Stealing Neutral

False dichotomy: What if you don’t accept either side of the story?

When the Spirit of God nags you through your heart about something, you can never be sure what it’s about until your mind is properly trained. I’m still learning. I had a post all written about something rather obscure to most of this world. And because of the false dichotomy that rules our social consciousness, it would have been branded as hatred. Of course, it wasn’t anything new on this blog; most of you understand it already.

Often I’ve tried to help readers trace how ideas are pushed through the public presentations into the social consciousness. When you develop a frame of reference that takes the intellect off the throne, as we do, you have a much easier time standing outside of the effects of propaganda. When you place little trust in mere cognition, cognitive manipulation is easier to catch.

It doesn’t matter who did it first in human history. If we are going to study it, what matters is how we got here in our current mess. Did you know that Scripture recounts the birth of propaganda as we know it today? I’m referring to seizing control of the public narrative to the point that breaking out of it is a miracle of God. We’ve already seen how the Fall hinges on the presumption of human reason to answer all the pertinent questions. It is this signal flaw that allows Satan’s lies to prevail. The effects are immediately seen in how Adam and Eve suddenly have a false image of God. They used to walk in the Garden with Him, but suddenly began to hide. The only thing that changed was their perception.

It’s not just deception, but the readiness of the human mind to be deceived. It’s the vast ocean of conditioning that teaches us to ignore a much more reliable faculty, reliable because it is not within human control. Instead of reason, the soul has to subscribe to truth that stands before time and space existed. You buy into it or you don’t. Jesus made that point when He spoke of the sharp division between Heaven and Hell: the huge chasm between where Lazarus rested in the bosom of Abraham versus where the Rich Man stood crying out to them (starts in Luke 16:19). It is also reflected in Jesus’ comment about no neutrality in eternal matters; either we work with Him or we oppose Him (Luke 11:23). There is a sharp line of departure between the Two Realms.

The flaw in human activity is presuming to pull all that truth down into this realm. It’s a pretty confusing mix of nonsense that assumes parables should be taken literally, a reverse and perverse logic of trying to cram our mortality into the business of Heaven. Meanwhile, the symbolic logic of talking about divine things is misapplied to our existence here. In other words, the boundary is obscured. Our Enemy wants to justify his complaint against God, but does so by deception.

When God Almighty elects to use you for something, it’s not because you are better than the other folks He might have chosen. When God chose Lucifer for the role that placed him at the top of all Creation, he decided it was an excuse to strut and claim some of that glory. When God chose Israel, it was not an excuse to strut and despise the rest of humanity. Indeed, as far as that goes, God made it clear through the prophets that Israel was easily the worst nation He could have chosen for the mission. He said that, had any other nation been put in Israel’s place, they would have repented far more readily at the warnings from the prophets.

At the same time, we realize that if you put anybody in the role of Chosen — like Lucifer and Israel — their moral flaws would result in stealing God’s glory for themselves. Paul warns in Romans 11 that we who were grafted into the vine of revelation and redemption should not strut, either. We humbly bow as David did in the Tent of Meeting he erected in the royal courtyard over the Ark of Covenant (2 Samuel 7:18ff). We know better than to play games with the truth of God, but with serious reverence accept the mission to share the truth. This humility was not at all typical of Israel as a whole.

Step back to the days shortly after receiving the Covenant at Mount Sinai. God wrote with His own finger the Decalogue on the stone tablets to symbolize the source of the message Moses bore. It was not that Moses was better; God chose Moses for reasons beyond human comprehension. Moses didn’t strut, but was accused constantly of it. That is, the leaders of Israel played the attitude card every day against Moses (for example, the Rebellion of Korah, Numbers 16). They were so petty that they made up some wild mythology about Moses being a mere shaman striving to keep secret the incantations by which he persuaded Jehovah to grant him miraculous powers (echoes of the Tetragrammaton). Why, the whole nation was sacred, right? Anyone could perform the rituals and get what Moses had. So when God made Aaron’s rod bloom and made fire burst out of the censers and kill the pretenders, they still insisted that Moses had simply tricked them through secret incantations.

In other words, from the very start, we see how elements in Israeli thinking reflected this insistence that things were whatever they said they were. They bought into lies of the Devil and this was their self-proclaimed reality. How do you fight that? How do you counter the noise when the folks making it insist that they are the only ones who can see the truth? When they insist that their very words have the power to remake reality, that God Himself is so enamored with their cleverness that He willingly goes along with their refinements of His revelation? This was centuries before Hellenism even existed, so we can’t blame all this on Alexander the Great and his teachings. Hellenism was simply a better frame of reference for the lies Satan had always told, lies that certain elements in Israel were always eager to embrace.

We see this same tendency reflected in the Talmud and Kabbalah teachings. It’s the same attitude that alleges God is not God, that reality is whatever the speaker/writer insists it is, that some folks are somehow inherently better than others. It matters not how they claim to gain that status, but that they claim one at all. You aren’t permitted to question their mythology because you aren’t good enough to hold the special privileges.

We know that the stark chasm that separates the Two Realms does not apply here on earth regarding the false dichotomies thrown at us. We don’t have to accept the story told by either side in the race riots scattered across the US today. We don’t have to accept the false dichotomy that either side is somehow holy and righteous, while the other side is evil. Both sides are evil liars. You can’t be neutral about Jesus; you either follow or don’t. However, He is God and the truth He taught is older than mankind. What we see in the public debates today has no bearing on what Christ taught, because Jesus said human political activity cannot work the righteousness of God.

Don’t let them steal the neutral ground. We reject the entire frame of reference, never mind the false stories told by both sides.