Could You Be Deceived?

In the Olivet Prophecy, Jesus said, at the end time, there will be false Christ and false prophets, that if it were possible, they'd even deceive the very elect. Could you be deceived? Could you be deceived? Could someone come along and deceive you about what God wants you to do?

To deceive someone is to trick them. When you deceive someone, you trick them into believing something that's not true. To be a deceived person, you actually believe the deceit. Now, this is very important. Because when you are deceived, you don't know it because you believe the deceit. A person who is deceiving another person may actually believe the deceit, too. In other words, their intention may not be evil. Their intention may not even need to hurt the other person.

Because what they believe they're saying is true. But it still is the deceit. It still takes them away from the truth. Could you be deceived? I want to look at three ways that you and I can be deceived in the world that we live in. Three ways that we can be deceived. And then, for the Bible study, I'm going to talk a little bit about the great deception that is prophesied in the Scripture.

That's going to happen in the future before Christ's return. But before we look at that, we have to look at ways in which we can be deceived, because these methods are the ways that people are going to be deceived then, at that time in the future. The first avenue or way of deceit I want to talk about is something we don't think about much. I call it the deceit of conventional wisdom. All societies have conventional wisdom. We all have just sort of collective ways that we think things work.

Collective ways that we think the world runs. You look at the United States today, and people are shocked to find out that actually this society is very fragmented. There isn't a common conventional wisdom about many things, probably not near as much as there used to be 40 years ago. But there is conventional wisdom that believes this is the way problems should be solved, or this is the basic concepts of right and wrong. Anything about conventional wisdom in the United States is based upon the belief in democracy. It's a belief in personal rights. It's a belief in some kind of free market capitalism. And that's the basic collective wisdom that's driven the country for 200 years.

There are ideas. People argue about what those ideas mean back and forth, and try to make those ideas work. But the idea of personal liberty is central to the belief system or the conventional wisdom of the United States. Now, once you think about the conventional wisdom of the world in which the New Testament writers wrote, there was the conventional wisdom of the Jewish world, which didn't always match up with the Scriptures.

We think, well, the Jews and Judaism matched up with the Scriptures, but look at Jesus in conflict with leaders of the Jewish world. They didn't always match up with the Scriptures. Think of the world Paul went into. Paul went into a world in which gladiatorial games were considered good for the people. There were gladiatorial games all over them. That just didn't happen in the Circus Maximus. It would have been around when Paul was there. They didn't have the Colosseum yet.

But it happened all over the Roman Empire. It happened in Egypt. It happened in the Middle East. It happened up into Europe. They had small Colosseums all over the place, where there were bloody gladiatorial games. It was considered not good and normal, and everybody would go to them. Not everybody, but many, many people would go to them. The Roman world was considered that all gods existed.

The conventional wisdom was that all gods existed. The God of Israel was a god. He was the god of Israel. He just wasn't as strong as Zeus. Zeus was a great god. They believed in multiple gods. Everybody believed that. One of the earliest things Christians were accused of were being atheists. They didn't believe in the gods. Except somehow Jesus was somehow a god, and we killed him, so they're really atheists.

They didn't believe in the gods. Conventional wisdom of the Roman Empire was that religious freedom, as long as you didn't condemn somebody else's religion, you could have religious freedom. One thing that's really interesting about Pompeii, if you ever go to Pompeii, the ruins of Pompeii, is that there are all kinds of temples set up all over Pompeii for every god imaginable. There's even one for Isis, one of the goddesses of Egypt. Religious freedom was very common, as was free market capitalism.

Very common in the Roman Empire. Everybody was making money. In fact, you can buy ancient Roman coins fairly cheap. They printed so many of them, because everybody made their own coins, minted their own coins, that they're all over the place. They have hordes of them. I mean, they keep finding every once in a while, they'll find a pot filled with thousands of them, and they'll go out on the market. There's some aspects of Roman world that you and I would actually sort of recognize.

