₦airaland Forum

So let’s go back to the story of Abraham and see who did what, where and why? Abraham was traveling into the nation of Egypt where a foreign government was ruled by a people who didn’t know God. In fact in the Bible Egypt was a type of the world and Pharaoh a type of Satan. According to Abraham’s reasoning, he told his wife to tell everyone that she was his sister so that these godless people would not kill him to get to her. So the motivation of Abraham was not to do any evil to anyone, but to preserve his own life in an uncertain set of circumstances surrounding evil people.

It was Egypt who was doing the evil and not Abraham by taking a woman just because she was pretty and good looking. You could compare this to rape today and this is clearly a crime. No one asked Sarah what she wanted; they simply decided what to do based upon what the king wanted. Was that the right thing to do? Obviously God did not think so and that is why He put plagues on the nation for what they had done. So Abraham was dealing with an uncertain evil nation of people who could potentially do great harm to him for what they wanted.

So do you see any differences now in this type of deception initiated by Abraham? Abraham never had any intention of harm for any evil purpose to anyone in being deceptive. So by not telling them all of truth; did Abraham lie? I still do not think so! Did Abraham sin? I still do not think so. Abraham’s heart was clear before God. I hope that you can see this.

What I am attempting to show you is that not every deception is a sin in the Bible and you will see some more examples of this in these next verses also found in Genesis. This is a story in chapter 38 is one that is very informative of many things, but I’m only going to talk about the concept of “Righteous Deception” given to us in this story. In Genesis 38:6 you see that Judah the son of Jacob had a firstborn son named Er and Judah got him a wife named Tamar.

However, verse 7 said that Er was wicked in the eyes of the Lord so God killed him. Not good for Er! So Judah had three sons the firstborn Er is now dead so Judah gives Tamar to Onan his next oldest son and tells him to have children for his dead brother Er. Onan is also wicked in the eyes of the Lord because he refuses his father’s request and God kills him also. Wow, Tamar is either really bad luck for the children of Judah or something else is going on here. We can read in this chapter that Judah tells Tamar to go to her father’s house and wait for his third son to get old enough and she will be his wife next.

So Tamar waits and waits and Judah never mentions it again and finally Judah’s wife also dies. So Tamar does what? What is Tamar supposed to do? In Genesis 38:13 it says that someone told Tamar that her father-in-law Judah was going to a certain city to shear his sheep. So Tamar comes up with a plan of deception:

Gen 38:14 And she put her widow’s garments off from her, and covered her with a vail, and wrapped herself, and sat in an open place, which is by the way to Timnath; for she saw that Shelah was grown, and she was not given unto him to wife.

Here we have a part of the story that is easily missed. You see Tamar could see that Judah’s third son was grown up and she knew that Judah had not fulfilled his word to her. By not doing what he said; Judah has become a liar and that is not good is it? Therefore, Tamar takes off her widow clothes and disguises herself with a veil. In doing this Tamar has taken on the outward appearance of a prostitute and she places herself in the path of Judah on purpose.

Gen 38:15 When Judah saw her, he thought her to be an harlot; because she had covered her face.

Some have tried to conclude that all deception is sin like my commenter and this is just not what the Bible teaches. That statement is really going to shock many of my readers. However, what people have done is taken a complex subject and oversimplified it and caused all deception to be thought of in a negative light. But yet as we continue through this lesson we will see that this is not true.

Let me give you an example of some deception that occurred in my life that might shock you. My own mother was a known and practicing deceiver; my mother deceived me when I was just a child in grade school. She tricked me into eating squash when I was a kid by mashing it up and stirring it into my cream corn. They were both yellow vegetables and when they were mixed together I could not tell that the squash was present. You see I liked cream corn but I did not like the squash and I refused to eat it.

However, by her trickery and deception of her mixing the squash with my cream corn and then by purposefully not telling me about her methods, I ate it without knowing I was eating it. Clearly she withheld key information and truth from me and clearly it was an intentional act of a hidden deception. By the definition of deceive that we looked at, she is clearly guilty as Abraham was, but, was this deception a sin? Did my mother sin by hiding squash in my cream corn and not telling me about it?

