Illusions

October 6th

Something that’s been rattling around in my brain this week is illusions.

The first contributing factor is a movie I saw with Brianne on the weekend called the Illusionist with Ed Norton, an actor I really enjoy, in the leading role. He’s usually in films with great suspenseful and twisting plots and he is a powerful and convincing dramatic actor. In this script, he played a magician in love with a princess in European 19th century society. Though there was some conjuring of spirits, or the appearance of magic, the plot itself was romantic in nature.

At one point, and at great risk to his own personal well-being and that of the princess he loved, he proclaimed from a balcony to the townsfolk, “Everything you’ve seen is an illusion!” He claimed to have no spiritual powers and certainly never used his abilities to deceive for his own benefit.

Second influence came unexpectedly from a book I’ve been loving called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. After Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, this book shares the same dynamic of stripping away a lot of the stale and traditional Christianity and making it more alive and authentic.

One of Miller’s chapters is called Magic, a title you wouldn’t even expect in a book addressing authentic Christian faith. Basically, he says he always thought God was like David Copperfield, an illusionist of sorts. And the older you get the less you are apt to believe in the Wizard of Oz, “just a schmuck behind a curtain.” Miller’s writings are wonderfully honest and refreshingly candid. I want to read all of his books and already have them on my most wanted list, including Searching for God Knows What and more.

He always thought Christianity was a religion for the intellectually weak-minded and naïve. Pastors and Christians sound more like salesmen trying to convince themselves of what they were saying, he says. “I felt as if Christianity, as a religious system, was a product that kept falling apart, and whoever was selling it would hold the broken parts behind his back trying to divert everybody’s attention... You either had to reduce enormous theological absurdities into children’s stories or ignore them,” he writes (p.30-31).

So in the film, a hopeless romantic albeit helpless man is known as the illusionist. Granted, in the end, he wins out through the sheer application of his God-given abilities. But then in Miller’s experience, God is seen as the illusionist. In other words, intelligent people in this day and age feel that they can’t trust who God is. He holds the cards behind his back and deceives us.

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I wonder how many truly feel that they know more than God. Obviously, there is an age-old distrust of the resurrection. Many feel that Jesus Christ was part of a well-conceived hoax and that his body was simply stolen away in the dark of night. If this is true of course, the entire Christian world has been duped and our faith is based on nothing but wishful thinking.

I can understand this reasoning, but I still reject it. Of course, anyone who prays to Jesus and knows the Lord and has tasted spiritual reality of His living Word, have no trouble accepting that the empty tomb is a pivotal concept in which God proved fulfillment of everything that the prophets said. And that miracle is not such a far cry from the centuries of miracles that preceded it from the Red Sea to the plains of Sinai, to the top of Mount Carmel, to David’s slinging of a small stone into the forehead of a giant named Goliath. God has been in the miracle business for a very long time!

Either you believe in God or you don’t. Either you get honest about his supernatural strength, or you go through life clinging to the visible and insisting that this realm of the hard and fast, the physical body, is all there is.

Still, how can you prove that there is NO GOD? You can’t. Unless someone has been to heaven and hell and survived, unless cosmonauts could travel to every corner of the universe, none could claim to KNOW what’s beyond this life.

Psalm 14:1 says, the fool says in his heart, there is NO GOD.

No, let me tell you what I think. Neither man nor God is the real illusionist. Satan is the culprit. He is as Jesus said, "the father of all lies". He is the perverter of every principle. The twister of every truth. The subverter of every standard. He is the mastermind behind every grand illusion and he is fiercely opposed to God.

Beware of his tactics. Know that he will fight and resist every good thing and every truth with relentless devotion. If he can’t get you to ignore it, he will attempt to defuse all spiritual reality.

Because of his many active strategies at work within our culture, our schooling systems, even our subconscious minds, we have to counter the contemporary messages that surround us. On the radio, the TV, the ads, the billboards, the world’s mind-numbing messages scream for our attention and drown out the whisperings of the living God, if we let it.

In order to take a step away from all this noise we have to seek a little quiet. A little ocean side repose or a mountain view might do the trick. A quiet yard or a wooded path where only the birds are rustling. Get alone with God and talk to him. Get down to the nitty gritty of who you are and ask the real honest questions on your mind. You may be surprised at what you hear.

God is no deceiver. He wants to open your eyes. The only "trick" is this. You have to ask.

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