Gaslighting! It’s a fairly new expression gleaned from the 1944 film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman, and a term that Merriam-Webster made their “word of the year” back in 2022. In the movie, a woman is driven to madness by the emotional abuse of her husband, who uses various hoaxes and schemes as a way to control her sense of self. His most systematic trick against her is when he secretly dims the house’s gas-powered lamps while insisting to her that they are still brightly lit.
Gaining traction in today’s public discourse, the word “gaslighting” has been used to describe any cunning form of psychological manipulation that might be implemented to change one’s perception of reality. It has been used most often as a ploy in personal relationships and politics, but is also a covert tactic of social engineering. This has been especially true of the recent attempts by worldlings to mold the biblical Christian into a pliable slave of tolerance and conformity through theological sleight of hand and half-truths tailored to appeal to base emotions.
Indeed there is a concerted effort right now by social influencers, mainstream talking-heads and authoritarian elitists who are actively trying to confuse Christian believers who are walking after Jesus in the Spirit-filled faith of the apostolic Gospel. Even within the visible Church, you will find wolfish critics in sheep’s clothing who are constructing rhetorical strawmen to create the appearance that faithful disciples are disordered or unhinged if they hold true to their biblical convictions.
What we are currently witnessing, therefore, is a diabolical form of spiritual gaslighting. Its classic purpose is not to drive us insane like Ingrid Bergman’s character, but rather, as Justine Isernhinke puts it, “to manipulate us, soften us, weaken us, force us to let our guard down and to change our perception of reality subtly, without us noticing until such time as our reality is so altered, it’s too late.”
THE SCHEME OF THE POSTMODERN VIRTUE SIGNALER
So what are these gaslighters doing to cause Christians to doubt their biblical sanity and lose their grasp of the real Jesus Christ and the truth of His word? Above all, these tricksters attempt to signal their higher postmodern virtue by claiming to understand Jesus more than the devoted, biblically-informed believer. They secretly dim the true light of Christ and tell you it is still shining bright, even though they have replaced it with the lesser light of a false Christ.
Pointing to the Bible, they will twist the words of God with the tempting finesse of the devil (Matthew 4:5-7). They will say, “Look at what little concern Jesus had about sin as long as love is involved! He drank with sinners, comforted an adulterer and never said one word against alternative lifestyles. Why, as a Christian, are you not displaying the same loving acceptance of all walks of life as Jesus did?”
The unsuspecting Christian has now been placed under their unauthorized scrutiny and spurious judgment. If the Christian dares to deny the gaslighter’s assertion of reality, then the soundness of the Christian’s perception can be easily put into question. Further mischaracterizations will then be used to break down the believer’s steadfastness under the pressure of feigned pity or public shaming. They will label the devout believer as an unloving person, a legalist, a fascist, misogynist, homophobe, a snob, a hypocrite, a dispenser of hate speech, or a heartless offender of other people’s sacred feelings.
It may even escalate to digitally-based crowdstalking or gangstalking as a form of weaponized cult behavior among these anti-Christ provocateurs who are desperate to justify their sins by downplaying the importance of God’s holiness among His people.
Their ultimate agenda? To demoralize or silence as many biblical Christians as possible to create the public impression that the Jesus of Christianity is nothing more than a social justice celebrity who would escort women into abortion clinics, celebrate at pride parades and hang out with Oprah and Greta Thunberg if He were back here on earth.
CONFUSING THE BELIEVER’S MIND OF CHRIST
Sadly, some professing Christians have already buckled under such psychological trickery and lost the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). They have become convinced that their theology is mistaken or outdated because the growing majority disagrees with their historic biblical position. For the sake of friendship evangelism, they want to be liked as the “cool” Christian. They don’t want to lose their camaraderie with the world. They don’t want to suffer for the sake of a righteousness now deemed archaic and judgmental by unbelievers. Never mind that the Bible directly denounces such feelings as acts of faithless compromise (2 Corinthians 6:14; James 4:4).
