The Path That Leads Us Out of God’s Will
Introduction: An Extensive and Profound Subject
This teaching began, as every work of the Kingdom should begin, before God: giving thanks to the Lord, placing the time in His hands, and preparing our hearts for whatever He had for His people. That prayer acknowledged that the work of the last days is a prophetic work, a work of deliverance, of spiritual warfare, and of revelation, because it is written in the Word that heaven must retain Him until all His enemies are made a footstool for His feet—and the Lord has made us partakers of that work. We also asked that God would open our ears to hear His voice, our eyes to see His work, and our hearts to understand the labor to which He is commissioning us in the name of Jesus.
The subject we are beginning to study is lies and deception. From the outset we should acknowledge that it cannot be exhausted in a single teaching: it is an extensive subject and, above all, one that is profound to understand.
The Purpose: Lies and Deception as the Fruit of the Old Man
Why study this subject? Because it is directly connected to the subject of the old man. For several weeks now we have been studying it, and lies and deception are precisely a consequence of the old man. That is why it is important to examine them carefully.
The definition we have generally held of a lie is simple: to lie is to hide the truth. “Don’t lie to me; tell me the truth”—that is, don’t hide the truth from me. But as this teaching unfolds, we will discover that the Holy Scriptures contain several definitions of what a lie is, and that many of them are unknown to us. And what is most serious is that we may have been living in deception without knowing it, without having understood it—and, worse still, while being men and women of God.
When we speak of lies or deception, we almost always have in mind a man living on the street, someone who does not know the Lord. But to say that a man or a woman who has acknowledged Jesus as the Lord of their life can live in deception is something that could shock us and even offend us. How is that possible? I live in the truth. That is precisely part of what we are going to study.
The Structure: Lie, Hypocrisy, and Deception
To orient ourselves in this study, it helps to establish a structure. Those who are taking notes can draw it like this: on the left side of the page, write the word lie; on the same line, on the right side, leaving a considerable space between them, write the word deception. This already helps us understand that there is a close connection between lying and deception: the lie leads to deception.
Directly beneath the word deception, write four words in a column: fantasy, illusion, imagination, and vanity. These are alternate words that help us understand the meaning of the word deception, which is why they are placed in the same column. Finally, in the space left between lie and deception, a little lower down, write the word hypocrisy.
| LIE | HYPOCRISY | DECEPTION |
| The first thing established; when embraced, it leads to deception | The screen or artifice that hides the lie | Fantasy Illusion Imagination Vanity |
This is the structure on which we are going to study, and it will help us understand where we stand.
From the Lie to Deception
Let us begin by defining the relationship between the lie and deception. Deception is not established at first instance; this is very important. Deception is the result of walking in a lie. The first thing established in this process is the lie, and when a person embraces the lie, he falls into deception.
This means that no one is deceived at first instance. I know that we often say, “You deceived me,” but according to the Word we are coming to understand that deception arrives when a person embraces a lie and, by embracing it, begins to walk toward deception. The text that best illustrates this is one we know very well: Genesis 3.
“And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, “You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.”’ Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” (Genesis 3:2-5)
The serpent’s words were a lie. And notice what happened next:
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.” (Genesis 3:6)
This is the process: when a man or a woman of God embraces a lie, he or she immediately begins to walk the path of deception. And that path is not easily resolved. To resolve deception, the person must identify the lie he embraced and discard it. There are people who have walked in deception for years, for decades, and cannot get out of it until they discover which lie they embraced and are able to discard it. An embraced lie makes us walk the path of deception.
Deception Is a Condition, and the Lie Charts a Path
Here we have a first definition: deception is embracing a lie. We cannot say, “I have already come out of the deception I was in,” until we have identified and discarded the lie we ourselves embraced. Why? Because deception is a condition. And how does one come to be in a condition of deception? When the person has embraced a lie. The text of Genesis 3 shows us this clearly: we are not exempt from lies or from deception, as long as we do not embrace what is presented to us.
Furthermore, a lie is not merely a truth that is not declared at the proper time: “Forgive me, I lied; forgive me, I didn’t tell the truth; forgive me, I didn’t tell you what was really happening.” The lie charts a path, and it makes us travel that path in order to take us out of the will of God.
