Light shall shine out of darkness

2Corinthians 4:6

For God, who said, " Light shall shine out of darkness," is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

From the movie The Matrix, http://www.moviesounds.com/matrix/choice.wav

It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth~what truth? That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch; a prison for your mind.

This is from a friend of mine:

Deception is the first and greatest mark of a life of futility. This is so because deception is the one all-encompassing ingredient needed to keep people trapped in lives that go nowhere. The working of deception is the goal of God's primary enemy - Satan. Deception is a worldwide phenomenon because it is a human phenomenon. We should expect this would be so because the entire world is under the influence and control of the evil one: "We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one." (1 John 5:19). We should also expect Satan's first and primary tool for injury in this world to be the lie and the practice of deception. After all, this is how Satan got control of the world in the first place: "Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, `You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"" (Genesis 3:1).

We should expect considerable resistance from the evil one toward our efforts to allow the Father to bring us out of the futile life of deception we were born into in the natural. Make no mistake about this point - we were all born (in the natural) into a spiritually generated dream world. Humanity is trapped in a dead-end existence leading to personal and corporate failure and ultimately to self-destruction. Yet, we have no legitimate or necessary need to feel either trapped or hopeless. The trap of a hopeless life is a self-imposed trap.

The reason we may have hope even in a fallen world is because there is a loving God who is in ultimate control over all of creation. This loving God desires to be our loving Father and to release us from the bondage of the life of futility. The means of this release is found in the verse just before the one quoted above from 1 John: "We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him." (1 John 5:18). The apostle John does a marvelous job of giving us the entire picture of reality in two short verses. If we are born of God (reborn or born again) then we are safe, even though we still live in a world under the control of the evil one.

Rich