How to Spot a Simulation
The smartest way to take over the world is to replace it with a fake one. The smartest way to replace it with a fake one is little by little.
Part 1
Deception is the common factor in all of Satan’s schemes, but throughout history his lies have taken different forms. This is because each new lie makes us wiser.
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
And that is precisely why God allowed the serpent to enter the Garden. If Adam was to rule the world, he needed to be able to discern the difference between good and evil, dividing and naming them in the way that his Father had divided day and night.
The tricky part is that Satan presents himself as an angel of light, or, in other words, a messenger of enlightenment. He has come to help, and is offering his expert advice. Of course, it is a trap, and his real agenda continues to be the theft of the world from its rightful heirs.
God requires that we persevere in patient faith until we have proven ourselves. When we are ready to bear the weight of the glory that He has in store for us, we will receive it freely. He is like any parent or guardian who puts money in trust for their children to be kept until they come of age.
Satan appeals to our impatience by offering an early inheritance. Like a corrupt accountant or trustee, or Judas Iscariot with the money bag, once he is put in charge of things, he intends to dispossess us of God’s promises. He offers a “conservatorship” as a legal guardian with the intent of seizing complete control of the finances.
“The fake only has to appear real until the trap has been sprung.”
The deception is the “bait and switch” concerning what is promised. He replaces a good thing that God has in store for us with an immediate substitute.
This is why Joseph was tempted to seize the household of Potiphar. After all, his father had exalted him above his brothers as the potential heir. It is also why David was tempted to seize Saul’s throne by his own hand, and why Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. In each case, the tyranny suffered by the true heir was intended to prepare him for righteous rule. Each of these men patiently trusted God and ultimately received a better throne than the counterfeit offered to them by the devil.
Falling for the lie is a terrible thing. The fake only has to appear real until the trap has been sprung, and then the devil’s victims become his legal captives. After all, they have actually defied God and are under the penalty of death.
The end of the world
In the Garden, Satan himself could not kill the man and the woman in order to steal their inheritance, but he could certainly corrupt them so that God Himself would have to kill them. The serpent weaponized the good Law of God, turning something that was designed for Man’s protection into the means of Man’s destruction.
This strategy is legalism, which explains why Jesus told the Pharisees that, in their hatred and lack of mercy, their spiritual father was not Abraham but the devil (John 8:44). They had unwittingly become “the seed of the serpent” and were now the Savior’s enemies (Genesis 3:15).
Obviously, that first sin in the Garden was not the end of human history. God produced a “fake” of His own—an animal that died on Adam’s behalf. The divine proxy spared the reality.
History continued, and Man continued to sin. Again and again, the serpent attempted to force God’s hand to execute the capital sentence required by His own law. But every time, God had mercy up His sleeve.
Man continued to learn, albeit the hard way; as Man grew in stature and wisdom under the direction of God, so also the devil had to up his game.
Evil learns
Beginning with Cain and Lamech, men rejected atoning animal sacrifices and instead promoted vengeance. They abandoned the use of images of men and instead shed the blood of the images of God. In other words, they despised the virtual and murdered the real.
This abandonment of worship was the underlying cause of the Great Flood. And the Great Flood was the destruction of the real—the entire physical world.
However, the strategy changed after the Flood because God’s own strategy had changed.
Noah was the first man who was given permission by God to bear the sword of justice against other men. He was given this office because he, unlike Adam, had proven faithful.
In some sense, Noah inherited the sword of the cherubim in Eden, the Sanctuary which had been destroyed in the Flood. The sword was now in the hand of a human legal representative.
So, in Noah, God established an order of tribal priest-kings. Each of these men offered sacrifices to God in heaven (priest), and also executed justice upon hateful, bloodthirsty men on earth (king). In that sense, they mediated between heaven and earth, like the angels that ascended and descended upon the stairway in Jacob’s dream.
This guild of armed noblemen prevented men, like the merciless vigilantes who had filled the world with violence before the Flood, from killing each other. And this new strategy was a wise one. Each of the 70 nations listed in Genesis 10 had its own patriarch, so this council of holy knights was decentralized. This meant it could not easily be corrupted, attacked, or abolished.