That lie may have come through someone outside us, but it may also have come from ourselves. Walking in deception, which is synonymous with having embraced a lie, does not necessarily require a third person: we may have embraced a lie that we ourselves constructed. That is why the other words in our diagram—fantasy, illusion, vanity, imagination—are so significant: many times we are the ones who form that environment, that imagination, that illusion, that vanity. Although most of the time another person may be involved, at other times we ourselves are forging the lie. And we will not come out of the imagination until we identify the lie and discard it.
This is very important because the old man is not easy to identify. Remember what we have seen in the earlier teachings: the old man has capabilities that are not born in the person but come from the kingdom of darkness. When we studied the fallen man, the fallen Adam, we identified characteristics having to do with personality, with character, with thought, with feeling. But we also saw that there are spiritual characteristics, because spiritual beings were present at the moment of the fall of Adam and Eve: the fallen angels. That is why the old man has capabilities that are not easy to destroy. And that is why it is so necessary to understand that we may have established a lie in our life, recognized those lies as truths, embraced them, and walked in them for the rest of our lives, deceived. A third person may have deceived us, but many times we ourselves construct the deception.
The Word shows how the heart can chart its own route:
“My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart.” (Job 17:11)
The heart makes a route, makes plans, and when we chart a route with the heart, we leave the path that God charted for us. One of the things that can take us off that path appears in the book of Job:
“If my step has turned from the way, or my heart walked after my eyes, or if any spot adheres to my hands.” (Job 31:7)
At times we see something, we desire it, we want to obtain it, and we begin to build toward what our heart desires. Then we add it to the will of God: we say it is to serve God, that it is for God, and we immediately bring in the service of God to strengthen those plans. That is extremely dangerous.
Why We Must Come Out of the Lie
The lie is the opposite of the truth, and the Word tells us who the truth is:
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
The truth is Jesus, the truth is God, the truth is what keeps us firm on the right path. Once the enemy succeeds in getting a person into a lie, that person is outside the kingdom of heaven—even if he is preaching the Word, even if he is fasting, even if he is praying, even if he is doing whatever he wants to do, even if he remains within a ministry, a church, a group, with pastors or without them. As long as we are in a lie, we are outside the kingdom of heaven. The lie does not fit in the kingdom of heaven; it is not admitted, because the substance of God is love, and love is made of truth. That is why the Word became flesh: the truth of God, His Word, became flesh, and there is no room there for the lie to dwell.
What does this mean? That in whatever part of our life is in a lie, we are disconnected from the truth, and God is truth. There is no way for our life to come into fullness with God until we come out of the lie; there is no way to restore what follows. That is why Jesus came to establish the truth.
That is also why John the Baptist had such strong power that Jesus Himself said there had been no prophet like him, nor would there be. When we look at that, it startles us, because we ask: What about Moses? What about the other prophets? He says there is no greater prophet than he, nor will there be. Why? Because John the Baptist had the power and the revelation to bring the mysteries and to speak truth. Every time he spoke, he spoke the purity of the Word, which is truth, and the darkness could not withstand that. If there is one thing the darkness cannot withstand, it is the truth. They cut off his head, we know, but they could not silence the truth.
Something fundamental about authority follows from this. Authority is not that people follow us, nor that we have human or financial resources, because the darkness can also give resources to people, both delivering souls and delivering financial resources. That does not guarantee that the person at the front has the power of God. The power of God belongs to the one who speaks truth, because the one who speaks truth speaks from the kingdom of heaven and with the power of God.
So why must I remove my soul from the lie, along with the parts of my soul that are in a lie? Because we can be serving the Lord and yet have a part of us in a lie; and those areas are dark, and Satan has control over them. I must come out of the lie because I need to live in the fullness of the kingdom, and in that fullness are all the resources I need: resources of health, of direction, of God’s covering and God’s care. And most important, the instructions there are very clear—not some that clash with others, nor of the kind, “if this suits me, or that suits me, what should I do?” The instruction is clear, and the presence of God is a full presence, because we walk in the light and we walk in the truth, and by being in the truth we are in Christ, in fullness.
Hypocrisy: The Screen That Hides the Lie
Let us return to the diagram we drew at the beginning. There is an element we mentioned in passing that we still need to identify: hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the screen, the artifice, that a person automatically generates to hide his lie. Whoever walks in a lie or has embraced a lie immediately generates this screen, which is simply a way of presenting to others, as acceptable, the image the person has of himself.
