Mark's Musings

AS we were discussing the idolatry of Jeroboam in the men’s morning Bible study, we soon came around to acknowledge the condition of our heart and how deceitfully wicked it is. Pondering this truth brought to mind one of the more arresting passages in Pascal’s Pensees:

“The characteristic of human nature is to love oneself and consider only one’s self. What else can it do? It cannot help its own love being inconsistent and miserable. It wants to be great and sees that it is only small. It wants to be happy but finds it is wretched. It wants to be perfect and sees itself full of imperfections. . .

“Finding itself in this predicament, it reacts in the most unjust and criminal passion imaginable. For it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth that would rebuke it and convince it of its faults. It would like to eliminate this truth, and not being able to destroy it, it represses it as much as it can. . .

“Unquestionably, it is an evil to be so full of faults but it is a still great evil to be full of them and yet not willing to acknowledge them. This results in the further evil of deliberate self-delusion.”

In other words, Pascal intimates that we are our own best dupes. He goes on to say that this is why anyone who desires to be our friend or win our approval and care will often minimize our errors and excuse our failures. “We tend to be treated as we want to be treated for we hate the truth and it is kept from us. We desire to be flattered and so we are flattered; we like to be deceived and we are deceived.”

Moving up the ladder through promotion and advancement can actually shield us further from the truth about ourselves. So Pascal says, “A prince could be the laughing stock and yet the only one who doesn’t know it.” His conclusion? Human life is nothing but continuous delusion. “No one talks about us in our presence as he does in our absence.” Human relationships are based upon this mutual deception.

At first glance, this seems extremely cynical. Yet think how we function in our society today. Imagine political discourse, entertainment in all its forms and advertisement with out deception? And then think how often we tend to feign innocence and think we are an exception to the sins of Jeroboam. The heart, said the prophet Jeremiah, is deceitful above all things.

RE Mark Seeley