A person walks into a clothing store and sees a nice shirt that they’d like to buy. A question that might come into their mind is, “I wonder what this shirt would look like under true light?” The reason for this is that objects illuminated with indoor light often do not reflect their true color.
A dress might appear red in the store but will appear more purple outdoors. A yellow car might shine brightly under showroom lights but could appear rather dismal once it’s on the road. An experiment would show that this is because different wave frequencies and their red, green, and blue attributes reflect off of objects differently. In photography, we call this term white balance.
Similarly, in the Bible, Jesus warns of people who will appear to others as true light but will actually be fake (or false) light. This is by far one of the saddest things for me to see as a Christian: people saying that they are Christians, but do not act like followers of Jesus. Jesus says in Matthew 7:15-18:
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.
And Timothy writes:
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4)
Beware of these people and measure what they say against the actual Word of God—the Bible.
Many people have heard of the boiling frog analogy. If you haven’t, it generally goes like this: If you put a frog in a pot of water at room temperature and slowly turn up the heat, the frog will simply acclimate to the water. Before the frog realizes what has happened—that it was in danger without even noticing—the water has boiled, and the frog is dead. But if you drop the frog in the water when it is already hot, the frog would realize the danger and immediately jump out.
The same goes for color. On average, a person can distinguish between over 100 different hues of the same color if they are allowed to compare them with each other. But, if the person is not allowed to compare two slightly different hues side-by-side, it is unlikely that they will notice any difference.
Such is the case with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Numerous false-light (professed) Christians have slowly distorted the Bible into something that it’s not. A simple example would be the prosperity gospel—where someone teaches that God will guarantee material wealth to true Christians. This is the furthest distortion of the truth, yet false-light Christians will cherry-pick certain verses from the Bible that suit their own pleasures and passions. Beware of these wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are not leading people into the Light.
As Vaneetha Risner notes in her Desiring God article, one New Testament translation has 112 references to the words bless, blessing, or blessed. Guess how many of those 112 references connect blessing to any sort of material prosperity?
The answer: zero.
Like the age-old optical top hat illusion—where the height of the hat appears longer than the width—so have false-light Christians provided the illusion that the Bible is conveying something that it certainly is not. Measure the hat for yourself!
A final remarkable experiment would show that if someone were to walk in a room and see a boy wearing a blue shirt projected on a yellow screen, that person would see the boy’s shirt as gray. This is because blue and yellow are complementary colors; when combined, they absorb each other.
If that same person is first shown the picture of the boy on a white screen, then when they see the boy projected on the yellow screen, the shirt will appear blue! Perhaps that is where the term, “You can’t un-see things,” comes from.
Throughout one’s life, a person sees many different objects over and over and learns to determine what the true color of something is.
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. (1 John 5:20)
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If you were dying and you had one last chance to talk with the people that matter most to you, what would you say? If everything was on the line, and nothing was left on the table, what wisdom would you impart? My name is Ray Majoran, and this book is my last lecture.