There's also an empire that was based entirely on cruel power and the use of power in a way that isn't anything like you and I have ever experienced. Their conventional wisdom was, Rome was the center of the world, and anyone who disagreed with that would be crushed. They believed in slavery, cruel slavery. Slavery in the Roman Empire was not based on race, it was based on you were conquered, no matter who you were. And anybody could own a slave that was free. In fact, most people were grown dead, even the middle class and poor classes of people owned slaves. Conventional wisdom was this was good.

Conventional wisdom in Rome was, if you had a child and you didn't like that child, a baby, this baby isn't as pretty as I want, there was places you would go abandon that child. And people would come along and take that child and make it into a slave. Or they would just let it die. That was just common practice. Conventional wisdom, they had technology that they had never had before.

Things like running water that ran through lead pipes. They had found entire villages in ancient Rome that the average person didn't make it to 40 because they all died from lead poisoning.

But the technology was amazing! You had running water. That all seemed quite normal. The thing you have to understand about conventional wisdom is it feels normal. You and I still to this day believe things that are normal for us in American society that are not normal for most people in the rest of the world. And actually are not normal or even proper biblically. But we accept it. We believe it. It's the way we grew up. It's interesting that the earliest Christians in the book of Acts were accused of turning the world upside down. In the Roman world, they saw the earliest Christians as being the strangest people they'd ever met.

Now remember, Rome is an amalgamation of people. We're talking about strange ideas. Study some day some of the different countries, the different areas where the Romans conquered. We're talking about some of the strangest pagan customs you can ever imagine. And the Romans accepted all of them. But the Christians were the strangest people.

They took the world and turned it upside down. And this is what makes what Paul writes to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians very interesting. 1 Corinthians 2. There's a lot that he covers here. I'm just going to cover a little bit of this, because for the sermon, I'm only going to cover a few scriptures. I'm going to get into a few more scriptures in depth in the Bible study. But 1 Corinthians 2. Oh. Because we need to understand how conventional wisdom can deceive us. Conventional wisdom is a term that's used all the time in the political world.

They'll talk about what is the conventional wisdom, the fact that a candidate's running for a major office, one of the things they'll ask, what is the conventional wisdom on this subject? How do I go against, you know, I don't want to go against the conventional wisdom. It is the collective way in which society sees things. People outside of that main group, outside of the majority, are not that important. It's what the collective majority think that matters.

That's what conventional wisdom is. Paul writes to Corinth. There in the middle of Greece, in the Greek world, wisdom was the greatest concept. All the great philosophers came from Greece. Knowing what wisdom is was the whole purpose of their society. They were the first group of people to have public education. In fact, there's a lot of things in our society today that is actually Greek in origin. There's a lot of things in American society that actually comes from Greek origins. They're Greek and Roman concepts. That's why when you go to Washington, D.C., a lot of the buildings are in Greek and Roman style.

The early founding fathers understood that. Democracy is a Greek idea. Democracy, as we know it, is a Greek idea. It came from Athens. This is all conventional wisdom of the day. Athens was a democracy. It didn't last very long, but that became their conventional wisdom to a collapse. 1 Corinthians 2, verse 4, Paul says, "...that my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom." I was talking to people who are immersed in the conventional wisdom of Greece.

And in 1 Corinthians, there's this amazing indictment against those people. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, literally tells him, "...take one man, just throw him out of the church. Get him out of the church." Other people, he condemns for horrendous things that were part of the conventional wisdom of the day. I'll give you an example. He condemns a couple of people for going to prostitutes. Now, we would be appalled. How could a person in the church, because remember he's writing to the church, go to prostitutes?

Do you realize that if you study the history of Corinth, the whole basis of Corinthian religion was centered around a temple to Athena, the goddess of love. And there were, at least, they know, a thousand temple prostitutes. It was an honor. For generation after generation, part of your worship was to go be with the prostitute. That was an actual worship ceremony.