This isn’t to say that there cannot be sympathy for these afflicted professors. No doubt it can be a confusing time in the midst of this persistent gaslighting, especially when such manipulation comes from progressive “red-letter” Christians who want you to believe that the “black letters” of the Bible can be devalued if they don’t line up with Jesus’ words. Indeed when someone from within the visible Church takes the law of Christ and strips it from its full biblical context to prove their distorted view of Christian love as mere neighborliness, the unsuspecting believer can be understandably rattled by the notion that they are failing to emulate the true love of Jesus.
Nobody wants to be seen as a bad person or an embarrassment to their Lord and Savior. They don’t want to be condemned by their neighbors, co-workers or family members because of the appearance of hard-heartedness. Love, after all, IS important! In fact, it is the greatest of all virtues and a fruit of the Spirit; and the Christian should always consider genuine love to be the commanding force in their relationship with God and in their kind and hospitable interactions with the people around them (1 Corinthians 13:13; Galatians 5:22).
Nevertheless, Christians should not be confused by any gaslighting that tricks them into believing that the more palatable words and deeds of Jesus are incompatible with the more demanding teachings found elsewhere in the Bible. His appearance on earth, clothed in the Gospel of His loving grace, was certainly a fulfillment of the great purpose entrusted to Him by the Father, but we cannot forget that His divine power and presence have been evident since the very first words of Genesis. As such, it is only in a survey of the panoramic vista of the Scriptures that we are able to more fully apprehend the plenary revelation of our Lord and Savior in both the Old Covenant promises of the law and prophets and in the apostolic ministry of His New Covenant church.
The believer should not be fooled. Any self-serving attempt to elevate the words attributed to Jesus over and above the totality of God’s holy word is tantamount to denying Him as the second Person of the Trinity, the Cornerstone of the holy temple of God built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, and as the Lord of the spirits of all the prophets — particularly in His function as the Prophet who speaks to us in these last days (Matthew 28:19; 1 Timothy 2:5; Ephesians 2:20; Revelation 22:6; Hebrews 1:2).
GROUNDED IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST
The fact is, all Scripture is “breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16). Therefore, the Christian is perfectly equipped to withstand any spiritual trick or hoax by holding fast to the revealed truth of Jesus that shines like a golden thread throughout Bible history. Whether His words are recorded in the Gospels or clarified and expanded upon by the inspired apostles for practical application to the Church, the transcendent resonance of Christ’s authoritative voice can be heard by the believer in every book of God’s holy writ as they “bear witness of Him” (John 5:39).
As the Word made flesh, Jesus proved the sufficiency of Scripture and substantiated the spiritual sustenance of feeding on “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (John 1:14; Matthew 4:4) According to John H. Armstrong, “He endorsed the Old Testament Scriptures as the Word of God, both in specific statements and in how He used them (Matthew 5:17-20; Matthew 12:18-27; Matthew 26:52-54; Luke 10:25-26; Luke 16:17). Further, it was He who foresaw the writing of the New Covenant Scriptures and who made provision for this by appointing the apostles to be His proxies so that they might lay the foundation of the church upon His unique person and work” (Matthew 10:40; John 13:20).
Indeed, it is an unquestionable biblical reality that Christ inspired the apostles and qualified them with spiritual gifts suitable to their work. When He commissioned His apostles, He stated unequivocally, “He who hears you, hears Me. And those who refuse to hear you, refuse to hear Me” (Luke 10:16). As such, Peter, John, Paul and the other apostles were given all authority to speak and write down the “words of Christ” so that faith would come and bring instruction, admonition, wisdom, thankfulness and other rich blessings to those who would believe (Matthew 28:19; Romans 10:17; Colossians 3:16).
The disciple of Jesus, then, should be grounded in this truth. Just because worldlings of every sinful stripe find some of these “words of Christ” to be ugly or offensive should never cause the biblical Christian to question their historic validity or spiritual power. These devious attempts by theological manipulators to suggest that the believer is only truly faithful to Jesus when he critically questions the “hurtful” scriptural precepts found outside the Gospels must be rejected out of hand.
