The Spider’s Web: Deceptive Beauty

Have you ever sat and watched a spider web growing slowly larger as the fine threads are spun? The web is like some gossamer lace that one could imagine being cut for fairy garments for formal occasions. And then comes a fly. The lace is not being made of fine, delicate silk after all. There is a camouflage taking place in the midst of beauty. The web is spun around and across leaves and twigs that the fly knows well in its buzzing journey, and there is no startling change to warn the fly of dangerous territory ahead. A trap? A bit more than a trap—an enticement spread in the midst of familiar surroundings, adding interest to that which has been experienced so often that it has become dull. And then the moment of exploring has become a decision. One foot caught, another caught. Now there can be no turning back. The spider has accomplished what it set out to do.

Solzhenitsyn, in a speech in August, 1975, recently printed in the National Review, began by asking, “Can one part of humanity learn from the bitter experience of another or can it not? Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger?… Coming from different countries and without consulting one another, they [people from Communist-controlled countries] warn you of what is already happening, what has happened in the past. But the proud skyscrapers stand on, point to the sky, and say: It will never happen here. This will never come to us. It is not possible here.”

He goes on to tell of the 125 years that Communism has been writing of itself openly in black and white to be read by all. He notes that few care to examine the content of the Communist Manifesto. He tells us that in pre-revolutionary Russia about seventeen people a year were executed, during the Spanish Inquisition about ten persons a month were executed, and at the height of Stalin’s terror in 1937–38 more than 40,000 persons a month were shot. He speaks of the Berlin Wall, a monument to the loss of freedom, the prison-like situation, in which so many millions live. He tells of the forced treatment in insane asylums in Communist countries where right now doctors are making their rounds and injecting into people’s arms substances that destroy their brains. He tells of “dialogues with Christianity” which are dialogues with guns, not words. There is this statement: “You cannot love freedom just for yourself and quietly agree to a situation where the majority of humanity over the greater part of the globe is being subjected to violence and oppression.” And there is this question: “These persons who sign treaties with you now … at the same time give orders for persons to be confined in mental hospitals and prisons. Why should they act differently to you?… Why should they act honorably and nobly toward you while they crush their own people?” Solzhenitsyn goes on, “In your wide open spaces even I get a little infected. The dangers seem a little imaginary. On this continent it is hard to believe all the things which are happening in the world.”

Satan weaves a web of false ideas, of lies that promise one thing and deliver the opposite. The first temptation was like a delicate web whose threads glistened in the sunlight of that gorgeous garden of Eden. Like a fly approaching the spider’s trap, Eve listened and then took the step that was to affect not only her whole life but the whole of history. The false glistening draws us into the web of lies. Freedom to hear the truth, or compare falsehood with truth, is threatened on every side. Yet we sit and watch others get caught; we watch until it is too late to do anything to save our generation of people scattered over the world, or our children and their children.

Violent takeovers of country after country by Communists or others, the killing of larger numbers of people as time goes on with no trial, no sense in the violence and torture—these are not the only visible demonstrations to us all of what happens to the human flies. We see people standing in line, waiting for they know not what, gullible as they listen to promises, walking a foot at a time, an inch at a time, into a trap. This is true politically and also morally. We go from being soft on abortion to being sold a new step: infanticide, so that the deformed or deficient won’t have to live an abnormal life. We put a foot into false promises of freedom from pain and difficulties and end up in the trap of killing old people through some form of euthanasia. We are constantly caught by promises of “liberation” in one form or another, and we watch the “liberated people,” whether blacks, or women, or old people, or homosexuals, finding their feet caught in the gossamer threads, the webs of false promises that become painful prisons.

Has God warned us? Can we stand before him someday and whine about how attractive the ideas were that cut across his Word? Can we tell God that he never expressed in an understandable way the fact that he had given sufficient truth to cause us to fly away from the shining web?

Come back a few centuries to Isaiah, seven centuries before Christ, and be warned: “Behold, the LORD’S hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness. None calleth for justice [or, righteousness], nor any pleadeth for truth [or, in truth]: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity. They hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web: he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper. Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works: their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths. The way of peace they know not; and there is not judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths: whoever goeth therein shall not know peace.… And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the LORD. As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; my spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s, said the LORD from henceforth and forever” (Isa. 59:1–8, 20, 21).

Strong warning, strong command, strong commission. We cannot simply shrug off the Word of God, which tells us of the great responsibility we have for others, and of the danger of the spider’s accomplishing what it has set out to do, in our own lives as well as in the world.

“My words which I have put in thy mouth shall not depart out of thy mouth.”

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