WG-12-13. THE CONDITIONS OF FAITH

13. THE CONDITIONS OF FAITH THE pursuit by the natural man of first one and then another of the many forms which unreality takes, and the willingness to be deceived, which the man himself recognizes even while he yields to it, are evidences of his lost condition. Until he comes under the convict­ing work of the Holy Spirit, man will avoid meeting the truth that he has lost fellowship with God. Yet his very willingness to hear of some­thing improbable, and to invest it with attributes of reality, is a perpetual witness to the conscious lack of something which is outside all worldly ex­periences, which the world knows nothing of, and which the natural man knows nothing of; for “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1Co 2:14). The readiness of the mind of man to accord to falsehood that acceptance which, in a clear and un-fallen mental state, would be accorded only to truth, may be seen in the prevalence throughout the whole world of idolatry, superstition, and false religion. The heathen world, embracing more than two-thirds of the living human beings, is completely under the sway of falsehood and dark­ness. But the so-called civilized peoples exhibit precisely the same tendencies. Religious, medical, and other quacks flourish in the centers of highest intelligence, and it is safe to say that no man is free from the inherited tendency to give heed and credence to the improbable and untrue. And when men are not thus occupied, as were the Athenians, who “spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing,” they fall into the mental occupation of “exercising the imagination.” Whatever that faculty may have been intended for, its chief exercise in fallen man is to spin long skeins of falsehood, presenting to the mind a succession of unrealities and im­possibilities in great variety. The fact that their character is known does not interrupt the process; and like the objective diversions in which men engage to “kill the time” while hastening on to eternity, these imaginations serve to crowd out all profitable subjects of meditation, and to exclude the knowledge of God. Therefore, the Apostle speaks of one phase of the Christian warfare as “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2Co 10:5).

There is a spiritual consequence which men bring upon themselves by having “received not the love of the truth”; and that consequence is the sub­ject of our present consideration—namely, that they are always ready “to believe the lie,” easily subject to “strong delusion,” and exposed to all “signs and lying wonders,” and to all “deceivableness of unrighteousness” (2Th 2:9-11).

Such are the effects not only spread plainly in view on every hand, but within the common ex­periences of every heart; effects of what? Is there any explanation, which even purports to account for these effects and to state the cause of them, save only the information given in the third of Genesis?