The Problem with Self-Deception
Passover • Sermon • Submitted • 40:08
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· 1,390 viewsself-deception is not the worst thing we do, but it’s the reason we can do the worst things. Self-deception is not the worst thing we do, but it is the reason why we so easily miss God.
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Sermon Introduction
In the 1930s, London was filled with Government officials that loved Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was building Autobahns and recovering Germany’s fallen economy. Ranking members of parliament were in love with Hitler and when Churchill tried to warn them that Adolf Hitler could not be trusted these government officials just smiled because they knew better than Churchill. They said Churchill was an alarmist, hysterical, and trying to push England into a war. They said he was walking on a road no one else was traveling on and that he needed to get on the path with the rest of the government officials in England who wanted to appease Adolf Hitler.
You can read all about this in the biography of William Manchester 2nd Volume called the Last Lion. Part of the problem of the British government at this time is that they just could not believe that the government of Germany had fallen into the hands of criminals. They couldn’t believe it and would not believe. They resisted the truth and the convinced themselves of one lie after another. When German invaded Czechoslovakia the British Prime Minister refused to believe the report of his own ambassador. His ambassador wired him that Nazis were savaging Jews in the streets. He refused to believe. Neville Chambers sent wire back to him and simply said, “Impossible! If Hitler knew of any suffering of Jews he would put a stop to it at once.”
William Manchester: most men in power…believe what they want to believe, accepting whatever justifies their policies and convictions while taking out insurance, whenever possible, against the possibility that the truth may lie in their wastebaskets.
It was not just the English Government that refused to accept the truth, most of the nations and their populations stayed in darkness. They saw the truth and deceived themselves into believing a lie.
All these years later, we are still not so different are we? Self-deception has not really gone away has it? Our bad temper is really righteous indignation. Our Gossip is an information service. Our High Stress is just the result of love for family. Our lack of forgiving other is really just enforcing firm boundaries. We go through our lives and promote our self-righteousnes when we really have none. That is the height of self-deception.
What is our capacity for self-deception? The human heart has an almost infinite capacity to hide the truth from itself if that truth is too unpleasant or uncomfortable. Here is the thing you need to hear today: self-deception is not the worst thing we do, but it’s the reason we can do the worst things. Self-deception is not the worst thing we do, but it is the reason why we so easily miss God.
Our passage today is about the cure for present and future self-deception.
Grab Your Copy of the Scriptures and Say: Hafoke-Ba
On Screen Bible (, TLV)
Isaiah was a prophet in ancient Judea, southern Israel He prophesied during the days when the confederation of the Northern Ten Tribes were defeated by Assyria and taken into Exile. During the days when the Lord of Hosts stood with Hezekiah the great King and defeated the great army of Assyria. He prophesied when Judea was a prosperous and victorious kingdom.
All that prosperity and victory led people to believe things about themselves that were not true. The believed that their prosperity was a sign of their right-ness with God. Isaiah had this as his mission to open the eyes and ears of the self-deceived ().
Bring out the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears.
His mission was unique because God showed this prophet the future. He showed him what the future would be because of their self-deception. He showed this prophet that self-deception would wall people off from God’s suffering savior, the Messiah. He also says to future generations: there is a way out of this self-deception.
The Bible: The journey from Self-Deception to the need for a Suffering-Savior: The Facts, The Reasons, and the Cure
1. The Fact: When You See As God Sees You Will be Shocked
The Fact: We Have an Infinite Capacity to Deceive Ourselves
A. When You See As God Sees You Will be Shocked
So He will sprinkle many nations. Kings will shut their mouths because of Him, for what had not been told them they will see, and what they had not heard they will perceive.
Shocked about Self-Deception
Shocked about who the Servant is ( )
“Behold, My servant will prosper, He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.
The servant is not one of the pagan kings like Cyrus because it is those kings and any kind how is shocked about the Messiah.
The servant is not the nation of Israel because in the servant is acting on behalf of the nation.
The Jewish community has held and still holds to this day (I will show you at the end of the message) that this passage can only refer to God’s Messiah.
