Truth Really Matters

http://hometownheroesrun.com/lib/neptune-crossing-the-chaos-chronicles-vol-1 114.  1/1/2018:  John Vassar:  How much can love do?
http://marionjensen.com/2014/10/i-can-read-your-mind.html 115. 1/15/2018: Where do you start? Van Til’s Apologetic Part 3
116. 2/1/2018: Escape from Reason
117. 2/15/2018: Two Unlikely Brothers: Mitsuo Fuchida and Jacob DeShazer
118. 3/1/2018: Should Art Be Part of a Christian Worldview?
119. 3/15/2018: Happiness
120. 4/1/2018: Redeeming Science
121. 4/15/2018: No Little People
122. 5/1/2018: Why do bad things happen?
123. 5/15/2018: True Spirituality
124: 6/1/2018: Where does music come from?
125: 7/1/2018: I Don’t Want to Change!
126: 8/1/2018: How to be an intellectual
127: 9/1/2018: Rules for Life
128: 10/1/2018: What is the purpose of freedom?
129: 11/1/2018: Mao: A Portrait of Evil
130: 12/1/2018: Who is the real environmentalist?

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114.  John Vassar:  How much can love do?
January 1, 2018

While waiting for an appointment, the old fellow struck up a conversation with a very fashionable and proud-looking lady who was also sitting in the room.  With great seriousness he urged her on the necessity of the new birth and her need for Christ as Savior.  The lady was shocked at his fervor, responding that she did not believe in any of those things.  But her response simply provoked him to appeal all the more, quoting Scripture, warning her of the danger of rejecting Christ and the certainty of wrath to come if she failed to repent.

Another fellow, observing the exchange, reported that he was alarmed at the boldness of the confrontation.  Suddenly, however, the gentleman for whom the old fellow was waiting appeared and called him into another room.  A moment later the lady’s husband came in.

“There has been an old man here talking with me about religion,” she said.

“Why did you not shut him up?” he asked gruffly.

“He is one of those persons you can’t shut up,” was her reply.

“If I had been here,” he said, “I would have told him very quickly to go about his business.”

“If you had seen him you would have thought he was about his business,” was her answer.

1-2-1 evangelism was the only ‘business’ that John Vassar cared about.  Why?  After his conversion at the age of 28, attending a Baptist revival meeting while working in a brewery in Poughkeepsie, New York, he dove into his Bible, wrote Scripture verses on the wall where he worked to aid in memorization, joined prayer meetings, and teamed up with others to reach out into the community with the Gospel.  He simply came to realize that if in reality men and women are lost sinners and Jesus is their only hope for salvation, that judgment is sure, and that Heaven and Hell are real and physical locations, then what could possibly be more important?

A simple way to look at his life is that he fully embraced the Christian worldview.  Sure, we’ve all got to earn a living for food, clothing, and shelter, but what’s really important?  What really lasts?  What has more than merely temporal value?

In this essay I’ve pulled some nuggets from various online sources, but I suspect they all derive from his 1879 biography, Uncle John Vassar: The Fight of Faith. I also suspect that Heaven’s library shelves feature several thick volumes of his exploits . . . exploits that he would never have taken the time to write about, since he was always rushing to the next opportunity to share the Gospel or to teach and exhort believers to do the same.

John was no respecter of persons, not at all timid before the rich or powerful, not at all reticent to seek out the poor or despised.  When he met President Grant, he paid him the respect due to the chief executive of the United States, but held onto his hand until he had told him of the Lord Jesus Christ, courteously questioning whether the President had been born again.  Once introduced to the Mormon ‘prophet’ Brigham Young, John made the same appeal and pressed the same searching questions on that lost fellow’s soul.

I haven’t had the same opportunities with celebrities, although I’ve occasionally thought that it would be great fun to try.  I once shared the Gospel with the mayor of a small town, but she didn’t really qualify as a celebrity.  Before I left my position as a professor in a major state university many years ago, I sought out several people, including the university’s president, to share the Gospel . . . not to any observable effect, however.  But I did give them a chance and made sure to relieve my own conscience of my responsibility.  I have shared the Gospel personally with many thousands of individuals and given tracts to hundreds of thousands and simply don’t care what worldly position anyone occupies.  We’re all the same, after all, all sinners in need of the Savior.

What I have learned over the years is that lost people are generally clueless about spiritual realities.  Whether rich or poor, religious or atheistic, brilliant or stupid, pleasant or obnoxious, lost people simply do not understand the Gospel.  They do not understand the brilliant sense of the Gospel and the nonsense of competing philosophies.  Because they embrace a non-Biblical worldview, they suffer inconsistencies and illogic.  They are not in touch with the reality of who God is, who man is, what the purpose of life is, and what is really going on in the world . . . which includes spiritual warfare, a subject about which the most brilliant power brokers and pundits are entirely ignorant.

To my surprise, many years ago, I came to realize that inner city gang members tend to be more in touch with spiritual realities than any other ‘class’ of people. The twenty-year-old gang member (generally) does not need to be convinced he’s a sinner, he doesn’t deny that he deserves Hell, and the necessity of repentance for salvation, as his responsibility, is an easy sell. In fact, it’s quite refreshing to talk to such spiritually savvy lost people, in contrast with typical Roman Catholic or Protestant or Mormon or evangelical church members, all quite righteous in their own eyes.

But the Great Commission, Mark 16:15 for example, is about reaching out to every soul.  Don’t try to find ‘easy cases.’  There are none!  Just go after everybody!  John Vassar took no rest while unsaved souls were in reach.  He would often visit forty families in a day, in their homes, and on Sundays would travel to speak to three different Sunday schools, if possible.  Vassar mentioned at one point that he had conversed with over 3,000 people during the previous three months, and anticipated that the city he was working in was about to experience a great blessing.

A friend laboring with John recalled meeting a man on the road, resting his team of horses.  When John engaged him, he loudly declared that he was an atheist.  But John put him under such tremendous pressure, using Scripture and argument, that within five minutes the skeptic’s countenance changed startlingly, as he avowed, “I need this Savior, and will seek Him.”  You just don’t know who is hard and who is already under conviction.  Who was harder than Saul of Tarsus as he traveled to Damascus to arrest and imprison Christians?  Yet he crumbled immediately upon confrontation with the Lord Jesus, showing no rebellion, no defensiveness, no arguments, as soon as he knew that his Lord was Jesus, whom Saul had persecuted by persecuting Jesus’ followers.  Saul must have been under increasing conviction since the stoning of Stephen, but no one knew it, except the Lord.

We don’t know who is already feeling the pressure as the Lord draws on lost souls, as Jesus said, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”  He draws all . . . our job is to ping all with the Gospel.  Vassar traveled from Maine to Florida, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, on foot, on horseback, by rail, and by steamer in pursuit of souls.

From 1863 to 1865, John Vassar worked among the soldiers of the Union armies, leading thousands to Christ. A witness of his army labors writes:

“From a merely physical point of view his achievement was prodigious.  He began his day at roll call, and was in a state of intense activity for sixteen to eighteen hours.  He ate little, and slept little, yet never flagged, and never gave out.  Week after week, and seven days in the week, the same even high rate of energy was sustained.  I suppose there were few of the 8,000 officers and men of our division with whom in the time he was with us he did not talk, and with the majority of them more than once or twice.  I used to see him running in his eagerness to get about.  Yet he was as far as possible from being in a hurry.  His restlessness was wholly eternal.  He always knew exactly what he was after . . . Conversing with 75 to 100 different men a day, he came to the 50^th or 60^th just as fresh in his manner, just as much interested, just as tender, as at the first.  He wasted no words.  He went right to the heart of his errand at once, and his bearing was such that it was hardly possible to take offense.”

Our temptation in reading about such dedicated saints is to throw up our hands and say, “Wow, what a great guy!  I could never hope to aspire . . .”  Ok, but could we maybe learn something encouraging, something useful, and then do . . . something?  Maybe even a little more than we’re doing now?

In my own little way I can resonate a bit with Vassar’s experience.  When I lived near Chicago and would occasionally spend the day in the downtown area,  I typically worked myself to exhaustion.  The hours I spent on the ground, tracting and doing 121s, were precious and I didn’t want to waste any time.  I had to work hard to be fresh with every tract offer.  Since many 121s tend to be very similar, I worked hard to be fresh with every new one, knowing that it might be the only 121 that fellow ever experienced.  I regularly got tempted to experiment beyond what I knew were the best approaches, the best arguments, etc., just to ‘have some fun’ . . . but I never could, because the soul in front of me was too precious to play with.  John Vassar’s example . . . be fresh with each one . . . was often in my mind, urging me to do the same.

John Vassar was once captured by troops under the command of Jeb Stuart, the legendary Confederate cavalry general.  Suspected of being a Union spy, he was brought to a Colonel for interrogation.  John stepped right up to the Colonel and said, “Colonel, I see by your uniform what side you are fighting on; but are you on the Lord’s side or against him?”

The Colonel replied, “We won’t speak about that just now.”  So John turned to another officer and said, “Major, how is it with you?”  He faced each officer in turn, speaking to them about the Lord Jesus.  Finally, one of them said, “Colonel, you had better let this man go.  If you don’t turn him loose we will have a prayer-meeting all the way from here to Richmond.”  They released the evangelist after eliciting a promise from him that he would not speak of anything he had seen for 48 hours.

Many years ago I visited a family that lived in the public housing projects in Rockford, Illinois.  After a good visit, sharing the Gospel with the family, I stepped out of the building to discover seven fellows in their late teens hanging around my car, leaning against it.  My old minivan surely wasn’t the attraction, so I figured that they were waiting for me.  No one else was in sight in the parking lot or outside the adjacent buildings.

It took me about a half-second to evaluate the situation and decide what to do.  I smiled and walked directly toward the fellows, greeting them enthusiastically, and pulled a stack of Gospel tracts out of my pocket.  I handed each fellow a different tract, explaining what they were, then began to ask them about their spiritual condition.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far.  They all made excuses and left in a hurry before I could explain much of the Gospel to them.  But they did keep the tracts (the small comic book tracts from Chick Publications).  As I left I thanked the Lord for the boldness that may well have saved me some trouble.

John Vassar was always direct.  Life is too fragile and too short for subtilty, when lost souls are walking blindly over a cliff into eternity.  Evangelist Ray Comfort once received a challenging letter from an atheist who was dumbfounded that Christians said they believed in Hell, but didn’t care enough to warn others with fervor and compassion.  Here is an excerpt (The entire letter is posted at Way of the Master) . . .

“If you believe one bit that thousands every day were falling into an eternal and unreacheable fate, you should be running the streets mad with rage at their blindness.  That’s equivalent to standing on a street corner and watching every person that passes you walk blindly directly into the path of a bus and die, yet you stand idly by and do nothing. You’re just twiddling your thumbs, happy in the knowledge that one day that ‘walk’ signal will shine your way across the road.”

In a PBS interview, Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg was asked about religious believers . . .

“I have very good friends who belong to religious denominations whose teaching is that since I don’t accept their teaching I am damned for all eternity.  And you would think that these friends would try to convert me.  But they never do.  Now, you could explain this in various ways.  It may be that they really don’t like me very much and are just as glad to see me damned for all eternity – that’s a possible explanation.  But another explanation which I tend to think is more likely is that although they know what their church teaches, they give lip service to it.”

In the New Heaven and New Earth, in the ages to come, I hope to meet John Vassar, and look forward to hearing more stories about the grace of God in his life.  I hope to meet some folks who became part of the family through his work.  I also hope to have something to talk about if that wonderful saint asks me about what God did in my life.  I won’t have any trouble being humble about it.  Yet I do want something to be humble about.  I can’t match John’s efforts or trials or results, but I can use whatever days I have to try to do something.  How about you?

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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115. Where do you start? Van Til’s Apologetic Part 3
January 15, 2018

This blog is found within the essay entitled Van Til’s Apologetic Parts 1,2,&3 found in the Evangelism section of this web site.
Click on . . . Van Til’s Apologetic Parts 1,2,&3

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116. Escape from Reason
February 1, 2018

I’ve written on the insights of Francis Schaeffer before, and hope to do so several more times.  I love the guy and anticipate sharing a campfire or a fireplace chat with him during the Millennium.  He was an author, evangelist, house church leader, philosopher, cultural savant, and a really smart fellow.

In this essay I’ll take a safari through a couple of his books, Escape from Reason (1968) and He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972), pulling some nuggets out and adding my own thoughts.  Let’s start with Escape from Reason.

Schaeffer observes that, centuries ago, natural science was not naturalistic. The early heroes of science (Newton, Galileo, Pascal, Kepler) traced the paths of natural causes, but were never foolish enough to believe that God or man was caught in the machinery. Yes, we can use the oh-so-repeatable laws of gravitation and mechanics, along with the tools of calculus, to predict orbits and trajectories, yet God and man can intervene and generate causal chains that would never have occurred otherwise.

God made the machine and we can tinker with the machine.  Free will is free indeed.  We live in an open system.  We’re not prisoners.  We’re not automatons.  Both atheists and Calvinists get it spectacularly wrong.  They have escaped from reason . . . reason is not possible without free will.

Integral to our very existence is antithetical thought.  If ‘A’ is true, then ‘not-A’ is false.  If Freddie ought to do right, then he ought not to do wrong.  God is there.  God is not not-there.  God’s existence is the very basis for such thought.  We cannot live without it, despite the pretensions of postmodernists or New Agers who also must live within reality and God’s morality.  They won’t cross the street, either, as the bus rolls by.  It’s either them or the bus, either-or, not both-and or ‘whatever’.  They, too, are offended when someone lies to them or steals from them or seduces their wife.  Where does their anger come from?  They were wronged.  God calls it sin, which is vertical first, horizontal second.

Schaeffer uses a variety of “upper story / lower story” diagrams to illustrate man’s modern dilemma.  Here’s one . . .

GOD   LOVE   MORALS   FREEDOM   SIGNIFICANCE   MAN

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NATURE   PHYSICS   PSYCHOLOGY   DETERMINISM

The richness of human life in God’s creation depends on the reality of those elements in the upper story, that God, love, morals, etc., are real and not merely consequences of the physics of particle interactions.  Yet modern culture, in education and media, strives to swallow up, to vaporize everything in the upper story, leaving us adrift in “a deterministic sea without a shore.”

Most people who contentedly buy into the evolutionary fairy tale don’t think it through.  If the lower story is the entire story, then man has no freedom, no significance . . . therefore man does not exist.  Any individual man is just a sack of molecules.  But we all live as if we exist and can aspire and choose.

“If man is determined, then what is, is right . . . morals really do not count.  Morals become a manipulation by society in the midst of the machine.”  Feminists, among others, should object.  If men are stronger than women, by nature, then “the male has the right to do what he wishes to the female.”  What is, is right.  Consider this – only the Biblical worldview makes women truly equal, equal because male and female both are God’s image-bearers.  (See Galatians 3:26-29 for an explicit example.)

