3 Ancient Tactics We Still Use Today
It’s a deeply uncomfortable feeling. You encounter a fact or an idea that directly contradicts a belief you’ve held your entire life. Your immediate, gut-level response is often to deny it, to push it away. This isn’t a personal failing; it’s a universal human experience.
Psychologists call this mental conflict ‘cognitive dissonance’—the tendency to seek consistency among our beliefs. When new information creates an inconsistency, our minds fight to restore harmony, often by rejecting the challenging information. We resist being proven wrong, and we resist the idea that our families, friends, and teachers could have been in error.
This article explores the deeper, often subconscious, ways we resist truth, drawing insights from an ancient text that details this very human struggle. We will break down three surprising methods of resistance that are just as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago.
“Do you Realize it is extremely disconcerting to discover that what you have heard all of your life and what you have been taught all of your life has been error and wrong. We fight against truth many times simply because we do not want to be proven wrong or we do not want our family and our friends to be in error.”
1 We Attack the Messenger to Avoid the Message.
One of the most common ways to avoid an uncomfortable truth is to discredit the person delivering it. Instead of engaging with the message, we focus on the messenger. The ancient account of Moses and Aaron confronting Pharaoh provides a clear blueprint for this tactic. Pharaoh didn’t disprove their message; he denied their authority and mission. This resistance often takes three specific forms.
- Imitation: Pharaoh’s magicians attempted to replicate Moses’s miracles. The goal was to devalue the original act by creating a counterfeit, making the messenger seem less special. But their efforts revealed a profound truth: imitation is not creation. The magicians could add to the misery—making more bloody water or calling up more frogs—but when Moses brought forth life from dust in the form of lice, they could not. Satan and his emissaries can imitate, but only God can create. This tactic endures today in counterfeits that mimic the language of truth—”another Jesus, another spirit, another gospel”—but are ultimately powerless and produce only death.
- Insinuation: This is a subtle form of character assassination used to discredit the messenger without a direct confrontation. Consider the church gossip who sees a man’s truck parked in front of a liquor store and starts a rumor that he’s a drunkard. When confronted, the man reveals he was doing a repair job. The damage, however, is done. It works through subtle phrases, too. Instead of making a direct claim, someone might say, “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I knew,” planting a seed of doubt that poisons the well without ever making a falsifiable claim. The Pharisees used this against Jesus, insinuating his illegitimacy by saying, “We be not born of fornication.” It’s a way to dismiss the message by casting suspicion on the messenger’s character.
- Intimidation: When other tactics fail, the final resort is to silence the messenger through threats. Pharaoh threatened Moses directly: “See my face no more, for in the day that thou seeest my face, thou shalt die.” While modern intimidation is often less overt, it is no less powerful. It can manifest in the life of a pastor who is so intimidated by the board of deacons or a wealthy church member that he’s afraid to preach the whole counsel of God, fearing they might leave and take their money with them. The threat isn’t to his life, but to his livelihood, and it works to silence uncomfortable truths.
This strategy is a classic logical fallacy. By attacking the person, we avoid the difficult work of grappling with the idea itself. If you can convince yourself the messenger is flawed, you give yourself permission to ignore the message.
2 We Acknowledge the Truth, But Live a Different Story.
A more insidious form of resistance is not outright rejection but “practical denial.” A person employing this tactic professes to believe a truth but lives a life that completely ignores its principles and authority. They intellectually assent to a set of facts but practically deny them through their actions. They are, in effect, a practical atheist—someone who says they believe but lives as if God has no authority.
“They profess that they know God but in works they deny him being abominable and disobedient unto every good work reprobate.”
This form of resistance is so dangerous because it allows a person to maintain the comfort of their professed beliefs while avoiding the difficult, transformative work of applying them. Someone might attend a religious service, acknowledging God’s authority, and then “live and act six days during the week as if God had no authority, had never spoken, and not one thing that he has said is binding upon them.”
There are generally two reasons for this disconnect. The first possibility is that the person is not genuinely converted to begin with. The second is that they may be genuinely converted but have never understood or learned how to apply the principles of their faith to their everyday lives. Either way, they confess the truth with their mouth but deny it with their lives.
3 We Dilute the Truth to Make It More Comfortable.
A third way to resist truth is to compromise it—to mix it with error to make it less offensive, less demanding, and more palatable. This approach feels like a reasonable middle ground, but it ultimately neutralizes the power of the original message. Pharaoh presented three such compromises to Moses, each one a temptation to dilute the truth.
- First Compromise: “Worship your God in the land.” This was the temptation to make faith look and act just like the surrounding culture, stripping it of its distinctiveness. It’s an invitation to blend in, to remove any uncomfortable separation between one’s beliefs and the world’s values.
- Second Compromise: “Only the men can go.” This was an offer to pursue truth personally but to sacrifice the family and future generations. Pharaoh knew that if the women and children remained, the men would eventually return. This compromise asks us to follow a path alone, leaving behind those we are responsible for.
- Third Compromise: “Leave your possessions behind.” This final offer was a temptation to profess belief without being fully invested. Pharaoh knew that if the Israelites’ wealth remained in Egypt, their hearts would eventually follow. It represents an unwillingness to fully sacrifice for the truth one claims to hold.
Compromise is tempting because it seems less extreme than outright rejection. One of the most powerful modern examples of this is found in the pressure of church debt. When a church is in debt up to its eyeballs, it “cannot afford to lose any member because every member’s needed to help pay the syncing fund payments.” This financial pressure creates an environment where nothing “divisive, nothing offensive, nothing controversial” can be preached. The truth is compromised not for theological reasons, but for financial ones, stripping it of the very power that makes it transformative.
Conclusion: Trading Truth for a Lie
We resist uncomfortable truths in sophisticated ways. We attack the messenger through imitation, insinuation, and intimidation. We engage in practical denial, professing a belief but living a life that ignores it. And we compromise, diluting the truth until it loses its power.
The source text warns of a stark consequence for those who habitually fight the truth. It describes how those who “received not the love of the truth” are ultimately sent a “strong delusion” so that they “should believe a lie.” The final outcome of trading away truth is not a neutral emptiness, but an active embrace of falsehood. When we refuse the truth, the only thing left to believe is a lie.
Knowing our natural tendency to fight uncomfortable truths, what is one step we can take today to become more willing to listen, even when it challenges what we’ve always believed?