When I first started playing around with computers, one of the programs I used to like a lot was a game called "°RobotWar" which is from the `70's. In the game, you programmed a little robot to fight other robots, and the last one standing won. There were three basic robot abilities you could fiddle with = speed, armor, and firepower. If your robot was heavy with armor and fast, your gun was so worthless it was ridiculous. Obviously you might sacrifice armor for a quick, hard hitting robot. However the arena was only so big, and after a couple medium hits it was all over. So there was this balance.

The best part about the game was you programmed the thinking of your robot then turned it loose. The code you used to write the controls was actual machine language instructions, low level and mysterious. That didn't stop us from figuring out every last word of the syntax to help us in the fight! I learned a lot of native coding that way, but I digress.

It turns out I was pretty good at this! For instance I once programmed my robot to immediately run to a corner when the battle started and then scan, which it could do quicker because I only had to scan 90 degrees of space. Everyone else would scan 360 degrees around and around. By the time they saw me I had locked on and was pounding the daylights out of them.

Then I did things like scan every 3-5 degrees instead of every degree. I would find people faster. Then I added logic that if I took a hit, to quickly run to another corner and set up shop there. My robot was be bopping around taking shots at everyone until I won.

Of course every time I made an improvement, everyone else would copy me! I might win several battles. but once people managed to figure out what I was doing they would of course adopt it for their own. Eventually I wrote logic to move to the center, and then just check the four corners. and I was back on top winning until someone copied that. Sigh.

Anyway, what had me thinking about that is I was watching a televangelist who was telling the truth and I was like hey! Cool! But I quickly found (in less than a minute) they only quoted the parts that they liked and ignored all the rest. In a sense they were using the bible to make themselves look smart and moral, but in reality they were not interested in that much at all. They would mimic the bible a lot like my game.

I then thought about Rabshakeh, remember him? He said he had come to destroy Jerusalem, indeed he had surrounded it with a huge army, and that GOD had told him to pass judgment on it and had sent him to restore worship as it should be in Jerusalem. He used words very similar to what God put in the prophets mouth. Very similar!

Didn't the devil mimic God, by quoting him in the garden and adding just one word? What did he "offer" Eve, - "hey don't you want to be a winner like God?" Well of course she did. Were not the magicians of Pharaoh able to do the same, at first, that Moses and Aaron did? The old prophet that lied to the young one, he was a prophet after all, and the words he used sounded very much like what God would say (enough to trick the younger).

I think what this means is that God is good, and pure. and righteous but the evil one will mimic him as much as he needs to twist truth juuuuust a little. For instance apparently wheat and tares look very similar. Yet, as much as evil mimic's good there comes a place where evil just won't go - doing actual good, for example.

A winning strategy is to mimic God of course, and the sloppier we are about it the more likely we're going to get the daylights pounded out of us. But if we persist, uncover every instruction and apply it to ourselves, at the end of the day we may be the last one standing in spite of all the evil around us. Think about it.

Randy