But if you teach men that they are just machines and they should maximize their self-esteem, what would you expect to get, if not profanity, cruelty, sexual abuse, and addiction?  I find it remarkable that in recent publications from within the Physics / Astronomy community within academia, that sexual harassment of female grad students and female faculty is epidemic.  Isn’t academia a bastion of feminism?  No, atheism trumps feminism.

No one can live consistently as if only the lower story exists.  And so, many make an irrational leap toward an upper story that has no basis in their worldview.  They talk of “people of faith” . . . faith in whom?  Doesn’t matter.  Just have faith in faith.  Go ahead and talk about faith and meaning because the talk makes you feel better, because it’s just so darn depressing to face up to the idea that there is nothing upstairs.  “Modern man is committed to finding his answer upstairs, by a leap away from rationality and away from reason.”  Man “feels the damnation of being in the machine.”  So he flees from reason.  We see this all the time when secular media personalities deal with a tragedy by saying “their thoughts and prayers are with . . .”  No, they’re not.

Jesus gets roped into this irrationality.  What matters most to evangelicals is an encounter with Jesus.  Here’s another two-level diagram . . .

NONRATIONAL – AN ENCOUNTER WITH JESUS

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RATIONAL – YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO PROVE

OR DISPROVE PROPOSITIONS

How does this play out?  Doctrine is despised.  Don’t argue about what the Bible says or doesn’t say.  Don’t divide over doctrine.  Don’t you dare suggest someone is not truly born again – How dare you judge that?!?  As long as someone says she has had an encounter with Jesus, that’s good enough!  Let’s all get together . . . Mormons and Catholics love Jesus, too!

But a contentless Christianity is no Christianity at all.  A Jesus not grounded in the true / false propositions of God’s word is a Jesus who cannot save.  The Biblical propositions on law, sin, and judgment enable a real encounter with the real Jesus who will save only via content-full propositions regarding repentance and faith.  At the end of the story Heaven and Hell, specifically the New Heaven and New Earth vs. the Lake of Fire, are content-full Biblical propositions about reality that have eternal consequences for every man and woman.

Christian parents had better model such realities in both love and discipline, consistently, or their children will grow up thinking that religion must be like Santa Claus.

I just noticed as I was reading Schaeffer’s 1974 book last night, No Little People, that he invites us to imagine that we were among the shepherds visited by the angels in Bethlehem as the baby Jesus was delivered.  “Can we think that these shepherds would have accepted the idea that the great doctrinal truths about this baby did not matter?  Imagine them proclaiming the message in the street.  All believe!  All believe!  Then someone comes along and claps one of them on the shoulder.  ‘All right.  Never mind about what the angel said.  Remove the content and just let us believe.’  These down-to-the-earth men would never have accepted such a thing.  They would have turned around and responded, ‘Forget the angels and the content they spoke?  We can’t.  They were there.’”

Schaeffer describes a beautiful painting by Paul Robert displayed in Switzerland’s old Supreme Court Building.  In the foreground the artist depicts many kinds of litigation – wife against husband, architect against builder, etc.  How shall the Judges judge?  But this is a Reformation country.  The artist has portrayed Justice pointing her sword toward a book emblazoned with the words, “The Law of God.”

The Christian man has a basis for law.  Modern man has thrown the book away and with it the possibility for a foundation for morality and law.

Schaeffer recounts his conversion path.  He had been part of a liberal church for many years.  What he heard led to a decision for atheism or agnosticism.  For the first time he decided to read the Bible so he could contrast it with other philosophies, including the Greeks he was reading.  He worked through this as a matter of personal integrity, so he could say with honesty that he had evaluated what he’d left behind.

After about six months of this he became a Christian, a real one, “because I was convinced that the full answer which the Bible presented was alone sufficient to the problems I then knew, and sufficient in a very exciting way.”

Just so.  This is presuppositionalism.  Examine God’s worldview via the Bible.  See if it makes sense of everyone and everything in reality.  It does.  Nothing else comes close.  Schaeffer found the Bible to be a system of truth that a man can use to explain himself, his needs, his desires, his temptations, his sins, his conscience, and how he fits into reality . . . that God is there, man is accountable, hope is grounded in the Gospel, and that history will have a climax.  Above all, man is not a machine.  He is personal and therefore the product of a person – God.  No God, no personhood, no man.  And man can only find truth in and from God.

As far as how man should live, that’s based on this truth:  “Man can influence history, including his own eternity and that of others.  This view sees man, as man, as something wonderful.”  That’s good stuff.  And it provides us a very specific quote proclaiming Schaeffer’s abhorrence of Calvinism.

In his book He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Schaeffer deals with epistemology, how we know and how we know that we know.  If you get that wrong, you’ve got no ground to stand on.  Schaeffer’s foundation is presuppositional . . . God is there and He is not silent, and that changes everything about who we are and what it’s all about.  An example he cites is that no materialist or psychological determinist is ever able to live as though he is not a man, a person with free will.  Only the Biblical worldview can be lived honestly.

Everyone has a worldview.  This is as true, Schaeffer writes, for “the man digging a ditch as it is of the philosopher in the university.”  I discovered this by experience many years ago while knocking hundreds of doors in various towns, sharing the Gospel.  Everyone I met thought they had the world figured out.  They didn’t necessarily know why they believed what they believed, but they were sure what they believed was the real deal.

Schaeffer notes what I’ve also observed – Christians tend to despise the concept of philosophy, and are proud to do so!  A consequence is that Christians don’t know how to point out the fallacies in unbelieving worldviews and are weak in explaining the strength of the Gospel.  Evangelism suffers.  The lost fellow needs help to understand that his ground is mere quicksand and he needs help to see why the Gospel is on solid ground.  If you’re too proud to learn how to help him, shame on you.  That’s why I’ve written so much about apologetics and personal evangelism on this web site, and I’ve tried to convey the issues in the most practical way possible.  I’ve tested these things on the street. I’m no armchair philosopher / theologian.  I keep learning and I keep trying.  So should you.

Schaeffer discusses the philosophers Heidegger and Wittgenstein.  Their names aren’t important – on the street – but they had some relevant insights.  They realized that if we are going to know anything, something must be spoken.  Language is vital.  If you can’t express it, you don’t understand it.  You can have a feeling, but language is essential for anyone else to benefit from what’s inside you.

The problem those two guys had was that they were secularists . . . no God and therefore man is just a clump of molecules.  It’s the brain chemistry argument that I’ve written much about.  Who’s speaking?  Or is that just brain chemistry?  And if it’s all just brain chemistry then there is no man (or woman) who understands anything.  Knowing must start with God as a person who created us as persons.

If you’re a machine, you don’t know anything.  You’re a machine in a closed system of cause and effect, just bumping along one particle collision at a time.  Materialism dehumanizes man and makes the world so small and trivial.  In reality, we live in an open system, “open to reordering by God and by man.”

Everyone lives as if this is true.  Everyone loves even though love is not part of the laws of physics.  Everyone subscribes to absolute morality – murder, rape, etc., are wrong – even though morals cannot be found in the Periodic Table.

Schaeffer writes, “That is why I am a Christian and no longer an agnostic.  In all other systems something ‘sticks out,’ something cannot be included; and it has to be mutilated or ignored.  But without losing his own integrity, the Christian can see everything fitting into place beneath the Christian apex of the existence of the infinite-personal God who is there.”

This is true regarding what we see in creation, including the design of galaxies, ecosystems, and ribosomes. It’s also true when we look inward at our own conscience. Furthermore, the dynamics of relationships – interpersonal, social, and societal – make sense within the Biblical scheme.

Schaeffer was visited by a brilliant man, who broke down weeping because he had thought through the consequences of his humanistic existentialism.  The man had spent much time in Paris, the center of such thought (Sartre, Camus).  He had ultimately found it all so ugly and inhuman, provoking him to consider suicide.

The fellow was amazed that Schaeffer showed him love.  “How do you love me, how do you start?”

Schaeffer replied, “I know who you are because you are made in the image of God.”

Their façade doesn’t matter when we witness to the lost.  We know who they are.  God put in everyone a capacity to recognize truth.  Start with God.  Use the law, knowing that the conscience will hear it.  Declare the Gospel, knowing that there is no other salvation, both for living this life and for eternity.  If need be, dismantle his objections and misunderstandings.  But come from above, from on high, knowing that the message is God’s, infinitely superior to man’s vain philosophies.  (Only one philosophy works!)

This isn’t just about dealing with skeptics.  The religious lost all have man-centered philosophies.  Isn’t that what works-based religion is all about?  How man can earn some form of salvation?

It’s also not just about evangelism.  Rather, it’s the core of discipleship.  The growing Christian must work to understand better and better, more and more Biblically, who God is and who we are.  Knowledge enables wisdom for living.  A God-honoring perspective puts the trivialities of the world in their place.  Yes, we must all pay our bills and brush our teeth and cut the grass, but the Christian must spend quality time in the upper story, encouraging others to do the same.  If necessary, schedule it!  Most young and middle-aged adult Christians I know are consumed with Earth’s perspective, foolishly hoping that some day they might lift their heads up high enough to look around the upper story.

No, live it today.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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117. Two Unlikely Brothers: Mitsuo Fuchida and Jacob DeShazer
February 15, 2018

. . . . . by Bonnie . . . . .

On December 7, 1941, Mitsuo Fuchida, a commander in the Japanese army, led 360 airplanes toward Hawaii to surprise and cripple the American naval forces in the Pacific. He did not think of the attack as opening a moral confrontation with the United States. His main concern was victory.

Viewing the American fleet floating peacefully at anchor in the harbor below, he smiled as he reached for the mike and ordered, “All squadrons, plunge in to attack!” If you’ve seen the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, Fuchida is the man who spoke those famous words.

Like a hurricane out of nowhere, the torpedo planes, dive-bombers, and fighters struck suddenly with indescribable fury. As smoke billowed and the proud battleships, one by one, began to list, Fuchida’s heart was ablaze with joy. During the next three hours, he commanded the fifty bombers as they struck not only Pearl Harbor, but the airfields, barracks, and dry docks nearby. He then assessed the damage to make a report to his superiors.

It was the most thrilling exploit of his career. Fuchida had dreamed of becoming an admiral. Because of his exemplary service in the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was invited to an audience with the emperor, a rare honor for a junior officer.

During the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Corporal Jacob DeShazer was on K. P. duty in a camp in California. When the radio announced the sneak attack, he shouted, “Jap, just wait and see what we’ll do to you!”

On April 18, 1942, Jacob DeShazer was a bombadier on the historic mission called the Doolittle Raid. It was a bold plan to fly over Japan and bomb strategic military targets in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was aboard the last B-25 to take off from the aircraft carrier. His airplane was called Bat Out of Hell.

DeShazer’s plane was forced to land in Japanese occupied territory and his entire crew were captured by the enemy. Tortured and beaten for 40 months as a POW, 34 of those in solitary confinement, DeShazer was to meet his divine destiny within the narrow walls of a Japanese cell. His heart was full of bitter hatred for the people of Japan.

Three of his buddies were executed by a Japanese firing squad 6 months after capture and another died slowly of starvation. Soon after Meder’s death, Jacob began to ponder what caused such bitter hatred between members of the human race: “My thoughts turned toward what I had heard about Christianity changing hatred between human beings into real brotherly love. I begged my captors to get me a Bible, and when the emperor of Japan told them to treat us better, I got one.”

When he received his Bible in May of 1944, he eagerly read it from cover to cover. The sentence that changed Jacob’s world was, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” On June 8, 1944, the words in Romans 10:9 stood out boldly before his eyes: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” DeShazer: “In that very moment God gave me grace to confess my sins to Him, and He forgave me all my sins and saved me for Jesus’ sake.” As he found later in 1 John 1:9, Jesus is faithful to forgive.

“I realized that these people did not know anything about my Saviour and that if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”

God replaced the hatred in his heart with love for his torturers and he determined with Christ’s help to acquaint the Japanese with God’s message of salvation that they might become Christians.

Jacob’s faith was tested immediately. Returning from exercise, a guard shut the door against Jacob’s foot and kicked it with his hob nail boots. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you,” were the words that came into my mind. He managed to calm down, nursing his foot, and decided to try love.

The next morning he greeted the guard respectfully in Japanese. The guard’s look was puzzled, but he said nothing. Every morning Jacob did the same. One day the guard spoke to Jacob through the door and smiled. He asked DeShazer about his family. Once he brought a boiled sweet potato, another time figs and candy.

In August 1945 Mitsuo Fuchida was in Hiroshima attending a week-long military conference with the Army.  Fortunately for him, a long distance call from his Navy headquarters asked him to return immediately to Tokyo, the day before the bomb was dropped.

A few days later, on August 20^th, freedom finally came for DeShazer when American parachutists dropped onto the prison grounds and released the prisoners from their cells.

Back in the U.S., Jacob DeShazer went to seminary to prepare for his life’s work. God had commanded him to go and teach the Japanese people the way of salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ. He was asked by Bible Literature International to write a tract of his story and his testimony to be distributed to the Japanese people. It was called, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan.” Over 1 million copies were distributed before he and his wife arrived by ship to begin their first missionary tour in 1948.

In the first 2 months of his ministry he spoke over 200 times. During the first 6 year assignment, he spoke 2-5 times per day.

As Mitsuo Fuchida got off the train in Tokyo one day, he saw an American distributing literature. When he passed by, a man handed him a pamphlet entitled, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan.” He put it in his pocket, determined to read it later.

What he read fascinated him. The compassion and peace suffusing DeShazer’s tract was exactly what he was seeking. Since the American had found it in the Bible, Fuchida purchased one despite his traditional Buddhist heritage. He began reading it eagerly.

When he came to the Crucifixion, he read Luke 23:34, the prayer of Jesus Christ at his death: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” He had the distinct impression that he was certainly one of those for whom Jesus had prayed. The many men he had killed had been slaughtered in the name of patriotism, but this message was diametrically opposed . . . that Christ wishes to implant His love in every heart that yields to Him. The warrior’s eyes and heart were opened for the first time in his life.

At that moment he met Jesus for the very first time. He understood the meaning of Jesus’ death as a substitute for his wickedness. In prayer, he requested Him to forgive his sins and change him from a bitter, disillusioned, defeated warrior into a loving Christian with a purpose for living.

That date, April 14, was the second, yet most notable day of his life. On that day he became a new person. His worldview was changed by the intervention of the Christ he had previously ignored and despised. Soon other friends beyond his close family learned of his decision to be a follower of Christ and could hardly understand it.

One remarkable aspect of Fuchida’s conversion is that his background included no Biblical history or Christian perspective, unlike the typical American who is confronted with the Gospel. The Biblical truths of creation, the Fall, sin, judgment, the promised Messiah, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the necessity of personal repentance and faith . . . these were all new concepts.