According to my commenter he would have said that she did. However, was this not just an example of the practical use of deception to achieve a positive outcome for me? I think that you can see it was the only way that I was going to eat squash so it worked. What was my mother’s reasoning and motivation for deceiving me? Was it to do evil and harm to me or was it to do something good and positive for me so that I benefited? In her mind it was to do good so that I would eat my vegetables and grow up strong and healthy. So hopefully you can see that not every type of deception is a sin from this one simple example. I do not believe that my mother was committing a sin by hiding squash in my cream corn, do you? So let’s change the scenario and say someone hid poison in your food.

This of course changes everything dramatically. Now we have a different motivation for a different purpose and the expected outcome of the deception is completely different. Clearly anyone who would do this is well within the realm of committing a horrific sin by using a very similar deception method that my mother was guilty of. I hope that you can begin to see the impact that motivation and purpose play into the role of deception. Do you see the potential dilemma being presented to us from my two examples of food deception? It matters who is deceiving, why they are deceiving, who is deceived and what is the intended purpose of the deception in order to make a determination if it is a sin or not.

Just because my mother hid squash in my cream corn and did not tell me that she did it, does not constitute an evil act of the sin of deception. Are you grasping these very important concepts? You see if you only used the web definition of the word “deceive” you can clearly see my mother was guilty of “deception”, therefore she should go to jail or hell. But, her reasons for doing it were justified to achieve a positive outcome for me. This is called “Righteous Deception” and I will show it to you in the Bible so that you can better understand how it works. I pray that you are beginning to see the complexity of the subject of deception and the potential use of deception to achieve a positive outcome for someone.

Nobody asked Sarah what she wanted, did they? Of course back then it was a male dominated world and when a male king wanted a woman, there were no options for the woman given to her. When Abraham tells the kings she is my sister, the kings ASSUMES that she is available to be taken like a stray dog that doesn’t belong to anyone.

They make a very wrong assumption based upon not knowing all the facts that they could have found out if they had just asked some more direct questions in order to find the truth. You can read scriptures about being “Self Deceived” in Jer. 37:9, Oba. 1:3, 1 Cor. 3:18, Gal 6:3, James 1:26 and 1 John 1:8.

There are many factors that cause self-deception and these can involve pride, arrogance and wrong thinking where you think too highly of yourself and see yourself to be wise in this world. You should go and look up these verses to learn how people can deceive themselves and you should be able to see how these verses can easily apply to the kings in Abraham’s story.

There are three basic factors to deception that are critical to understand that are not normally taught. First, there are different types or methods of deception. You can clearly see this by someone telling a lie, but you can also see this by someone just failing to tell the truth. They are dramatically different types of deception in the eyes of God.

Second, there are different reasons or motivations for using deception and the intended outcome for the deception. In other words is the person doing the deception doing it for someone’s harm, hurt or destruction or for a purpose of overall good? Then the third factor to consider is who the intended target for the deception is. Is the one being deceived a good person or an evil person? Can the one being deceived do me any harm if they are not deceived?

All three of these factors matter in order for any deception to be called a sin in they eyes of God. You see there is an implied problem with deception that you have not fully thought of or comprehended fully. If you take the literal internet definition of deception and apply it as it was written that the omission of information or truth is called “deception” then God is guilty of deceiving us all. Is your God a deceiver? If you only take this definition, He is because He knows things that we clearly do not know and many of them.

You know I do not have to be right about everything that I say and teach. I am perfectly willing to change if you can show me the chapters and the verses that say something different than what I teach. I would rather change and be right than to stay with believing an error. However, if you are just telling me your opinion that I’m wrong because that is not what you think is true then you have a major problem, not me. Here is a web definition for the word “deceive” that I found:

Deception, beguilement, deceit, bluff, mystification, and subterfuge are acts to propagate beliefs that are not true, or not the whole truth (as in half-truths or omission). Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda, sleight of hand. It can employ distraction, camouflage or concealment.

