There is a stale old joke we used to tell. When someone would ask, “Where do you live? What state are you from?” I would snidely remark, “I’m from the state of confusion!”
Well, sadly, it is not a joke anymore. It seems that nearly everyone today is literally living in a state of confusion. It seems almost impossible to carry on a conversation with anyone today for any length of time before you realize that we are not speaking the same language.
Yes, we are both speaking in English. Yes, we may even be speaking in the very same dialect. However, we are not speaking the same language. We might use the same words, but our words have different meanings.
The meanings of words are being changed. The perception of reality is being changed. This makes it very difficult to communicate effectively with anyone. It makes everything very confusing.
This situation is not new. It has happened before. To understand what is happening now, we need to go back to Genesis and see if we can learn from the past.
Let us turn to Genesis 11:1-9 and consider the account of God intervening in man’s efforts to reach up to heaven and exalt himself, making a name for themselves. All of mankind had the same language, using words with the same meanings.
God intervened by confusing their language so they could not understand one another’s speech. So they left off the work and were scattered abroad, all separated into small groups. The name of the city they were building was called Babel, or Babylon, which means confusion.
The word confusion has the meaning of being confounded, mixed up. It has the idea of being unable to distinguish between what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. This confusion is often the result of the meanings of our words being changed.
It is interesting to consider how many words have been confiscated by the world and have had their meaning changed. For example, the word rainbow had a meaning of faithfulness and promise. It has been hijacked into a symbol of rebellion and perversion. The world has done this with many words recently. This hijacking of the language has been instrumental in the hijacking of the entire culture of a country, even of the whole world.
Unfortunately, this process of usurping a culture has not taken place only out in the world. This process has been going on for quite some time right here in the church. It has been so effectively used in the churches that it has virtually destroyed the Christian language and the Christian church.
It has been used for years, even for centuries, to attack the oneness of the body of Christ. It has been used to separate church from church, believer from believer, to the point that it is now extremely difficult to find like-minded believers. It is very difficult to find believers that held fast to the meanings of the words as they were used in the scriptures.
We have allowed philosophies and the doctrines of men to hijack the language of the scriptures and by doing so, to hijack the culture, even the very nature of the church. It has now progressed to the point where many churches have no resemblance to the early church that we see in the New Testament.
Men and women have usurped the place of Christ as head of the church. The doctrines of man and the philosophies of the world have usurped the place of the scriptures. And the natural abilities, the natural talents of the unspiritual man have usurped the place of the Holy Spirit.
These churches have become counterfeits of the real church. These churches have been used by the world system to prevent the real church, the body of Christ, from being built up. These people not only are not entering into the kingdom themselves, but they are using their counterfeit churches to keep others from entering in.
Satan, God’s enemy, often uses the same tactics that he has learned from observing God working. He disguises himself as an angel of light. He has used the confounding of the language to scatter people abroad and to stop the work of building.
Words have meaning. It is important that we use the words of scripture with the same meaning that the Holy Spirit intended when directing the writers of the scriptures.