In ancient Greece, there is an account of how deception and subterfuge led to the downfall of a mighty nation. After a long and drawn out war between Greece and Troy, the Greeks finally arrived at a plan of wit and trickery that they employed and executed masterfully against the Trojans. After three days of crafting a wooden horse large enough for warriors to fit inside, the Greeks deceitfully offered their handiwork as a gift to the Trojan gods and a consolation of their defeat.
Throwing caution to the wind, the leaders of Troy accepted the gift as a sign from the gods and marched and paraded their offering and reward through their magnificent city–to their demise. For, when darkness began to fall upon the fields of Troy at the close of the day, Odysseus and his fellow warriors quietly emerged from their so-called wooden offering to the gods, they briskly opened the gates for their fellow battle-hardened Greek army, and swept through the city of Troy capturing, sieging, and undermining its strongholds until Troy was finally defeated.
This story seems distant, but there is a spooky resemblance of a narrative that was commandeered and carefully executed that reaches through time and lays hold of us still today…
How Does This Apply To The Christian Today?
Our present culture has not had much success defeating the Christian outright or in a head-to-head public battle. Just look at how passionate people are about defending their personal rights to express their religion or beliefs. The culture is simply too wise to utilize the public forum alone. Instead, they are focusing their war efforts on subterfuge, wiliness, and intrigue.
For instance, the redefinition of marriage by the Supreme Court was not won on the battlefield of public debate, but under the guise of equality and love. Furthermore, the so-called victory for any woman to abort a living and heart-beating child in her womb was not won on the battlefield of public discourse and town hall meetings, but under the seductive intrigue of liberation and choice. They changed the narrative, they commandeered the story, and they won those battles–at least for now.
This present culture is not bent on engaging the Christian in hand-to-hand combat, but instead through above-the-atmosphere-satellite-launched missiles–i.e. through changing the narrative. Their weapons are subterfuge, deceit, and wit in the mediums of story, experience, and romance.
Therefore, the Christian–to win this present-day battle against a culture bent on its destruction–must be thinking outside the box. It’s no longer a battle of the binary (i.e. the “do this and don’t do that” public morality debates), but instead the battle of the storylines (the schema of content that drives passions, desires, intrigues, curiosities, as well as stories that pull upon the heart-strings, grates against the spine, and/or sticks in the craw). In other words, the battlefield waged against the Christian is not on the battlefield of morality (primarily), although that is important, but instead on the battlefield of the heart and the mind written in the form of story.
What is the Christian to do?
Invest your life, time, resources, energies, dreams, thoughts, desires, etc. in taking back and rewriting the script.
How do you do that?
Stay tuned…this is the start of a new series set aside to answer this question…
— June 7, 2019