Now, that seems strange to us, but it wasn't if you lived in Corinth. To understand, we live in a little bubble of our culture. Throughout history, everybody's lived in a little bubble of their culture. And for Corinth, the people in Corinth, going to the temple prostitute was a form of worship in which men and women both accepted.

It wasn't considered adultery. It wasn't considered breaking your marriage vows. It was a form of worship. We can't accept that. We don't understand that. To people in Corinth, it was normal. It was conventional wisdom. And it was hard for them to break away from their conventional wisdom, just like it's hard for you and I to come out of our society and break away from our conventional wisdom.

Sometimes we think God is an American. I hate to disappoint you, but He's not. And it's hard for us to break away from our concepts, because we live in what is the conventional wisdom of the day, and that's why we get deceived by it. And so Paul has to tell them, you're deceived by this conventional wisdom.

Now that you have come to worship the only true God, you have to give up all the gods, including Athena. He had to break away from it. It was hard for them to do that. He says in verse 5, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Verse 6, however, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing.

But we speak the wisdom of God and a mystery. To the world, this is a mystery. The hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew, for if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Part of the great mystery is about Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Go to chapter 3 here and look at verse 18. So he's talking to them about the difference between the wisdom of God and the conventional wisdom of their age.

Just like we have to deal with the difference between the wisdom of God and the conventional wisdom of the age you and I live in. Let no one deceive himself. Isn't that interesting? One of the greatest deceptions we will face, or deceivers, that we ever face is, well, okay, Satan will deceive us. Yes, other people can deceive us. Yes, we can deceive ourselves.

And that may be the hardest one to face. We can actually deceive ourselves because it's something we want. Well, no one deceive himself. If anyone among you seems to be wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, he catches the wise in their own craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise that they are futile. Therefore, let no one boast in men, for all things are yours.

You and I live in a world of conventional wisdom that we take so much for granted that sometimes we're deceived and don't even know it. And that's going to be very important when we face the conventional wisdom that's going to form in the future during what the Bible calls a great deception. It's just going to come on the whole world. The problem with conventional wisdom is it seems so right. It really seems so right. It seems so good. Because why? Because everybody believes it. It's the way things are. It's the way society works. And it becomes so ingrained in their thinking that anyone who disagrees with that is disagreeing with reality. But conventional wisdom also changes. I want to explain something to you. I want to show you how conventional wisdom can be formed and change. Because all societies evolve, they don't stay the same. All societies evolve, they don't stay the same. And what may be conventional wisdom at one point changes over time until it becomes accepted by everybody. And it doesn't happen overnight. Now, I'm going to give you an example. Seventy-five years ago in the United States, both homosexuality and transgenderism and transvestitism were all considered mental illnesses.

Homosexuals, 75 years ago, were put into mental institutions. And they were sent to psychologists because they were considered... it was a mental illness. In fact, it was a mental illness until the 1980s. It was finally changed. Transgenderism is still a mental illness, according to the... what is it? The American Psychological Society or whatever. I forget the exact name of it. Although there are efforts now to change that. So there's not a mental illness. How does something become a mental illness to something that is accepted in society?

And we tend to take a short-term view of that, how that changes. And the reason I bring this out is because this is just one area in which people can become deceived and not understand the true teachings of the Scripture.

So I'm just using this not because I'm going to, you know, create a rave against homosexuality. I'm trying to show how something changed. How something changed. Well, it started to change ten years ago. No.

It's part of a long process in which the conventional wisdom of our society has changed until it will become the norm. It's already almost there. To understand the change, you have to go clear back to the 1700s.

In the 1700s, there was a movement in Europe called the Age of Enlightenment.

And in the Age of Enlightenment, a new philosophy formed inside of Europe. This new philosophy said that everybody had personal freedom and personal religious freedom.