Consider what it would be like to witness to someone from an entirely pagan culture. I would necessarily start in the beginning. God designed a perfect world and created a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, in His own image. They had complete freedom and intimate fellowship with their Creator until, one day, Eve was tempted to do wrong. God had said not to eat the fruit from one particular tree in the middle of the garden. Satan in the guise of a beautiful creature deceived her, and in a weak moment she took the fruit of the tree. Adam, eyes wide open, chose rebellion over obedience, they both ate it, and their lives were forever changed.

Now they knew about sin – disobedience to God. The result was spiritual and physical death, separation from the beautiful fellowship they had enjoyed with God. Life on planet Earth was cursed in many ways and now man would have to toil for his daily subsistence.

Later, the law was given to man, summarized in the Ten Commandments written by the finger of God and given to Moses on tablets of clay. This law is what speaks to the conscience of each individual, convicting them of their own disobedience to a moral and righteous God.

“But I’m a good person!” you cry. I know. I thought that for over 20 years. Okay, then let’s measure your life against the standard.

Have you ever told a lie? It doesn’t matter what color or how small. Then you are a liar. Have you ever stolen anything, a paper clip, some time from your boss? It doesn’t matter how small. Then you are a thief. Have you ever murdered anyone? No, of course of not, what kind of person do you think I am? Well, Jesus said that if you have anger in your heart toward someone without just cause it is as if you have actually murdered him. So let’s see where you are. We have just established that according to God’s law, you are guilty of lying, stealing, and murdering.

What hope is there? When you stand before God and are judged according to this standard, how will you plead? Guilty, guilty, guilty. He who does the crime must pay the time. A righteous God cannot overlook the payment for sin. Even if I would willingly give myself in your place it would not be enough. Sin requires a perfect sacrifice, one without blemish. Only One qualifies for that, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. It’s amazing that even without this background, Fuchida turned his life over to Christ, repenting, trusting.

As an evangelist, Fuchida traveled across Japan and the Orient introducing others to the One who changed his life. 1970 – “I would give anything to retract my actions of 29 years ago at Pearl Harbor, but it is impossible. Instead, I now work at striking the death-blow to the basic hatred that infests the human heart and causes such tragedies. And that hatred cannot be uprooted without assistance from Jesus Christ.”

“He is the only One who was powerful enough to change my life and inspire it with His thoughts. He was the only answer to Jake DeShazer’s tormented life. He is the only answer for young people today.”

DeShazer served faithfully in Japan. His plane had bombed the city of Nagoya during the Doolittle Raid, but in 1959, he established a church there. DeShazer and Fuchida did much traveling together and spoke to people about the transforming power of Jesus Christ. In May of 1950, they spoke to an audience of 5,000 people in Osaka with another 3,000 standing outside. There were 600 who responded openly that day to turn to Christ.

The one-time Japanese fighter pilot, Mitsuo Fuchida, went home to be with the Lord in May 1976. Jacob DeShazer retired to Oregon before his Heavenly homegoing in 2008. Even out of the tremendous hatred people can have for each other, and the dire circumstances of war, God was still working to advance His kingdom. Out of great evil, came great good.

 

References:

Return of the Raider, Jacob DeShazer’s autobiography

God’s Samurai, by Gordon W. Prange

 

• bonnie@truthreallymatters.com

 

Supplementary Material:

DeShazer’s rescue: Dick Hamada who was in his bunk in Pearl Harbor during the attack, became an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) member and part of a 6 man team to negotiate the return of DeShazer. At the end of the war, his group had learned from sources in Beijing that four Doolittle Raiders were still alive and held secretly. “The Japanese were obviously stunned. Apparently they had believed that no one but themselves knew the Raiders were in Peking.” Minutes later came the order to release DeShazer, Robert Hite, Chase Nielsen, and George Barr.

Until their rescue no one had known what had happened to the 8 man crew. Doolittle had accounted for every member of the Raid except these. The men had been sentenced to life in prison never to be released. The Japanese considered them war criminals and not POW’s. When Doolittle’s men bombed the homeland of Japan it proved they were not invincible. They lost face and were vulnerable to attack on their own homeland.

Jacob DeShazer, Bombardier on Doolittle Raid, Dies at 95

By Richard Goldstein

Published: March 23, 2008

Jacob DeShazer, a bombardier in the storied Doolittle raid over Japan in World War II who endured 40 months of brutality as a prisoner of the Japanese, then became a missionary in Japan spreading a message of Christian love and forgiveness, died on March 15 at his home in Salem, Ore. He was 95.

His death was announced by his wife, Florence.

On April 18, 1942, crewmen in 16 Army Air Forces B-25 bombers, commanded by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, flew from the carrier Hornet on a daylight bombing raid that brought the war home to Japan for the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The raid resulted in only light damage to military and industrial targets, but it buoyed an American home front stunned by Japanese advances during the war’s first four months.

Corporal DeShazer, a native of Oregon and the son of a Church of God minister, was among the five-member crew of Bat Out of Hell, the last bomber to depart the Hornet. His plane dropped incendiary bombs on an oil installation and a factory in Nagoya but it ran out of fuel before the pilot could try a landing at an airfield held by America’s Chinese allies.

The five crewmen bailed out over Japanese-occupied territory in China and all were quickly captured. In October 1942, a Japanese firing squad executed the pilot, Lt. William G. Farrow, and the engineer-gunner, Sgt. Harold A. Spatz, along with a captured crewman from another Doolittle raid plane. Corporal DeShazer and the other surviving crewmen from his plane, Lt. George Barr, the navigator, and Lt. Robert L. Hite, the co-pilot, were starved, beaten and tortured at prisons in Japan and China — spending most of their time in solitary confinement — until their liberation a few days after Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

Amid his misery, Corporal DeShazer had one source of solace.

“I begged my captors to get a Bible for me,” he recalled in “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” a religious tract he wrote in 1950. “At last, in the month of May 1944, a guard brought me the book, but told me I could have it only for three weeks. I eagerly began to read its pages. I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity. I realized that these people did not know anything about my Savior and that if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”

Corporal DeShazer gained the strength to survive, and he became determined to spread Christian teachings to his enemy.

Upon returning home, he enrolled at Seattle Pacific College (now Seattle Pacific University) and received a bachelor’s degree in biblical literature in 1948. He arrived in Japan with Florence, also a graduate of Seattle Pacific and a fellow missionary in the Free Methodist Church, in late December 1948. A few days later, he preached his first sermon there, speaking to about 180 people at a Free Methodist church in a Tokyo suburb.

In 1950, he gained a remarkable convert.

Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and had become a rice farmer after the war, came upon the DeShazer tract.

“It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as my personal savior,” Mr. Fuchida recalled when he attended a memorial service in Hawaii in observance of the 25th anniversary of the attack. He had become an evangelist and had made several trips to the United States to meet with Japanese-speaking immigrants.

. . . . . end . . .

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118. Should Art Be Part of a Christian Worldview?
March 1, 2018

The more conservative the Christian, the more likely he is to consider art to be a fringe matter or something ‘the world’ does, not something of any importance to the Christian life. Yet the Lordship of Christ is for the whole man, the whole universe, and all of reality . . . including the aesthetic.

So says Francis Schaeffer in his short book, really a long essay, Art and the Bible, published in 1973. God made us both body and soul / spirit. Redemption, Schaeffer reminds us, is for the whole man, not just his soul. Our salvation is yet to be completed, that occurring when we are clothed upon with our resurrection body. At present, the believer’s soul is indeed saved, yet God also begins to refashion his mind and his perspective on use of his body. “True spirituality includes the Lordship of Christ over the whole man.”

How should we begin to answer the title question? Well, we could see how God deals with art in the Scriptural record. Schaeffer observes that “on Mount Sinai God simultaneously gave the Ten Commandments and commanded Moses to fashion a tabernacle in a way which would involve almost every form of representational art that men have ever known.”

For example, God instructed Moses to acquire “from the Israelites gold and silver, fine cloth and dyed ram skins, fine wood and precious gems, and so forth.” God served as architect, showing Moses the patterns for construction. This included representational art, constructing two golden cherubims – part of the angelic host. Well, ok, you might say, but that’s art concerning heavenly things, not the muddy things of Earth!

But just outside the Holy of Holies we find candlesticks, very much earthly objects, decorated with representations of earthly creation – flowers and blossoms – right there in the place of worship! Furthermore, on the priests’ garments were pomegranates of blue, purple, and scarlet. Now, purple and scarlet could represent natural variations on pomegranate color, but not blue. Thus God endorses freedom for creative liberty in works of art . . . art doesn’t have to be strictly photographic.

Schaeffer notes that in the Jews’ first temple, Solomon (2 Chronicles 3:6) “garnished the house with precious stones for beauty.” Not for mechanical stability, but for beauty. “God is interested in beauty. God made people to be beautiful. And beauty has a place in the worship of God.”

One reason I chose physics as a career field is that I find the mathematics that describe God’s creation to be beautiful. The wave equations of electromagnetics and quantum mechanics produce a startling variety of beautiful – compellingly beautiful – physical effects. The math itself has a beauty, but you’ve got to be a real nerd to appreciate that.

In verse 16 we find a hundred sculpted pomegranates on chains along with two free-standing columns . . . of no utilitarian significance. Just art upon art. In 2 Chronicles 4 we find a huge altar and a “molten sea” that may have had a capacity of 10,000 gallons. The brim of the sea was wrought with lilies. Holding up the sea were sculpted oxen.

All right, that’s religious art and, clearly, God can be for it if done to honor Him. Secular art is found in Solomon’s throne (1 Kings 10), with ivory and gold and twelve sculpted lions . . . “there was not the like made in any kingdom.” There is a thought that the additional two lions on either side of the throne may have been alive, an intimidating piece of performance art!

In Numbers 21 God instructs Moses to construct a fiery serpent on a pole, using art as a type fulfilled in the Cross. Centuries later Hezekiah smashed this brazen serpent, not because it was a work of art, but because men had made it an idol. It matters how art is used.

Poetry qualifies as art and Scripture is filled with it, especially in the Psalms, inspired by the Holy Spirit. Jewish poetry is found elsewhere, too, as in 2 Samuel 1:19-27, where David praises the prowess of Saul and Jonathan. Poetry is endemic to music – the Psalms were and still are sung, after all. And the Song of Solomon is one of the most poignant pieces of poetic art ever penned.   Perhaps the most fantastic congregational singing in history was performed by the Hebrew nation in Exodus 15 after deliverance from Pharaoh’s army.

What about other forms of art? God tells Ezekiel to perform a drama in chapter 4, prophesying the coming judgment of God on Jerusalem. Dancing is explicit in Psalm 149:3 – “Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp.” Yes, the world perverts dancing, but the world perverts everything. The existence of counterfeit currency does not put me off the use of genuine cash.

What would godly dancing look like? Frankly, I don’t know. Yet it’s clear, Scripturally, that it must be possible. It’s been done before.

Schaeffer extols the mural at Neuchatel’s art museum painted by Paul Robert, a Swiss artist who loved the Lord. He did three great murals, in fact, one illustrating Christ’s relationship to agriculture, another regarding industry. The third, Schaeffer says, is the greatest, depicting Christ’s relationship with the intellectual life and the arts.

This mural’s background shows Neuchatel and its lake, plus the art museum. In the foreground is a great dragon, wounded to the death. Underneath the dragon are vile and rebellious images, but near the top we see the Lord Jesus in His Second Coming with His hosts. A stairway shows young and beautiful men and women carrying symbols of art, architecture, music, etc., denying them to the dragon.

Paul Robert saw that the Lordship of Christ includes everything, not just then, at the Lord’s return, but now. We must praise the Lord Jesus now, in everything.

We all interact with art. It’s not just about art museums. We read books, watch drama, listen to music, admire architecture, enjoy flower arrangements. Schaeffer offers eleven distinct perspectives from which a Christian can evaluate works of art. I’ll mention just a few.

Art has intrinsic value, reflecting the creativity God has given His image-bearers. Genesis 1:1 declares that God created. Within His creation we can honor Him by creating with what He has wrought. Of course we may dishonor Him, too, but that’s true for any human activity. Man is fallen, yet may choose at each moment to give glory to God . . . or not.

Schaeffer, when he looks at pre-Columbian silver or African masks or Chinese bronzes, sees them as expressions of humanity’s character and God-given creativity. Each work clearly meant a lot to the artist responsible. What might seem mundane to me was something vibrant to someone else. This thought can broaden our perspective. It may reflect the artist’s worldview, or at least his mood that day. In Michelangelo or Leonardo’s work we can glean their worldviews to some extent, at least.

Schaeffer suggests that seeing a side of beef in a butcher shop is an entirely different experience than viewing Rembrandt’s Side of Beef Hanging in a Butcher Shop at the Louvre. Schaeffer reports that he can’t look at beef in a real butcher shop with the same superficiality as before. Interesting. I guess I’d have to do the experiment myself to understand exactly what he means.

In literature, particularly in the Bible which is rich in poetry and metaphor, “the effect of any proposition, whether true or false, can be heightened if it is expressed in poetry or in artistic prose rather than in bald, formulaic statement. For example, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” There are a lot of boring ways to express the thought. The Holy Spirit’s choice is rather memorable and poignant, don’t you think? (Beware of modern versions that dumb everything down. The KJV’s English was designed to transmit the richness of expression of the original Hebrew and Greek texts.)

How might one judge paintings? Technical excellence includes the use of color, form, texture, balance, etc. Validity is “whether an artist is honest to himself and his worldview, or whether he makes his art only for money or for the sake of being accepted.”

Schaeffer considers the art form of public preaching. Some preach because it’s their livelihood; it’s just a career. It’s easy to play to the audience, Schaeffer points out, to produce the effect that keeps everybody and the preacher’s position . . . comfortable. In fact, the best pulpiteer I’ve ever seen personally I believe was a lost man, an independent Baptist. The more I found out about his life, the more incongruous his preaching.

Content reflects whether the art correlates with reality – Scriptural reality, which is the only reality . . . “. . . the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.” (John 8:48) Schaeffer cites the ideas of freedom espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an autonomous freedom for ‘supermen’ who supposedly could live above reason, above the norms of society. Rousseau led a reprobate life, however. You can’t live in devilish freedom without harming others.

Now, crude art, whether paintings or prose or video, even if its message is destructive, may have little impact if it is poor in technical quality. The world, however, has lots of experience in generating art of technical excellence, albeit with damnable content. I’ve noticed that the technical excellence of movies and TV shows makes it that much harder for Christians, with limited resources, to compete technically. This is not true in prose, however. I’ve also observed that the literary quality of modern novels suffers considerably with respect to those of previous generations . . . statistically speaking.

