126 Beware the Trickster!

Meaning: “conveying a significance that is not directly expressed . . .”

In Blog #124, I said that any thorough positive value analysis will produce warnings, cautions, or advisories. Well, from my study of Scripture, here is a major advisory: Beware the Trickster!

Interestingly, "Trickster" is another appellation for the Adversary and Scripture paints the Adversary as the ultimate proponent of negative meaning-making. Let me explain.

First of all, unlike God with His absolute and reliable standards based on pure goodness, the Adversary embraces relative and dubious standards based on the perversion of goodness.

Second, he is a master of deception and twists meaning to suit his purposes.

And third, negative meaning is his all-too-frequent tool of deception.

Knowing that meaning motivates, the Adversary regularly works to undermine absolute good (positive meaning) and relies on relative standards—standards relative to his self-serving preferences—to achieve that end. His methods include evasion, confusion and intentional misrepresentation and make meaning tricky to navigate and negative meaning even trickier to discern. And the Adversary knows that.

Consequently, the Adversary uses negative meaning to trip-up people. And he does so principally by insinuating thoughts, feelings and desires into the human mind, emotions and will. He slyly portrays lawlessness and unbridled emotion as preferable to self-restraint, reasoned intellect and sentient composure. Or contrarily, he promotes callousness over compassion, to name but a few among his other assorted and plentiful nefarious schemes. The Adversary is tricky. Mark that well.

Furthermore, the Adversary is always eager to persuade the believer (non-believers are already well off-track) that he speaks truth and God lies (Genesis 3:1, NKJV). He therefore deals prolifically in half-truths. This means that he will take a truth and slip a lie in beside it, camouflage his lie with partial truths. And he does this as a matter of routine. Tricky!

The Adversary employs this half-truth routine to misdirect or corrupt the thinking of the “follower of good” concerning God’s purposes, plans and recommended practices, and it is his first and foremost line of attack. Tricky! No redeeming value there, Gentle Reader.

At any rate, it will always be well-worth remembering, Dear Confidant, that the adversarial relationship between positive and negative meaning is ongoing and in every generation. And, generation after generation, it again and again reaches its apex in conflict described as spiritual warfare—the subject of our next blog.

To be continued . . .