Now, we all see those things as absolutely part of our society. That's because, you and I, our conventional wisdom is based on the Enlightenment philosophy. Most of the founding fathers of the United States were influenced by the Enlightenment. That's why many of them did not believe in the Bible the way that we think they did. Just read the writings of Thomas Jefferson. You'll find he did not believe in the Bible the way evangelical Christians do today. Or even mainstream Protestants do today. They were influenced by this idea of personal freedom and personal religion that had come out of the process of Reformation. That everybody should decide what was best for them in the pursuit of personal happiness.

It's hard for us to understand how remarkable of a new idea that was in the 1700s. Up until that point, for a thousand years, all of Europe was controlled by the Catholic Church and the divine right of kings ordained by God. That's how people thought. The Catholic Church was the church that was established by Jesus Christ, and all the kings ruled because God gave them the right to rule. That was the idea for a thousand years. But the Enlightenment changed that. Each human being had value. The idea of a republic began to be formed, a democracy began to be formed, and it's what helped form the United States. And it changed all the governments over time in, throughout, of Europe. In the early 1700s, you know who owned almost all the land in Europe? The government. The governments owned the land. Because the kings had the right to do so in the way people thought. So the United States forms. It's formed on two things. The Enlightenment philosophy and the Bible. But not all of the Enlightenment philosophy and the Bible go together. Eventually, one had to win out over the other, because they don't all fit. From the very beginning, there was a flaw in the idea. They don't fit together entirely.

And so there was a debate about religion in the United States from the very beginning. But religious freedom was part of the concept, which is very good for us, because that's why we were able to sit here on the Sabbath morning and have this service. And discuss these things.

In the mid-1800s, we have Charles Darwin print his book on evolution. Now, we all know that. Nobody here believes in evolution. But you cannot downplay the impact of evolution on our country.

Because it is now, among the majority of science, it is accepted as truth. 75 years ago it wasn't. 100 years ago it wasn't. It is now. So to not believe in evolution means you're not very intelligent. There's something wrong with you.

So something's changed from... Charles Darwin's book is looked at by a lot of very smart people, said this is not true, to now, well, it's absolute truth. Although, I don't know of any scientist actually believes in what Darwin said about evolution, they've modified it. Because it doesn't work. But so they've modified it.

So now you have a scientific thought process that takes over and is formed inside the United States, where any disagreement of that is stupid. You go to university to disagree with humanism, which is an enlightenment philosophy taken to its extreme beliefs. To disagree with humanism and to disagree with evolution, there's something wrong with you. You're not very smart. Smart people all believe this. It is the conventional wisdom. You understand? It has become the conventional wisdom. And the educational system will eventually produce a society that that is what everybody believes, and everybody outside that has problems.

With evolution becomes a very serious viewpoint of life that's different from the Scripture. Up until the printing of Charles Darwin's book, the great conventional wisdom of society, where the United States of Europe was, God created the universe, and human beings were created in His image. Human beings are the greatest creation of God. With evolution, something changes. That's very important to understand.

Human beings are simply a higher form of animal. That's all we are. So the human beings are more equal with cows, right? Because we're all part of this evolutionary process. Where the other view is animals are a totally different type of creation, and human beings are more equal with God, made in the image of God. Now, there's a huge difference in the way you view the world. It's a major difference.

And then the third thing that happens is that in the 1900s there's an explosion of technology. So that everybody is now exposed to every idea. Not only every idea, but let's talk about homosexuality for a minute. What is one of the first things they did when they made motion pictures? The teens in the early 20s. They started showing naked people, so they had to pass walls which could do that. Eventually, of course, film, video, internet, the exposure that people have to all kinds of sexual activity is just enormous. Things that people never even heard about in 1850, people watch on their television sets. So what does this produce? It produces, one, a moving away from the Scripture of the Bible as the basis of conventional wisdom. Secondly, a viewpoint that evolution is the explanation for all human behavior. Third, exposure then to every kind of what would be considered deviant behavior that no one even heard about or afraid to talk about in public just a few years before. As this happens, people who participate in those behaviors become more and more open about it, and pretty soon you meet someone who is homosexual and you realize, well, that's a nice person. Right? I mean, they're not going to kill me in my sleep. So we start to move away from even tolerance, which is the beginning discussion, to acceptance, to participation. So, in the 1980s, what had been always considered a mental illness in the history of the medical profession in the Western world, and morally unacceptable in the history of the Western world, becomes not only morally acceptable, but it becomes, it becomes mentally fine.