Targum Jonathan a 6th century Jewish Aramaic Translation says this:
52.13 Behold, my servant, the Messiah, shall prosper, he shall be exalted and increase, and shall be very strong. 52.14 Just as the house of Israel hoped for him many days...The Aramaic Bible: The Isaiah Targum, trans. Bruce D. Chilton, vol. 11 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), .
Kevin Cathcart, Michael Maher, and Martin McNamara, eds., The Aramaic Bible: The Isaiah Targum, trans. Bruce D. Chilton, vol. 11 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), .
Shocked about what the Messiah’s story ()
i (52:15b-c)
Just as many were appalled at You— His appearance was disfigured more than any man, His form more than the sons of men. So He will sprinkle many nations. Kings will shut their mouths because of Him, for what had not been told them they will see, and what they had not heard they will perceive.
Illustration: You use a good reason for your self-deception
We have an infinite capacity to deceive ourselves don’t we. From the trivial to the very serious.
For example, I just came out of one of these self-deceptions with my wife. I had a lot of problems believing there was anything wrong with my dishwasher. Every night we would put the dishes in the dishwasher and then the next morning Lauren would pull out the dishes and say, “See, the dishes are not clean and the water is not draining.” And of course I would say, “No, it is okay just put some Draino in there and maybe better detergent.” All the evidence was there that the thing was not working but you know the money, the time, a call to Joe Hollar my arch nemesis, the plumber. I worked hard to convince Lauren and she played along for a while and then finally she hatched a plan that got a plumber out and a brand new dishwasher. Then I admitted my self-deception.
Let me go up one more step. Here’s a young gal. She’s a beauty and she is smart, and she was sort of raised in a kind of religious home. She moves out of mom and dad’s house, and now she wants to establish her own life.
The truth is she knows down underneath there is a God and there is a right and wrong and there are moral absolutes, but it’s very painful for somebody who desperately wants to be accepted, to be seen as cool, to get the job she wants, to hang out, to be accepted, and she certainly wants to keep the boyfriend she has, he is a real catch, and he wants to sleep with her.
B. God’s Way of Saving Us Have Never Been Easy to Accept ()
There’s plenty of evidence she does believe there’s a God. She talks as if racism is wrong. That shows you believe there’s a God because you know there are moral absolutes, just not for you. And she hides it with a a good reason for her self-deception. She says, “Most of the believers I know are all kind of hypocrites anyway.” And on we go. Let me get just one more. It gets worse.
Have you heard about the very famous incident where Eisenhower was liberating Germany at the end of World War II? He was so tired of people saying the knew nothing about what was going on in the horrible death camp that in a particular town in which Eisenhower got to the boiling point. He issued a very, very famous command. He said at gunpoint every man, woman, and child in that town would march into that work camp and would bury the bodies themselves. And he did it. Afterwards they filed out, and the mayor and his wife went home that night and hung themselves. They knew. You wouldn’t hang yourself unless you knew that you knew but you didn’t want to know, because if it’s really happening …
They saw the Jews being carted off, and they knew something was going wrong. “But my goodness, it’s too painful to stand up. If I stand up for that, I might be taken myself, and I don’t want to think of myself as a coward.” So what do you do? You use a good reason for your self-deception. You say, “Those Jews, they’re really the problems we have anyway.”
We have an infinite capacity. The same thing I’m using on my wife and my car is the thing the mayor and his wife used. We have an infinite capacity. If we don’t like a truth, though there’s evidence we believe it, we know how to not know it. For example, here are the three techniques
Application: The scary thing about Self-Deception is How it can insulate us from God’s Savior.
Application: The scary thing about Self-Deception is How it can insulate us from God’s Savior.
As long as there is a King or Queen over your heart you will keep God’s salvation for self-salvation.
Here is the fact Isaiah is starting out with: God’s chosen people are oblivious and yet they are not.
Here is a definition you need to know: Self-deception is the ability to know the truth but not know the truth because you don’t want to know the truth. To know it and yet not know it at the same time because you don’t want to know it. That’s something the human heart is able to do under sin, and it’s amazing.
In other words, in self-deception, happens because the truth is too hot to hold
Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).