Another criterion for artistic judgment is “how well the artist has suited the vehicle to the message.” Schaeffer cites some of Picasso’s work, who expressed his despondent view of the world in representing men and women as fractured, broken.

Schaeffer suggests that the Christian, in producing art, must speak to “the meaningfulness and purposefulness of life.” In the area of metaphysics (of being, existence), “God is there, God exists. Therefore, all is not absurd.” Which is a counterpoint to the hopelessness of much modern art and philosophy. Love, for example, is real . . . it’s not just about sex. “True morals exist . . .” and there is a sufficient foundation, the infinite-personal God. Therefore guilt is real and the need for forgiveness, which leads to the Cross, is real.

I note that art depicting Jesus on the Cross almost always lies, depicting a non-scourged Christ. See Isaiah 52:14. Chick publications does a much better job in its tracts regarding Calvary.

Interestingly, Schaeffer insists that a minor theme in Christian art is neglected, that of discouragement and defeat. To neglect the trials is to romanticize the Christian life. Modern evangelical culture focuses on the light-hearted, the bubbly, the happy-go-lucky. It’s not honest, on balance.

On the other hand, modern secular art is pervasively pessimistic. There’s not much hope, certainly no hope founded in reality. We recently watched a movie entitled Tuck Everlasting. A family finds a spring in the woods that maintains their bodies at the same age, from whenever they began to drink from it. It’s a Disney movie and the secular humanism is pervasive. At the end of the movie the only message is that a life well-lived is all that counts. But what does that mean? In a God-less world, you don’t exist after you die and anyone that remembers you will die, too. I could tell that with this movie, like many others in the anti-Christian culture, that the writers struggle valiantly to find some measure of hope, but they fail miserably.

Yet they are clever, from a Satanic point of view. Can you guess what the movie’s conclusion is regarding an everlasting life on the Earth? They make it boring and pointless. Ergo, the Christian view of eternal life is nothing to be desired. Clever indeed. Satanic indeed.

Such themes ending in manufactured optimism are typical of secular literature. If Kirk defeats the Klingons today, there will simply be more Klingons tomorrow . . . and Romulans and Cardassians ad infinitum. Janeway takes the Voyager spacecraft to the other side of the galaxy and discovers all kinds of different alien species. Different? Not really. They’re all self-centered, power hungry, greedy, duplicitous, just like humans. Nothing but trouble. Secular artists apparently can’t even imagine what a happy ending in their God-less universe could look like.

Schaeffer challenges us as Christians to use art to proclaim our assured hope. “If God made the flowers, they are worth painting and writing about. If God made the birds, they are worth painting. If God made the sky, the sky is worth painting . . . It is worth man’s while to create works upon the basis of the great works God has already created.”

Christianity is not just involved with ‘salvation’ . . . although that’s huge, infinite! Our walk with the Lord involves “the total man in the total world . . . Man as man – with his emotions, his feelings, his body, his life – this is an important subject matter for poetry and novels . . . In God’s world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual.”

Schaeffer’s short book is part of Volume 2 of his Complete Works. The analysis or production of ‘art’ is not in my ‘wheelhouse,’ trained as a scientist as I am. But his perspective heightens my awareness of my interaction with art throughout my life. Even in playing tennis, there is an aesthetic beauty in the production of a great shot, whether I’ve hit it myself or merely watched a real artist like Roger Federer on his favorite canvas.

How about you? Got any artistic bones in your body? Consider how you might glorify God with whatever gifts He has graced you with.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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119. Happiness
March 15, 2018

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Yes, we live in a fallen world, and the world is inhabited by fallen people. Yet there is much beauty in the world, in sunny blue skies and in freshly fallen snow, in a flower garden and in a rain forest, in colorful fish and clever dolphins, in iridescent hummingbirds and in the majesty of an eagle. Men and women, too, are capable of great compassion and dazzling creativity, of self-sacrificial integrity, of tenderness, of diligence, even of tenacity in pursuit of godly virtues.

I need not detail the perils we face, the stresses, the frailties, the temptations and yes, the yielding to selfish and wicked acts, harming others and diminishing ourselves. Life itself is too fragile, too filled with discomfort, and too short.

Yet happiness is attainable in this life, even in this week. We need not wait for Heaven. (I speak to the born-again Christian in this essay, not the unbeliever.) God intends for us to experience peace and joy while we inhabit Earth’s shadowlands. Eternal life is not just for the afterlife. Eternal life begins with repentance from sins and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We live within that eternal life now. Happiness is part of God’s gift of eternal life.

I recently read, over the course of several months, Randy Alcorn’s 2015 book, Happiness. It’s rich in content, perhaps too rich to read straight through. It’s like a huge bag of potato chips or a big box of candy bars, best savored a few bites per day so you can look forward to enjoying another treat tomorrow. The book is organized into 45 bite-sized chapters, which makes it useful as an occasional devotional.

I do recommend it – heartily – although with a few caveats, which I’ll share up front. Alcorn annoyingly uses 37 different English translations of the Bible. Thirty-seven! If he had simply used the KJV, the reader would be much happier! Also, he quotes mostly, but not exclusively, from Calvinist authors. Happiness is a subject that should be cautionary to Calvinists because in their nonsensical view of God’s sovereignty, every thought, word, and deed and every wiggle of every molecule in the universe’s history is planned, foreordained, pre-determined. So you’re only happy if it’s already in The Plan. Fortunately, like all Calvinists, Alcorn does not live consistently within his doctrine, and so he writes within a framework of free will that allows happiness to be a choice.

I’m going to pull nuggets from three of the forty-five chapters, beginning with Chapter 11, “Do Secondary Gifts Have Real Value Apart from Their Source?”

Alcorn observes that the believer, knowing Jesus, can see Him everywhere he goes. A student of insects, birds, or flowers, for example, can take a short walk and find dozens of fascinating specimens. An urban dweller with no such interests can take the same walk and see nothing. The observant student who is not a believer, an evolutionist for example, may note the creatures and yet not see them truly. The student who knows the Creator, however, sees the creature as an instrument of the brilliance and care of the Lord Jesus, and knows its true origin.

Two of Alcorn’s grandsons love football and admire certain professional players. Randy and his wife, Nanci, can enter into their world and say, “Isn’t it amazing that God has given each person special gifts to use for his glory, and the rest of us get to enjoy it?” When they see an athlete who honors Christ, they can encourage their grandsons with his testimony. But the athlete who glorifies himself . . . that ugliness is the Curse at work, yet provides a teaching opportunity.

The gifts any of us have been blessed with should provoke frequent thanksgiving and praise. I was glad to wake up again this morning! At this point I would certainly rejoice to wake up in Heaven, but as long as I have another day here, perhaps I can do something useful for the Lord’s sake, in gratitude to Him.

Moses’ last recorded words are found in Deuteronomy 33:29, knowing the Lord was about to take him home, knowing that he would not get to step into the Promised Land . . . “Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord, the shield of thy help, and who is the sword of thy excellency!”

Note the exclamation point at the end – it’s not a question. Moses rejoices in God and exhorts his people to do the same, reminding them that God is their defense (shield) and their offense (sword). I note that Alcorn leaves off the last part of the verse, perhaps because he just wants to focus on the ‘positive.’

Here’s the rest of the verse: “. . . And thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places.” We should never forget that we live on a battlefield. Satan contends for the souls of men and we are God’s troops. Our mission is His Great Commission. There will be victory and that assurance contributes to happiness. Prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen often skip half of a verse, pretending that life can be all sugar or all victory celebrations. No, there’s a war on, and we will have battles. We can find moments and periods of happiness throughout, but in the hard times we are to be sustained by the promise of victory, delivered by spiritual shield and sword. Ephesians chapter 6 comes to mind, doesn’t it?

Alcorn relates a story about friends of his who rescued a scraggly terrier about to be euthanized, then listed “Princess” for adoption. A couple came by, along with their adult son who had been brain damaged in an accident thirty years before. His erratic behavior over that period had necessitated institutional care for most of his life.

But Princess transformed the man’s life. They connected instantly and the fellow’s behavior changed so significantly that he was able to move back in with his parents. They called to say, “Thank you for giving us our son back.”

Randy’s friend reports, “We were too choked up to say it, but of course Princess deserved the credit.” But the true source of this joy is the Lord. As Matthew Henry (1662 – 1714) wrote, “Whatever is the matter of our joy, God must be acknowledged as the Author of it.” The Christian sees the ‘secondary source’ of joy so much the better if he recognizes the Primary Source.

Alcorn suggests that the brightest ‘stars’ in the sky, which are actually the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, “are bright only because they reflect the sun. Likewise, the moon is a beautiful sight, but it doesn’t generate light on its own. It merely reflects it . . . The moon was made to glorify the sun, and when it does, it shares in the sun’s glory.”

Secondary sources of happiness, like art, music, literature, careers, and hobbies are ‘reflectors’ of God’s creative glory, since He invented them. James 1:17 . . . “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

Accordingly, we aren’t constrained to seek the Giver instead of the gifts; rather, “We should seek the Giver through the gifts.” If, however, like an unbeliever, “we worship and served the created rather than the Creator, our happiness is eclipsed.”

C. S. Lewis wrote, “I shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if I have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest.”

Alcorn: “If I am not happy in God when I see a waterfall or hear a great symphony or see a child playing in a mud puddle or watch a dog chasing its tail, then I will not be happy in God when I attend church, read the Bible, or pray.”

Chapter 31 is entitled, “Happiness Is Our Choice.” (Yes, the irony of the author’s Calvinism is apparent.) I do agree emphatically with his thesis! He tells a story of a woman who had two sons, one who sold umbrellas and one who sold fans. Rain depressed her because no fans would sell, and sunshine discouraged her because then no umbrellas would sell. Her friend remarked, “If the sun is shining, people buy fans. If it rains, they buy umbrellas. Change your attitude; be happy!”

The Greek philosopher Epictetus wrote, “Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.” The Bible, of course, is filled with admonitions to choose joy . . .

“Rejoice evermore.” 1 Thess 5:16

“Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” Phil 4:4

“Be careful [full of care] for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Phil 4:6-7 . . . See also verse 8 which is all about choosing what to think about! What? You haven’t memorized this passage?!? Get busy!

David Brainerd (1718 – 1747), a missionary to the Delaware Indians, was an orphan, and suffered from debilitating illnesses, finally dying at age 29. His diary uses the word pain 78 times and suffer or suffering 30 times. Yet he uses happy and happiness 60 times, delight 50 times, pleased and pleasure 177 times, joy and enjoy 350 times. He also uses blessed over 200 times, a word which often means ‘happy.’

On David’s 24^th birthday, suffering much pain, he wrote, “This has been a sweet, happy day to me.” Brainerd spoke of “the absolute dependence of a creature upon God the Creator, for every crumb of happiness it enjoys.” He said of God, “He is the supreme good, the only soul-satisfying happiness.”

Many times during my own life I have begged God to heal me from my neurological problems, which have tormented me almost every waking moment of my life. One reason I enjoyed playing competitive tennis so much in years past is that it so fully engaged my mental and physical attention that I would lose my symptoms . . . until the match was over.

At one point in my professional life I was so wracked by symptoms that I could barely speak, making my life as a university prof – teaching every day – utter misery. My wife would begin praying when class time approached and God saw me through those lectures. This went on for months as I prayed for at least some measure of relief. (Medical science was unhelpful through all this, as that industry often is.) Finally, I found specific prayers and promises, and a particular dependence on the Lord that gave me peace . . . and God brought me back from the brink. Yes, I still suffer, but the Lord taught me that I am better off relying upon Him in the suffering, than I would be if I were completely healed and just muddling along according to my natural inclinations. Paul’s experience, related in 2 Corinthians 12, is a passage I empathize with.

For me, happiness had better be a choice, because my neural system fights me every moment.

Alcorn observes that many of us divide our lives between the spiritual and the secular, focusing on the Lord and His work at times, but also searching for happiness in reading, music, watching a ball game, or talking with friends. But the Christian life cannot be divided. It all belongs to God! Thank God for the creative author of the book you’re reading and for the musicians who produce the music you love.

“Our thought life is a choice.” This is the explicit message of Phil 4:8 and Romans 12:1-2. Many of the psalms begin with a lament, but end with a trust and a praise in the goodness and the presence of God.

Thoughts lead to actions. “Happy people give generously, serve others, and seek to make others happy.” Happiness is a God-given consequence of doing good. I find happiness in giving tracts out, giving people a chance to hear and understand the Gospel, a chance to get saved! I find even more happiness in sharing the Gospel verbally, encouraging and exhorting a lost soul to find the Savior.

My wife and I recently have had various medical difficulties. We have become ‘medical missionaries’ to the doctors and nurses and receptionists and the people who inhabit their waiting rooms. I particularly enjoy giving away the tracts I’ve designed.

We shared one waiting room with three older folks who were watching a news feed about Billy Graham’s funeral. One fellow mentioned that he saw Billy Graham preach when he came to Shreveport in 1951. He commented that he liked the preaching a lot, and tuned in to a number of BG’s televised crusades, despite being a lifelong, committed Roman Catholic. The other two people in the room were Roman Catholics, too.

I remarked that I had heard Billy Graham preach in the early 1970s and that I’d had an entirely different reaction! Suddenly, everyone in the room was extremely attentive. I explained that I had been raised Roman Catholic, and I found the Gospel message to be entirely different from what the priests and the nuns had taught me. I went on to explain the differences and how I had gotten saved through the witness of a Christian family in 1968. I went on to explain the Gospel to the three elderly Catholics and I made sure to make it personal – that they needed to be born again.

Well, that was a good day! We passed out tracts to at least 30 people that day, while in the midst of a day of surgical procedures for melanoma . . . for both of us. Yeah, we had a painful day. But it was a happy day, too!

Alcorn insists, properly, that we don’t make ourselves happy, but we can make choices that lead to happiness. I choose, for example, to write essays twice per month for our web site, and I find satisfaction in doing so. But feedback is rare, and typically from only a few friends scattered far and wide. Our site gets surprisingly (to me) good traffic, about 500 page views per day, from all over the world. But not many write to say, “Hi.” Yet some of the feedback is extremely encouraging, especially when someone comments that they learned something useful or were encouraged. That makes me happy! Particularly when it’s clear that my writing was actually read and understood!

Regarding your choices in thought and deed . . . Yes, we all have to deal with the mundane and the aggravating details of life. But we can deal with them and get back to focusing on what’s true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. (Phil 4:8) We don’t have to waste life and trash our joy by immersion in the latest political muck out of D.C. (It only takes a few minutes to be fully informed. Most of the ‘news’ is just blather about what others are saying, since real events occur infrequently.)

We can intentionally smile and encourage everyone we cross paths with, scattering Gospel seed as we go. We have a small grocery market near our house. I told one of the workers there that I really like their store. She appreciated that. I got the impression she doesn’t get such feedback.

