The greatest deception the world has ever seen

John Lennox was born on 7 November 1943 in Northern Ireland and brought up in Armagh, where his father ran a store. He attended The Royal School, Armagh, and went on to become Exhibitioner and Senior Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where in 1962 he also attended the last lectures of C. S. Lewis on the poet John Donne. Lennox obtained a Master of Arts, a Master of Mathematics and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge with the dissertation Centrality and Permutability in Soluble Groups (1970). Lennox was awarded a Doctor of Science degree in mathematics by Cardiff University in 1993 for his research. Lennox also holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford (by incorporation) and an M.A. degree in bioethics at the University of Surrey. In addition, he was a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Würzburg and the University of Freiburg. He is also the founder of the OCCA.org (the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics). FOREWORD The opinion of people with a remarkable knowledge and of a higher degree of education do not always accept the existence of the Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Bible, let stand alone the existence of Jesus, the Son of God, known by Christians and Messianic Jews all over the world. Despite a higher level of education in Science and/or Mathematics, intelligent people are more

inclined to believe in their knowledge and it is not always easy for scientists to become believers. Those who continue refusing in Jesus as their Savior are already under judgment. With this, Dr. Lennox provides a clear description of the danger which is coming our way.

As we can now also confirm that Hebrew, the original language of the Bible, imposes little or no limitation on what the Word of God really means, and where translations often fall short due to an ambiguous or erroneous meaning. Although we believe that when Jesus returns with His saints the elect will be both Jews and Gentiles who accepted Jesus in their heart. The Lord makes no distinction of person.

As we are living in the end times, for those who know and have read His Word in Matthew 24:4 know that the very first warning, which precedes the 7-year tribulation, that Jesus gave, was related that many could be deceived and if it would be possible, that even the very elect may be deceived. We therefore took the opportunity to show the word to a well know scientist who will make it clear how that believing Christians could be deceived by the lists of Satan.

THE GREATEST DECEPTION THAT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN

The main question that many people have quietly been asking themselves at some point is:

What if the most dangerous idea in human history wasn’t Atheism or fundamentalism or even Nihilism but something far more subtle.

What if the greatest threat to Truth wasn’t a frontal assault that you could see coming and defend against and prepare for, but a counterfeit so sophisticated, so internally coherent, so emotionally satisfying, that millions of intelligent people would embrace it wholeheartedly, convinced all the while that they were embracing the real thing. Now you may find that rather curious, because we live in a world that congratulate itself endlessly on its sophistication.

We have the Hubble space telescope; we have quantum mechanics, we have mapped the human genome, three billion bas pairs of what you think about is carefully a four-letter digital code of almost incomprehensible complexity. We are not a naïve civilization, and yet Jesus of Nazareth, 2000 years ago, sitting on a hillside in first century Galilee told His disciples that the era we now inhabit, our era, would be characterized above all by one thing: Deception.

Take heed He said, that no one deceives you, not once, not twice, He said it three separate times in a single discourse recorded in Matthew chapter 24 and then He added something that I think ought to make every thinking person sit up very straight indeed. Because He said “ For false Christs and false Prophets will arise and will perform great signs and wonders so as to lead astray even if possible the elect. Even the elect, in other words, the very people paying the closest attention. Let me put it this way: When the most brilliant mind who ever walked this earth, a man whose moral teachings even Berttren Russel, a committed Atheist grudgingly admitted, were admirable, when that man gives you a specific falsifiableprediction about the dominant spiritual character of a future era.

