[Nell]

Originally Posted by Trapped

To be honest, the turn the last portion of posts in this thread have taken has confused and concerned me. The statements that seem to be being made sound very much like the local church, quite frankly. Things like desiring to know things is somehow......bad? Things like we can never trust our clever minds?

These kind of statements are almost carbon copies of similar types of teachings propagated in the LC.

In contrast, the Bible speaks positively of knowledge, it says things like "My people are destroyed because of LACK of knowledge", it says things like we should be "be filled with all knowledge", and "excel in knowledge", etc....

I would understand if I was reading things like "the LC took advantage of the GOOD desire to know things...." but what I read makes it out more like the desire to know things itself is the bad thing. I simply do not agree here at all, if that is what is being said.

And in contrast, the Bible shows that mature believers can discern between good and evil. It shows that believers are entrusted with the ability to judge situations and with the responsibility to discern false teachings and deal with false teachers. I'm not sure where warnings about a believer's "clever mind" are found.

Sure, it exhorts us to be on guard not to be drawn away by deception, but to outright assume from the start that we are automatically deceived unless we receive specific confirmation otherwise? What power is being given to deceiving spirits here! It's like saying the evil spirits automatically start out winning by default every time. The Bible doesn't present things like that....at least to my recollection.

These kinds of warnings about knowledge and our own minds put too little stock in the beings God made in His own image, into whom He has poured out His Spirit.Trapped

On the contrary:

THE SPIRITUAL BELIEVER EXHORTED TO "JUDGE ALL THINGS"
The duty of this examination of spiritual things is strongly urged by the Apostle Paul, again and again. "He that is spiritual judgeth (margin, examineth, or, as in the Greek, investigates and decides), all things" (1 Cor. 2: 15). The "spiritual" believer is to use his "judgment," which is a renewed faculty if he is a "spiritual man," and this spiritual examination, or judging, is mentioned as operative in connection with "things of the Spirit of God" (1 Cor 2: 14), showing how God Himself honours the intelligent personality of the man He re-creates in Christ, by inviting the "judging" and "examining" of His own workings by His Spirit; so that even "the things of the Spirit" are not to be received as of Him, without being examined, and "spiritually discerned" as of God. ...

War on the Saints, pp. 56-57, Jesse Penn-Lewis

Maybe it would be helpful to consider that the converse of "assume you are deceived" is to "assume you are NOT deceived" and that you have arrived at the full knowledge of the truth of a matter. This is the "healthy" part...assuming you don't know the truth of a matter...until you do.

HOW THE EVIL SPIRITS DECEIVE BY "DOCTRINES"
How the evil spirits as teachers get men to receive their teachings, may be summed up in three specific ways:
(1) ...
(2)By mixing their "teachings" with the man's own reasonings, so that he thinks he has come to his own conclusions. The teachings of the deceiving spirits in this form are so natural in appearance, that they seem to come from the man himself, as the fruit of his own mind, and reasoning. They counterfeit the working of the human brain, and inject thoughts and suggestions into the human mind; for they can directly communicate with the mind, apart from gaining possession (in any degree) of the mind or body.

Those who are thus deceived, believe that they have come to their own conclusions, by their own reasonings, ignorant that the deceiving spirits have incited them to "reason" without sufficient data, or on a wrong premise, and thus come to false conclusions. The teaching spirit has achieved his own end by putting a lie in the man's mind, through the instrumentality of a false reasoning.
Ch. 1, p. 18

Nell