Deeper Waters with Duke Taber
I am going to be honest with you about something, because these reflections are not worth much if I only ever tell you the tidy parts.
Not long ago I stayed up far too late following a trail I had no business following. It started innocently enough with a single video, and one video became another, and before I knew it the clock read well past midnight and I was three or four theories deep into who was really behind a thing I had heard about that afternoon. I finally closed the laptop and lay there in the dark, and I noticed how I felt. I did not feel informed. I did not feel closer to God. I felt wired and uneasy and strangely important, like a man who had been let in on a secret. And underneath all of it there was a low hum of fear.
I lay there and I asked myself an honest question. What exactly had I just fed? Because I know the difference between how the Word of God leaves me and how that midnight trail left me. One leaves me settled and the other leaves me agitated. One draws me toward my Father and the other draws me toward my phone. And I had to admit that the thing I had just spent two hours feeding was not my faith. It was an appetite, and I had let it eat its fill.
Why it itches so good
Paul saw this appetite coming from a long way off, and he named it with a phrase I cannot improve on.
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. — 2 Timothy 4:3-4, NKJV
Itching ears. What a picture. An itch does not want to be healed. It wants to be scratched, and the scratching only makes it worse, so it demands to be scratched again. That is exactly what a certain kind of story does to the human heart. And I have had to ask myself honestly why the wild story so often scratches better than the true one.
I think it is because a good conspiracy flatters me. It tells me I am not one of the sleeping masses. I am awake. I see what the sheep cannot see. It hands me a secret knowledge, and secret knowledge makes a small man feel large. It also gives me something to do with my fear. The world is frightening and chaotic and mostly out of my control, and a theory takes all that formless dread and gives it a face and a name. Now at least I know who to blame. That feels like power, even when it is only a feeling.
But Paul is blunt about where the road ends. It ends in fables. The itching ears turn away from the truth and are turned aside to myths, and the tragedy is that the person never chose to abandon the truth. They just kept scratching until one day the truth felt boring and the fable felt alive, and they could no longer tell which was which.
Let me be fair before I go further
I need to say something here, because I would not want you to hear me wrong. I am not telling you to trust every official story you are handed. I have written before that the Lord calls us to test what we are told, and that sometimes powerful people really do scheme in the dark. Scripture is not naive about that. The problem I am describing is not the asking of hard questions. Honest questions are the work of a discerning believer.
The problem is the appetite. There is a world of difference between a sober search for what is true and a hungry craving for what is thrilling. One is looking for reality even when reality is dull. The other is looking for a rush, and it will keep swallowing bigger and stranger claims to get it. I know the difference because I have been in both places, and the tell is always the same. Truth-seeking makes me humble and careful. The itch makes me proud and certain and afraid, all at once.
God had a word for a nation that could not stop
There is a passage in Isaiah I had read many times before it finally landed on me the way it needed to. Isaiah lived in an anxious age much like ours, an age where everyone was whispering about plots and hidden threats, where conspiracy talk was in the very air people breathed. And the Lord spoke a startling word to His prophet in the middle of it.
Do not say, “A conspiracy,” concerning all that this people call a conspiracy, nor be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled. — Isaiah 8:12, NKJV
Read that again slowly, because I think it may be one of the most relevant sentences in the Bible for the season we are in. God was not telling Isaiah that no plot existed anywhere. He was telling him not to be like everyone else, seeing a conspiracy in all that this people call a conspiracy, letting that endless suspicion set the temperature of his heart. And then He tells him what to do with all that displaced fear instead.
The LORD of hosts, Him you shall hallow; Let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread. — Isaiah 8:13, NKJV
That is the redirection. The energy I was pouring into being afraid of shadowy powers at midnight was energy that belonged to the fear of the Lord. My awe had been misdirected. I was giving my dread to men when it belonged to God, and a heart that fears the Lord has very little room left over to be terrorized by the theory of the week.
The fruit tells the truth
I have learned to test these things not first by argument but by fruit, because the fruit does not lie. When I ask what the steady diet of hidden-knowledge content actually grows in me, the answer is sobering.
For God is not the author of confusion but of peace. — 1 Corinthians 14:33, NKJV
The itch produces confusion. It produces a mind that cannot rest, that suspects everyone, that jumps at every headline. That is not the fingerprint of God. Paul told Timothy exactly what the Spirit had given him instead, and it reads like the opposite of everything that midnight trail left in me.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. — 2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV
A sound mind. When was the last time the rabbit hole left anyone with a sound mind? It leaves a frantic mind, a fearful mind, a mind too crowded with plots to hear the still small voice. And I finally had to admit that whatever spirit was behind that appetite, it was not the Spirit of my God, because it produced none of His fruit.
The remedy is a love, not just a fact
Here is what I have come to believe is the real cure, and it is gentler than a lecture and stronger than willpower. Paul, writing to the Thessalonians about people who fell for a great deception, put his finger on the true failure.
because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. — 2 Thessalonians 2:10, NKJV
Notice he does not say they lacked the facts. He says they did not love the truth. That is the whole thing. The remedy for an appetite is not information. It is a stronger and better appetite. And the truth I am called to fall in love with is not finally a theory about who runs the world. It is a Person who made the world and stepped into it and gave His life for me.
For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty. — 2 Peter 1:16, NKJV
Peter draws the line I want to walk. There is a whole world of cunningly devised fables out there, endlessly clever, endlessly thrilling. And then there is the one story that is actually true, the one the eyewitnesses died for rather than deny. When I lose my taste for that story, the fables rush in to fill the hunger. But when I feast on Christ, when I let the gospel be the most fascinating thing in my life, I find that the midnight trails simply lose their pull. Not because I forced myself off them, but because I found something better to be captivated by.
A word before you go
So if you have felt that itch, and I suspect you have, I am not going to shame you for it. I felt it myself at one in the morning with a laptop glowing in the dark. But I will ask you to notice what it is doing to your peace, your trust, and your love for the people around you. Ask the Lord to give you back the fear that belongs to Him alone, the holy dread that quiets every lesser fear. And then go and fall in love with the truth again, not as a set of facts to win arguments with, but as the Person who is the truth and who has made you free.
And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. — John 8:32, NKJV
There is a quiet, deep water far from all that midnight noise, and the strange thing is that it is not empty out here. It is full of the only secret worth knowing, and He has been trying to tell it to you all along. Come on out to it with me. You can put the light down. You are already in on the truth that matters.
Duke
Pastor Duke has been preaching and teaching the Bible since 1988. He has shared his knowledge online since 2011.
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