“To keep His oath to Noah, God constructed a virtual world.”
So, a new situation required a new deception. Man learns, but evil also learns. The diabolical project before the Flood was the abolition of religion. But the strategy after the Flood was the replacement of religion. The tower and city of Babel established false worship.
In order to force God to destroy this holy order, its members would have to be united under a lie. To gather all of these leaders together on earth, the faith would first have to be counterfeited via a claim of access to heaven. This explains why Nimrod built a man-made mountain, the first ziggurat. The Tower of Babel was a counterfeit stairway to heaven, one that promised unity—but not unity in spirit and truth.
This false unity was destroyed by God, but many tongues resulted in many gods. And without the restraint of tribal violence by the ministry of the Noahic order, mankind would again deteriorate to the point where another global flood would be the only remedy.
God had promised Noah that such a thing would never happen again, so He responded to Satan’s strategy in kind. In the call of Abraham, He commenced a project whose purpose most Christians still fail to undertand. God constructed a virtual world.
Cosmic language
To hold back the death of Adam, God killed a virtual Adam. To protect “seed” from the Great Flood, God called Noah to build a virtual world, a model of the primordial creation to house “Adam and Eve” representatives of all that breathed.
Now, in order to keep His oath to Noah, God had to hold back another global cataclysm. To do this, He established a model of all dry land that would bear the curses on its behalf. The Promised Land represented the dry land and the surrounding Gentiles represented the sea. As a “firstfruits” of all the physical dry land, this social Land was “lifted up” from the wild social Sea of the other nations.
This shift from the physical to the social cleverly evaded the legal requirement to destroy mankind that was being weaponized by the devil. It also provided a safe place for the establishment of a new local priesthood. As a bootcamp that would instruct all nations, this virtual earth offered sacrifices in a new “Eden” until the promised Seed was born, the one who would crush the serpent’s head.
God could temporarily overlook the sins of the nations (Acts 17:30) because Israel was covering for them. And the Hebrew word for “atonement” actually means “coverings.”
This explains a feature of prophetic texts that confuses many Bible interpreters. The prophets used cosmic or global language to describe local events.
“I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord. “I will sweep away man and beast; I will sweep away the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, and the rubble with the wicked. I will cut off mankind from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord. (Zephaniah 1:2-3)
The word “earth” here can also be translated “land,” and as the prophet continues, the context of these events is quite clearly local. The focus of the judgment was the social order rather than the physical order. The creational devastation is what would have happened if Israel was not a representative of all mankind.
When Israel became corrupt, the wild Sea of the Gentiles would rush in like a “flood” (Daniel 9:26) to cleanse the Land of its abominations and bring rest. Remember, “Noah” means bringer of rest. The Land would then enjoy all of the sabbaths that were owed to it (Jeremiah 25:11-12; 2 Chronicles 36:21).
Likewise, while all of the Canaanite nations that had tempted and oppressed Israel remained disempowered after the “floods” of Assyrian and Babylonian troops, the return of Israel to the Land after the captivity is described in terms of dry land rising once again from the deep (Isaiah 44:24-28).
Israel’s sacrifices became obsolete when Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead as the once-for-all sacrifice for sin. In a wondrous twist, the realest of the real—the Creator Himself—was murdered as our proxy.
The purpose of the “model” Land had now been fulfilled, and it would be “de-created.” Revelation describes this deconstruction in various ways, but most strikingly as a burning mountain (Mount Sinai, representing the Law of Moses) being thrown into the Gentile Sea (Revelation 8:8).
The point here is that God and the devil both use substitutes. But whereas God uses models in order to instruct and deliver us, the devil uses counterfeits in order to deceive and destroy us.
Click HERE for Part 2.
Michael Bull is a graphic designer in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in Australia, and author, most recently, of A Lodge for Owls: Raw Theological Twitter. He blogs at Bible Matrix.