So, choose! Choose to think, choose to do, choose to make your day count at least a little. There’s happiness down that road.

Chapter 32 is entitled, “Ways to Cultivate Happiness.” Alcorn begins with a story . . . Stella’s 1^st Christmas as a widow brought feelings of deep loneliness. A messenger rang her doorbell to present a gift – a Labrador puppy. She asked, “But who sent the puppy?” The fellow replied, “Your husband. Merry Christmas.”

A letter was included, full of love and encouragement. He’d bought the puppy shortly before he died and arranged for delivery just before Christmas. The puppy licked her face while ‘Joy to the World’ played on her radio. Suddenly, she felt incredible delight.

We can intentionally bring happiness to others.

Alcorn suggests that most Christians rarely experience joy because they are ‘too busy.’ Too busy on social media, too busy doing extra coursework, too busy making sure the kids’ calendars are filled with activities, and too busy working well beyond what is required to simply make a living.

“God won’t force Himself on us. And He certainly won’t give us happiness in what’s not from Him or what’s distanced from Him. Happiness comes naturally in the same sense that fruit comes naturally from a tree. If the tree gets sufficient sunshine and water, if the ground is rich in nutrients, if the tree doesn’t contract diseases, then yes, it ‘naturally’ produces fruit. We must plant ourselves in the rich soil of God’s word, soak in the living water of God and His people, and bask in the radiant sunlight of His grace. And then happiness will come naturally.”

In this regard I marvel at the vast majority of Christians who have no part in the Great Commission, rarely or never giving someone a Gospel tract or sharing the truth eyeball-to-eyeball. What I have learned is that you simply cannot experience walking with the Lord Jesus unless you are about His work. Go ahead and claim all the mystical feelings you like. In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus promised to be with us in this work. If you claim to love Jesus, you will walk with Him in this. Read John 14:15 and tell me you disagree with Him.

Most Christians I encourage to start in this work act as if it’s a horrible, scary drudgery that they couldn’t possibly do. What stupid and wicked nonsense!

Regarding happiness-destroying sin, Alcorn relates a story about Eric, who told Randy that he was mad at God because, despite his prayers to keep him from immorality, he had committed adultery with a co-worker. Alcorn challenged him on several points: Had he asked his wife to pray for him? Had he avoided the woman? No, no, and no to several other challenges.

Randy stared at Eric and slowly pushed a big book toward the edge of his desk, praying, “Lord, please keep this book from falling!” The book fell with a thud. God didn’t suspend the law of gravity. Eric’s story ends badly. His illicit sex continued and led to sex crimes that landed him in prison.

One sin leads to another. It’s a bit like golf. If you hit the ball into the rough, the next shot is more likely to wind up in a sandtrap and the following shot into the lake. Keep the ball in the fairway . . . and don’t yield to the first temptation.

On the theme of attitudinal choice . . .

Architect Christopher Wren (1632 – 1723) built several magnificent cathedrals in London. A journalist of the era interviewed some workers, asking them, “What are you doing?”

The first said, “I’m cutting stone for 10 shillings a day.”

The second answered, “I’m putting in 10 hours a day on this job.”

The third stated, “I’m helping Sir Christopher Wren construct one of London’s greatest cathedrals!”

Which worker was the happiest?

What are you building? Are you a co-laborer with Christ as He prepares His kingdom? Are you happy to be part of such a great work? Is today precious to you because you have another day to show gratitude to God for what He’s done in your life?

I also recently finished a book of sermons by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. His teaching is in sync on the subject, that we are foolish to approach happiness directly and immediately, not realizing that happiness, according to the New Testament, “is always the result of something else . . . that happiness is based on a true relationship with God, that happiness is the result of the righteousness that God gives us through Jesus Christ his Son.”

In neglecting this truth we suffer ups and downs, joy and despair, yet the truth of God’s love and salvation is constant, ever present.

It’s our responsibility to grasp that truth. “That implies thought and theology . . . It is the result of an acceptance of certain truths and the working out of a reasoned, logical argument on the basis of these truths. It is not something vague and intangible which varies with one’s moods and feelings . . .” or circumstances. “If we accept the truth and grasp its teaching, we will be able to apply it to our needs at all times and in all places.”

“The primary business of the church with respect to believers is to teach the doctrines of the faith and not merely to try to enthuse or to comfort in general.”

Amen. Yes, that’s a little too cognitive for some tastes, yet when the mind is engaged, the heart and will can line up with truth. We don’t need to be ruled by emotions or circumstances.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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120. Redeeming Science
April 1, 2018

We all rely on God. In fact, every one of us on this planet is utterly dependent on the air God gave us to breathe, the comfortable gravity that holds us to the Earth’s surface, the biosphere that provides the amino acids and sugars and all that we use for metabolic fuel, and the brilliant design of the human body, whose heart pumps rhythmically without our attention and whose neuro-muscular system allows us to walk and talk and work and play – all the while taking such abilities completely for granted.

Scientists, who are also human, rely on God just the same. The eyes and ears and brain of a scientist enable him to do science, whether or not he lives in rebellion against his Creator, who established the laws of physics and chemistry, and designed the table of elements with such startling consistency.

Scientists can do science while in denial, embracing evolution, for example. But how much better to do science in a spirit of praise and astonishment, exploring the creation of God while thanking Him as we discover more and more aspects of His wisdom.

Such is the thesis of Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (2006), by Vern S. Poythress, a mathematician and theologian distressed at the naturalistic takeover of science in modern times. Naturalism, sometimes called materialism, is the worldview that insists that matter and its interactions are all that is. It’s just about particles in motions that obey the laws of physics. People are just clumps of molecules.

The ‘natural’ consequences of such a worldview include the non-existence of morality, justice, hope, meaning, or anything ‘immaterial.’ Naturalism makes the world so small, doesn’t it? Yet the big issues of human life are dominated by the immaterial. Of course we need to live on Earth’s dirt and reshape it to live comfortably, reshaping it into clothes, cars, sewing machines, and tennis rackets, but life is so much more than dirt. Indeed, within the atheist’s / naturalist’s worldview, naturalism doesn’t exist, because he has to use immaterial logic and reason and language and concepts to explain it. But to him that can only be the random effects of his brain chemistry. Why listen to him?

At a more mundane level, Poythress observes that science is taught to the young in such an ‘objective’ manner that the kids miss “the experience of personal fascination, delight, beauty, and mystery.” They miss the point of exploring God’s creation, with science “reduced to a game in which we learn meaningless rules in order to solve artificial problems posed on teachers’ tests. Or it is no more than a pragmatic tool by which we produce gadgets that bring comfort, entertainment, and status. Or, for those who excel in science, it is a platform for parading intellectual power and achievement.”

Vern and his wife noticed their third grade son studying biology, working hard to memorize the scientific terminology for the parts of a leaf or enumerating the divisions of the animal kingdom. But science is about exploring, adventuring, “and from time to time, after a long, exhausting climb, we catch a breathtaking glimpse of the beauty of God.”

I regularly visit university campuses to talk with and share the Gospel with students. I’ve noted the same atmosphere that Poythress sees, that the educational game is primarily about getting through the course work, whether you learn much or not, in order to get a good job and a big house and new cars and a big TV. “The universities have become multi-versities with no center.”

I don’t entirely agree. The center of the ‘uni’-versity is there, and it’s clearly atheistic / socialistic / leftist ideology. At best, some of the students escape with a degree into a life of piling up money and possessions, but in any case the culture works hard to blind students to the glory and majesty of God and the opportunity to find purpose in Him.

Scientists believe quite passionately in the consistency and rationality of scientific laws, and that these laws can be communicated through human language. In fact, we can know nothing of the universe’s laws unless we can articulate them and communicate them through language. Now, rationality and communication are very personal things. They don’t belong to rocks and trees and molecules. Also, nowhere in the animal kingdom do we find rationality and communication that approaches in any fashion what human persons can do.

In short, scientific law is personal. It is the essence of how human beings – persons – organize what we understand of how the world works. Scientific law is an aspect of how God organizes His creation and enables His image-bearers to comprehend it. It’s all quite amazing and all quite personal. I recall as a young Christian, and a student of physics, how amazed I was to see the beauty in the equations and the solutions and the physical phenomena of electromagnetics. I was dazzled when I learned something about how the quantum world works, and I was mind-blown when I learned how to apply simple statistical methods to the mechanics of atoms and molecules to generate all the laws of macroscopic thermodynamics.

If you weren’t a physics major you might not appreciate that list. But that’s what Vern was talking about . . . “after a long, exhausting climb” . . . namely, after years of study, you might just glimpse the genius of our Lord Jesus in the smallest things.

Physical laws constrain us – absolutely. Despite sci-fi fantasies, it’s clear that no one will be building faster-than-light star ships. In witnessing to atheists, it’s easy to show him that his common-sense understanding of science, yes even a theater major’s common sense understanding, makes the nano-technology of life impossible to explain via naturalism. There must be a Designer, a very smart Designer.

Similarly, moral laws constrain us – absolutely. The God-denier will agree that murder is wrong, rape is wrong, molesting children is wrong, and cutting off someone’s head because you don’t like their religion is wrong. God wrote moral laws into the heart of everyone. Moral accountability is personal. I have no moral accountability to a rock or any other clod of molecules. But I do have moral accountability with respect to persons.

Vern: “God’s character is the ultimate source of moral law.” Even in the conduct of science, atheistic scientists insist that you must play fair with the data. When you don’t, and let lying politics intervene, then you get made-up stories about global warming or evolution. Scientists also assume that ‘nature’ must play fair. They will never believe that the fundamental laws fluctuate or play tricks on them. In their heart they see a moral accountability between them and ‘nature’ – but if it’s just ‘nature’ . . . that’s irrational. If it is God and His creation, though, you’ve got hope for rationality and consistency.

Skeptics rebel against the very idea of God doing miracles, as if He’s not allowed to intervene, not allowed to break His own laws. But God made no such contract. Indeed, Colossians 1:17 and 2:3, among other Scriptures, indicate that moment by moment, God sustains His creation, actively, at the most fundamental level. I believe He actively holds the nuclei together, the atomic nuclei of every atom in our physical being. His laws are active expressions of His will.

It’s a scary thought. When we sin against God with our tongue, for example, we do so while God holds the atoms together that make up our tongue. God never goes on vacation. When He intervenes in what we call a miracle, turning the water into wine at Cana, for example, He’s merely acting in a more noticeable way at a macroscopic level.

Vern has an interesting discussion of moral hypocrisy in postmodern secularism. Leftists are committed to ‘tolerance’ (of their views only), public education, big government, the LGBT agenda, etc. In their view these are moral commitments, yet in their worldview morals are just opinions . . . or just brain chemistry. There can be no foundation because they deny an absolute lawgiver. And so fascism or animism must be valid opinions – moral systems – too, along with ISIS-style Islam or KKK-style racism.

I note that all such ‘moral’ discussions in the media are argued apart from a discussion of worldviews. The pundits argue as if their opponents should just intuit a moral foundation like their own. So everyone talks past each other. Hey, I get why an atheist doesn’t object to abortion. It’s not a baby to them. It’s just a clump of tissue – molecules. The pro-life pundit should challenge their atheism. That’s the real problem.

Vern asks the reader to consider animism. One variety teaches that good and evil spirits dwell in certain places and objects. One spirit might be in that antelope over there and another in this tree. If so, the antelope and the tree are sacred. The animist might object to scientific practice because to interfere with nature might offend the spirits.

The secularist presupposes that animism is wrong, not because he has demonstrated this scientifically, but because most everyone else in society acts like animism is wrong. But the idea that animism is wrong is itself a religious view, insisting what things are sacred or not. The secularist commitment to the nonexistence of animistic spirits is a religious view.

Now, using a presuppositionalist approach, you can determine whether the animistic worldview makes sense of the world we live in. Indeed, that’s the way to analyze any worldview, especially the secularist’s. Does the atheistic naturalistic worldview make sense of personality, morality, hope, and meaning? Of course not. Start with the worldview and ask whether it makes sense of life.

Vern: “Christian tolerance does not mean that all views are equally right.” Rather, the Biblical approach is to compassionately teach those in darkness how to find the light that makes sense of life . . . and eternity. Secular ‘tolerance,’ on the other hand, in practice, means that the Christian worldview should be stamped out, by force if mere intimidation doesn’t work.

I’ll mention here that I don’t recommend that you take the time to read Poythress’ book. He utterly compromises on a literal Genesis, favoring the Intelligent Design camp and citing various ID authors. In short, he’s a billions-of-years guy, departing from a Scripture-first foundation to get conned by atheists who need billions of years to make the fantasy of evolution plausible – not possible, mind you, just plausible to the ill-informed. On creation and flood geology Poythress is hopeless. Don’t waste your time.

Nevertheless, he has some insight in other areas. He observes that God made man to function as prophet, priest, and king, as an image-bearer of the One who speaks forth truth, rules, and blesses what He has made. Adam, before the Fall, spoke and named God’s creatures, he was to rule over the earthly creation, and was to bless those that came after him.

Man creates by reshaping materials at hand, but naming involves thought, speech, and understanding. Both creating and naming work together. In science we see a division of labor between experiment and theory, on the one hand devising experimental instruments to interact with the material world, and on the other hand employing rational and creative thought to name, categorize, and explain. The two disciplines must interact continually, iron sharpening iron, so to speak. Otherwise, experiments are ill-designed and poorly understood and theories can run amok with fantastical speculation.

When scientists depart from reality, away from a Biblical foundation, evil consequences abound. Billions of dollars and thousands of careers are invested in evolutionary fantasies and the search for extraterrestrial life. Medical research is hindered because the nanotechnology of life is misinterpreted as if it arose from random chemical chance, rather than design. The evolutionary concept of Junk DNA, for example, is a startling case where scientists have failed – for decades now – to look for function within major portions of the genome because they refuse to see design. Thankfully, this is starting to turn around because more and more brilliant function is discovered within the so-called junk.

Adam had a good start in observational science. But the Fall resulted when Adam and Eve autonomously decided whatever they liked about a particular tree. Insistence on man’s autonomy apart from God leads to corruption in science, as it does in the rest of life.

Vern: “And there are secondary effects as well. People like Able die without passing on the knowledge that they gain. Wars and destruction and death and famine give people little leisure for any kind of patient, extended reflection on scientific questions. Great libraries perish in fire or in ruin. In order to gain power, people conceal knowledge rather than share it.”

Also, Vern observes, idolatry corrupts the prophetic impulse to explore and understand. The polytheist – the Hindu – avoids science because his worldview is rife with illusion and irrationality and battles among petty gods. The animist avoids experimental science that might offend spirits. The Buddhist nirvana is sought by emptying the mind, quite a different road from that of the scientist.