I think the intellectually honest thing to do is to take it seriously. Today we want to do exactly that, now I should say at the outset that I am aware how this sounds some of you. I spent decades in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and lecture halls from Harvard to Moscow, debating some of the finest scientific and philosophical minds of our generation, and I know what the secular person says when someone stands up and talks about biblical prophecy. They say, oh come now, that’s the language of the credulous, that is for people that haven’t quite caught up with modernity, and I understand that instinct. Truly I do, I was educated exactly in that tradition. My training as a mathematician taught me to demand precision to follow the evidence wherever it leads. To have no patience with wishful thinking dressed up as argument. But here is what I have discovered, and this is not a small thing. The question whether Jesus was a reliable witness to reality is not a question that you can dismiss with a wave of the hand. It is a question that demands the same rigor we would apply to any other serious historical and evidential claim. So let us think carefully what Jesus actually predicted and whether we see it. He predicted first an unprecedented global proliferation of people claiming his name and His authority, but whose teachings would in crucial ways betray and distort His actual message. He predicted second, that these counterfeits would not be obviously fraudulent. They would be persuasive. They would perform sings, they would speak with confidence, they would be spiritually compelling. And He predicted third, that the deception would escalate as history progressed, not diminish. Now I ask you simply, does that resemble the world you see when you open your eyes in the morning. I suggest that it rather does. We live in the religiously plural spiritually eclectic, and theologically confused moment in human history. More people today claim some form of spiritual authority in the name of Jesus Christ and in any previous point in two millennia, and simultaneously, and here is the thing that ought to make us pause. The actual teachings of Jesus, His specific concrete, historically verifiable claims about himself, about human nature about God, about life after death. Those specific teachings have never been more aggressively diluted , reinterpreted or outright contradicted who nonetheless invoke his name. The philosopher, Charles Taylor in his monumental work, “A Secular Age”, describes what he calls “The Nova Effect”. An explosion of spiritual options in a modern world that has created , not clarity, but a kind of dizzying confusion. People are not less spiritual, they are in many ways more spiritual. But the spirituality on offer is a vast bewildering marketplace were every option claims equal validity, where conviction is considered arrogance and where the word Jesus is freely borrowed and radically repackaged. Let me be precise about something I am not talking now merely about cults, that would be too easy. The cults are obvious enough once you look, I am talking about something more pervasive and far more interesting intellectually. I am talking about the systematic redefinition of Jesus by academics, by popular theologians, by media figures, by well meaning people who genuinely believe that they are doing Him a favor into altogether different from what the earliest historical documents actually record. The Jesus who said “ I am the way, the Truth and the life” is quietly replaced by a Jesus who says “I am one way among many”. The Jesus who performed miracles attested by hostile witnesses is replaced by a Jesus who was simply a great moral teacher with a flare for metaphor, the Jesus who rose bodily from the dead, an event treated as non-negational historical fact by every writer in the New Testament is replaced by a Jesus who rose in the hearts of his followers which is a beautiful sentiment that means when examined carefully, almost precisely nothing. Now, that strikes me as deeply significant, because it is exactly what Jesus said what would happen. But here is where I must be honest with you as I always try to be. I can hear the objection forming. It is a good objection, and it deserves a serious answer. The objection goes like this: Professor Lennox, you are doing what every religious apologist does : You are taking a vague enough prediction. There will be deception and then casting your net broadly enough over human history to catch whatever you like. This is not prophecy. This is a cold reading it is the same trick the astrologer uses when he says “ you will face a challenge this year”, and then any subscriber finds a challenge to attach to it. I think that is a fair challenge, it deserves a careful answer. My atheist friends would say, and I understand that predictions of deception are trivially easy to make because human beings are always deceiving each other, and therefore any ancient text that predicts deception will appear vindicated in any era you examine. They would call this “Post-Diction”, the attribution of prophetic significance to statements general enough to fit any circumstance. Now let me put it this way, if the prediction were simply, there will be liars. Then yes I would concede the point without a moment’s hesitation. That would be as unimpressive as predicting that the sun will rise. But that is not what Jesus said; Jesus made a specific cluster of predictions, that taken together, constitute something falsifiable and historically remarkable. He predicted first that deception would be predicted first, that the deception would specifically centered on claims about himself, on false Christs, on people claiming his identity or his authority. Not general deception, Christological deception. He predicted second, that this deception would be miraculously supported. Great signs and wonders, he said. He predicted third, that it would be targeted at the most committed believers, not at the indifferent. And He predicted fourth, that this would intensify as the age drew towards its close. Now that is not a vague prediction, that is a specific prediction with a mechanism, a specific target and a specific trajectory, and every element of it has been fulfilled with a precision that if it appeared in any way in any other ancient text about any other figure, historians would call remarkable. Consider, never in human history have so many people claim miraculous authority in the name of one specific individual, Jesus of Nazareth, while simultaneously teaching things that contradict what that individual actually said. This is not a general religious phenomenon. You do not find vast movements of people performing signs and wonders in the name of Confucius, while contradicting Confucius actual teachings. The phenomenon Jesus predicted is specific to Jesus. It was specific to Him then, and it is specific to Him now. If you follow the evidence where it leads, that specificity matters now. Let me build the case more carefully, because I think that this where it gets genuinely interesting. We are, as we said, Mathematicians and scientists in a culture that prizes evidence. So let us asks what would we expect to see in a world where Jesus’s prediction is true? And what we actually observe? We would expect first that the counterfeits would be internally coherent enough to be compelling, not obvious shams but sophisticated systems with their own logic. Their own emotional and even intellectual appeal. And we observe exactly this. The prosperity gospel movement, which teaches the financial wealth is a divine sign of spiritual favor, has swept through enormous portions of the global church, particularly in the developing world and increasingly in America. It invokes Jesus, it invokes scripture. It produces experiences people describe as transformative and it directly contradicts almost everything that Jesus actually said, about wealth, about suffering, about the nature of the kingdom of God. