“If you abide in My word, truly you are My disciples; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (Jn. 8:31-32).
There is no lie in truth. There cannot be. Christ Jesus is Truth Himself, He has come that we may live in the Truth. To abide in a lie is to abide outside of Christ. For a lie has no place in Him whatsoever.
Sin is a lie, it needs lies to survive. The devil is the “father of lies” (cf. Jn. 8:44). He cannot be without them. It is only through lies that sin and the devil can tyrannize mankind. They lie so that we will freely submit ourselves to them once again. In them there is no truth. Lies require that we first surrender truth.
Wherever we find a lie we may be certain beyond a doubt that Christ is nowhere near.
“We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble: ‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength,’” proclaims Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his perennially pertinent work “Live Not by Lies.”
And in words that could have been written concerning the on going experience of the c-19 crisis, he says, “We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence … We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a Moscow residency permit.”
Solzhenitsyn aptly observes that to preserve material comfort men are prone to surrender their principles. Many will live by lies if only they think they can preserve their basic material well-being. Many will act out a lie, if only to save their skin.
Yet, deep in mankind resonates the longing for freedom. This manifests itself in many ways. To be truly free, first the lie must be confronted.
“But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not ‘they’ who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!”
First the lie must be confronted in our own hearts. In our own person. The lies must first begin to die within me. I must begin to reject the lie. We must, therefore, be proficient in discerning lies. I must find repentance.
“So has the circle closed? So is there indeed no way out? So the only thing left to do is wait inertly: What if something just happens by itself?
But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.
From lies.
When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”
Let not lies reign through me. For this to be, one must diligently strive to live unabashedly, no matter the cost, according to truth.
Most of all, as Christians, those who claim to be “of truth,” we must ask – have we actively promoted lies this past year (and beyond) in things surrounding the c-19 crisis? We must ask this first of our own selves.
Dr. Michael Yeadon, a man with over 30 years of experience in senior research positions with pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, voices his well grounded concern regarding the numerous lies that have been promoted during this crisis, in an article called “Why are we being lied to about COVID” –
“Truth is our most powerful tool. And the truth is that we’re being lied to.
The truth also, however hard it is to believe it, is that there is unequivocal and clear evidence of planning and co-ordination. Not to face this fact is to have your head in the sand. Where it’s leading is easy to discern, once people are willing to lift their internal censoring and look objectively at the evidence.
First, though, the lies. It’s abundantly clear now that pretty much everything that the public has been told and continues to be told is between untrue and downright lies.
I offer as a shortlist that:
- PCR mass testing reasonably reliably distinguishes infected and infectious people from others;
- that masks reduce transmission of respiratory viruses;
- that transmission of infection in the absence of symptoms is an important contribution to epidemic spreading;
- that lockdowns as executed reduce hospitalisation and deaths;
- that no matter how small the remaining susceptible population and no matter that virtually no people who, if infected, might die remain unvaccinated, the position is perilous;
- that no pharmaceutical treatments are available;
- that variants are different enough to warrant border closures and require new vaccines;
- that the gene-based vaccines are safe and effective;
- that “vaccine passports” will increase safety while having no material impacts on freedom of choice in a liberal democracy.”
How many of these fables have been promoted in some Christian circles? It is a grave tragedy that Christianity has in certain places simply been a mouth piece for the continuation of these current narratives, which are but an extension of government agency.
It is indeed much easier to keep one’s head in the sand. Yet, a lie will always betray a person in the end. A lie will never deliver a person from the peril which he seeks to avoid by adopting it.
He further states, “It is impossible to believe that intelligent, well-connected and well-briefed senior advisers to governments don’t know that almost all, if not all, of the above are simply not true.”
I cannot help but agree based upon my own substantial research into events and happenings over the past year. People are generally well meaning, no one wants others to die. Yet, human concern has been exploited to promote a secular lie. A terrible lie that seems to be continuing to mutate even as I write. Lies always exploit people. Lies always have facilitators, most of the time they know they are lying. They do so purposely. They do so to enslave other people. As the Soviets did with Solzhenitsyn.
Dr. Yeadon ends his articulate article with these words, “I think I’ve made a decent case that what governments and their advisers have done easily amounts to conspiracy. The same “mistakes” have been made everywhere. The same tricks and manipulation. Those who claim this is all coincidence are coincidence theorists.
