“It is a healthy thing, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted”

~ Bertrand Russell

Questioning things you’ve always believed is good exercise. It can result in a more strengthened belief or a gradual deconstruction. The process can be challenging if you derive your sense of well-being or identity from the neat categories or tidy boxes containing your views. My kids will go through this process themselves, but I hope my efforts will give them a more accurate foundation than the one I received. It was by hanging question marks on things that led me to see that some of the narrative explanations I grew up with in my family were wrong. Consequently, I’ve changed my mind about numerous things. The two most far-reaching categories are Government and Theology. 

I’ll start my answer by describing how my view of The United States, and our role in the world, has changed. My Stepfather, and to a lesser degree, my Dad, raised us to be Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan Republicans, staunch conservatives on the far right. Over time, I gradually discovered the depth of corruption in our Government and that only a few, if any, men and women in Government have a moral compass. It became clear that our Federal, State, and Local Government officials, elected or appointed, are all for sale to the highest bidder. As our Country has grown and prospered, greedy men with a lust for power have seized control, and we have steadily moved away from the vision of our founders. 

My Stepdad, Jim Messinger, convinced us that our Country’s involvement in the Viet Nam war was to stop the advance of communism in the world. That was the conventional belief, and, at face value, it seemed upright and moral. It was something an idealistic young man could get behind and support. We were afraid for him but proud that my brother served in Viet Nam. During that period, Jim taught us that the anti-war protesters were “commies, pinkos, and fags.” Later, it became apparent the protesters were right. We were not there to stop communism; we were there because of corporate business interests. 

It was stunning to realize how deceived I had been by propaganda, that our Country was the paragon of virtue, heroic in the world. I’ve learned that the phrase “American interests abroad” is code for corporate interests and that the name of the geopolitical game is US hegemony. 

The US has used our massive wealth and strength to topple other Governments, engineer regime changes, and exploit foreign countries’ natural and human resources for one overarching reason; to maintain US hegemony. 

Can you identify one issue of consequence in the following list about which our Government told us the truth? World War I? World War II? The Korean War? The Vietnam War? The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King? How about 9/11? The war in Afghanistan? The Iraq War? The destruction of Libya? Syria’s President Assad’s use of chemical weapons? Covid? The Covid “vaccines”? The current war in Ukraine? 

It’s easier to add to this list of lies than to find one instance of the Government telling the truth. Correcting lies of this magnitude is not just challenging; it is nuanced and complex. The human mind tends to protect the lies it has believed. Over time, an elaborate infrastructure forms to preserve them and deceive the public. For instance, tenured teachers and professors defend their jobs by going along with lies. Authors of history books and historical novels perpetuate them, and writers and producers of popular movies lock them into our subconscious. 

By the time the “real” truth is known, almost everyone involved in perpetuating the original lie is dead. And the newer generations need help understanding how and why it’s relevant. A recent ruling by The Supreme Court protects campaign contributions as a First Amendment right, basically legalizing graft. In other words, special interest groups have the constitutionally protected right to purchase the Government, which ends up serving their interests rather than the people’s. 

When I was growing up, various teachers taught me about who God is and his disposition toward his creation. It turns out that people lied about God too. 

By hanging question marks on long-held beliefs, my convictions about who God is and what He is like have changed substantially. I’ve come to see that the Gospel is astonishingly good news. Not just “potentially good news” if you can perform a certain way. When it came to the relations between God and man, the starting point I grew up with was we were all born separated from God. Although I didn’t have adequate language for it as a boy or young man, I always had a niggling sense that this picture was somehow wrong. I reasoned that if we all live and move and have our beings in Him, and God personally holds together our very existence, as St. Paul taught us in Acts 17 and Colossians 1, how could separation be possible? 

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

~Mark Twain

As I’ve gotten older, the worldview I started with has changed in some surprising ways. And sadly, what “live and learn” has taught me is the truth is usually unwelcome, and history gets falsified. I’ve learned that before you start questioning the “official narrative,” whether it’s about the Government or God, you better ask yourself two questions. Is it worth it? And how far are you willing to go?

For instance, my faith began to be de-coupled from my “patriotism” about 20 years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve traveled around the world, and I love my country, and, as unpopular as it is with some people, I don’t believe nationalism is all bad. Acts 17 points out that God established nations and set their borders. Nations appear for the first time in Genesis 10 and remain through the last chapter of Revelation.

As disappointing as it is, lies and deception have formed a significant part of our national consciousness. It is equally disturbing to consider that lies have permeated Western Christianity’s official narrative and theology. Many men and women who have translated our bibles, who preach in our pulpits, and teach in our Bible Colleges and Seminaries have given us patently false explanations about who the God of the Bible really is and what He is really like. 