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The counterfeit says, blessed are financially abundant in material things. Those are not minor theological disagreements, those are opposite messages wearing the same costume. Now C.S. Lewis, a man to return again and again, because he thought with such crystalline precision, Lewis observed that the devils’ greatest achievement is not tempting people to do obviously evil things. It is getting to do almost right things, for almost right reasons in almost right ways, so that the error is invisible until it is too late. The safest road to hell he wrote in the Screw tape letters is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. That is not theology as metaphor, that is a precise description of a mechanism. And the mechanism Jesus predicted is not a dramatic apostasy. Not people burning their Bibles and denouncing God, it is something far more insidious : it is the gradual replacement substance of the gospel, with the emotional experience of the gospel, the replacement of the revealed truth with therapeutic comfort. The replacement of the God who makes demands with the God who only affirms. Let me draw an analogy, from my own field: In mathematics we have what we call a morphism, a mapping that preserves structure while changing content. You can map one number system onto another in a way that looks on the surface perfectly consistent, perfectly rule following and yet the two systems are not equivalent. They look related, they share vocabulary, but they are fundamentally different things. What Jesus predicted is a the theological morphism, a mapping of the gospel onto something that preserves the emotional architecture that preserves the emotional architecture of the original: the community, the worship, the sense of transcendence, the language while substituting a different content at the core and the result feels like Christianity. It produces communities of devoted people. It generates real emotion, real belonging, real transformation of a kind, but it is not the thing that Jesus said it was. Now here is where it gets philosophically serious: Dostoyevsky who I think understood the human capacity for self-deception, more deeply than almost any other writer, puts these words in the mouth of “The Grand Inquisitor” speaking to a returned Christ: You gave them freedom, but they don’t want freedom, they want miracle, mystery and authority, and they will accept a counterfeit of each. Dostoyevsky suggests rather than face the demands of the real thing. And that is not merely a literary observation. That is a psychological and spiritual diagnosis that the 21st century has done nothing whatsoever to disprove. The interesting question is not whether this is happening, the interesting question is why ? Why would human beings rational educated sophisticated human beings embrace a counterfeit of something real. And here I want to introduce a concept from information theory that I find deeply illuminating. Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory demonstrated mathematically that a message can perfectly transmitted in terms of its syntax, its structure, its pattern and its form, while its semantic content, its actual meaning is entirely corrupted. You can send a message that looks exactly right and says something entirely different. DNA as we know is a four-letter molecular code: Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, Cytosine, operating as a genuine information system. Richard Dawkins himself in “River out of Eden “ wrote, and I am delighted to quote him here, that the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like: He was making a point about evolution, but he was also inadvertently making a point about information. Codes can be corrupted. You have something that looks like the original code, reads like the original code, and yet at the critical points contains substitutions that can change everything. Jesus predicted that His own message, a message He described as living and active, as sharper than a two-edged sword, would be subjected to exactly this kind of semantic corruption. The syntax preserved, the meaning replaced and the corruption would be nearly undetectable. That strikes me as not merely philosophically interesting, that strikes me as one of the most important predictions ever made. But let me push further, because of the implications are deeper than the merely religious. If Jesus was right about this, if the dominant spiritual character of our age is sophisticated deception, specifically targeted at the highest levels of sincere spiritual seeking, than this has consequences that extend far beyond what happens on Sunday morning. It means that the capacity for truth discernment is the most critical faculty that any human being can cultivate. Not intelligence, not sincerity, not even spiritual fervency because Jesus specifically said that the deception would target fervent people. No, the critical faculty is the willingness to hold even your most emotionally satisfying beliefs up to the light of evidence of historical reality of what was actually claimed and actually recorded Wittgenstein, Ludvig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, said something that I think is absolutely germane to this moment. He said “ the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. What He meant in part is that the words we use, the concepts we employ, determine the reality we are able to perceive. If the language of Christianity is hollowed out, if the words remain but the meaning is replaced, than the very vocabulary people would use to detect the counterfeit that has been compromised. That is breathtakingly clever. And Jesus saw it coming. My atheist friends and I have many and I cherish them, will sometimes say to me “ John, the reason Christianity produces so many variants and distortions, it that I was never coherent to begin with. You are not seeing the fulfillment of prophecy, you are seeing the inevitable fragmentation of a mythology. And I always say to them, that is a serious argument and it deserve a serious answer, and here is the answer: The