I argue that unless this is pointed out to the public before any possible ‘vaccine passports’ system is established, we’ve all collectively failed to discharge our duties to be courageous, to take chances, to risk looking foolish: I am absolutely committed to continuing to speak out for as long as I have breath in my body.”
I wish more Christians had this doctor’s courage. The end goal of the current system of lies is only tyranny. The tyranny of evil. By giving quarter to the lie we allow it to live and disseminate its death. By associating ourselves with it we separate ourselves from truth.
Solzhenitsyn calls to us, “And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?”
I believe for us the time has come, or it may be long past. What will we choose? Maybe we were unsure and a little spineless in the past (I include myself). Now is the time to shake such things off. Now is the hour to stand aright in the Truth of Jesus Christ.
Most of all we must resolutely determine to never again let what should be Christian principles be guided by falsehoods. We must be diligent to never allow a worldly lie to upend Christian worship, practice, and faith. If we do so we stray from truth and will find not freedom but ultimate slavery.
For us today these words penned by Solzhenitsyn in 1974 may bear even more urgency, “It will not be an easy path, perhaps, but it is the easiest among those that lie before us. Not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul. And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!
But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.”
Such a day is here. More than ever we must courageously stand firm in and with truth.
“And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views … Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill,” Solzhenitsyn.
“You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness” (Ex. 23:1).
The Inkless Pen 
It is hard to take the dramatization seriously, when my own state (MN) has already eliminated the mask mandate, and all restrictions except a few concerning schools have been lifted, with those last items to be lifted as the vaccine gets approval for children, likely by the fall. In places where government is overreaching, sure, push back, as with any other type of overreach. But COVID and the response to it has not, in most places, been the boogeyman it is made out to be. It’s a pandemic, with a pretty textbook pandemic response, down to the very messy, patchwork execution.
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It is ever common even in the “secular” world to reflect back upon a past year. This may be for many reasons – Why did we lose money, What spurred growth, etc. Reflection and consideration are utilized in sports. Reels of past games are analyzed. Even if, for example, a boxer loses his fight and his wounds are healing, he looks back to consider how and why. This is never dramatization. To brush aside such actions in such a manner is short-sighted at best. The fighter who would consider a detailed review of his fight to be “dramatization” will be doomed to repeat his failure. It is indeed nice that the wounds of the past year are healing, yet we must reflect upon how they were inflicted. If we do not we will simply suffer them again and possibly worse.
You are welcome to substantiate how it is not “the boogeyman it is made to be.”
I invite you to counter the points given by the doctor in this article with not off had rejection but rather solid information.
Thank you for your comment!
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lol you must be living under a rock.
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The problem is, you believe everything the official sources tell you. They say that this is an ordinary response, but it really isn’t, not in its scope, and not in the severity of the response. The disease itself is a pretty weak excuse for a Pandemic. Fauci himself was following the ordinary course of disease response until toward the end of February 2020; he said at one point, “Well, we don’t quite know what this is yet; if the numbers stay below this horizon, we’ve essentially got a bad flu season, if they rise above it, we’ll have an epidemic of some kind”. Of course, the numbers never rose above what had been indicated for a bad flu season. He also at the beginning was giving the standard teaching on masks, which is that they are ineffective in halting the progress of a disease. At some point, the word came down from his Globalist masters that they needed this disease as a pretext for their “Great Reset” and that he should spin things in a way that would allow them to extend social control universally, and he never subsequently deviated from this narrative. If you were a citizen of the Soviet Union, you would be saying, “There are no Gulags in Russia, because the Pravda says so”.
This goes way beyond this disease; they told us at the beginning that there was to be a New Normal. The government now exercises total control over the economy, and can now place every citizen under what amounts to house arrest under any pretext. What they have done for Covid they can do for the flu, or any other disease which comes down the pike; they are already talking about the possibility of shutdowns for environmental reasons. This extraordinary response to a rather ordinary disease has altered the sociopolitical landscape permanently, and any reprieve which is granted can be regarded as temporary. They are also in the process of creating a two-tiered society composed of the Compliant and the Non-Compliant, in which the Compliant will enjoy some degree of liberty (much like Party members in the Soviet Union) and the Non-Compliant will be deprived even of the right to basic social interaction, even though those who have the vaccine should be in no danger from those who don’t, and those who have had Covid don’t need the vaccine, and are under enhanced danger of having a bad reaction to it.