If the truth sets people free, what do lies do but hold people in captivity?

Alvin Toffler was an American Jew and a prolific futurist writer with a distinct prophetic edge. He predicted:

In the twenty-first century the illiterate people among us won’t be those who can’t read and write, it will be people who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

~ Alvin Tofler

The great American philosopher Eric Hoffer observed the same idea when he wrote:

“In times of rapid change it’s the learners who inherit the earth; the learned find themselves prepared for a world that no longer exists.”

~ Eric Hoffer

So, how can you learn, unlearn and re-learn if you’re not hanging question marks on stuff?

My son Conor works for Apple and deals with people who are stuck in old paradigms and outdated technology daily. Many of the men and women who come into his store of all ages feel trapped within structures and ways of living that have left them feeling like civilization has left them behind. I get it; with so much of the technology we use today already in its 10th generation or older, with each version building upon the other, it’s easy to feel that way.

I ran into this when I launched my internet-based business in 1996. It turns out that I was early… the business world was entrenched in old technology, and many industries, like construction, resisted the internet. I was patient; thankfully, other forces compelled people to adopt the technology.

All warfare is based on deception

~ Sun Zsu

Since we’re talking about truth and lies, I should say something about the nature of spiritual warfare. St. Paul tells us that we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

When God raised Yeshua from the dead, “He seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion”. (Ephesians 1:20–21)

And it was only after Yeshua had risen from the dead that it became apparent to the powers that they’d been duped. God’s plan was “made known … to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10).

Those same cosmic forces, “the rulers and the authorities,” were disarmed and put to shame by the cross (Colossians 2:15). Read Michael Heiser’s “The Unseen Realm” for more on this subject.

Cosmic warfare is legit, and it usually plays out through human events. It is based on strategies and tactics that employ deception, trickery & misdirection. And when it comes to warfare, as the old saying goes, to the victors belong the spoils, and that has included control over oral and written human history.

I believe the institutions that control the public narrative have given us false explanations about the activities of our government. I also believe that the men and women who have translated our bibles, who preach in our pulpits and teach in our Bible Colleges and Seminaries, have also given us false explanations about who the God of the Bible is and what that God is like.

I like to ask people what has changed the most throughout their lives about how they understand God. Surprisingly, some people have told me nothing has changed; they see and understand God the same way today as when they first believed.

That has not been my experience.

The truth has repeatedly disrupted my life.

I’m one of those people who like tidy categories and a bow on my boxes of truth. As a champion debater in High School, I learned to argue both sides of a question. You think through an issue to arrive at the truth… so you can be right, right?

My “unraveling” began to take shape after 9/11 when two things became clear: 

First, it was apparent to me that those events’ “official narrative” was a lie. I don’t claim to know what happened, but I don’t believe the official story, which led me to question other things.

Second, I had a concurrent crisis of faith. I didn’t stop believing in God or Jesus or the Bible. I just started questioning the “official narrative” I received in Church, Sunday School, and Bible College about who God was and what God was like.

The primary catalyst was that, although I was raised in Church and had been a “believer” since grammar school, my life was unchanged by the Gospel taught to me. Like many people encountering a crisis of faith, my questions were deeper than my theology.

I didn’t have an adequate theological explanation for what I was experiencing and NOT experiencing in my life. I didn’t have a good answer for all the pain and evil in the world (Theodicy), not to mention a compelling explanation for the bloodthirsty God in the pages of the Old Testament versus the Prince of Peace in the New Testament.

My theology was similar to a box of loose coat hangars, a tangled mess.

And by the way, I was tired of platitudes and the trite way people used the word “mystery” like the “get out of jail free” card in the board game “Monopoly”. If you couldn’t explain something, call it a mystery. That didn’t work for me anymore. Neither did the “God is love but He’s also Just” explanation for harmonizing the bloodthirsty and violent God in the Old Testament with the enemy-loving Prince of Peace. I realized most people walk around repeating what they’ve been told rather than studying the matter themselves. The truth is, most people are not very deep, and they’re ok with it.

I get it. The truth can be challenging to swallow. It has disrupted my life repeatedly. Sadly, some people are too entrenched in their categories and pat answers to consider they’ve believed lies.

And then some prefer ignorance. I get it. I’ve wished many times that I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

For me, things got darker before they got better. I eventually found myself in a men’s group for “broken” men where the leader passed out copies of a book called “Grace Walk”. It’s the story of a Southern Baptist Preacher going through his unraveling.

I could relate to his “hamster wheel Christianity” which consisted of performance that inevitably led to burnout and then to rededication, and the cycle would repeat.