That is why everyone who walks in a lie is a hypocrite. That’s it: we cannot shake it off or say, “I am not a hypocrite.” If we walk in a lie, we walk in deception, and that deception creates a fantasy that only we believe, but that can also deceive others. Such people can multiply in others the illusion they themselves hold; they can entangle others; yet they remain liars and deceivers. And they are very dangerous, because they develop a spiritual power given to them by Satan, with which they can carry many away entangled.
The only way to stand firm is to keep our life free of lies, so that deceivers do not carry us away entangled, but we have the firmness of the truth. And the truth is Jesus, and He is immovable. But we cannot ignore the word lie. Each of us should look for the areas of our life in which we are deceived and the areas in which we have allowed deception. Because there are men and women of God who use the mind and the imagination more to speak about God; they have an imagination, but they do not know God. The question is a strong one: Are you imagining?
Many of us walk in hypocrisy because it seems more convenient, more suitable, and more comfortable than confronting the truth. The truth hurts to confront; but it is the only way out of the condition of lies and deception in which we have walked for many years.
Inherited Deception: What We Received From Our Parents
There is more. When a person has walked and remained on the path of deception, his descendants can also be contaminated with deception. Let us read two texts from the book of Psalms.
“The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.” (Psalm 58:3)
“And if he comes to see me, he speaks lies; his heart gathers iniquity to itself; when he goes out, he tells it.” (Psalm 41:6)
Remember that we are speaking of men and women of God, of men and women of faith who have acknowledged Jesus as their Lord. There are people who may be walking in deception without knowing it, people who even fathered children, and the children were born into deception. The text says it clearly: from the womb.
Here I want us to look not so much forward, although we should, but from ourselves backward. If our parents embraced a lie and walked in deception, then when they conceived us they conceived us with a condition of deception, and we have lived our whole lives under a condition that we did not fabricate, but they did. As the text says, the person was born already under the lie and on the path of deception, and for these purposes that could describe any one of us. This is serious. Now we can understand the need to cut the genetic bond that unites us with our ancestors. In the previous two teachings we saw the subject of genetic inheritance; now we realize the weight it carries in every man and every woman born on this earth, in some more than in others, because ancestors who walked in deception fathered children also in deception.
Many oppressions come from this situation. There are people who are under oppression and do not feel bad—they are fine—but they know it is like wearing clothing one or two sizes too small, or shoes one or two sizes too small. There is something that does not let them expand, something that does not let them be completely free. What is it? A lie.
The Truth That Sanctifies and Sets Free
“Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.” (John 17:17)
The truth sanctifies and the truth sets free. When we take the Word of the Lord, make it literal, and establish it, we immediately enter processes of sanctification and deliverance. This is not an imaginary truth, nor illusion, nor what is vain or deceptive: it is the truth, and that truth sanctifies us, frees us, and enables us to grow and expand. To be sanctified means that it drives the demons out of us, drives out the contaminations, restores our organs, corrects our genetics, strengthens us, anoints us with fresh oil, and gives us spiritual authority to confront the force of the darkness and establish the kingdom of heaven in the midst of the earth. But we cannot rush to establish the kingdom of heaven from a weakness of lies. The lie is a very serious weakness: a spiritual weakness.
There are moments when we say, “I commit myself up to here, and no further.” We are already in a lie. And there are moments when someone comes and tells us a lie and a deception and we believe it, because we are looking at a manifestation, something that seems undeniable.
An example will help. A person takes his blood pressure, and the machine says it is elevated. That cannot be said any other way: it is elevated. The doctor comes and tells him he must take a pill because his pressure is elevated, and the person is frightened to death of a heart attack. Right there, within what appears evident, there is already a lie, because blood pressure can rise for many reasons. If the situation that raises it is resolved, there is no need to take the pill. There are even spiritual manifestations that can raise blood pressure: there are demons that raise it, and once the demon is rebuked and leaves, forget about the pressure. At other times what exists is a condition in an organ, a health situation that needs to be attended to; it is attended to, and the pressure normalizes. But there are people tied to a lie that led them into deception: the brain created the fantasy that if they do not take the pill, something cardiac will happen to them, and when the pill runs out they go running to the pharmacy. They walk tied to medications that are not necessary, because the enemy tied them with the lie.
