Who Pulls the Strings

Last weekend Joanna and I drove down to Beth Messiah in Cincinnati for a Saturday morning Shabbat service. We met friends there, sat through something that felt older and steadier than anything I was used to, and came home blessed by it.

Later, Jo brought me a video a friend had shared with her. It was part one of a teaching called "The Great Deception", by Jim Staley of Passion for Truth Ministries out of St. Louis. It is a few years old now. Whatever you make of the whole of it, one premise in it got its hooks in me and would not let go.

Staley points out that we have two ears, and asks whether that might not be an accident. Two ears, two frequencies. One station broadcasting from God, one broadcasting from the enemy. He takes it further and says we are something like computer monitors. A monitor is a beautiful, precise, expensive piece of equipment. Yet, it is a black rectangle of nothing until it is plugged into a source. It does not generate the picture. It displays whatever power source (frequency) is feeding it.

That impacted me. But it also seemed incomplete. I kept turning it over while Jo and I talked it through, and I found I agreed with where he was going but not entirely with how he got there. So I began praying and seeking for a better analogy. Here is the one I landed on.

We are like marionettes

Not mass produced plastic ones. We are carefully, lovingly hand carved.

Every one of us was made individually, by hand, by a Creator who was not in a hurry. He gave you a set of skills nobody else got in quite that combination. He gave you talents, a temperament, a sense of humor, a way of seeing a room. Paul says it plainly. "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10). David says God wove him together in his mother's womb, and that in God's book were written all the days ordained for him, "when as yet there was not one of them" (Psalm 139:13, 16).

Nobody carves a marionette without a play in mind.

Here is the problem. The stage we were set down on is not currently owned by the One who carved us. Paul calls the enemy "the prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2). This is his stage for now. He is a prideful, fallen thing running a theater he did not build, and every marionette placed on his boards has strings running up into his darkness.

Somebody is always pulling them. That is the part I want you to sit with. There is no neutral. A marionette with nobody on the strings does not become free... it becomes a heap of wood on the stage floor. If it is moving, something is moving it. Either the fiendish puppet master has your strings, or perhaps other marionettes around you do, or your Creator does.

Handing over the strings

Salvation, in this picture, is not learning to work your own strings better. It is handing them up, into the light.

By faith you reach up and put your life into the hands of the One who made you instead of the one who owns the current stage. That is the whole transaction. Jesus did not say that apart from Him we would struggle. He said, "for apart from Me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Nothing. A marionette does not have a second set of muscles in reserve.

I like this better than the computer monitor and frequency metaphor, and I will tell you why. A source switcher, or a frequency dial, is passive. You switch it, tune it, you do not belong to it. But strings mean you were made by somebody, for something, and that something is already attached to you. It keeps the uniqueness in the frame. Your Creator does not want a room full of identical puppets running identical scenes. He wants you, carved the way He carved you, moving the way only you move, bringing glory to His name.

I do understand my new analogy loses the two ears aspect. I am willing to trade that, because I think the strings are closer to what Scripture actually says about us.

The strings he lets you give away

Now here is the part I most want you to hear, because it is the part that nearly cost me everything.

The Stage Master will let you hand your strings to the Creator.

I am not saying he enjoys it. I am saying he is not nearly as troubled by it as we assume, as long as he gets to keep a few. If you have read C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, you know the moment. The patient becomes a Christian, and Wormwood writes to his uncle practically in a panic, and Screwtape writes back and tells him to calm down. It is not over. There is still a great deal to work with. Later he gives the line that has never left me: the safest road to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without signposts.

That is one of his strategies. He does not need all of your strings. He needs a few, and he needs you not to notice which ones.

So you get saved. You mean it. You hand your strings over and something genuinely changes. However, there are still strings running up into the dark that you never thought to look at, because you do not yet realize they are there, or because you are certain those particular ones are yours. That is the lie inside the lie. You do not think anybody is pulling them. You think you are.

What that looked like for me

I was under my Creator's control. I would have told you so, and I would not have been lying.