The Biblical Christian, however, sees design and beauty in God’s creation, and works to acquire knowledge and wisdom to glorify his Creator. Science has a purpose far greater than the production of widgets and the acquisition of tenure and prestige. Science gives us a window into God’s character and awesomeness. You don’t have to be a trained scientist to appreciate these things. The main difference between the trained scientist and the layman who can appreciate science is simply skill in mathematics. That difference is overrated. The biggest and best parts of science can be fully enjoyed without doing higher math.

Even the brightest scientist, of course, can never know in the way God knows. Our exploratory knowledge has a tentativeness due to our finiteness. But we can know truly everything God reveals in Scripture, which is why we must always start there. We cannot know exhaustively, as God does, but we can know truly whatever He reveals.

The secular trend in science has generally been reductionism – to reduce the world by invoking a minimum number of principles, a minimal set of equations, for example, along with a minimum number of elementary particles . . . protons, neutrons, electrons, or quarks as the underlying constituents of protons, neutrons, and some other particles.

Poythress cites philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, who suggested that when people reject God they must still try to explain the coherence of God’s world. Reductionism is an intellectual idol, but it cannot explain human life, or the design inherent to an automobile or a jet fighter, not to mention the design of the nanotechnology of life. Basic laws and particles simply cannot explain the existence of poetry or the purpose of a birthday cake or what people do on a tennis court. Purpose and design are properties of intelligence, of people, of persons.

Vern notes that postmodern relativism looks like reduction to the social aspect or even just linguistics, “because language is used as the tool by which we see the relativity of all human points of view. Empiricism looks like a reduction to sense experience . . . Idealism looks like reduction to the mental or psychological or perceptual aspect.”

But a child knows that atoms and forces do not have the capacity, on their own, to form dogs and apples, just as bricks do not have the capacity to form buildings from the bottom up. A building starts top – down, in the mind of an architect. Similarly, the atoms in the apple don’t have ‘apple’ wired into them. To get an apple, you start with an apple tree, which comes from an apple . . . all the way back, yet someone had to design the apple top – down! And the same with dogs and people.

Secular philosophy and atheistic science has it all backwards, or rather upside – down! You’ve got to look up to find Cause. A microscope, even if it can resolve the tiniest elementary particles, cannot tell you where you came from.

Is beauty real or just an ‘epiphenomenon’ of brain chemistry, “a surface whose real meaning lies buried beneath in a scientific analysis of light as electromagnetic radiation, and of rods and cones in the retina, and neural processing in the visual cortex?”

Yes, beauty is real, a characteristic of God who made the world to reflect His own beauty, which is evident to all, even though marred by the Fall. Vern: “One of my friends, when younger, found himself one day overwhelmed by the beauty of a field, so overwhelmed that he felt that he should worship. But he did not yet know that there was anyone to worship!”

All the levels, from the subatomic to the molecular, to the cellular, to the physical stuff we experience with our senses (including our own bodies), to the geological, to the astronomical, to the cosmological – they’re all real, all woven together, all sensible within a Biblical framework, top – down, starting with God, the ultimate source of rationality.

Purpose is everywhere. Vern observes that only by knowing what a machine is for can we say whether it is intact or broken, efficient or inefficient. The same goes for organisms, from body level to subcellular level. If your DNA gets scrambled, your protein-based cellular machines won’t work and you get sick or die. To live and to live in health, thousands of micro-processes and trillions of nanomachines in your body must work just right, moment by moment. That’s design.

Man’s problem, though, is neither mechanical nor scientific . . . it’s spiritual. We don’t want God in everything, particularly in the details of our own lives – but that’s just it – we don’t ‘own’ our lives. We’ve been gifted our lives to know Him and serve Him. Only in that wisdom can we fully live our lives, not just for now, but throughout the ages to come. Science falsely so called continually distracts with idols to avoid the God who is there, and here, and everywhere.

I’ll conclude with a critique of Vern’s naivete regarding his conclusions about academia’s commitment to naturalism. Vern: “. . . in my opinion the predominant methological naturalism in science needs to change, however painful that may be for those who currently hold cultural power. In particular, cultural space needs to be made for the hypothesis of intelligent design, as one reasonable alternative to pursue, rather than stigmatizing it as many cultural gatekeepers do.”

He misses the point. This is spiritual warfare, not merely scientific debate. Methodological naturalism – the philosophical insistence that everything in science must reject the possibility of design, that everything in the universe must have a purely natural, materialistic origin – is at the heart of atheism. The atheistic ‘gatekeeper’ in academia starts with his atheism. Then he makes a rule like methodological naturalism so that there can be no discussion about a Creator. He’s not going to give up his power to intimidate.

The naturalist is a committed fellow, you see. It’s not a time for Christians to wimp out. No, we should never plead for equal time from those who hate the Gospel. Rather, we should declare truth, point out that evolution is stupid and void of evidence, indeed void of rationality, that the atheist stands on no rationality at all since he believes that he doesn’t exist, it’s just brain chemistry making sounds come out of his mouth.

Note the dual use of the word needs in the quote above. That’s passive voice. It’s as if Vern hopes that someone else will somehow make this happen. No, it’s up to the Christian . . . and every Christian is either an evangelist or is disobedient to his Savior. Go big or go home. Life is short. Make the days count. Speak up and speak truth.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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121. No Little People
April 15, 2018

“Who am I? What could I possibly do?”

“Well, I don’t have any experience in that subject. It’s not like I went to Bible college or anything.”

“You should talk to her. I’m not any good at witnessing.”

“Maybe you can get him to come to church. Our preacher is really good.”

“What? Home school our kids? I don’t have the educational background.”

………………………………

In 1974 Francis A. Schaeffer wrote a marvelous book for timid Christians – that would include about all of us – entitled No Little People. The first chapter’s title adds the phrase, “. . . No Little Places.” He begins with a signature event in the life of the man the Bible declares was meek “above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.”

Who was this ‘meekest man’? When God gave him the mission to lead the exodus of millions out of slavery, Moses responded with, “Who am I, that I should go forth unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (Ex 3:11) It’s interesting that God immediately promised that He would be with Moses, an exact parallel to Jesus’ promise to be with us as we obey the Great Commission (Matt 28:20).

From our human perspective, was anyone in the Old Testament used more spectacularly than Moses? Yet Moses did not seek notoriety . . . just the opposite. In the New Testament, was anyone used for God’s work more than Paul? Yet he confessed that when he started his work in Corinth, he was with them “in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling,” and his speech and preaching “was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”

It’s God’s power that counts, not our strength . . . nor our timidity. Yes, there was only one Moses and only one Paul, and one Elijah and one John the Baptist, etc. Schaeffer’s theme is that God is so big that among His children there are no little people and no little places. In your neighborhood, in your community, in your family and among your relatives, neither Moses nor Paul have any work to do at all. You’re it. You’re the missionary. You’re the teacher. You’re the helper. You’re the pray-er. You’re the witness. Anywhere you are on Earth, if there are other people nearby, in your space and time, you’re it.

In Luke 14:7-11, the Lord Jesus instructs us, when invited to a wedding feast, for example, to sit in the lowest place, not the place of honor. In context with the work God gives to His disciples, He concludes with, “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

Jesus transitions immediately to the idea of making a feast yourself, and not extending invitations to friends or relatives or rich neighbors, but calling on the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind. After all, anyone can do that. We may not have a lot of friends, or know the rich or powerful, but we all know people we can extend an invitation to, particularly an invitation to know the Savior.

Schaeffer suggests two reasons why we ought to seek the lower place rather than the higher. In the lower place “it is easier to be quiet before the face of the Lord.” Not easy, but easier. It’s the same in the workplace as in the Lord’s work . . . big responsibilities generally mean lots of attention and plenty of noise. It takes much spiritual maturity to be ‘quiet’ and close to the Lord in the high place. Daniel in Babylon was able to handle it, but he had been tested in the low place before that. Solomon, in contrast, couldn’t handle it.

Schaeffer wisely notes that quietness and peace with God are more important than whatever influence is attached to a high position. True accomplishment in God’s kingdom requires the power of the Holy Spirit. A Christian who gets out of sync with the Holy Spirit will accomplish nothing of real value, whether he is a megachurch pastor or President of the United States. “. . . if a place is too big and too active for our present spiritual condition, then it is too big.”

This is no excuse for laziness, however. It’s not about dropping out or, with a fake spirituality, pretending that you’re just waiting on God to give you something to do. “God’s people are to be active . . . There is no monasticism in Christianity . . . because when the Holy Spirit burns, a man is consumed. We can expect to become physically tired in the midst of battle for our King and Lord . . . The size of the place is not important, but the consecration in that place is.”

I was in a big bookstore last night and saw a group of six black college students studying together around a table. I had a stack of tracts in my pocket (Always be prepared!!) and approached. The fellow who was speaking at that moment stopped and all eyes were on me. The expressions seemed to say, “What does this old white guy want with us?” I smiled and asked, “Are you all above average in intelligence?”

A young lady responded with, “Absolutely!” I said, “Great! I thought so. I’ve got something for you then. I design these, brainteasers on a variety of subjects. Something to stimulate your mind. You might check out our web site, too.” As I talked I gave each one a different tract. (Keep a variety of tracts on you!)

Everyone was gracious in accepting the tracts. That was one minute of fun for me! And six people got a chance to do some thinking – that’s the hook I design into my tracts, provoke some thinking – and to confront their need for the Savior. How hard was that? Come on, this is the easiest work in the world! Anyone can do it, anywhere.

The second reason to not seek the higher place is that if your desire for leadership is tainted with a yearning for recognition and admiration, you simply aren’t qualified. “Why? Because we have forgotten that we are brothers and sisters in Christ with other Christians.” Schaeffer insists that the only good kind of fighter for the Lord Jesus Christ is the man who does not like to fight. “The belligerent man is never the one to be belligerent for Jesus. And it is exactly the same with leadership. The Christian leader should be a quiet man of God who is extruded by God’s grace into some place of leadership.”

Extruded? Extruded is a manufacturing term wherein a material is forced out under pressure into a desired shape. In Biblical history, Jacob was extruded, as was Joseph, David, Peter, and Paul. I’ve written about a number of more recent stars (Daniel 12:3) in God’s work who were graced with ‘high place’ opportunities via extrusion, including John Sornberger, Lillian Trasher, Seth Joshua, and Jeremiah Lanphier. Who’s heard of them? God has, along with the souls saved through their work.

Schaeffer observes that “one of the loveliest incidents in the early church occurred when Barnabas sought out Paul to help with the revival in Antioch.” Paul was in Tarsus, his own little place, but the Holy Spirit had a larger work in mind.

We’ve long observed in fundamentalism and in evangelicalism a culture of glorifying young men who believe they’ve been ‘called to preach.’ Particularly among the IFB (Independent Fundamental Baptist) churches, during scheduled ‘revival meetings,’ much heat is generated about ‘surrendering to preach.’ There are never special meetings aimed at pointing young men and young women to be God’s servants within the medical or engineering professions, or to be successful God-honoring entrepreneurs. The only ‘profession’ that gets magnified is that of ‘preacher.’

But isn’t the Great Commission for every believer? Isn’t that what ‘preaching’ is? Apparently not. Within both IFB and evangelical churches, the ‘preachers’ are those sent off to Bible colleges (an unbiblical concept), who obtain a secular degreed credential and then enter the clergy as paid hirelings in brick-and-mortar ‘church’ enterprises.

Hirelings? Yes, and that’s a Biblical term. If the hireling loses his paid clerical status, does he get a job and serve as a faithful member of the same church? No, he looks for another paid clerical job. Hirelings are also called Nicolaitanes, literally “overcomers of the people” – see Rev 2:6 and 2:15. Some of the most fervent young men in the churches yield to the temptation to become the star preacher on stage, and it often wrecks them. It is especially unseemly to hear a teen boy brag about his ‘call to preach.’

But I’ve written much on this site on how God designed the New Testament church, and how little His design is employed, so let’s move on.

Schaeffer poses the question, “What is the Bible?”, and suggests that a good place to start to answer is, “The Bible is a realistic book.” This stresses the Bible’s realism in opposition to the romanticism and mysticism that characterize not only the world’s religions, but much of Christendom.

Most Christians I know live their lives in a secular mindset, only occasionally making ‘leaps’ to acknowledge the spiritual realm. We get tempted into worry about our finances or our job stability or whether the car’s repair can be delayed until the next paycheck. Where is God? We forget about Him in our own travails, but nod along in a Sunday School class when 1 Peter 5:6-7 is mentioned. Certainly we need to plan and to take care of our daily business. The temptation is to foolishly divide ‘our business’ from God’s and His will from ours.

We yield to fuss and friction in our relationships, but on Sunday morning sing hymns and quote Scripture about loving others, putting others before ourselves, and blessing those who persecute us. Yet on Monday we bristle at perceived slights or the apparent selfishness of others, puffing up in our own self-righteousness, sitting in our own Judge’s seat, proud to refuse forgiveness. The next Sunday we glory in how God has forgiven our sins.

Here’s a practical piece of advice (from the Lord Jesus) when you find yourself thinking or speaking evil of someone else: Stop and pray for that person. If he’s lost, that’s the problem. If he’s a Christian, ask God to help. Be a brother, not a Judge. You’ll find peace in this practice.

Schaeffer sees the Bible as realistically in touch with the reality of God’s creation, particularly in seeing men and women and children as sinners in a fallen world. He applies this to child raising and the necessary forms and structures that parents must establish.

Schaeffer: “The Bible . . . teaches that force must be used at many different levels. Christians understand that chastisement must be used at home . . . The balance of form and freedom must exist in the home in a practical way: there must be chastisement as a part of love.”

Parents that resist chastisement, spanking in particular, endanger their child’s salvation. If you tolerate their rebellion, failing to teach them the law of the home, and / or fail to deliver judgment, how will the child come to respect God’s laws and fear God’s judgment? How will the child ever come to see her need for mercy, for forgiveness, for the Savior? We Christians in the West raise rebels into their teen years and then wonder why they reject and despise ‘the faith of their youth.’

Schaeffer: “Anarchy soon dehumanizes men.” This is true both in society and in the home. It applies to open borders and sanctuary cities and politicians covering up their immorality, but it also applies to mom and dad fostering rebellion because it’s just so inconvenient to discipline. Hey, when little Johnnie chooses to defy you, in word or deed or whiny attitude, it’s never convenient! If you care, you drop everything and squash the rebellion instantly. Insure that the joy Johnnie derives from his rebellion is dwarfed by the unpleasantness of judgment. As the years pass and you teach Johnnie of God’s laws and sin, judgment, Heaven, Hell, mercy, grace, forgiveness, and a life fulfilled in the joy of salvation . . . well, he just might get it.