Here are some synonyms for Deception from the Thesaurus:

Trick, Trickery, Sham, Fraud, Con, Cheating, Pretext, Duplicity, Deceit

Wow this is a pretty amazing definition that is all encompassing, isn’t it? However, I noticed two things directly missing from this definition of deception;w with one being the motivation of the individual doing the deception and the other being the purpose for the deception or you could say the expected outcome for the deception. It further does not say or even imply that there are potentially times when deception is good and the results of the deception can cause a positive outcome to occur either. According to this lone definition that I found on the internet you can clearly see that Abraham was absolutely guilty of committing a level of deception for either evil or for whatever purpose.

However, I believe that to remain silent is still a key area that is totally different than to deceive someone by telling them a lie. I can find many verses in the Bible that say “Thou Shalt not lie” (Lev 19:11, Zep. 3:13). But, to be silent I have still not found any verses yet that says this is a sin. In this story found in Genesis 12 and 20 of Abraham telling the kings that his wife was his sister, I could not find any verses where God rebuked, chastised or punished Abraham for what he did or in this case didn’t do. Can you find this anywhere? You can clearly see that these kings were either plagued (Gen 12:17) or had a dream from God that told him that he was a dead man (Gen 20:3).

So God’s attention was focused on what the kings did and not what Abraham did or still in this case did not do. Do you understand this? So I want to introduce you to the first new factor about deception today that will upset your deception apple cart. This concept is called “Self Deception” where a person has deceived themselves into doing the wrong thing based upon their own personal thoughts, motivations or their natural physical or emotional desires. You can clearly see that the kings in these stories of Genesis 12 and 20 were only interested in themselves and what they wanted.

Of course it gets more complex than this because your silence is also tied to your motivation of why you are being silent and that fact alone make this subject infinitely more complex. We’ll talk more about your motivation shortly but, I searched and searched the Bible for a verse that said silence was a sin and I could not find it anywhere.

So my reader claimed that Abraham committed a sin of an invented name called a “lie of omission”. According to his definition, a “lie of omission” would be to remain silent in any area that left out any important information that could have been said in order to purposely deceive someone. However, after I confronted my commenter, he had to agree that this term “lie of omission” and its definition was not found in the Bible anywhere and therefore what he had said was a sin came from his own human reasoning.

The human intellect is an amazing God given blessing, however it is rarely God inspired thoughts unless you have thoroughly renewed your carnal mind with God’s spiritual knowledge, understanding and wisdom. Therefore, you cannot count on anything that comes from your carnal mind as being the truth. After all of this, my commenter refused to say that Abraham didn’t sin in what he did and he held to the concept that Abraham was therefore still a deceitful liar because he withheld information from the king.

Wow, this is a very dangerous approach to take in your Bible interpretation. In Matthew 7:26 Jesus called this action of ignoring God’s word a foolish man who has built his house on sand. To base your beliefs on your own human reasoning instead of the Bible will cause you to be wrong 100 times out of 100 tries. What we must do is to build our house on the Rock of the Word of God and base our beliefs on what God says and only what God says, in order to be assured and have confidence in what we know and teach to others.

I had a reader who read one of my Bible lessons on Abraham and left me a comment saying that Abraham sinned. In this story of Abraham, he went around telling everyone his wife was his sister so that no one would kill him to get her. If you read this Bible lesson called “Genesis 12: Was Abraham a Liar?” you should have learned that Abraham never lied, his wife Sarah was his half-sister (Gen 20:12).

They both had the same father but different mothers, so they were clearly brother and sister to each other by definition, yet Abraham married his sister and she became the wife who gave birth to the promised child Isaac. So Abraham was clearly guilty of remaining silent on the important fact that Sarah was also his wife and not just his sister and this is all that you can accuse him of based upon what the Bible says. Let me start by asking you this question, is silence a sin? Can you find anywhere in the Bible where it says if I’m silent even on a key point of information that I have committed a sin? I searched my Bible and I could not find one verse that said silence was a sin.

In the previous lesson on deception I talked about Satan being called a deceiver (Rev 12:9, 20:10) of the nations and how God looks upon these actions very unfavorably. One technique that Satan uses for deception is to take a truth and pervert it with an attached or alternative meaning.

Another technique of deception that Satan uses is to associate a Bible truth with a false religion, causing Christians to reject it as the truth. Another technique of deception is to take a Bible symbol of truth and to possess it as a satanic symbol so that Christians again reject this truth completely.

