18 August 2022
There's been some noise lately about some Bible passages and the Mandela Effect.
Lots of people insist that Isaiah 11:6 and 65:25 previously said "the lion shall lay down with the lamb" or similar words. Now they go back and discover that every copy of the Bible they can find says wolf and lamb, including really old copies of the KJV. (It shows up in copies of the Hebrew text as "wolf"). They cite all kinds of reasons why it simply must be a lion, not a wolf. Then, they insist that something happened to change all our copies of the Bible, and the typical explanation is that we have been shifted into an alternative universe. That's more or less what the Mandela Effect is about.
I have no argument with the idea of parallel realities. I have no argument with the idea that God could have moved us from one track to another, and that it's possible He could have allowed our memories to stand with the old track. But the alternate memories that these people claim are not universal.
For me, it's always been Berenstain Bears; I saw the book in a library and read through it with a kid on more than one occasion. We eventually had a copy in our home; our kids shredded it with rough play. I never recall any different spelling for the name those bears shared. I was an adult paying attention to the news through the 1980s and I don't remember hearing that Mandela died in prison; I knew his party came to power and he was the President of South Africa for a while into the 1990s.
And I remember how often people quoted the passages from Isaiah about the lion and lamb, but I recall distinctly remembering as a teenager that they were getting it wrong. I was just smart-aleck enough to mention it a couple of times and got yelled out by adults who didn't appreciate my sincere effort to help them get the Bible quotes correct. I've known for most of my life it was "wolf" and not "lion" -- though I could understand how they got it wrong. The former passage says "leopard" alongside a baby goat, and the latter passage does say the lion will eat straw. My memory confirms the current reading.
There's a lot of other odd tricks of common false memories that I've known about for a long time, like the proper spelling of Oscar Mayer, people misquoting Forest Gump or Darth Vader, and so forth. So, maybe I have always been in this particular universe and you all have joined me. Welcome to my world.
Does it never occur to anyone yakking about this stuff that God is in charge, and that He will not allow any changes that don't please Him? Nothing in the Bible justifies the notion that Satan has enough authority to tweak reality on that level. Keep in mind that I'm one who teaches that reality itself is variable, and that when you notice reality being a little wonky, it's possibly due to angels or demons. But it's the kind of changes that are connected to this Mandela Effect that push beyond the limits of what God has promised.
So, on the one hand, we do have accounts in the Bible itself of how Satan can work through his human minions to perform minor magical tricks, like Moses watching Pharaoh's magicians turning their staves into snakes, just Moses did. And we notice how God did things in the plagues that the magicians could not duplicate. There are limits. The Bible says God's Word is recorded in Heaven (Psalm 119:89), so it's not going to change on the earth in the manner suggested by those who promote this Mandela Effect stuff.
On the other hand, I've never doubted the power of mass false memories about things. How did virtually the whole of western Christianity get away from the Hebraic assumptions about reality and the Bible? Satan is pretty powerful, and human awareness is malleable, especially when it comes to his lies keeping us away from God's promises. Satan's authority to deceive is far greater than any power he might have to change reality itself. It's far more likely people have allowed themselves to believe those verses in Isaiah said "lion and lamb".
If your Bible changed, it wasn't Satan. He has no authority to touch that.
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