Isaiah says that he got a glimpse of the future and he saw that the truth about God’s servant the Messiah would be so painful to believe that many would rather believe anything else but when they eventually saw the servant as God sees him they were shocked at their self-deception.
Isai
The Reasons
ii. The answer to these questions and those like them are the same: there is another Savior ruling your heart and not God’s Savior.
For example, I just came out of one of these self-deceptions with my wife. I had a lot of problems believing there was anything wrong with my dishwasher. Every night we would put the dishes in the dishwasher and then the next morning Lauren would pull out the dishes and say, “See, the dishes are not clean and the water is not draining.” And of course I would say, “No, it is okay just put some Draino in there and maybe better detergent.” All the evidence was there that the thing was not working but you know the money, the time, a call to Joe Hollar my arch nemesis, the plumber. I worked hard to convince Lauren and she played along for a while and then finally she hatched a plan that got a plumber out and a brand new dishwasher. Then I admitted my self-deception.
Let me go up one more step. Here’s a young gal. She’s a beauty and she is smart, and she was sort of raised in a kind of religious home. She moves out of mom and dad’s house, and now she wants to establish her own life.
The truth is she knows down underneath there is a God and there is a right and wrong and there are moral absolutes, but it’s very painful for somebody who desperately wants to be accepted, to be seen as cool, to get the job she wants, to hang out, to be accepted, and she certainly wants to keep the boyfriend she has, he is a real catch, and he wants to sleep with her.
The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive Sin as Self-Deceit
Let me go up one more step. Here’s a lady. She’s a talented musician, and she was sort of raised in a kind of religious home. She moves to New York, and now she wants to break into the rock music era.
The truth is she knows down underneath there is a God and there is a right and wrong and there are moral absolutes, but it’s very painful for somebody who desperately wants to be accepted, to be seen as cool, to get the gig she wants, to hang out, to be accepted, and she certainly wants to keep the boyfriend she has, and he wants to sleep with her.
There’s plenty of evidence she does believe there’s a God. She talks as if racism is wrong. That shows you believe there’s a God because you know there are moral absolutes, just not for you. And she hides it with a technique. She says, “Most of the Christians I know are all kind of hypocrites anyway.” And on we go. Let me get just one more. It gets worse.
There’s plenty of evidence she does believe there’s a God. She talks as if racism is wrong. That shows you believe there’s a God because you know there are moral absolutes, just not for you. And she hides it with a a good reason for her self-deception. She says, “Most of the believers I know are all kind of hypocrites anyway.” And on we go. Let me get just one more. It gets worse.
Have you heard about the very famous incident where Eisenhower was liberating Germany at the end of World War II? He was so tired of people saying the knew nothing about what was going on in the horrible death camp that in a particular town in which Eisenhower got to the boiling point. He issued a very, very famous command. He said at gunpoint every man, woman, and child in that town would march into that work camp and would bury the bodies themselves. And he did it. Afterwards they filed out, and the mayor and his wife went home that night and hung themselves. They knew. You wouldn’t hang yourself unless you knew that you knew but you didn’t want to know, because if it’s really happening …
There was a particular town in which Eisenhower got to the boiling point. He issued a very, very famous command. He said at gunpoint every man, woman, and child in that town would march into that work camp and would bury the bodies themselves. And he did it. Afterwards they filed out, and the mayor and his wife went home that night and hung themselves. They knew. You wouldn’t hang yourself unless you knew that you knew but you didn’t want to know, because if it’s really happening …
They saw the Jews being carted off, and they knew something was going wrong. “But my goodness, it’s too painful to stand up. If I stand up for that, I might be taken myself, and I don’t want to think of myself as a coward.” So what do you do? You use a good reason for your self-deception. You say, “Those Jews, they’re really the problems we have anyway.”
We have an infinite capacity. The same thing I’m using on my wife and my car is the thing the mayor and his wife used. We have an infinite capacity. If we don’t like a truth, though there’s evidence we believe it, we know how to not know it. For example, here are the three techniques
Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).
What are the reason they see but don’t want to see God’s Savior?
