123 Monkey See, Monkey Do

Coming to grips with the fact that we're probably closer to the end of the world than most of us are willing to admit, always keeps drawing my thoughts back to its beginnings.

Life is a constant choice between positive or good and valid input and information, and its negative, non-valid, bad counterpart.

Only discernment and experience teach us to know the difference.

We're all basically standing at the same tree as did Adam and Eve.

The only difference is, all around us are billions of people who have already tasted the fruit of the knowledge of evil (= bad information), and they're all telling us, "It's good! C'mon, take a bite! I've done it, too! It's the only way!"

We don't only have the Devil to deal with in our struggle to resist temptation, but also his favorite weapon of the century: peer pressure.

What once used to require cunning persuasion on his part now merely takes an appeal to our basest herd instincts: "Monkey see, monkey do."

There's a lot of "input" out there, and it's pretty tough to know which of it is good and which is bad. It's not easy to make an estimate, but I'd say probably 90% of what bombards us is mostly negative.

The difficult thing is, that the Enemy is smart enough not to hand us 100% pure evil information, but what makes it all the more dangerous and deceptive is that he always mixes it with some truth.

Nothing has changed about that since his first sales talk. After all, it was true that they weren't going to die physically at the time they ate of the fruit, and we already expounded on that it was true in a sense that they became like gods, if even God Himself calls them thus later on in His Word...

So, I guess the conclusion is that nothing saves us from bad info, except the experience of what happened once we swallowed and accepted it...

It builds us up in a wrong way.

It feeds your ego, but not your soul.

It may fill your head with "knowledge" but doesn't make you one bit wiser.

It may lead you to the conclusion that "there is no God," and that you and your own kind are the only masters and heroes of the universe, and yet leave you utterly ignorant of the fact that in God's dictionary, you thus become the perfect definition of a fool.

It may make you feel hip and cool, but on God's thermometer you may merely amount to the status of "lukewarm."

You may think you're "hot 'n' heavy," not realizing that you've been weighed in the scales of the Creator of the universe, and found wanting.

What it all boils down to when all the dross and muck has up and gone into smoke and vapor is the truth: coming to face yourself for what you really are, namely not much, if anything at all, without a connection with the One Who put you on the planet, and the single Authority on why.

But that's a great place to start, because it begins the process of your willingness to absorb the other stuff, that formerly totally unattractive type of input you would have sneered at when you still thought you were the king of the hill.

It may not immediately make sense to you... But slowly, as you keep immersing your soul and parched spirit in it, eventually it begins to make sense, and you begin to derive so much information out of even one formerly seemingly meaningless phrase, such as, "In the beginning was the Word..." (John 1:1)

It all began with information... the right kind of input, and... yeah, you want more of it! Lots more!