But there were strings I had never surrendered, because I had never identified them as strings at all. Old wounds. Triggers I could not have named for you. Ways of coping I had carried so long they read as personality rather than bondage.

Then came a hard season, the kind that comes for every man eventually, and those strings got plucked. Not by God. And because I believed they were mine, I answered them like a man exercising his own free choice, and I took a step. Then another. Not a dramatic step. A gradual one. Subtle changes. Soft underfoot.

Every step took me a little further from center stage and a little closer to the edge, and here is what the enemy does at the same time, because he is good at this. He isolates you. The men who would have looked at me and said "Steve, what are you doing, who is pulling that string" ... I quietly moved away from those men. Not with a decision, but with a drift. A missed call. A skipped study. A thing kept to myself that a year earlier I would have said out loud. Isolation is not the consequence of the drift. Isolation is the method.

And the further out on that stage I walked, the less I could tell who was moving me. That is the horror of it. Discernment is not a fixed quantity. It dims. The strings felt like mine right up to the point where the path I was on was very close to costing me my marriage and my life.

"Was he ever really saved?"

People ask that question about men like me. When someone who has professed Jesus for years does something that lands like a bomb in his life, the room wants to resolve it cleanly. He must have been faking. He was never really in.

I understand why we want that answer. It keeps the story at a safe distance from our own house.

But Paul will not let us have it. "For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate... For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want" (Romans 7:15, 19). That is not a skeptic writing. That is the apostle. If Paul can describe a war inside a genuinely redeemed man, then the existence of that war in me is not proof that I was never His.

It is proof that some of my strings were still in the wrong hands.

That is not a comfortable answer and it is not meant to be an excuse. It is meant to be a warning, and the warning has a shape: a man who looks completely saved from the outside can be walking, step by gradual step, toward the edge of the stage. To everyone watching, the performance is fine. He shows up. He serves. He knows the words.

Why you cannot do this alone

This is the whole case for community, and it is not a soft one.

You cannot see your own strings. You are inside the marionette. You do not have the angle. What you have instead is the gift of other marionettes... men close enough and honest enough to look at you from the side and say, "that movement did not come from you, who is directing that, who is pulling that string?"

That is why Hebrews tells us to "consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another" (Hebrews 10:24-25). It is why Paul says that when a man is caught in any trespass, "you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness," and then, "bear one another's burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:1-2). It is why James says, "confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed" (James 5:16). None of that is church program language. It is a man on the edge of the stage being seen before he goes over.

If there is no one in your life with permission to ask you who is pulling that string, then whatever else is true of you, you are further out on the boards than you think.

The greatest lie

The fiendish Stage Master is a liar by nature. Jesus said it flatly. When the devil speaks a lie, "he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44). And, "the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy" (John 10:10). He is trying to pervert the play into a tragedy, and direct every marionette into death in the final act.

And the greatest lie he tells is not that God is not real. It is subtler and it sells better.

The lie is: you pull your own strings. That is what it means to be free. That is what it means to be a man. Take them back, all of them, and finally, truly live.

It is a lie because it is not on offer. Nobody is unstrung. The only question ever on the table is whose hands.

So here is the question, and I would rather you answer it this week than five years from now on the edge of the stage.

Which strings are you still holding? And is there one man who has permission to tell you what he sees?

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A little more

Scripture. "I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing." (John 15:5)

Observation. Jesus does not say apart from Him we do less, or worse, or slower. He says nothing. There is no reserve capacity in a branch, and none in a marionette. The strength was never in us. It came down the strings the whole time.

Application. Sit with the strings you have never consciously handed over. The reactions you excuse as "just how I am." The habit you have never said out loud to another man. Name one this week and give it to Him on purpose, out loud, and then tell one brother you did it, so it stops being a secret string.

Prayer. Father, You carved me on purpose, for a part only I can play. I have taken strings back out of Your hands without even noticing I did it. Show me the ones I still think are mine. Put men around me who will tell me the truth about what they see. Keep me off the edge of the stage. Not my hands, Lord. Yours.