2. The Reason they refuse to see Him as God’s Savio
i. He was too pitiful ()
‘Who has believed our report? To whom is the arm of Adonai revealed? For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, nor beauty that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, One from whom people hide their faces. He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
i. We reject God’s Savior because He is too plain (53:1-3)
ii. He was too punished ()
Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our pains. Yet we esteemed Him stricken, struck by God, and afflicted. But He was pierced because of our transgressions, crushed because of our iniquities. The chastisement for our shalom was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. We all like sheep have gone astray. Each of us turned to his own way. So Adonai has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
iii. He was too passive ().
He was oppressed and He was afflicted yet He did not open His mouth. Like a lamb led to the slaughter, like a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth. Because of oppression and judgment He was taken away. As for His generation, who considered? For He was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgression of my people— the stroke was theirs His grave was given with the wicked, and by a rich man in His death, though He had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in His mouth.
Illustration: The Inescapable Truth is that we saw God’s Savior substituting Himself In Our Place and it was jut too hot to handle, to controversial, to hard to imagine.
I don’t think our problem is that we hate the idea of substitutionary death. You know one person dying for another. Our culture is filled with these images.
There are a lot of people who have died for other people, and that moves you. Something deep in our soul tells us substitution is the meaning of life. Whenever you get near it in a story … You know the movie version of The Last of the Mohicans? Remember when the women are about to be killed and in comes Daniel Day-Lewis (La Longue Carabine) Nathaniel Poe, at least in the story.
1. Movie: The Last of the Mohicans
There are a lot of people who have died for other people, and that moves you. Something deep in our soul tells us substitution is the meaning of life. Whenever you get near it in a story … You know the movie version of The Last of the Mohicans? Remember when the women are about to be killed and in comes Daniel Day-Lewis (La Longue Carabine) Nathaniel Poe, at least in the story.
He comes and says to the Indian chief, “Me for them. Kill me instead of them.” But he doesn’t know the language, so he has to do it through an interpreter. Remember who the interpreter is? Duncan, the spurned suitor of one of the women. Duncan starts speaking, but Duncan says, “Me for them,” and they string Duncan up and kill him so they can flee. You watch that, and something moves you. This is the meaning of life. This is something amazing.
2. Novel: Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Or A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens. Sydney Carton is in love with a woman, but she marries Charles Darnay. But Charles Darnay is soon in prison, and he’s going to be executed. He’s going to go to the guillotine. Sydney Carton, who looks quite a bit like Charles Darnay, comes in to see Charles Darnay and says, “I’m switching with you.” What? He basically knocks the man out and puts on the condemned man’s clothes, the condemned man is given the free man’s clothes, and Sydney Carton dies.
By the way, near the very end, Sydney Carton is playing like he’s Charles Darnay. He’s in line. He’s ready to go to the guillotine. There’s a young girl who’s there, and she says, “Hey, you know me. I used to be with you back in here and back in there,” and she looks up, and she realizes it’s not Charles Darnay. Her face goes white, and she says, “Are you dying for him?” He says, “Yeah.” She says, “Hold my hand. I think I’ll be able to face anything with somebody like you.”
3. Song: Bruno Mars, “What you don’t understand is that I would catch a grenade for you, catch a blad for you, jump in front of a train for you, I would go through all this pain, yes, I would die for you baby but you won’t do the same.”
What’s going on there? There’s nothing more moving than that. This is the stuff that moves millions of people to tears and yet why are we not phased by the Messiah?
Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).3. Song: Bruno Mars, “What you don’t understand is that I would catch a grenade for you, catch a blad for you, jump in front of a train for you, I would go through all this pain, yes, I would die for you baby but you won’t do the same.”
ii. We celebrate this kind of self-giving, altruistic love and action but what separates God’s saving work from all of these movies, novels and songs is that the Savior substituted Himself for you because you are separated from God by sin and only his death can bridge that gap
It’s the opposite of sin. The essence of sin is “Me before You.” Salvation is “You first.” The essence of sin is “Your life for mine.” The essence of salvation is “My life for yours.” When Yeshua was dying on the cross, what was holding him there? His love for you. Nothing else. Nothing else at all. That means, no matter what you do, you couldn’t possibly break his love for you. Think about it. What did it take? It took God’s wrath. It took punishment. It took all of this stuff.
