 Debates over the place of deception in terms of both the absolute and ordained systems of possibility involved Holkot and a number of his immediate contemporaries. If the world is a contingent place that can be other than it is, then do God’s revelations constrain the scope of his possible future actions? If not, can what God says be deceptive or false? Discussion took up scriptural instances in which God seemed to deceive. Holkot, against a number of his contemporaries, argued that God can deceive human beings even in the ordained system, has deceived them as shown in scripture, and has deceived them for no redeeming good apparent to human beings. If God’s words to human beings might be deceptive, such that it is not just the bishop who may impart false information, but even God, then the human intention to believe God’s words as true and to obey them takes on even more importance. Holkot did not believe that God was playing the role of Descartes’ deceiving demon, but Holkot also did not know how to rule out the possibility that he might be deceived about any given thing he believed (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 94–99). The important thing was that even if he were deceived, God had promised that his intention to believe what was revealed and to do what he understood God wanted him to do provided security under the covenant. Faith in the covenant was the source of certainty, not rational demonstration.