Magic has the power to induce momentary bliss but lies can never produce the lasting joy that every magician desires to create.

Satan’s original lie was in the form of manipulation and like a slithering snake the power to manipulate is engrained in the minds of every human being. It hides in the grass of denial and often, we aren’t even aware of how we manipulate. Others are aware and become masters of manipulation and can even think of their controlling form of lying as an ability to be proud of. Pride expressed as denial allows us to ignore that nasty snake, pretend we are the honest people we want to be seen as, and expect other people to be. Denial is delusion in its infantile state and for those who practice denial as a way of life, delusion is the next step, when the magic of denial proves weak. Delusional people are dissociated people, disconnected from reality and in extreme cases, avoiding contact even with themselves because of excruciating shame. They develop masks and personas in hopes of pleasing and fooling others into believing they are someone other than the shameful person they know as their true self. When reality of self can’t be ignored, alcohol, drugs, money, fame, prestige, present themselves as a reasonable choice in maintaining the charade. However, the charade always falters because lies are magic and deception can’t create but only imitate. The power of the lie is fear and the fear of exposure traps people inside the worlds they create in pursuit of their dreams of greatness and personal power. The only way out is reckoning with ultimate, divine truth.

There is nothing a liar hates worse than the truth and those who live by lies will not willing seek Jesus, who unlike all other human beings isn’t the embodiment of the lie but instead, divine truth in living form. Jesus didn’t desire personal power or personal greatness. Jesus desired God’s Will and lived and died in service to Him. The Ten Commandments are an offense, an accusation to every liar but to Jesus, they were the Commandments He loved and lived by, from the heart. Every liar confronted by God’s Holy Law, will either snarl and run for cover, or collapse in utter recognition of how great God is and what a miserable lying worm they are in comparison. Without Jesus and His sacrificial death, each response ends in death. Because Jesus died for our sins and lives, those who understand their hopelessness may find hope by believing and accepting Jesus as Savior from their sin. Those who open their hearts to saving faith are sealed as belonging to Jesus, when the Holy Spirit makes His home in their heart. It is the Spirit that dispels the magic of the lie by breaking its fearful power and replacing it with divine truth. It is the beginning of a life-long process that ends in total freedom from sin, as all natural longings for power and greatness that come by instinct, are replaced with the desire to glorify God. The Ten Commandments no longer condemn but become the very Words of life for those who by the Spirit have become new creatures, destined for the new Creation and partakers of eternal life.

Believers are spiritually new creatures who remain in carnal form. They will still struggle against the instinct to seek their own power and control but every time we give in to the old nature, Jesus is there to remind us of the new; we stumble, we fall, and Jesus picks us back up. Though, we are still sometimes deceived by that slithering snake, his magic has no power over us because we no longer belong to him. We belong to Jesus. His Father is our Father now, and in Jesus we are being transformed from the kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of Light. It is by self-confrontation and reckoning with divine truth that we are set free from death and it is by truthful reckoning that we maintain the joy of the salvation that will end in complete freedom from sin. There is no magic spell that can prevent its completion and no lie can apprehend or destroy the righteous joy of Jesus.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is Spirit.