There are so many complex methods of trickery involved in deception and you should become intimately knowledgeable of every method that you can so that you are not the one deceived in the future. However, today I am going to flip the evil deception apple cart and introduce you to a brand new concept that you probably have never heard anyone speak on before in your life, especially in church. Obviously everyone teaches that deception and lies are an evil sin.

But, today I am going to attempt to show you the positive side of deception found in the Bible. Right there your religious mind is probably giving you fits saying “I didn’t know deception had any positive side or use”. What I will show you in today’s lesson is that there are different kinds of deception found in the Bible and how that the Bible says not every deception is considered evil or a sin by God.

I guess most people struggle with this subject because they do not realize that there are multiple types of deception found in the Bible and therefore they do not understand how that any level of deception could be permitted at times to achieve a positive outcome.

Many religious people look purely at the existence of only one type of deception that they associate with someone telling someone a lie. They then lump all deception into this same basket category as being an evil sinful lie.

Culled from agapegeek blog. agapegeek.com

My number one goal is to help you to understand the Bible better today than you did yesterday. If I can help just one person accomplish this, I believe that is worth the countless hours that I have invested in writing these advanced Bible lessons. If you know God better than you did after you read my lessons then I have succeeded at accomplishing my goal. Today’s lesson is about the complex subject of deception, but this lesson is much more advanced than the first two in the series.

The first two lessons were general overviews of your enemy Satan and the techniques that he attempts to use to deceive people in the earth today. The first two lessons dealt with only one side of the subject of deception that I refer to as “Evil Deception”. Today I will introduce you to the other side of deception to show you that it can be used for positive outcomes and that will shock many Christians who have never been taught this side of the subject. If you have not read this series of lesson from the beginning I would suggest that you go back and start with “Part 1”.

Also today’s lesson is intended for spiritually mature Christians since I will probably go into many things that you have never heard before from anyone and I do not want to cause anyone any confusion so please judge your level of spiritual maturity and make the determination if you want to hear something that is potentially new and controversial. If you do not want to learn anything new, then just go read someone else’s blog for today.

Not all lies are a sin and not all deception is evil. This is a bitter truth to comprehend. A couple of life's experiences led me on a quest to understand God's system of justice and judgement. I found an article online which may have cleared up my doubts. I will drop them in bits over the next few weeks. This is not taught in churches, and I don't know why. If it were, a lot of Christians will not fall into the errors they now find themselves in. I don't know how you'll take this, but ask God to help you understand. Lies and truth are relative just like that. May this Knowledge empower you.

Disclaimer: This message is for matured Christians. If you realize that you may be getting fits of rage and painful confusion while reading, please stop and go read something else.

Dude is clearly aware that he has enemies in the house. It's really scary and confusing when you know that you may have no chance at succeeding because the people around you express their animosity towards you without pretending.

He silently shed tears of joy after his escape yesterday. Baba go change game plan now. But I feel like it's still his loving Esther that will betray him in the end.

. Sorry ma'am, better luck next time. What an error, maybe divine, you'll never know.

Nothing new for a lot of Nigerian girls even for some of those berating her. She's just open about her own. I hope Ike can live with the revelations because, with a woman like Mercy, you never know how deep the rabbit hole goes.

If you see a lot of Indian movies, you'll know this is not voodoo but film tricks. The video is played in reverse and there are cuts in between which explains some of the guy's awkward movements. Nice one though. Dude holding the camera should go into film making.

Boys are really hustling...

greenhulk:
Says who? Apart from those first 2 thumbnails, deleting the rest will remove those files from the phone.

I'm referring to the cache files oga.

IZUKWU:
WILL deleting them affect the original file .

No it won't.

And he'll go on to score one more...

Remove them. They won't affect your phone. They are cache files for some media, pictures or videos on your phone.

NaijaMutant:


Your hatred for the church will surely consume you

Why are you so hateful and violent. Read your comment again before you answer.

People are just losing their humanity everyday. The thirst for blood is so high now that more people will respond to the call to come take a life, than a call to come save one... Smh. I'm just tired.

These guys clearly disregarded the rules of engagement in situations like this.