So you know what becomes the argument legally? And this is why, by the way, homosexuality is not illegal in any state in the United States, because this is the argument that we use state by state. Human beings are a higher form of animal. If you go into the animal world, I won't be too graphic about this, but if you put a bunch of male monkeys in a room and don't put any female monkeys in there, after a while, they're doing stuff to each other. Therefore, it is a natural evolutionary process. So what has been argued legally and won in every case is that homosexuality is a natural evolutionary process, because animals sort of do it. Of course, I have a real problem with that. If we're going to use animals as our criteria for human behavior, I mean, lions, male lions, will go find the cubs from another male lion and kill them. Some animals eat their young. Some animals perform what we would consider downright rape. So is that going to be our criterion? According to the legal arguments, and this is what gets scary, is what's that like 20 years from now, the legal arguments are that since this is an evolutionary process, what happens naturally in the animal world is acceptable in human behavior. This is the natural thought process. If you really believe in evolution, this is what you blame. If you really believe in it.

See how it's changed? So what used to be a mental illness has changed to this. If you do not agree with homosexuality, as in you think it's immoral, you are now homophobic. Homophobic is a mental illness. That's what a phobia is. The entire definition of mental illness has changed from this is a mental illness to if you don't agree with it, you're mentally ill. At the curt rate it goes, there will be a time where your children will be, if you teach them that, they will be forced to go to special classes. And some of you here have already told me about classes you've been sent to in the business world that you're in. They will be forced to go to special classes to teach them how not to be mentally ill. You don't want children growing up mentally ill in a society, and the parents are mentally ill, can't do much about that, but we'll make sure their kids aren't. And there will come a time when your children will be forced to go to classes to teach them how not to be homophobic.

And the UN is now trying to pass some resolutions that make transgenderism no longer mental illness. Now, transgenders are actually fighting against that, because they want insurance to pay for the changes they go through.

And they have to have a medical condition for that to happen. And so you don't want it to be normal, because then the insurance will pay for it. There will come a time when that will be considered normal behavior, and it will be the conventional wisdom. Let's see how it happened. This is why everybody walked around saying, How could this happen in such a short period of time? It did not. The term homophobic only appeared in the English language in the 1960s. It's taken over 50 years for it to become commonly used. It did. And now it's commonly used. And many of us in this room would be considered mentally ill, and will be considered mentally ill in the future.

It's changed, and it will continue to change. And because of technology, the world you and I live in 10 years from now won't even be recognizable to what we live in now.

That's why we need to understand this. There are other things that are taught in the conventional wisdom of this country that's just plain wrong. If you truly love Jesus, you won't judge anybody, because Jesus said, Do not judge. But read the rest of the chapter.

It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere. Oh, really? The Catholic Inquisition were very sincere people.

And they tortured and killed tens of thousands of people. Muslim terrorists who blow themselves up and kill 30 or 40 other people are very sincere. You have to be sincere to do that, okay? You have to be really sincere. It doesn't make their actions right. Sincerity doesn't make behavior right. But our society believes that. It's becoming the conventional wisdom. And because of that, Christianity is changed. It is being dramatically changed. Barnas says that to be a Christian in the United States in 1975, which was the majority of the people as first a Protestant Christian, a Protestant Christian today, that was believed what people believe in 1975, is 6% of the population. 6%, 13 million people. That's it! That actually believed what the average Protestant believed in 1975. But see, conventional wisdom changes so that it becomes the norm, so that no one questions the norm. It's just the way it is. If you question it, something's wrong with you.

