Muddying the Waters
R. A. Snider, developing
The devil loves to obfuscate, to blur and obscure clear vision and plain understanding, and he loves to do so with grand visions, pointless diversions, irrelevant details, and positive oceans of words. Red herrings, all of them.
In Stephen King’s 1977 genre-leaping novel The Gunslinger, the titular character and protagonist, Roland, pursues an archetypal bad guy for the duration of the story, just as he has for decades. When he finally catches up with the him - a sorcerer who goes by several names (naturally) - he enchants Roland with a grand, sprawling narrative about scale and the size of the cosmos, the interconnectedness of dimensions and realities, the mysteries of the Dark Tower, and of God, and even manages to make it at least partly about himself, the sorcerer. As readers, we are caught up in this narrative, enchanted by it almost as much as Roland himself, whose knowledge of the sciences is much less developed than our own, and all the while, Roland (and we) forget the fact that the sorcerer is a seditious murderer who cuckolded a reigning monarch and orchestrated the fall of the last civilized country in Roland’s world. We forget that he’s the bad guy, and that he’s got blood on his hands and the devil’s own ambition in his heart.
How about another example from popular media: Kaecilius spouts a moving narrative in the 2016 movie Dr. Strange about what an insult death is, as if his polished monologue somehow justifies his decapitating of a former colleague and his deal-making with a malevolent force that would bring untold ruin to the human race.
Isn’t this just like the devil? He is a liar and the father of lies, and he loves to camouflage his lies with anything that will divert us from the plain and simple truth that lies before us: he is the bad-guy, and what he’s showing us doesn’t change that. It doesn’t matter what some corrupt televangelist did in the 1980s, or if someone who claimed to be a Christian led your spouse into adultery, or if the pastor of your last church embezzled from the general fund and then ran off with the pianist. None of these things change the fact that the one who keeps obsessing you with these things, especially while drawing you away from the legitimate goodness of God Himself, from the leadership of Jesus Christ himself, is a liar and a murderer, and seeks only your personal misery and ruin. He is the one who broke the world, polluted creation, defiled the human race in Genesis 6, provoked the reprobation of early man, necessitating a global flood to wipe the slate clean, and impelled Judas to betray the Lord of glory. He is the author of confusion, and when you steadfastly refuse to move past your many past grievances, no matter how legitimate, you’re listening to him, enchanted by his grand narrative that somehow makes it all seem alright. Justifiable. “Of course it’s ok that I’ve forsaken the fellowship of the saints, every fellowship of the saints, because someone did me wrong a long time ago.” Or, “…because some pastor in Arkansas extorted from his congregation.” Or, “…because the church didn’t pay my rent for me when I was between jobs.”
When your thinking is like this, you’ve been enchanted.