Tampered Evidence

God created a universe full of evidence reflective of the perfection and fairness of His character. He created intelligent beings with minds and hearts similar to His own in many respects, designed to live and thrive on love, to accept blessings in order that they could pass them on to all around them. Living in harmony with the great design that reflected the very essence of God Himself, everything in creation functioned perfectly, harmoniously and with great joy until one of the created beings, one with the greatest intelligence and capacity of all, chose to begin tampering with the evidence.

Lucifer, the light-bearer, the one created being commissioned to be the most trusted representative of God to all other created beings, began to entertain ideas foreign to what God had created him to use. He began to harbor pride and desires to be the recipient and focus of worship that only God deserved. The longer he allowed these false ideas to linger in his heart the more he found himself experimentally rearranging the meanings of everything that God had designed in creation to draw out His children's affections and praise back to their only Source of life.

Much later now we find ourselves totally immersed in a world filled with tampered evidence. This world was originally created perfect where nature and even our own thought processes and impulses had originally been designed to draw our hearts out to return praise, gratitude and worship to the Source of life while spreading to others the blessings of life we received from Him. Originally nature functioned in much the same way as we were supposed to function acting as a great circulating system, receiving blessings from God either directly or through the means of other elements designed to provide for them and then passing it along.

But the evidence contained in the great book of nature that was provided for us to know Him better has been seriously tampered with and it now gives us confusing and conflicting messages about its Designer. Even more damaged is our own internal psychological processes which have been so distorted that they are now unreliable as a means of recognizing the original template created in God's image.

Consequently we now find ourselves struggling to believe in the goodness and fairness of God in many situations. When a young child is molested, tortured and brutally murdered, or when 'natural' disasters create enormous pain and suffering or any number of other things that arouse questions in our minds, the root of all our questions and doubts can always be traced back to what we think about God and our feelings about how He is running things. Sometimes we say it openly when we cry out in our pain demanding to know why such tragedies come into our lives or that happen to those around us. Other times we smother our questions under layers of religious rhetoric, tradition or false piety. But I am starting to be more and more convinced that at the deepest level of all of our questions is to be found the fundamental issue of God's fairness and justice.

This is the primary intent of the enemy of God who has spent millennia tampering with all the evidence in every way he can imagine to cause us to question the goodness of God, the integrity of God and the Word of God given to testify about the truth of Himself. Even the Bible, the greatest objective written testimony that is designed to help us perceive the real truth about God has been tampered by the biases of many who translated that document from one language to another. I am not suggesting that all translators have intentionally altered the meaning of the Word in their efforts. But one must be aware that it is unavoidable that inherent biases, traditions and assumptions about God within each person involved in converting ideas from one language to another unavoidably become woven into the text subtly or openly and passed on to subsequent readers.

So when we wonder why it seems so hard to believe what God says about Himself and we even struggle with the testimony of Jesus who came to represent the truth about God to us, we must keep in mind that the evidence we rely on has been potentially altered to include false ideas about God in ways sometimes intended to keep us afraid of Him.

But God has not left us to the deceptions of the enemy without provisions to overcome the negative effects of the tampered evidence. While it would be so much easier to perceive clearly the real truth about God's love and goodness and grace and compassion from living in a perfect environment rather than in all the confusion we now find ourselves, the Spirit of God has been given as heaven's gift to supply our needs and to give us insight and interpretations of our surroundings that can counter the false messages the enemy wants us to believe. The deceptions may be compelling and even overwhelmingly convincing at times, but the truth is always greater than the false and sooner or later the truth about God will emerge clearer and more beautiful than ever. All those who choose to cling to the revelations of God and His declarations about Himself in the face of opposite assumptions suggested through tampered evidence will find themselves on the winning side when it is all over.