So we're deceived by conventional wisdom. Everybody hit on two other things, just quickly, because I want to bring out in the Bible study how we have to be careful about what's going to happen in the future. A second way that we are deceived is to see by sin. And we say, okay, well, come on. How can I be deceived by sin? Sin is sin. I know thou shalt not steal, so I'm not going to be deceived to steal. Okay. But what about convincing yourself not to pay your taxes because it's an evil government? Well, the truth is it is an evil government. But Jesus said, pay your taxes.

And when He was on the earth, there was nothing more evil than the Roman government.

Yet He commanded His followers to pay their taxes.

So what do you mean by deception? We can deceive ourselves into not following the clear instructions in the Bible because we can come up with a reason not to.

I don't want to pay my taxes because it's an evil government.

But Jesus told us to. In fact, there are a couple of occasions He told us to. Paul tells us to do it. And Paul is writing in a time when Nero is the... I mean, there's no more evil man in history. And he's writing over the Adolph Hitler. He's paying your taxes.

So I don't steal, but now I'm not going to pay my taxes. I'm taking... Look, I work for a big company. It's not going to mean anything to them when I, you know, every month take home some office supplies. You know, a couple boxes of pencils and pens and a stapler and a few things. Because, I mean, come on, they're a big company. But it's stealing.

We deceive ourselves because sin is attractive to us because there is a temporary benefit to sin. Now, we have to be careful, we tell our kids, all know you don't want to sin. Bad things happen to you. Well, they happen later. The problem with sin is, at the moment, there's a benefit.

There's a benefit in having a little more money at that moment. And so we deceive ourselves into compromising with sin in ways that don't seem overt, but they're actually breaking the commandment. So what we do is we sort of categorize sin. I'm not a thief, I'm not a murderer, but, you know, I do slander a lot.

You ought to do an interesting study. In fact, I think about doing a sermon on this, simply because someone has asked me to, but it's a little frightening to go through what the Bible says about slander. It's considered a major issue of the Bible. We don't consider slander a major issue. We want to say all kinds of things about people.

We're our own resentment, our own hatreds, our own covetousness, our own greed, our own envy. Well, that's not as bad as this. We become deceived by our own sins. James chapter 1.

So conventional wisdom is an external influence that can deceive us. The problem with sin is an internal deception. It's our own thought process. It's verse 21. James says, Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not here as only deceiving yourselves. We can have a great deal of biblical knowledge and be deceived.

If we're not doers of what God says to do, our knowledge is nothing.

We deceive ourselves through knowledge.

But be doers of the word, and not here as only deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he's like a man observing his natural face in a mirror, for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. And he who looks into the perfect law of liberty, and continues in it, lives by the law of liberty, and is not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the word, this one will be blessed in what he does. If anyone among you thinks he is religious, does not bridle his tongue, but deceives his own heart, this one's religion is useless. Now that's interesting. He said, we have to do, we just can't listen, we just can't have knowledge. And then he says, you know, if you have this knowledge, but you're constantly saying things you shouldn't.

He says that your religion is useless.

Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this, that visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

We deceive ourselves through sin. We see everybody else's sin, we don't see our own, we don't see our own, or we justify our own, or we come up with a reason why that's not really sin for me, or God will understand.

God will understand. And I've had people say that to me for everything from just, you know, giving up the Sabbath and working on the Sabbath to committing adultery. Well, God will understand.

And so we use that as an excuse, and we deceive ourselves.

And that's what makes this part of, this kind of deception so difficult. This whole sermon in itself. This kind of deception is so difficult because it's internal. Ephesians 5. We do it to ourselves. You and I have to be remarkably honest with ourselves. We have to, on a regular basis, go to God and say, Father, please get mercy and ask in mercy. Show me my sins.

