Home · The Seven Fronts · Front V of VII
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9
This front has no publishing house and no seminary. Its headquarters is inside your own chest, which is why it is the hardest front to fight and the one the others all depend on.
“Yea, hath God said...? But how does the verse make you feel? I just feel led. I have a peace about it. My God would never...”
How the question is asked on this front
Watch for five words: “My God would never...” finished with whatever the written Word plainly says he would. The man who says them is not reporting God; he is manufacturing one, poured in the mold of his own preferences and named after the God of the Bible. The second commandment did not stop applying when the graven images moved from the mantel to the imagination.
The same authority-swap runs through the softer phrases. “I feel led” outranks the verse. “I have a peace about it” closes the discussion the Book had already closed the other way. Sunday itself gets engineered for it: lights down, fog on, four chords rising to the key change, and the swell in your chest is announced as the presence of God. Feelings follow stagecraft. They always have. The Word needs no fog machine.
The Evidence · The one exhibit this front needs
Peter stood on the mount of transfiguration. What he wrote about it afterward settles this entire front.
Weigh that. Peter saw the Lord transfigured with his own eyes and heard the voice of God the Father with his own ears, and under inspiration he called the written Word more sure than the greatest spiritual experience any man ever had on a mountain. If Peter's transfiguration ranks below the Book, where does your goosebump rank? The question answers itself, and Peter answered it first.
The Evidence · Exhibit B
Every believer runs one of two tests, and everything downstream depends on which one. Either the experience is judged by the Book, or the Book is judged by the experience. The first is Berean: “they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11), and the Holy Ghost calls them noble for it. The second is this front's whole deception, and the Book already ruled on the judge's fitness: deceitful above all things, desperately wicked, unknowable even to its owner.
A pilot in cloud feels, with total sincerity, that the aircraft is level while the instruments read a dive. Flight schools have a name for what happens to pilots who trust the feeling over the panel. Your heart is that inner ear: real, God-given, and not built to navigate in fog. The Book is the panel. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12). Seemeth is the operative word.
None of this makes feelings the enemy; God made them, and the man who follows the panel lands safely and feels joy on the runway. Feelings are passengers. They are wonderful passengers. The deception on this front is promoting them to pilot.
What saith the Scripture
Faith does not come by feeling; it comes by hearing the word of God. That is why the enemy's every front, in the end, aims at the Book: cut off the hearing and the faith starves, leaving a religion of moods that any lighting rig can counterfeit. Worship that is in spirit but not in truth is half a verse, and the missing half is the half that anchors it.
Test the feeling. Keep the feeling when it passes. “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20). That verse carries this site's next front, because when the heart is enthroned, the spirits it invites come next.
Watch
Before you go
“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Acts 16:31
Read the Gospel