From this madam? Well...

I don't know, but something feels awkward about this.

MobilityExpress:
So doing your own chores, or chores in your parents house as a teenager, parents that feed, cloth, provide, shelter, pay school fees, medical fees, and all kinds of other bills, this is hard work in your dictionary? Hard work that the parents have to pay for them to clean up after themselves? Ok, raise you child that way, and let's see whether your child won't be begging for handouts all his or her life. I can only imagine the kinds of conversations you will be having with your children - Why are you sitting there watching TV all day long, watching that useless BBN show, why are you not in school? Daddy, you have to pay me money before I go to school? I'm sure you will love that . You see people like you who love to deceive themselves, people like you who raised their children the way you talk about, go and see how they end up, they end up alone, broken, depressed, brokenhearted, sorrowful, infirmed and abandoned in one old people's home somewhere being looked after by the government charity because they raised their children to be useless, self centered and vain. Since they had nothing to offer their children again, the children abandoned them to their fate of old age. Go to old people's homes, maybe you will learn a few things, whether you want to end up there too, or raise your child the proper way, so that when you are old, your child will take care of you genuinely, not because he's waiting for you to die or kill you himself so he can inherit your property.

You are missing the point here. With your write up, I see that you still don't understand what the woman is doing. All the things you have mentioned still happen to parents who did otherwise to raise their children. These are some of the points you're missing, let me break them down; The woman has successfully taught her kids accountability and responsibility in earning a living, introducing tax literacy to them at an early age, opening their minds up to a real job interview scenarios preparing them for the real world out there...remember that she can still pay them monthly allowance even without attaching responsibilities to it. But you see, it's a win-win situation for her and the kids.

needful:
You never see anything and to think that after all those beating for discipline, they will end up becoming prostitute, thieves, armed robbers. Do u know that, with the level of poverty in naija as at today, an average boy or girl wouldn't condescend so low to even wash plates for money, they believed in making millions and manners falling from heaven because that is what the parents thought them. The rich ones, will prefer getting an underage girl as house maids and pay them why their children slay. Nigerian mentality is zero that's why we cant even produce a good leader. I have already adopted that type of parenting and is helping alot in my home. Let them know how to do it and I will give them incentives so that when they grow old , they will appreciate their partners for doing it.

Couldn't have said it better, well done. Your kids will grow up with a healthy self esteem.

Debramaye:
you're looking at everything from the Nigerian perspective... If you decide to have children it's a must to take care and provide for them the best way you can which of course includes giving them what they might need from time to time, reverse is not suppose to be the case until they're grown to fend for themselves.. What the mother did is good actually

Seriously, the Nigerian situation has bred a generation of people with very low self esteem who don't think they deserve good in their lives. I call it the slave mentality.

MobilityExpress:
This is not modern parenting, this is stupid parenting. So you will pay your child to wash his clothes or sweep his room? Do you know what you are doing? You are raising a child that will grow up to be useless to himself and useless to society and greedy and selfish, whose only motivation is personal gain, a child that will later becoms someone that will sell himself for money. That is exactly the kind of mindset you find with prostitutes and thieves.

On the contrary, reward for hard work is what is being taught here. I think your mind has been clouded by the slave culture that is prevalent in Africa, especially Nigeria where employers would blatantly refuse to pay their employees and the latter would just remain there like people who are under a spell. You see, raising your kids like this will boost their self esteem and get them ready to face a cruel world that would most likely try to take advantage of them. I hope you free your mind soon, if not, you'll expose your kids to a cruel world that they are not ready to face.

Ktiti:
A job, my dignity and self esteem

Tell me about it

Foolishness

professorT:
that means that they should be singing worldly songs

No not at all. It means that they'll have to write and sing songs according to the desires of whoever is paying their bills.

GrabHisBalls:
The foreign gospel artist I know didn't look up to a church to fund their life. They're full time gospel artist and are living their life on that with side businesses and other career paths.

That is subject to debate because you don't have their entire history and how they were before they went global, but if you check well, someone gave them the initial platform to launch out on their careers before they were able to stand on their own.

Hmmmm... This is very serious. Although, I think every tribe has those very wicked people in them.