That's a hard thing to do. Show me my wrong attitude. Show me where I am wrong. Show me where I don't understand. But do it in mercy. Be gentle. He'll be gentle if we ask for gentleness. And you're just going to say, God, show me my sins. You're going to have a bad week, okay?

Because God answers that prayer. It's not good. But if you ask in mercy, show me what I need to do.

Ephesians 5, verse 3.

Paul says, but fornication, all in cleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named upon you as this fitting for saints. Neither filthiness nor foolish talking nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this you know, that no fornicator, unclean person, or covetous man, who is an idolatry, as any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God, let no one deceive you with empty words. For because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore, do not be partakers with them. What here he's talking about is deception, that grace is a license to sin.

The deception that grace is a license to sin.

Grace is a remarkable privilege. It is in its favor shown to us by God.

For us to take that favor, that love, that mercy, and use it as an excuse to give ourselves, oh God gave me this favor, so my sins don't matter. I can do whatever I want. He says here, Paul makes an indictment against that way of thinking. Do not be deceived by those empty words, that somehow all these actions don't matter.

They do matter to God. Remember, he's writing to the church.

They do matter to God. Now, we can go ask for forgiveness, but there's a difference between asking for forgiveness and just saying, oh, it doesn't matter. God forgives me. He doesn't care. Yes, he does.

So we have to be careful about the deception of sin.

The deception of sin happens in four little steps, and this goes back to conventional wisdom. Society can convince us to sin. It starts with tolerance, and then acceptance, and then we find it attractive as we get to know more people, and it's introduced to us through technology, and we just find it more and more attractive, and then we participate.

But it begins with a tolerance. Now, actually, Christians are remarkably tolerant, and we don't go around stowing people. We sit down and have lunch with our coworkers no matter what their sins are, right? We don't treat people badly, but we don't tolerate that in our lives. We don't accept other people's behavior as God's level of behavior. We're holding ourselves up to a different standard, the standard of Jesus Christ. We live by those standards.

Or we deceive ourselves with our own sin. And then our last point is in 1 Timothy 6. And this is an interesting one, because here Paul tells Timothy about setting a snare. You know, a snare is a trick to deceive a trap and animal, right? It is a trick. You set a snare to deceive an animal. The animal doesn't know what's there. Steps into the snare and is now captured. 1 Timothy 6.

Verse 6. He says, Now godliness with contentment is a great game. We brought nothing into this world. It is certain we will carry nothing out. And having food and clothing with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, from which some have strayed from the faith and their greediness and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

You and I live in the richest country in the history of the world. You and I live with things and at a level that the average person even in the world today can't even dream of. And throughout history couldn't even imagine. Air conditioning is something Solomon could have never had.

Heat in the winter. You know, it was a fireplace. That's what you had. If you were Solomon. If you walked away from the fireplace, it was cold. You know, he had somebody fanning you. There's nobody else anybody fanning them, so everybody else was miserable in the heat, right?

You and I take all this for granted. And if we're not careful, we fall into a snare of riches so we can be deceived by wealth. Now, having wealth, there's a couple of things that we have to be careful about. And when I say, I'm talking to all of us because we're all wealthy by world standards. I mean, standards of the world. One is that because of our wealth, wealth is to prove that God's with me. God's blessed me more than this person.

I thought of that this week. I was driving along and there was a woman with a sign that said, have three children, live in an apartment complex, there were a couple of car employees. The complex was around, she says, and need help. You know, yes or no, man, you know. And I'm sitting here and I looked at her for a minute and I'm thinking, I wonder what situation she really lives in. And I'm analyzing it and sort of judging her. And another person drove up beside me in a beat-up car, obviously didn't have anything, rolled down the window, motioned her over, and this woman gave her some money. And I thought, maybe I'm over animalish in this. I'm rather judging this person, I don't even know her. And this person, I know he looked like a couple of bucks, but the issue was, it was very interesting, am I seeing, I maybe had to think about this. Am I sitting here because of my wealth in my really nice car, in my nice suit, looking at this person and saying, get a job, when I don't even know the person's circumstance.