presence of counterfeits does not argue against the existence of an original. It argues for it , we do not have a vast and sophisticated global industry, dedicated to manufacturing counterfeits in Zimbabwean Dollars. We have counterfeit American Dollars, and the reason is obvious : It is only worth counterfeiting something of genuine value. The sheer scale of the effort to redefine, reinvent, domesticate and ultimately detoxify Jesus of Nazareth, to file of the sharp edges, to silence the uncomfortable claims, to reconstruct Him in the image of whatever the culture currently finds is most congenial. That scale of effort is itself remarkable evidence that the original is something extraordinary. You do not send the army of deception against a rumor! You send it against a threat. Now let me say something that is the deepest implication of all of this, and then I will begin to close: If Jesus predicted that the defining spiritual crisis of our age would be the confusion of the real with the counterfeit, if He predicted that people would face exactly this choice, wrapped in exactly this difficulty than He was also necessarily claiming that the real exists, that Truth is not infinitely elastic, that there is a Jesus of Nazareth who said specific things, made specific claims, died and rose again as a matter of historical fact, and whose message is not interchangeable with any other message, regardless of how sincerely it is offered, He was claiming in other words, that the stakes of getting this question are not trivial, and that is the claim I want to sit with, not with alarm, not with guilt, but with the serious intellectual honesty that the question demands, because here is what I found: after 80 years of examining this question, from every angle I know how to bring to bear, as a mathematician, as a philosopher, as someone who has read the critics and the defenders and everyone in between what I have found is this, is the Jesus of the actual historical record, the Jesus of the first century documents. The Jesus who is described with a specificity and a psychological depth and a theological coherence, that no invented figure of antiquity approaches, that Jesus predicted our world with a precision that I find impossible to explain on the hypothesis that He was merely a great moral teacher. A great moral teacher does not make specific falsifiable multi-generational predictions, about the spiritual character of civilizations, that will emerge 2000 years after his death. Great moral teachers teach morality. Jesus was doing something categorically different, He was claiming to know the future and He was claiming to know it because he claimed to be the one in whose hands the future ultimate rested. The interesting question is not whether He made that claim, He did! Every serious historian acknowledges that. The interesting question is what do we do with it? Let me end if I may with something rather personal. I was born in Northern Ireland, a place that knows perhaps better than most what happens when religion becomes a tool of human power, rather than a vehicle for divine truth. I grew up watching men invoke the name of Jesus, to justify things that would have horrified Him. I understand viscerally why thoughtful people become suspicious of religious claims. I understand why the counterfeit produces not only confusion but revulsion. But here is what I also know, what it is to sit with the actual text to read Matthew 24, not as a religious exercise, but as an intellectual document to ask as I would ask of any ancient text, what is being claimed here? How specific is the claim what would falsify it and what does the evidence actually show. And what I have found what I cannot get away from try as I occasionally have, is that the man who has made these predictions was not describing a vague spiritual malaise. He was describing a mechanism with extraordinary precision that has operated exactly as He said it would for exactly as long as He implied it would, targeting exactly the people He said it would target. That is not the track record of a deceiver and it is not the track record of a lunatic. Those are the only two alternatives available to the person who is unwilling to consider the third option, that the evidence actually supports that I am an old man. I had the extraordinary privilege of spending my life at the intersection of science and faith, of mathematics and meaning of the most rigorous intellectual traditions that Western civilization has produced and I can tell you, not from emotional need, not from cultural habit, not from the comfort of unexamined tradition, I can tell you that I have the evidence and I have made a choice, the choice is not to believe, despite the evidence, the choice is to believe of it because Jesus of Nazareth told us this world would defined by the confusion of the real and the counterfeit. He told us it would be difficult to tell them apart. He told us that even sincere seeking people would be vulnerable and he told us the antidote : you will know the truth He said and the truth will set you free, not comfortable not unchallenged not free from the effort of discernment of the greatest deception the world has ever seen, is not the work of obvious frauds, it is the work of something more subtle, more patient and more targeted than that. And the only man in history who predicted it with this precision, this specificity, this structural exactness, is the same man who claimed to be the truth against every counterfeit must ultimately be measured. I have followed that evidence for 80 years and I cannot stop following it now. ________________________________ We totally agree with the details given by Dct Lennox and we have 70 info-studies on our website www.aleph-tav.be which we have published earlier to explain certain events related to the end times according to the Word of God in the Bible. The following are just a few out of the list of which can be downloaded in PDF format, free of charge in English. Here are the references : 00UK The heart of the matter – 1UK The doom of cash/ Artificial Intelligence - 6UK The Past Reveals the Future – 008UK The war of the gods (The secret war) - 24UK The Rapture – 25UK Why shall many miss the Rapture – 47UK The mark of God or the mark of the Beast - 66UK The War(s) of Gog and Magog – 67UK The War against the Book / Edom and Ishmael unite - 68UK Intro : Understanding the Book of Revelation. ___________________________________ Dear reader, Some topics can often be the subject of much discussion. Our info-studies are always based on the Scriptures and biblical prophecies and may contain events that are happening before your eyes. We are not religious professionals but simple people who have trusted Jesus and the Word of God. We hope that the discovery of the truth has enriched you spiritually and our web address www.aleph-tav.be can always be shared with friends or family. Jesus is always listening to the prayers of people who are looking for the truth. None of our info-studies were written using Artificial Intelligence.