Now, we also cannot deny what is tangible and real. We cannot say, “God is going to heal me; I am not going to take any pill because God heals me.” Whoever speaks this way is in a fantasy and an imagination; if the person is in that state because he is demonized, it will not change until he is set free. In the meantime, take the pill. We cannot take God and turn Him into a fantasy and an illusion, because God is truth and He does not deny Himself.
If we have a problem in our relationship with the Lord and we know we have entered a situation of contamination, we must find a way to be set free, because as long as we are not, our organs will become more and more complicated; that is a reality. There are times when the answer is simply having sinned against the body. Fornication brings health problems because one sins against his own body, and the Word says so. If we had problems with fornication and illicit sexual relations, we must know that we sinned against the body and that the body will react with sickness. What do we have to do? First, repent, of course, and then work on that area. If the sin was gluttony, if we set out to eat everything we see and then our blood pressure goes up, we cannot say, “Lord, You are going to heal me.” We are fantasizing; we are waiting for God to heal us, but it is an illusion. “But His Word says that He is my healer. I am taking this pill, but I know that God is my healer and I am waiting for the healing.” Keep waiting; you have just taken another dose. It is a fantasy.
We must correct where correction is needed, adjust where adjustment is needed, and walk in the truth of the Lord, in His mercy and in His grace. It is true that God can bring a manifestation of healing through His Holy Spirit to people who walk in ignorance; we have seen it, and God does not ask what happened: He poured out mercy, and it was as if He cast a net and everyone was caught up in it. But that does not mean that, when we are before the Lord in a life lived before Him, we are going to create a fantasy of God and oblige Him to wait to heal us. No: we have to heal our life, bring our life into order, and heal what we did. If I gave myself over to fornications that I committed against my own body, and my body is speaking, I have to work on that.
So we see how that lie leads us to a hypocrisy that deceives us and leads us to a fantasy, and from there come an illusion, an imagination, and a vanity. And when we reach the point of vanity, how do we turn back? We are already at the place where God is at our service: “I have faith that God is going to heal me of this; I have faith that God is going to raise this person up; I have faith that God is going to do this with that.” Look, you are in vanity, and that has to be worked on. God is telling us to discard the lie because He is truth, and without truth we will not have fullness. Fullness is when we are in the truth of His Word, and His Word sanctifies us.
How Deception Is Transmitted: An Example
Let us take up the example of blood pressure again to see how one person can father others under the condition of deception. Suppose that the one who accepted the lie was our father or our mother. He or she embraced the lie, and from that moment walked in deception. What did that mean? That from then on, he or she became a user of medication. And haven’t we seen cases like this, in which the person announces it: “I am taking something for my pressure, I am taking something for this”? Then what happens is that my father or my mother, who embraced that lie and walked in deception, when conceiving children (in this case, me), made them deceived—under deception—because he or she walked in deception.
So the question arises: How do I free myself from the deception of my father and my mother? We are looking at two deceptions: the one I inherited and the one I myself embraced. And we are considering only one generation, but behind my father and my mother were my grandfather and my grandmother, my great-grandfather and my great-grandmother. Let us look first at one generation, and then at the deceptions of the lies that I embraced.
How to Be Freed From the Deception of Our Parents
The answer begins with confession. Let us read from chapter 9 of Daniel, and I urge you to read the whole chapter:
“And I prayed to the LORD my God, and made confession, and said, ‘O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments, we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments. Neither have we heeded Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings and our princes, to our fathers and all the people of the land.’” (Daniel 9:4-6)
Unfortunately, this kind of confession is scarce in the life of the righteous man and the righteous woman of our time. Why? Because we have embraced a lie, and it is a religious lie. Which one? “God already did everything; Jesus did everything on the cross; you don’t have to do anything.” That is a lie we have embraced, and as a result we have not worked for our deliverance or for our sanctification.
I must therefore confess the sin of my parents. You may have noticed that when someone dies, particularly an ancestor, we say he was the best man or she was the best woman: there was no one like him, there was no one like her. That is the tendency in our times. But when he was alive, he was not the best man; when she was alive, she was not the best woman. What am I referring to? That we need to know exactly what our parents and our ancestors were, and not hide it. “He is my father and I must honor him; she is my mother and I must honor her; and I must obey everything he tells me and everything she tells me.” This is where we continue the deception that they began, and therefore we will never be able to come out. If my father was an abuser, a deceiver, a perverse person, that must be said. “I prayed to the LORD my God, and made confession, and said”: this is where the truth begins to be established.