If such shameful gaslighting were to actually succeed, it would not only cause spiritual damage to the faith of the individual believer, but as Joel Looper rightly points out, would drive some evangelical groups in the visible Church “toward a Christianity that looks less like the Jesus the first Christians knew and more like a Jesus fashioned in our own image.” And sadly, this has already happened with the noticeable decline of Christian influence in the West.
THE HOAX OF THE HEARTLESS CHRISTIAN
At the heart of this tricky matter is the matter of the Christian heart. Too often, it appears, the shrewd manipulators of this world have successfully focused their gaslighting on the believer’s perception of love, which they presume to be the greatest moral weakness of the biblical Christian. By constantly pointing to the Lord’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39), they endeavor to cause the believer to feel he has fallen short of this imperative while clinging to the whole of Scripture. And by doing so, these deceivers of the faith have sometimes convinced the self-conscious believer that the righteousness of God has been replaced by a malleable “Christlike” spirituality that conforms to the world for the sake of an indulgent love that, in reality, bears false witness to the sinner (Exodus 20:16; Ephesians 4:25; Proverbs 14:25).
Thankfully, the disciple of Christ has been given the spiritual instruction to withstand the subtlety of this hoax. As J.C. Ryle once wrote, “A man who is born again does not use the world’s opinion as his standard of right and wrong.” Thus, the biblical Christian, helped in his or her weakness by the Spirit and His Word, is fully equipped to faithfully walk in the genuine love and obedience of the Savior, who set the righteous course for His people. Who, therefore, is the interloper who thinks he can bewitch the believer into the notion that he or she is misinformed about the full measure of Christian love?
With the divine guidance of God’s word, the biblical Christian understands this: Just as the Son of God appeared on earth “to destroy the works of the devil,” His followers likewise find their particular battle with “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” and not with flesh-and-blood (1 John 3:8; Ephesians 6:12). Jesus Christ and the glory of His Gospel of grace, therefore, has set the bar for the believer’s faithful expression of love to his fallen fellow man in the hope that “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13).
This recognition of the spiritual link between mercy and judgment, then, is crucial to the bilateral complexity of Christian love. Without the holding forth of the certainty of God’s impeding judgment, there can be no necessity for mercy. As such, if our view of Christian love does not factor in or address the issue of sin and the coming judgment against unrighteousness, then we fall short of the glory of God found in His grace.
This is why Jesus, in a powerful display of sacrificial love, has commanded all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which He will judge the world by a righteousness that far exceeds that of the pride-filled virtue signalers of our decadent age (Acts 17:31; Matthew 5:20).
THE GENUINE LOVE AND OBEDIENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN
Most assuredly, Jesus declared to us the first and greatest commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind,” and then the second, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Yet what did He mean by this, and what example did He set for us?
It is written in the Bible for our edification that Jesus, as the Son of God, did love the Father with all His being through a complete and perfect obedience to His righteousness. And although He was a son, and being found in human form, He “learned obedience through suffering” and “humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Hebrews 5:8; Philippians 2:8).
And why did Jesus do as the Father commanded Him? “So that the world may know that I love the Father” (John 14:31). “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments” (1 John 5:3).
This, then, is the modeled expression of genuine love to God as described in His word. As such, the biblical Christian cannot ignore the righteousness of God that has been revealed to us, “for either you are a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you are obedient to God, which leads to righteousness” (Romans 6:16). Ultimately, of course, the obtaining of such righteousness only comes to us by faith in Christ, but nevertheless God has set the ethical standard of righteous living that not only pleases Him, but will be used to judge the world (Philippians 3:9).
