Why “whitewashed”? Because Jesus knew what His Spirit would later inspire the Apostle Paul to write (2 Cor. 11:13-15): “For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.” The “wolf in sheep’s clothing” (cf. Matt. 7:13-14; Acts 20:28) has been Satan’s chief ploy for deceiving the unsuspecting since the early days of the Church. 

Matt. 23:27: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.”

In 1942, Englishman C.S. Lewis published a book entitled The Screwtape Letters.  In it, a senior devil named Screwtape details to his nephew and underling Wormwood methods for waylaying and ultimately damning his intended victim. The book is a clever and revealing look at how the actual devil, Satan, goes about perpetrating his odious work in the world. One overarching theme behind Screwtape’s instruction to Wormwood is how the subtle provocation away from truth is usually more helpful in bringing souls to hell than blatant exposures to deplorable sins. Writes Screwtape to his young apprentice, “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts . . . .”

One glance across the landscape of professing Christianity since the book’s publication shows how Satan has capitalized mightily on Screwtape’s insight, using incremental apostasy to poison the well of doctrinal truth and undermine the Church’s message. Incremental nudges away from biblical fidelity are the hallmark of the false church, and the chief exponents Satan has employed for this task have been the contemporary equivalents of the “scribes and Pharisees” of Jesus’ day, those tasked with overseeing Scriptural instruction. Christ’s no-holds-barred denunciation of such false teachers was designed to expose these counterfeit religious leaders for who they really are—walking sepulchers housing spiritual cadavers.

Why “whitewashed”? Because Jesus knew what His Spirit would later inspire the Apostle Paul to write (2 Cor. 11:13-15): “For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.” The “wolf in sheep’s clothing” (cf. Matt. 7:13-14; Acts 20:28) has been Satan’s chief ploy for deceiving the unsuspecting since the early days of the Church. Christ’s diatribe in Matt. 23:27 is meant to warn of the spiritual leader housed in a sincere, winsome, wholesome-appearing, religiously adorned exterior, all the while concealing a spiritual corpse. And what was true then holds true today: nothing infuriates God more than a theologian or spiritual teacher whose noxious instruction is hidden by a veneer of respectability and charm, with just enough feints towards orthodoxy to beguile the naive. Moreover, knowing that students ultimately become like their masters (cf. Luke 6:40), Christ wanted all to know what was at stake given continued exposure to such impostors and their fetid deceit.

But despite the myriad of Scriptural warnings to be on guard against such impostors, the sad reality is that the Church has never been so awash in falsehood as it is today. It is as if Satan has hit upon the “whitewashed tomb” as the principal means for furthering his deception and is doubling down on their production. So if a new edition of The Screwtape Letters were to be published today, we might imagine it would contain an addendum entitled, “How to Build a Whitewashed Tomb.” If artifice and apostasy is to continue infiltrating the Church, then Wormwood must be updated on the furtherance of this chief armament of Satan. With this in mind, let us imagine how Screwtape might write to Wormwood today:

My Dear Wormwood,

It being some time since our last correspondence, with developments both favorable and troubling, I feel compelled to write and bring you up to date on the latest directives from our Ruler. You will recall in prior posts I emphasized to you the value of incremental apostasy in undermining our Enemy’s work. And no factor over the last two millennia has been more integral to this stratagem than the ongoing reproduction of (to use our Enemy’s censorious term) “whitewashed tombs.” As you know, these clandestine operatives appear to be working for Him, when in reality they are working for us.

That such a strategy has succeeded through the years, and even works today, is quite remarkable. For when our Enemy walked the earth, He plainly exposed our agents then for what they are—”whitewashed tombs”—and warned in great detail how they were to be identified (Matt. 7:13-14; 23:1-36; John 10:7-13). Not only that, His inspired scribes revealed us—the instigators and motivators behind these agents—in our true form, as “servants of righteousness” (2 Cor. 11:13-15). Such disclosures might have spelled disaster, as the impact of our counterfeit work lies in its spiritual camouflage, and here the Holy One of Israel was drawing back the curtain for all to see. Fortunately, time, vanity and spiritual lethargy have combined to dull the discernment of mankind to His warnings, to a degree that never before have our agents been so ubiquitous, and are finding greener pastures with every passing decade.

But we cannot become complacent. Remember how five centuries ago, the tide turned against us most dramatically and severely, and many souls were lost to the Enemy forever. It is uncertain we will ever fully recover from this calamity, as even now vestiges of that so-called “Reformation” continue to befuddle and undermine our labors. Therefore, you must understand our Ruler’s prioritization of false teaching as our foremost task at hand, which in turn is predicated upon the replication of our prized “whitewashed tombs,” that the unsuspecting might be permanently waylaid from the Truth. So without further ado, I pass along to you our Ruler’s formula for how to build a “whitewashed tomb.”

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