We said at the beginning that as long as we do not denounce the lie—in this case, the one our parents embraced—we will not be able to come out of the deception. One cannot leave the state of deception as long as one has not identified the lie and denounced it. To the extent that I come to know what my father was and who my father was, what my mother was and who my mother was, to that extent I must go on discarding the lie that they embraced; otherwise, I will not be able to come out of the deception in which I was formed. We will not be able to come out as long as I keep seeing my father as the best man in the world and my mother as the best woman in the world. If I do not identify the lies and the deceptions by which they walked, I will remain in this same condition all my life.
That is breaking bonds. That is establishing truth. When I do not want to confront the abusive father he really was, I am not establishing truth; on the contrary, I am establishing the continuation of the lie and, therefore, multiplying the lie that began with them.
But breaking bonds does not mean ceasing to speak to my mother or my father because they were perverse or still are. It is not that. Breaking bonds is identifying: “These things stop here; this I do not pass on.” And then taking my soul out of those things, and not saying, “But it was my dad and my mom—imagine what I’m going to do.” That is not for me. This does not mean that you will develop hatred or any adverse feeling toward your father or your mother; that is not what is being said. What is being said is: we know this does not please God, this does not go with me, and it is not going to happen. I cannot look at it as though everything were fine. It is easy to tell someone else that something is wrong, but we must begin at our own house. “Oh, but my mom… I can’t see that as wrong.” That is wrong.
When we do this, we will realize that many health conditions will be resolved, because many conditions that men of God have today did not begin in them: they simply inherited them from their parents, as we saw in Psalm 58. We will go on releasing many bonds from our lives. And when we say deception, we must understand that there is mental deception, because there is a mental structure that we may have forged ourselves; emotional deception, sentimental deception, and deception that has to do with sensations. All these levels of deception will be released when we truly confront the past of the people who conceived us.
It is about stopping the copy and paste—the copying and pasting of the father or the mother. That copy and paste has to be stopped, because the child copied everything, accepted everything, swallowed everything, and so he goes along the same course. This is very important.
The Lie I Embraced
So far we have seen what runs from the parent toward us. But our concern is that each one identify his old man so that he can be freed from him; it is not the first time we have said so. These teachings are not for accumulating knowledge, but so that each of us may work on this foundation and be set free from his old man.
Now, then, let us work on the part that has to do with the lie I embraced and that made me walk in deception. In the same way that I worked through the case of my father and my mother, I must identify the lie I embraced. This is important: if I do not identify it, I will keep walking in deception, even while inside a church, even while saying I am a child of God, because the one does not deliver us from the other. I must identify the lie that was given to me and that I embraced, or the one I myself fabricated, because both events are real. The question I must answer is: What lie did I embrace? And when I identify it, I must establish it as an abomination.
A very simple example: marital unions, or conjugal bonds. A person was married, or in a bond with another, for however many years, and afterward there was a divorce or a separation. How do we define that union? On that depends whether I can be freed from the deception into which I fell. If I define it like this—“we divorced because it didn’t work; he had one character and she had another; they were incompatible; we ended up divorcing, separating, and everything is fine now”—there is the lie, and I am walking in deception. As long as I do not say that this union should never have been, I will keep walking in deception, and the children conceived, if there were any, have fallen into a condition of deception. Let me repeat: as long as I do not identify that relationship as one that should never have taken place, I am walking in deception, and the children born under that union are likewise in deception.
What must I do, then? Acknowledge: that union should never have taken place; I should never have joined myself to that man; I should never have joined myself to that woman. I am speaking of broken relationships, of fractured relationships. This is important because as long as I do not identify them as such, I keep walking in deception, and my children remain immersed in a condition of deception. I must identify and classify that relationship or that union as abominable in order to cut the deception in which I have walked and to keep my children from being contaminated by it. There are deliverances that take place without the other person being present; in the case of the children, without the children being present. There is a deliverance when I establish truth, and that is establishing truth.
“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32)
The truth is what I walk in the Lord. It is not “a relationship that didn’t work” or “a relationship that lasted a short time, but it really didn’t work out.” I must identify that the union should never have taken place, because as long as I do not identify the lie I embraced and walked in, I will not be able to come out of the deception in which I have been living. As long as I have not discarded the lie I embraced, no word will apply to me, and I will not be able to walk in the Word, because I must first be free in order to establish the Word in my life.