Therefore, how can we truly love God if we do not denounce the unrighteous works of the flesh and uphold His righteous commandments regenerated in the New Covenant fruit of the Spirit? Both of these concurrent disciplines are exercised throughout the Scriptures for the purpose of leading sinners to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, so that in Him they might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Should we not seek to open the eyes of worldlings who can no longer see the clear evidence of their earthly corruption? Should they not be made aware of the evil thoughts that come from within their hearts to defile their bodies? Should they not be told that their practice of fleshly acts will bar them from the Kingdom of God? (Mark 7:21-22; Galatians 5:19-21; I Corinthians 6:9-10). Surely, for the sake of their plight, we must warn them that all of us “will appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
“Put to death, therefore, the components of your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting” (Galatians 6:8).
Indeed, this is how the biblical Christian shows genuine love to unsaved neighbors who presently stand under the wrath of God because of their unrighteousness. In the likeness of the merciful Savior, the believer is called to a sacrificial love that disregards temporal status and physical well-being if only to snatch such sinners from the fire of judgment (Jude 1:23). Did Jesus not lay down His life for the “greater love” of such a cause? (John 15:13). And is this not the model of genuine love which the Christian is supposed to emulate when he or she speaks truth in love to those in danger of eternal punishment? (Ephesians 5:2).
As Romans 12:9 teaches us, “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” Here, in these apostolic “words of Christ,” Paul makes a curious connection between two instructions that have a clear import for the biblical Christian, and is encapsulated in this paraphrase by Charles Ellicott: “Let your love arise from genuine and deep emotion; let the basis of your character be an intense hatred of evil and as strong an adhesion to good.”
Of course, for those committed Christians, it won’t be an easy task to bear the name of Christ while doing good for those perishing. By standing firm in their biblical convictions, believers will be hated as Jesus was (Matthew 10:22; John 15:18-19). It will bring a sword of division that cuts them off from friends and family members (Matthew 10:34-37; Luke 14:26). It will cause the suffering of personal loss and the end of worldly status (2 Timothy 3:12; Hebrews 11:25). Yet, by the grace of God, persecuted believers will reap an untold harvest of spiritual blessings as more lost souls are saved from their sins to the glory of Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:11; I Peter 4:12-16).
A SOLEMN WARNING TO THE GASLIGHTER
The spiritual gaslighters of our day, therefore, should tred lightly when trying to “correct” the unabridged theology of the biblical Christian. Contrary to their notion of an inoffensive Christianity, Jesus Himself did not mince His red-letter words when He issued an horrific judgment against anyone who might cause believers to stumble in their childlike devotion to Him:
“It would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world for the causes of sin. These stumbling blocks must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!” (Matthew 18:6-7).
Whether it is done “by evil example, by teaching to sin, by sneers at piety, or by giving soft names to gross offences” (Pulpit Commentary), the gaslighting of any faithful child of Christ which then gives occasion for a fall in their belief or in their pursuit of righteousness will not bode well for the perpetrator when he exposes the level of his resident evil.
“Such is the depravity of man,” writes Albert Barnes “that there will always be some people of wickedness endeavoring to lead Christians astray, and rejoicing when they have succeeded in causing them to fall… No wickedness can be more deeply seated in the heart than that which attempts to mar the peace, defile the purity, and destroy the souls of others; and yet in all ages there have been multitudes who, by persecution, threats, arts, allurements, and persuasion, have endeavored to seduce Christians from the faith and to lead them into sin.”
How sad it is, and yet ironic that these emotional abusers of the faithful would elevate the “loving words” of Jesus over the rest of Scripture, and yet fail to read, comprehend and heed the clear “red-lettered” warnings of the Lord concerning the hard reality of His unflinching judgment and the eternal punishment of hell “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Matthew 10:28; Matthew 25:41, 46; Mark 9:48).
Yet, all is not lost. Although a gaslighter may try to manipulate the thoughts of a biblical Christian, God has given His children the spiritual defenses to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). And with a mind set on the things above, the blessed believer is therefore approved to show the genuine love of Christ to these opponents of the faith in the hopes that God might grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth (2 Timothy 2:25).