I think there is a time to look at somebody and say, get a job.

But is my wealth, I've thought about that a lot this week, has my wealth made me so, look how God's blessed me, and therefore I can look down on this person.

The other extreme about wealth is that you don't have it, so it proves that God hates the wealthy, he loves the poor.

So now we take great pride in our lack of wealth. And there's people in the Bible that had wealth, and there's people who had nothing.

Who were righteous, and there are people in the Bible who were wealthy and unrighteous, and people in the Bible who were poor and unrighteous. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with righteousness.

Right?

It doesn't seem to have anything. Both of them can take you away from God, being poor, and what was it, agar praying? God help me not to have so much I forget about you, but not to have so little that I steal.

Yeah, problems. You know, there's where we should be. So we have to be very careful not to be deceived by riches, because you and I have opportunities. Wow! What we can buy, what we can do. I've heard of people that actually have Amazon accounts that just randomly buy things every day and send it to them. You know, they have so much money in the account, and they spend ten dollars a day or whatever, and they get a package every day that way. They don't even know what it is! They're just so excited! Like it's something new! That's a little scary, isn't it? The deception of wealth is going to be important in what happens in the future. What happens in the future, in the great deception. You know, no matter when you lived as a Christian, you had to fight the same things. Conventional wisdom, sin, and riches.

That's been the same. You see Paul talking about it, you see Jesus talking about it, you see the Old Testament prophets talking about it. The conventional wisdom of Israel was so messed up that we're using God's teachings to actually create traditions that were the exact opposite of what he was trying to teach them. We've even done that in the church.

You have to be careful.

You have to be careful. You know, one thing Mr. Keller has talked to me about is how sometimes, because he's traveled so much in Africa and so forth, that we're not careful. We're not careful about the church in America Church, where American society determines certain things instead of the Bible. We have to be very careful about that. Because why? It's normal for us. It's just normal.

We have to be concerned. Do not be conceived by conventional wisdom. We have to be very open-minded about this and look at it and say, is this what the Scripture says? Even though it becomes very uncomfortable.

I had a man all about two years ago. I had this conversation with a friend of mine. He was shocked by what he said. He said, when Jesus comes back and we have pure capitalism, I said, what do you mean by pure capitalism? He explained what he meant by that. I said, oh, that's not what Jesus is going to bring. I can go to the Bible and show him. He was just shocked. No, no, he's not. It's not going to be socialism either, but it's not capitalism. Sorry, banks aren't allowed to charge interest. They won't be allowed to charge interest. According to Scripture, or at least according to what was given to ancient Israel, that changes everything, doesn't it? That changes everything.

You can buy property, you can own property, it knows how to take your property, but if you can't have usury, it changes everything.

But that's the way we do things. That's normal. Of course God's going to do that. He's going to have football games too, when we all pray to him. Singing him before us. I'm not sure that's going to happen.

But that's the way we do it. If you live in Spain, or Germany, or France, you're sure that's going to happen, but it's going to be real football, soccer, right? And God's going to preside over soccer games.

So we have to be careful. We must be humbly submitting to God every day, submitting to his direction, asking for his direction, being open to his direction.

We have to be in this Bible every day, so that we can notice when conventional wisdom isn't biblically correct. Or we won't be deceived by our own sin, because we're asking God to show us our hearts and minds. To reveal to ourselves where we are deceived. To keep us from self-deception. And we have to resist the temptation to be deceived by wealth.

So what we want to do then, after the potluck, is I want to go through just two major scriptures and look at what the Bible tells us about the deception that's going to happen in the future and why that deception is going to come out of the whole world. There's reason why that's going to happen. And understanding some of this, how we are deceived, will help us be able to understand how that deception happens.