“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-6)
Notice the expression “when your obedience is fulfilled.” I cannot presume to take the Word and apply it to my life if I have not first resolved the deception in which I am living, because what will happen is that I will contaminate the Word and use it for the benefit of the deception in which I am walking.
And Then, Where Would I Be?
A question arises at once. If my mother and father’s relationship should not have been, where would I be? And likewise: I have three sons, and I know I should not have gotten involved with the boys’ father; I know that, because I disobeyed God. But then, what would have happened to my sons, the ones I have today? It is a legitimate question, and it is striking that almost no one asks it. The Lord answers it in His Word:
“For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry; for the spirit would fail before Me, and the souls which I have made.” (Isaiah 57:16)
Where would we be? God would have sent us regardless of the parents. What we take from our parents is genetics and social mores, what surrounds us and forms our social character; but the souls were created by the Lord. So we might ask what the function of the family is, if the Lord creates the souls. The Word answers this as well:
“Yet you say, ‘For what reason?’ Because the LORD has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you have dealt treacherously; yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant. But did He not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.” (Malachi 2:14-15)
This means that if God gives us our spouse, we must not abandon that person, because we are supposed to raise up offspring for God there. But if that person, or oneself (because we always talk about the other person, but it is also oneself), was not in the right place before God, offspring for God will not be raised up. That is why there are separations, and there are separations that come directly from God.
Each of us is a soul, a created human being, who came from the Lord with a particular function. God created us, and we took from this and from that; now God has to repair us: repair our DNA, set us free, look at us in the past and in the present. God is restoring what happened, because He created the soul. Where would we be? Again, where we were meant to be: where God would have placed us.
A Restoration in Every Sense
The restoration is in every sense: a genetic, mental, emotional, and sentimental restoration, and even a spiritual one, because the psalmist David says:
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10)
So that when you see yourself restored and compare yourself with your family, you will see a distance—an abysmal distance. That is precisely where the Lord is taking us. But as you are realizing, there is work to be done. First, I must identify the lie that my parents embraced and the lie that I embraced, which will be passed on to my later generations. I am no longer going to walk in that lie: my parents walked in that lie and conceived me in deception, but I do not continue with that lie; I separate myself from it.
In the experiences the Lord has allowed us to develop, not only in teaching, there have been times when we have had to go to cemeteries, so that the person confronts the one who is buried in that place. The Lord has taken us into that kind of experience so that it can be seen that this is not theoretical. It is not enough to say, “Tonight I will do it; I separate myself from all this, I free myself from all this.” There must be a real conviction, to the point of confronting what I am abominating, because otherwise the lie does not disappear and, therefore, the lie and the deception continue to be established in my descendants.
Conclusion
What have we discovered regarding lies and deception? That many times we may be walking in deception without knowing it, because of a lie we embraced: either because it was told to us and we embraced it, or because we constructed it ourselves and it suited us, it seemed good to us to walk in it. As long as we do not identify the lie, we will not be able to come out of the deception. And this is where truth begins to be established.
The truth hurts to confront. That is why, as we saw in the diagram, many of us walk in hypocrisy, because it seems more convenient, more suitable, and more comfortable than facing the truth. But it is the only way out of the situation of lies and deception in which we have walked for many years. God does not want us to walk in deception; how are we going to be able to establish truth if we are living in deception?
In the next teaching we will study several definitions of what a lie is, and the lies that lead to deception. Because, as we said at the beginning, a lie does not mean only a hidden truth, an unspoken truth, or a concealed fact: it goes much further than that. Notice that, according to Genesis 3, the lie was practically the first thing that appeared as evidence of the fall, among the characteristics of the fallen Adam and the fallen Eve.
Review Questions
1. What is the difference between the common definition of a lie (hiding the truth) and the way this chapter describes the relationship among the lie, hypocrisy, and deception? In what area of your life might there be an embraced lie that you have not yet identified?
2. The chapter asserts that deception can be inherited from our parents and can also be constructed by ourselves. According to what was studied, what does it mean to confront the truth about our ancestors without falling into hatred, and what does it mean to break bonds?
3. What religious lie is mentioned in the chapter, and why does it hinder confession, deliverance, and sanctification? What concrete steps is it your responsibility to take in order to establish truth in your life?
Leave a Reply