Even within the evidence that has been tampered with and distorted to support false claims about what God is like, we can still perceive, with the aid of the Spirit of God, the underlying outlines of the original truths that God built into the very fabric of all creation. Whether in nature or in human interactions, the original face of God has not been totally obliterated and we can discern it if we are willing to turn away from counterfeit interpretations and choose to base our beliefs on what God says about Himself. If we will learn to measure everything in the light of the truth Jesus came to provide to this world we will begin to see more clearly the truth about God everywhere we look in spite of all the tampering of evidence the enemy has done to confuse us.

The most important issue in the universe and the conflict between good and evil is God's reputation. To rule effectively the way He wants to govern God must solicit freely the obedience and allegiance of all His created beings without ever resorting to force, intimidation or threats to win their affections. He desires only the service of love which is based on complete mutual respect and belief in His goodness. As long as anyone has reservations about the consistent goodness and fairness of God, He cannot govern free of resistance as He originally created His universe to be operated. So He has chosen to put Himself and His methods on trial to allow His subjects to decide for themselves whether the charges against Him are provable or whether everything anyone has said against Him is a fabrication.

Of course, His enemy Satan, the accuser, is doing everything possible in a desperate attempt to keep as many as possible in deception and blindness as to the real truth about God so that his own existence can be extended. He knows that because of God's goodness and the way in which He has chosen to resolve the whole sin problem is to let it continue until it self-destructs, Satan's very existence is secured as long as he can keep any one person trapped in doubts about the fairness of God. God will never force anyone to acknowledge Him or worship Him, but He is wise and skillful enough that at some point in time circumstances will coalesce to cause every created being to see clearly the truth about Him in the evidence and will also see how the evidence has been tampered with and how that came about.

What is the fundamental purpose behind someone tampering with evidence in a trial? It is for the purpose of causing the evidence to convince people of something opposite from what it was originally intended to imply. Tampering with evidence is an act of deliberate deception and is evil. And while not all people who have perverted evidence did so intentionally, behind all tampering is a very intentional purpose of the enemy of God who is intent on deceiving the whole world and keeping us afraid of God. He wants us to continue believing his lies about God and continue to distrust God. For as many as he can keep in distrust of God he knows he can keep them out of God's plan to reconcile to Himself and prevent them from enjoying the initiate, close fellowship of love and trust with Him. Jesus said that the enemy only comes to steal, kill and destroy and one of the ways he does this most successfully is by deceiving us about what God is like.

When all the evidence becomes plain and everyone is given full opportunity to examine it freely, at that point everyone will acknowledge without coercion that God never used deception or force or intimidation to get His way like He has been charged of doing. It will become clear that He has been more than fair in every situation and that our doubts about Him were not based on reality but on our choosing to believe the lies circulated by His enemies. If we are lost in the end it will be because we have refused to love the truth about God.

Each of us must choose what we are going to believe about God in the face of often confusing evidence. Some evidence has been tampered with seriously and we must be aware of that. But if we allow God's Spirit to alert us to the tampering and enlighten us as to the true implications of the original evidence we will have enough evidence about God and the truth about His integrity that we can choose to trust Him even if some evidence seems to indicate differently. Jesus urges us to believe in Him and believe in His Father in spite of all the charges leveled against Him. And for those who choose to believe the truth about God and reject the false claims made against Him – even those that come from inside our own hearts – He will reward our choice to trust Him by dwelling inside us and transforming us to become like the One we are choosing to trust.

By beholding we become changed and transformed. If we continue to believe lies of the enemy about God or cling to dark pictures of God we may have received from religious sources, we will become like the kind of God we have chosen to believe. Whatever we choose to focus on and give credence to, whether it is true or false, we will be transformed into thinking and acting and relating to others as a result of the ideas and feelings about God that we cherish.

I want God to keep unmasking the lies of the enemy, many which are still buried deep in my own heart and thinking. I want to continue to move closer to the light of the real truth about God that I have been starting to glimpse in His Word and from revelations from His Spirit to my own heart. I want to be more free of the lies of the enemy that have kept me afraid of coming closer to God and to trust Him fully for all of my life. I want to let go of my resistance to believing the truth about Him and to have Him totally make me over and restore me to His original design for me of perfectly reflecting His likeness that He intends for me to enjoy.