I started reading McVey’s blog, and one day followed an obscure footnote and discovered Thomas Forsyth Torrance, one of the greatest theologians since the Reformation. As I began to study The Torrance brothers and their students, they introduced me to their mentors in the early days of what would later become Christianity.

I read my way from The torrances to Karl Barth all the way back to the Cappadocian and Patristic Fathers.

It felt like I hit the Motherlode.

I read sections of Torrance’s books on the Incarnation and the Atonement aloud to my wife, Becky. We would look at each other, often with tears in our eyes, and say, “Can this be true? How was it that we had grown up in Church, gone to Bible College and had never heard any of this?”.

I was undone in the best possible way. I felt like I understood what Paul meant when he wrote in Romans 1:16 that the Gospel was the power of God to save.

I was so excited about what I was reading and looked for every opportunity to talk to people about it.

That’s when I ran into this brick wall:

       “It’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary                                  (or identity  or sense of well being) depends upon their NOT understanding it”

                                                ~ Upton Sinclair

The Gospel is a disruptive technology

A disruptive technology or ideology displaces an established technology or ideology. It will shake up and eliminate existing industries, structures, and institutions. 

That is precisely what happened to me.

People get entrenched in things and can feel threatened by opposing or new ideas. Personal and societal change only happens when the pain of refusing to change exceeds the fear of change.

Did you know there are over 40,000 Protestant denominations? All of them differ on some point in theology or practice.

                             “Everyone is right, just ask them”  ~ Gerald Tatham.

This process has been going on for almost 20 years, and after hundreds of books, videos, classes, and lectures, I am just now finding my language for what I’ve come to see.

“And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” John 17:3.

When our kids were growing up, we’d hide Easter eggs in the yard after Church on Easter Sunday. When they were very young, we’d hide the eggs in the open, so they’d be easy to find. As they got older, we hid them more carefully, making them difficult to find.

It was fun hiding them because we knew the kids would enjoy hunting for them.

God is like that.

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out. Proverbs 25:2

The Bible translator, JB Phillips, was an Anglican pastor in England during WW2. The young people in his congregation struggled to understand the King James Version of the Bible. It was during the German bombings in London and Phillips was forced into bomb shelters that he began writing his contemporary translation, “The New Testament In Modern English”. 

Here are the opening verses to his translation of the book of Hebrews. 

“God, who gave our forefathers many different glimpses of the truth in the words of the prophets, has now, at the end of the present age, given us the truth in the Son. Through the Son, God made the whole universe, and to the Son, he has ordained that all creation shall ultimately belong. This Son, the radiance of the glory of God, the flawless expression of the nature of God, himself the upholding principle of all that is, effected in person the reconciliation between God and man and then took his seat at the right hand of the majesty on high” Hebrews 1:1-3  JB Phillips Translation                                                                

Theologically speaking, the book of Hebrews is at the deep end of the pool in New Testament literature. In this passage, we find the musings of a first-century orthodox Jew who had come to know Jesus as Messiah. He’s looking back on his heritage and scriptures, trying to help his readers grasp who Jesus is.

The New Testament didn’t exist then, and his Jewish audience was like him, devoted to their scriptures and traditions. They loved and relished the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings collectively known as the Tanakh.

It’s no small thing when he writes that God had only given their forefathers “glimpses” of the truth… but that Jesus is the “flawless” expression of the nature of God. 

Jesus is the exact, precise expression of God.

In other words, if you want to know what God is like, look no further than Jesus.

The Hebrew Scriptures did not form the final definitive picture of who God is. In the pages of those scriptures, we discover “glimpses”. They formed a gradual revelation of who God is and what God was like. They are filled with types and shadows alluding to the one who would come disguised as one of them one day. 

The word of God made flesh.

Like those Easter eggs we hid for the enjoyment of our kids, God hid a wealth of revelation in the pages of the Hebrew scriptures. Some of the treasures are right there on the surface others require more effort, and we get to experience the pleasure of searching them out.

Clearly, throughout the entire epic romance that unfolds within the pages of the scriptures, God has obscured himself and has always been willing to be misunderstood.

As a parent, while raising my kids, they often misunderstood me. It was only later, in retrospect, that they could see more clearly what I was up to, and what my intentions were.

We live in an unprecedented time in human history. It used to take years, even decades, for advances in technology or knowledge to find their way into the conversations and lives of average people.

Today it takes minutes, but you have to put in more effort.

What comes into your mind when you think about who God is is the most important thing about you.

Have you thought very much about the difference between the glimpses of who God is in the Old Testament versus the flawless expression of Jesus?

It turns out that God is exactly like Jesus. 

God has always been exactly like Jesus. 

There has never been a time when God was not exactly like Jesus. 

We haven’t always known this…

But now we do.