Schaeffer: “Unlimited freedom will not work in a lost world; some structure and form are necessary.” Scriptural principles (see Isaiah 33:22, for example) lead to checks and balances in government, recognizing that power corrupts. The same principles are reflected in the New Testament design for the local church, wherein authority is limited and distributed, no popes, no cardinals, no Super-Senior-Pastor; rather, a fellowship of brothers and sisters, with a group of elder-peers to take care of necessary (but rather minimal) administration.

Utopianism is cruel, according to Schaeffer, “for it expects of men and women what they are not and will not be until Christ comes.” Socialism preaches utopianism, but without exception results in corruption, tyranny, and loss of freedom.

The Christian who stands on the Bible should never be shocked, Schaeffer says. How should we expect lost people to act? Don’t be shocked at what lost politicians do, or what your neighbors do, or how your lost mom or dad react when you tell them that their sins are so worthy of judgment that they must repent and trust the Savior.

It’s a sport in our culture today to be outraged at everything. It’s especially comical for leftists, who wallow in an atheistic worldview, to be outraged at immorality in their political opponents. Or for secular conservatives to be outraged at the corruption of leftist bureaucrats. Outrage is God’s bailiwick, not ours.

When I share the Gospel with a lost fellow, I always include myself as a lawbreaker in my explanation. Schaeffer: “Nothing will help you as much in meeting people, no matter how far out they are or how caught up they are in the modern awfulness, than for them to perceive in you the attitude ‘we are both sinners . . . we stand in the same place.’” I walk through at least 3 of the 10 commandments with the fellow, then conclude, “You’re like me. Busted, 3 for 3. If we went through all 10 commandments, it would be 10 for 10, and not just once, but thousands of times. If you and I get what we deserve, we deserve Hell, not Heaven.”

Utopianism afflicts the home, too. Parents can expect too much from the child, and the child expects perfection from the parents. In marriage, also, this is tested day by day. Hey, what would your husband think if he really knew everything that you thought about him? How would you react if every thought in your husband’s head were spoken? YIKES!! Scary, huh? Yet God knows all . . . and loves you.

The form of the modern church, in contrast to the New Testament design, is particularly susceptible to utopianism. The Senior Pastor seems perfect from what you can see, given his carefully scripted performance on Sunday. All the people in the pews or the auditorium seats around you seem cheerful and content, too. Everything is cool. But in an honestly structured house church, flaws are out there. It’s clear there are people and things to pray for and it’s much harder to hide your level of maturity, or lack thereof. Such ‘reality’ gives believers a chance to actually know each other and help a bit, a chance to grow despite the messiness.

Yeah, we’re all a mess. The Bible is rich with messy examples of believers, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Elijah, Peter, and even Paul. Schaeffer: “There are no perfect men to do God’s work. God is not romantic concerning men.”

Yet God can use us, if we try. I’ve often noted that I would have avoided offending or annoying all kinds of people if I had just never tried. I could have gotten along just fine with mom and dad, my sister, and my uncle as the years went by, if I had just kept my mouth shut about the Gospel. There are Christians, too, who got out of sorts with me because of what I said or what I believed.

Indeed, I’m obligated to try gently, compassionately, yet sometimes firmly, boldly. It’s hard to get it right all the time. I try to show mercy to those who get it wrong towards me and I wish I were on the receiving end of mercy more often when I get it wrong. Oh well . . . as long as I live I’m going to try . . . try to reach the lost and try to encourage the believers. That’s the Great Commission: evangelism and discipleship. The Bema will reveal how well we’ve tried.

The key is to continue to go back to God’s word for principles and practice, reading with eyes as fresh as possible. If your eyes aren’t fresh as you read and study the Bible, you won’t learn new things.

The lost rebel has a “spirit of antilaw”, as Schaeffer puts it. “It is characterized by man putting himself at the center of everything, making himself the standard of value.” Humanism “is man with a capital M. It is man saying, ‘I will only accept knowledge that I myself can generate out from myself.’” I met a man today, like so many others, insisting that he himself was striving toward Heaven, striving to be righteous enough in his own eyes to merit salvation. I also met a professional young woman, a stock broker, who redefined faith in Jesus as being in touch with the divine spirit of the age.

Any perspective outside the Gospel is, ultimately, humanism, also called rationalism by some, but regardless of the details, characterized by man or woman trying to redefine reality, in rebellion against God’s character and the image-of-God conscience inside all of us.

The Christian must guard against the ‘world spirit’, the cloud of delusion propagated by the ‘god of this world’, the Adversary. Schaeffer warns that “the real battle is in our thought-world . . . The battle is in the mind.” Paul had something to say about this . . . “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:1-2)

Schaeffer: “If I am not going to be dirtied as I walk through the mud of the world, the first thing I must do, by God’s grace, is not to be conformed to the present form of the world spirit in the world of my thoughts.”

The world spirit offers a huge variety of distractions so that its followers can avoid reality. Schaeffer noted in his day (!) that “many in this present generation . . . fill their lives with entertainment, even if it is only noise.” Since Schaeffer’s time, entertainment and social media distractions have increased a hundredfold. Even Christians spend hours per day avoiding reality and missing opportunities for spiritual or intellectual growth, neglecting relationships.

Schaeffer: “Some friends once gave a birthday dinner for my wife and me at Villars. We sat in the sun, looking out across tremendous mountains, and we had time to think. But nobody could think because over a loudspeaker a radio program was blaring out; a man was shouting something that nobody could understand. Nevertheless, when I asked the management to turn it off, they said everybody else wanted it on. The twentieth-century entertainment and noise follow us everywhere.”

Is there some quiet in your life? No? How can you pray? How can you think? How can you grow? How can you possibly sense the leading of the Holy Spirit in the midst of such noise?

The Christian must face reality. The believer must be the ontologist. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of reality. Only the born again Christian understands who he is, who God is, and what our responsibilities are toward God and man. Only the Christian can truly appreciate the glory and the beauty of God’s creation and the precious hope of the ages to come.

Schaeffer: “Some entertainment and activity is appropriate, but as we look at the church, even much of the evangelical church, what we see is tragic, for often the church is using entertainment or just plain busyness to attract non-Christians. This is a poverty. But it is an even greater poverty if we need these to hold people after they are Christians . . . This too is a way of being drunk.”

Why not have a church that consists solely of believers who want to grow? Whether newer or older Christians, regardless of where on Maturity Road you find them, why not ‘pander’ to people who want substance? Schaeffer: “Some people are honestly looking for real, fundamental answers, seeking truth in the confusion of our generation.”

Maybe there won’t be many, and maybe it’s hard to find or recognize them, but if we are to be obedient to the Great Commission, to disciple believers so that they actually grow, we must provide the opportunity. Oh my, there is so little substance in the churches today! It is both annoying and depressing to visit churches in ‘the system’ and find such sameness, such triviality. And so much the more in today’s culture than when Francis Schaeffer lived.

The time is short, friends. We ought to make our days count. Buddhists and Hindus don’t see history in climactic terms, instead teaching that everything is returning to the pantheistic whole. Modern man, too, believes history is going nowhere. Classical Marxists, who once believed that history has a utopian socialistic destiny, don’t really exist anymore. Modern Marxists are simply devoted to power and chaos.

The Biblical view is startlingly different. Jesus, God eternal, who exists not only in our present space-time, but inhabits eternity past and future, has already revealed what is to come, namely His return to establish a kingdom of light, love, and justice. Despite the world’s vain attempt to erase B.C. and A.D. from history, via B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E., creation’s history is centered in the Lord Jesus Christ who will return to inherit His own. Either join the team, the family, or join the rebels in that dreadful place called the Lake of Fire.

I’ll close with some comments on Schaeffer’s analysis of the practical materialism that afflicts both unbelievers and believers. “We all tend to live ‘ash heap’ lives’; we spend most of our time and money for things that will end up in the city dump.”

The way I think of it is that everything material in our lives is made from dirt, from the minerals of the Earth beneath our feet, whether it’s our clothes or cars or cell phones or furniture. Don’t invest your life principally in acquiring dirt.

Schaeffer recalls their arrival on the mission field in Europe in 1948, to a continent crushed and impoverished at the end of WW2. He noted that some other missionaries brought their American luxuries with them to the field. That was not a good witness. “What do you think happened when he invited the poor people into his luxurious home to a Bible study? The effort was useless.”

Francis and his wife observed that most of the village women in Switzerland washed clothes at the village pumps, even in bad weather. His initial reaction was, “Isn’t this a shame? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these people had washing machines.” Yet the women shared time together, enjoying the fellowship. What does the American woman do with the time saved by all of her machines? Is she building her family, growing intellectually and spiritually? Sadly, the time saved by modern technology is often used toward vain ends.

As the years went by, all the Swiss farmers acquired lovely little tractors for their mountainside plots. But early on, the women labored with their husbands throughout the day, pitching hay alongside them. “I thought of all the American women who did not have to do this.”

But Schaeffer changed his mind. “The women who worked with their husbands shoulder to shoulder during the day and then slept with them at night had one of the greatest riches in the world. Is there anything worse than our modern affluent situation where the wife has no share in the real life of her husband?”

Is Schaeffer advocating a return to a pre-technological culture? Indeed not. But what will we do with the resources we have today? Do we use our technology and our vehicles and our homes and our luxuries for good? Is there more quiet or simply more dirt in our lives? We can lay up treasure in Heaven . . . we can take treasures with us by sending them ahead. But the treasure isn’t found in the dirt. It’s found in the Great Commission, in relationships, in quiet with the Holy Spirit, in learning and growing and loving and . . . trying.

Think through your life this week. Have you designed your life the way you want it? Why not do that?

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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122. Why do bad things happen?
May 1, 2018

If God is loving and good and if God is all-powerful, then why do bad things happen?  Since bad things happen, maybe God isn’t actually good, or if He is good, then maybe He’s not all-powerful.  Or maybe there is no God after all, because isn’t the whole idea of God wrapped up into love and goodness and omnipotence?

The “problem of evil” has perplexed philosophers for millennia, at least back into Plato’s time.  The atheist likes the problem as a hammer to beat Bible believers with, not realizing that the Bible makes perfect sense of this issue.  I’ll get to that a little later.  If God does exist, though, would the atheist want God to intervene to prevent all cases of evil?  Well, no, nobody wants that, since free will – human autonomy – would end.  Perhaps God should just prevent terrorist attacks and child abuse and conservative politicians from winning elections.  (Atheists do tend to be leftists.)

In the 2014 book by Norman L. Geisler and Daniel J. McCoy, The Atheist’s Fatal Flaw:  Exposing Conflicting Beliefs, they propose three ways God could intervene in moral evil:

A (“All”):  Forcible prevention of all moral evil

B (“Bad”):  Forcible intervention into the most egregious cases of evil

C (“Conscience”):  Voluntary intervention at the mental / spiritual level

The atheist who insists that if God exists, He “should fix everything” (option “A”) but then demands, “But God shouldn’t touch anything,” contradicts himself.  I have used this in 1-2-1 evangelism, by asking the atheist, “Do you really want God to stop all evil all over the world right now?”  If he says, “Yes,” I’ll ask, “What about your evil, your anger and hatred and lust and thefts and greed and selfishness and blasphemy?”  With some additional explanation, I’ll try to help him understand that it’s only the grace of God that we rebels are not cast into Hell right now, so we don’t do any more evil to those around us.

It’s the goodness and patience of God that leads us to repentance (see Romans 2) and grants us the time to figure this out.  Now an atheist might say (choice “B”) that God should at least fix the worst things.  So where does he draw the line?  It’s great fun to force the issue.  The Lord Jesus, in Matthew 5, makes it clear that the worst crimes against God and man start in the mind and heart.  God judges anger as murder of the heart and lust as adultery.  God’s line is drawn more than conservatively.

What about option “C” – God should just influence the conscience, leaving the final determination to the individual.  Yet men and women, including atheists, don’t like their conscience pricked.  We don’t like guilt.  We don’t want to be warned about consequences and judgment.  True autonomy means freedom from guilt so man can just do anything he wants, including lie, cheat, steal, and harass the women around him.  It’s interesting that in recent times even the Left sees sexual harassment as a vile sin, although they can never bring themselves to utter the word sin.  Use of the word sin might imply objective morality and a God who judges.

Regarding the book by Geisler and McCoy – I don’t recommend the book unless you already love to read apologetics books and want to go deeper than usual.  It’s not always an easy read, but they do make some good points.  Hopefully, the nuggets I pull for this essay might be helpful.

The Biblical truths are that God is love, God is good, and God is all-powerful.  God gives us spectacularly free will and, starting with Adam, we use our free will to demand autonomy, rebel against God’s laws . . . which reflect His very character and the reality of the creation we live in . . . and work to deny who we are, made in the image of God and therefore happy only in sync with Him.

The Fall changed things.  Children get sick, hurricanes and forest fires ravage the works of our hands, moral evil abounds, and . . . death takes us all.  That’s the big one . . . DEATH.  Death ought to get our attention.

The Bible also explains redemption, salvation, the hope for personal resurrection available to everyone, the promise of eternal life, and a New Heaven and a New Earth, wherein God’s children – God’s children by their own choice – will enjoy righteousness, peace, love, and fellowship.  This future reality is tied to our troublesome present reality and the reality of Biblical history.

In existentialist / atheist Albert Camus’ work, The Plague, Father Paneloux preaches to his congregation, “Calamity has come on you, my brethren . . . and you deserved it.”  But after the plague kills off children indiscriminately, even sweet children, he softens and points toward Heaven, saying, “My brothers, the love of God is a hard love . . . It alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours.”

The atheist in the play rejects the priest’s sentiment, concluding that if it’s God that deals out death, such a hand is never fair.  So he reasons that God simply cannot exist.  Camus’ point is that we live in a miserable, godless universe and all that matters is what you’re doing now, grabbing whatever gusto you can.

But how can he reason if he is merely molecules in motion?  Reason would be merely brain chemistry.  All the issues of life – human life – including love, compassion, justice, hope, meaning, and morality . . . require personhood.  Persons only exist if the spiritual exists, the nonmaterial.  Morality is personal and objective morality necessitates an ultimate Person – God.  How can Camus reason at all and do so on moral grounds?

Atheists, along with most religiously lost people, misrepresent what faith is.  Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Faith means the will to avoid knowing what is true.”  Richard Dawkins writes about what he thinks the Christian perspective is:  “Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue.  The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are.”  Christopher Hitchens insists that ‘faith’ “is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.”

Sam Harris writes, “Every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence.  In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable.”

I’ll give them credit for employing the tactic of the big lie.  Whatever you’re guilty of, accuse your opponents of it, loudly and often.  This is why Christians must go on offense, challenging the unbeliever’s worldview at every turn.  If anyone’s faith is blind, for example, it’s that of the atheist, who believes in evolution, life somehow evolving from molecules to minnows, from muskrats to molecular biologists.  All without evidence and in defiance of everything scientists have discovered about the information content of DNA, the complexity of protein complexes, and the design of cells, tissues, organisms, and ecosystems . . . design startlingly evident despite the corruption since the Fall of man.

