"Then ye shall know that I am the Lord, when their slain men shall be among their idols round about their altars...." Eze. 6:13a
Sin creates illusion. It is a mist-maker, a darkness so cunning that it can fool you into thinking that it is no different from the daylight. All of our idolatries come back to this deception: those images that we erect to our own self-aggrandizement are merely blinders for our eyes. Every sinner is a funhouse maker, cocooning themselves within a maze of mirrors and halls with impossible angles; and we are all sinners (Rom. 5:12). We all build palaces to our ever-expanding ruin, and the longer we stay in them the more we accept their aberrations as fact. The whole world is just such a place: a madhouse run by the inmates. We have been trapped in our fallacious follies for so long, do we even know what is real anymore? I dare say that we do not.
There is no help for us from within this tangled net of self-made illusions. We are all equally spiders caught in our own webs. Thus, our help must come from without, and it cannot be a mere pick-me-up or another moral lecture. It must be an awakening. The bonds must be cut. The walls must be knocked down. Sin is not a principle to be argued against; it is a spell that must be broken. Snapped, if your will, by a sudden flash of light that can cleave the soul. The idols of the Self must be effaced and cast down, revealed for what they are: dumb, deaf, blind, and dead. There is always a bitter irony to such revelations. Indeed, every awakening is ironic, for we think that the world is being turned upside-down but find that it has finally be placed right-side-up.
-Jon Vowell (c) 2011
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