Application: We must Face the Truth of our Sin
Our pageantry is tragic.
Our position is not secure.
Our power is a problem.
3. The Cure
The Reversal of Self-Deception is His Love for You in Messiah.
i. God was Pleased with His Sacrifice for You (, )
Yet it pleased Adonai to bruise Him. He caused Him to suffer. If He makes His soul a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, and the will of Adonai will succeed by His hand.
Therefore I will give Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the spoil with the mighty— because He poured out His soul to death, and was counted with transgressors. For He bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors.
ii. God was Gives Righteousness to You by Him ()
As a result of the anguish of His soul He will see it and be satisfied by His knowledge. The Righteous One, My Servant will make many righteous and He will bear their iniquities.
B. Remember 9/11 when the towers collapsed. We knew the death toll was high and we hoped for survivors but for a long time we thought there was none. Until, the sound of knocking.
C. Isaiah was writing for “us” every “us” that has ever lived. One of the hardest facts in the universe is that God will not overlook sin but He does forgive it.
i. When God forgives he doesn’t do it because you made something so beautiful for Him that his heart is warmed.
ii. When God forgives he doesn’t do it because you impressed him with the path of your life.
iii. When God forgives he doesn’t do it because you really stood your ground on some great cause in life.
iv. When God forgives he does it because you see His Savior, the Servant, the Messiah Yeshua dying in your place.
Daniel Boyarin, the orthodox Jewish scholar at UC Berkley, wrote a great book called the Jewish Gospels. Daniel Boyarin trains the next generation of Rabbis. He himself is not a messianic Jew but his own admission. Yet, he made the most incredible statement about this understanding of and how us messianic Jews have been interpreting it:
“Moreover, many who hold this view hold also that was distorted by the Christians from its allegedly original meaning, in which it referred to the suffering of the People of Israel, to explain and account for the shocking fact that the Messiah had been crucified.
The commonplace view that says was distorted by the Christians from its allegedly original meaning, in which it referred to the suffering of the People of Israel, to explain and account for the shocking fact that the Messiah had been crucified has to be rejected completely.
The notion of the humiliated and suffering Messiah was not at all alien within Judaism before Yeshua came to earth, and it remained current among Jews well into the future following that—indeed, well into the early modern period. The fascinating (and to some, no doubt, uncomfortable) fact is that this tradition was well documented by modern Messianic Jews, who are concerned to demonstrate that their belief in Yeshua does not make them un-Jewish. . .they have a very strong textual base for the view that the suffering Messiah is based in deeply rooted Jewish texts early and late. Jews, it seems, had no difficulty whatever with understanding a Messiah who would vicariously suffer to redeem the world. ” – The Jewish Gospels, p. 124
Daniel Boyarin says, “this is the right way to understand and this is the way Jewish people have for ages understood it.” Why aren’t Jewish people coming in droves to the Messiah?
The same problem Isaiah said: self-deception that walls us off from God’s Savior. I know there are two groups of people here today that really need to respond to this message.
First, are my people, my Jewish community. We cannot afford to wall ourselves off from God’s savior, our Messiah. We have centuries of reasons to barricade ourselves in but we have one great reason to end our resistance our self-deception that we can be saved apart from the Messiah and it is .
Second, there are a group of people here who are already followers of the Messiah but you have gotten away from him and turned to your own ways and have fallen back into self-deception and you need to experience a renewal, a revival, a returning back to the Messiah of your salvation.
I know for both groups this seems terrifying. To borrow a parable: imagine you are a living house and God offers to come your house. Yet, once God gets to your house He starts knocking your house around in a way that does not feel good at all, it does not make sense and it hurts a little. You look around and discover that God is breaking down walls, spreading out gardens, setting up towers, stocking the ponds; see you thought you were a decent little cottage that God would feel comfortable in. No, the truth is you were a house dilapidated, falling down, near ruin and you did not know it. You were self-deceived. The reason God sent his Savior was to rescue you from your house – your self-deception – and give you His House, His kingdom, His palace through His Son, Yeshua.