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Thank you father. You are a voice crying in the wilderness for us. We pray that God continues to bless you with the discernment, courage and faith that are behind these articles.
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Beautiful!
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You have skillfully aligned Solzhenitsyn’s iconic essay with the work of Dr Mike Yeadon, showing those with eyes to see the trajectory of tyranny in our times. Absolutely brilliant.
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Well said, dear Father. We must all stand for truth, that we at least remain a part of the remnant of the Church that is fast approaching. American, and indeed the whole of the Western World, has succumbed to the Great Lie, and the Reset is happening. Marxism is alive in the White House, and unless we repent as a nation, a new age of persecution against Christ’s Church will be upon us.
Abbot Tryphon
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When we lie, we order our universe to support this lie, and end up making a fictitious universe. Reality always breaks in eventually, breaking the fragile strands of untruth. The Devil, being the Father of lies, has ordered an alternate reality for he and his followers in which God is not the center. When reality breaks in, there are only two ways to respond: To repent, and acknowledge that we have been wrong, and wicked in persisting in wrongness, and to persist in our delusion and continue to deny reality. The Devil until the end will never cease knotting together the broken strands of his fiction, which seem so strong to those caught in them, but when the light of Truth dawns, they dissolve like spun sugar.
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I like that phrase “Coincidence Theorist”. I have on a number of occasions in the past been asked why I believe in these conspiracies, and have answered “Because at some point I stopped believing in an everlasting series of long strings of fantastic coincidences”.
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How many of these “malicious witnesses” there have been in the past year. Many of these people probably believe they are doing good by consciously telling lies; they believe that they do so to defeat an evil enemy, and that somehow peace and freedom will be the result of deception and injustice. We have to learn that this is never the case; our forefathers knew this, but we have lost their knowledge, and wander in the labyrinths of false philosophy.
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Solzhenitsyn is a hero of Liberty from the last century; no matter the situation, he told the truth boldly and unapologetically. He told the truth in Russia, and was persecuted for it. He told the truth in America, and became deeply unpopular with certain groups who had been prepared to fete him if only he would sit in his golden cage and sing of the glories of Capitalism. We need to honor and support those in our own time who tell the truth; there is danger in it, and this danger is increasing daily.
I was slow to become certain; there were many theories which I held in my mind which seemed plausible enough, but which seemed too extreme to me. People who I regarded essentially as lunatics ten years ago have been absolutely confirmed in my mind by the events of the past year; I now honor and extol those who fought bravely for truth when I myself was a fence-sitter; if I and many like me had followed their lead back then it might have changed things. Now I am one of the entertaining lunatics for a new generation of cautious observers; irony abounds!
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The below is a continuation of the post made by Maxim. There were some technical difficulties (for whatever reason) and, as admin, I’m posting it for him.
Begin post –
We as a People have grown comfortable with lies; we eat them as our daily bread in the form of advertising. The lies stream past so quickly and so constantly that they soon come to be considered normal. We stopped expecting politicians to tell the truth years ago. Newscasters used to be expected to at least project an image of probity and the disinterested pursuit of truth, but now news programs are a hornet’s nest of lies, and journalists have lost all detachment, and are no more than partisan hacks who boast of their “Political Engagement”. I’m just old enough to remember a time when cheating in sports was frowned upon, but before I entered High School the mantra became “If you’re not cheating you’re not trying” and announcers began to lambast officials for calling penalties rather than players for breaking the rules. This was a change which came rather suddenly as I recall; “Losers” followed the rules to the letter, while “Winners” found ways to get around the rules without getting caught. Lost was the old traditions of Sportsmanship, which recognized that if you cheated you weren’t a winner, you didn’t even have the dignity of competing valiantly and losing, you didn’t even play the game. “Cheater” used to be one of the most shameful tags which could be put on you. In the work environment, all my life the expectation has been that one is required to tell lies which benefit one’s employer. No wonder no one will jeopardize their career by coming out and telling the truth. We have allowed collusion by employers to blacklist those who don’t “play the game”, so many don’t see how they can make a stand for truth without making their families suffer. Until we as a people regain our abhorrence for the bald-faced lie nothing is going to get better; because we have lived by lies, we are being enslaved.
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