BY CLIFFORD GOLDSTEIN

very idea, image, sound, and touch you've ever felt, heard, seen, or thought, you've done so in warm-blooded darkness. Our character, emotions, knowledge, passions, and dreams foment in a realm where light never reaches, because our mind--where almost all that we are is--sits locked in a box that lets no light in. We are, literally, in darkness, and I see this darkness as a metaphor for self-delusion.

I've met people--bright, educated people, even vegetarian, Sabbathkeeping people--who were so self-deluded, so skewed and imbalanced in their own view of themselves and their relationship to reality, that they seemed to exist in a parallel (or maybe perpendicular?) universe. Facts of sterile clarity, after being processed in their minds, would come out so differently from what seemed to go in that I'd have to rub my eyes just to make sure we're looking at the same thing. Years ago, after listening to some poor soul express a view of himself that fit reality like panty hose on a lobster, I was hit by the fearful thought What about me? How self-deluded am I?

We all, I imagine, to some degree are. We have to be. Socrates once said, "Know thyself." Most people who do so become suicidal. "Man," wrote Joseph Brodsky, "is more frightening than his skeleton." That, I think, explains our capacity for self-delusion; it's a kind of defense mechanism, a soiled way of deflecting ourselves from ourselves. It's bad enough to see another's degeneracy; who can bear the sight of his or her own? Our most effective masks are the ones that we wear outside in.

"How canst thou say, I am not polluted, I have not gone after Baalim?" (Jer. 2:23) the Lord asks those who have so long been defiled and who have so long gone after "Baalim" that they see themselves as doing neither. Judas, Ellen White wrote, actually thought he was doing good by betraying Jesus. The Laodicean disease is, essentially, self-delusion: "Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Rev. 3:17). And then there's the most frightful self-delusion, the self-delusion of the damned: "Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? . . . And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity" (Matt. 7:22, 23).

The only cure is the cross--rather ironic because the cross is what shows us just how bad we are, and it's our own sick visage that causes us to hide behind self-delusion in the first place. Yet the cross also shows us that no matter how wretched we are, God accepts us anyway. At the cross we can afford to look at ourselves because whatever appears has been covered by the blood of Jesus, and it's only when we know we've been covered that we dare take off our own masks. What does it matter what we think about ourselves as long as we know what God thinks? "For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things" (1 John 3:20). Only when we know what God thinks about us can we start stripping away the lies in which we've hidden ourselves; only as we know that we are accepted and loved can we have the security to look squarely in the mirror and confront the evil that looks back.

Otherwise, how will we overcome sins that we don't see? In the sure refuge of salvation, where we have been accepted in Jesus despite our sins, we can begin the long, painful, and arduous processes of having those sins, nerve ending by nerve ending, purged from our lives. If not, sin will only increase our self-delusion, and we will compose myth upon myth that will push us deeper into the dark and mazy rills of our sin-wearied mind, where we will wander farther and farther away from the One who said, "I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness" (John 12:46).

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.