In fact, how dare they use such words as truth, evidence, and conceivable?  These are non-material, not in the Periodic Table, and have no meaning unless personhood exists, and no reality unless truth and logic exist apart from matter and the laws of physics.

The arrogance of the pseudo-intellectual skeptics is unbounded.  Sam Harris writes, “Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation.”  Yet somehow I have had stimulating, coherent, and meaningful conversations with hundreds of Muslims.

What do I, a Bible-believing Christian, have in common with Muslims?  We believe in a Creator who gives man his conscience, that objective morality is real, and that the Ten Commandments – the Biblical Ten Commandments – are representative of man’s responsibilities to his Creator and to other men and women.  Using that common ground and the fact of his God-given conscience, I can easily help the Muslim to understand that he violates God’s laws and therefore falls short of God’s glory . . . in short, he needs a Savior and that Savior must be the Lord Jesus Christ, who is more than the prophet supposed by the Muslim.

Indeed, it is the atheist who is described best by Harris’ follow-on statement:  “Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world.”

Christopher Hitchens wants to lump the Muslim with the Christian as “people of faith,” and beware of those extreme in their faith, as for example the 19 members of Al-Qaeda involved in the 911 attack.  The issue, of course, is the ground for your faith.  Neither the heretical faith of the Muslim nor the blind faith of the atheist have ground to stand upon.  It’s all about worldview, about who is in touch with reality and how you live out your worldview.

Consider how futile are the back-and-forth ragings of the political class and their media pundits.  How can you have a rational argument without agreeing on a worldview which reflects reality and thereby sets the rules?  On abortion, for example, the issue is whether the child is a soul made in the image of God.  If mere tissue, who cares whether it is excised?  If body, soul, and spirit created by God, then a child’s life is precious and worthy of protection.  Figure out what reality is first!  Politicians and pundits are too stupid to think this through.  Ignorance and arrogance are deadly in combination.  The conservatives are just as wicked as the liberals in pretending that God is not really there, not really judging every word that comes out of their mouths.

Let’s recall what ‘faith’ is, properly.  I have faith in my wife because she has demonstrated thousands of times that she is worthy of my trust.  Then, when I plan to go out of town on business, I have faith that she will be faithful to me and responsible with our finances.  My faith is grounded on a solid foundation.  And so it is with the Christian faith.  My trust in God is founded on thousands of specifics, including the veracity of Biblical history, the heart / mind resonant logic of God’s principles, the fruits of my conversion, and the utter vacuousness of competing worldviews.  And so my trust in God extends to His promises not yet fulfilled, including my assured hope for a personal resurrection when the Lord Jesus returns to establish His kingdom.  My faith in God for my future is well grounded.

The authors point out that some atheists are so bold as to consider that “any god who prescribes faith is held to be automatically untrustworthy . . . namely, that it is immoral of God to withhold knowledge.”  Hah!  The atheist admits that he wants to be a god himself, an omniscient god, and cannot stomach the idea of a God above him.

Dan Barker and Bertrand Russell extend this ‘principle’ to sex, arguing for sexual freedom – licentiousness.  Children, they would say, should learn anything they like about sex and never be taught any taboos – rules.  There should be no such thing as sexual sin.  So maybe the whole issue with many atheists is sex.  They want to do anything they want with anyone without consequences.  Many famous atheists have lived accordingly, leaving in their wake a disastrous trail of abused women and abandoned children.

Back to death . . . Asked about the finality of death, Richard Dawkins responded, “I don’t feel depressed about it.  But if somebody does, that’s their problem.  Maybe the logic is deeply pessimistic; the universe is bleak, cold, and empty.  But so what?”

Bertrand Russell:  “All fear is bad.  I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.  I am not young, and I love life.  But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.”

Here’s my take:  The old atheist is so filled with pride that he can face such depressing concepts and scorn the consequences.  In my experience talking with both young and old atheists, however, the young skeptic has not thought through to the end of his empty religion.  It is the evangelist’s job to help him see it.  It just might shake him up and provoke him to think.  That’s what happened to me as a teenage atheist.  I thought it through and got suicidally depressed some fifty years ago . . . which the Lord used to save me, sending a Christian classmate my way to provoke me to think . . . You mean, there might be hope?  And reasons to hope? . . . I had to check it out, at least.  Thank God.

Some atheists are sympathetic to pantheism.  C. S. Lewis explains the attraction:  “The pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing.  He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf.  He will not pursue you.  There is no danger that at any time Heaven and Earth should flee away at His glance.”

Pantheists I’ve talked to, especially Hindus – yes, even highly educated and successful engineers – display a worldview with a ground the consistency of jello. God is whatever you feel like and one’s destiny is no big deal. It will all work out somehow. The task here is to make it personal, emphasizing the personal God and the personal responsibility of the sinner. All morality is personal. If all is illusion or impersonal, we’re back to atheism with no objective morality and a universe with no persons in residence.

Interestingly, atheists (and pantheists) argue that death is natural and so we shouldn’t be worried.  They only get angry with the possibility that God is involved in death . . . and judgment.  Similarly, “faith is understandable, even virtuous, when the object is something trustworthy like man and science.  Thus the problem with death and faith lies not in themselves but in their utilization by God.  The problem is God.”

Atheists do, somehow, see the value of laws and criminal justice systems.  But Sam Harris opines “that the men and women on death row either have bad genes, bad parents, or bad luck.  Which of these quantities are they responsible for?”

What does he mean by bad?  Hey, Sam, what’s bad about rape, murder, or molesting children, or racism, sexism, or sexual harassment?  Isn’t a violent act simply about this clump of molecules in collision with another?  Isn’t that just physics?  And racist or sexist comments . . . that’s just acoustics, right?

Bertrand Russell writes, “It is evident that a man with a propensity to crime must be stopped.”  Must?  Then he likens a man suffering from plague to “a man who suffers from a propensity to commit forgery; but there should be no more idea of guilt in the one case than in the other.”

Yet no atheist truly wants to do away with all police, courts, and prisons.  You can’t live either personally or societally with the consequences of atheism.  Justice is tied to guilt which, by God’s design, is tied to objective morality and the consequences of judgment, whether judgment temporally by man or eternally by God.  Dan Barker doesn’t like guilt:  “We atheists possess ‘salvation’ not because we are released from a sentence, but because we don’t deserve the punishment in the first place.  We have committed no ‘sin’.”

We see the fruits of humanistic thinking in America today.  Absolutes are despised, even minimalist absolutes like the Constitution.  Without sin, laws are arbitrary and judges rule by whim.  Consider . . . how can the Supreme Court, with the preeminent jurists in our nation, continually produce split decisions, 5-4, 6-3, etc?  Isn’t there any clarity at all in their hearts and minds?  But they have no foundation.

Jesus sums up God’s rules:  Love God.  Love others.  The rest of the Bible provides details and examples.  It’s not so complicated.

Christopher Hitchens objects:  “Nothing could be sillier than having a ‘maker’ who then forbade the very same instinct he instilled.”  Once again, he’s talking about fornication.  Sex within a faithful marriage is not good enough for CH, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of monogamous sex, from stable marriages, happy children, better health (no STDs), wealthier households, and even sexual satisfaction.  Consider the typical daily news reports.  Take fornication and substance abuse out of the culture and most of the crime disappears.  Yet the culture despises Christian values, insisting that life is lived fully by ‘partying.’  What does partying mean?  Simply, it means substance abuse and fornication.  How small.

Russell writes, “The worst feature of the Christian religion is its attitude toward sex.”  Dawkins complains that God is “morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions.”

So when you try to reach an atheist with the Gospel, it’s a fair guess that the real problem is fornication.  Don’t be shy about calling him out on that.

The authors point out that the atheist / leftist / humanist is not above ‘righteous anger.’  Christopher Hitchens asserted that abusive (dogmatic?) religious teachers should be glad that Hell is actually a myth “and that they were not sent to rot there.”  Sam Harris:  “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.”  Where would they draw the line?  Should Sunday School teachers be executed?  They’re not concerned about the problems of tyranny as long as they are part of the ruling elite that does the drawing.

We see this on college campuses today where conservative speech is suppressed and persecuted, and violent protests against conservative speakers are encouraged by the faculty and administration.  America is quickly losing its constitutional values, let alone its residual Christian values.

Ultimately, the God-hater cannot live within his worldview, because he demands ‘justice’ defined by his whims and is eager for punishment on those who aren’t part of the group-think.  He just doesn’t want God’s rules, God’s justice, or any god above his own desires. Interestingly, the vocal atheist hates Christians and will invest considerable time and energy, wasting his woefully short life, to persecute those of us he thinks are deluded.  Why?  Why does he care if we enjoy our delusion?  It all makes sense only when we realize that . . .

Atheism is actually Satanism.

The book suggests an interesting point about Hell.  Humanists argue that the idea of God is unnecessary with regard to moral authority because moral authority can be determined within a man or a woman, or by a society of men and women.  What about people who don’t conform to the society’s norm?  Elizabeth Anderson sees a simple solution:  “We deal with people who refuse accountability by restraining and deterring their objectionable behavior.”

But that’s what Hell is, a place where those who hate God and break His laws are restrained from causing any more trouble.  Norm Geisler (one of the authors) was knocking doors, sharing the Gospel, and a fellow named Don opened the door.

Norm:  “Don, if you were to die tonight and stand before God, and God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into my Heaven?’, what would you say?”

Don:  “I’d say to God, ‘Why shouldn’t you let me into your Heaven?”

Norm:  “Don, if we knocked on your door seeking to come into your house, and you said to us, ‘Why should I let you into my house?’ and we responded, ‘Why shouldn’t you let us in?’ what would you say?”

Don:  “I would tell you where to go.”

Norm:  “That’s exactly what God is going to say to you!”

In the rebel’s view, it is completely permissible to keep God out of his life, but for some reason, God cannot keep the rebel out of His.  Heaven, along with the New Earth, would be no Heaven at all if populated by unrepentant rebels, those who would defy God and live self-centered lives for eternity.  Hell . . . the Lake of Fire . . . is, sadly, necessary.

C. S. Lewis admitted, “Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse – so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.”

Here’s a nugget from their discussion of guilt:   “If you imagine how mangled a body would be without a sense of pain, then you get a picture of a soul without a sense of guilt.”  Guilt isn’t some unfortunate quirk of psychology.  True moral guilt is a gift from God.

God uses guilt as the tool in ‘C-level’ interventions, “which the atheist detests because they threaten his autonomy.”  Yet the atheist doesn’t want ‘A-level’ or ‘B-level’ interventions either.  In short, he doesn’t want God to exist.  It’s not so much that he doesn’t believe that God exists.  He doesn’t want to live in a universe with the God who made it.  Well, he won’t have to after the Great White Throne Judgment . . .

. . . which is why we should pray for and plead with and press the unbeliever to WAKE UP!!!  The tracts I design are my best shot at provoking the lost to think, along with others that I use, as discussed in my Tracts essay on this site.

The occasional thoughtful atheist “values a moral humanity as well as a free humanity.”  But so does the God of the Bible, the Creator of our universe.  (Note:  Calvinists can’t make this argument.)  The Bible teaches that ultimate freedom is found in sync with Christ, free from the addiction and the penalty of sin.  We can only be all that we can be in Christ.  That’s what image-of-God design means.

Sin ravages.  Sin destroys.  Sin addicts.  Sin makes one smaller and smaller.  That’s reality.  Atheists can be sympathetic with pantheism, which renders ‘god’ as a “featureless generality,” according to C. S. Lewis.  Even Richard Dawkins doesn’t mind the idea of deism, as long as God stays where He is and leaves us to our own devices.

Moderns love the Star Wars ‘force,’ which is just a form of pantheism.  But true joy, true personal growth, derives from fellowship, first with God, and then with those pointed in the same direction.  It’s got to be personal.  Challenge the atheist’s utter hopelessness and challenge the New Ager’s utter impersonal-ness.  We’re wired (designed) for the personal, both for accountability and for fellowship.  Persons cannot develop without the Creator of persons.

“While Hell rages into the great divorce, Heaven climaxes into the Wedding of the Lamb . . . In the end, each life becomes a battleground of eternal possibility . . . A concrete, personal God makes things He touches more risky.  The stakes are raised to the heavens . . . Such a God is unsafe.”

Redemption, conversion, and ultimately the Christian’s resurrection to a purified body and mind – yet still the same person – changes the rebel’s perspective.  The Lord Jesus . . . God . . . becomes Savior and . . . Friend.  No fear there.  But the Gospel must be given and received for the Holy Spirit to do that work.

We’ve got a part to do there.  Are you helping?

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

 

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123. True Spirituality
May 15, 2018

What if you took a short trip to Heaven, looked around for a while, and then returned to your life on Earth? I’m not talking about those phony visions you hear about, especially those made into books and videos . . . how can you tell they’re phony? For one thing, the message brought back is unbiblical. But what if the Lord actually took you for a short tour? Would it change you?

Afterward, how would you respond to the usual pressures to conform to the world around you? Would you care as much about the latest political flap, or which team won the league championship, or whether taxes went up a bit or down? Would your ambitions change? How would you value the things you spend time on? How would the ‘stuff’ – the wealth – you acquire compare with the riches shown you in Heaven?

After spending time with the Lord Jesus, would you still be starstruck, whether by actors, supermodels, sports stars, or Presidential candidates?

Francis Schaeffer asks such questions in his book, True Spirituality (1971), observing that the Bible records one such man, the apostle Paul, who had just that experience, referenced in 2 Cor 12:2-4. What did Paul see? What did Paul hear in Heaven? The Lord told Paul that he wasn’t allowed to tell us. What we are allowed to preview comes from the Revelation given to John when that apostle was transported in both time and space to observe and report on some of the Heavenly and Earthly events at the time of the Second Coming of Christ. In Paul’s case, the awesomeness of his experience is indicated by the ‘thorn in the flesh’ given to him to keep him humble, no matter his prayers for relief.

Romans chapter 6, especially verse 10, instructs us that we can acquire a properly spiritual perspective now, without a special excursion. “For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” Because of the Cross and the Resurrection, and our new birth, we are to be dead to this present world so that we can “be alive to the presence of God.” Schaeffer: “When I am dead both to good and bad, I have my face turned towards God. And this is the place in which, by faith at the present moment of history, I am to be.”

Now, this type of preaching has generally irritated me throughout my Christian life, because it sounds good, but ethereal, mystical. How do I actually do that on a Tuesday afternoon?!? The problem of the Christ-centered perspective is the continual and annoying distractions of life on Earth . . . take a shower, go to work, get a haircut, shop for food, cook food, wash dishes, change the baby’s diapers, cut the grass, don’t get annoyed by your spouse or boss or the neighbor’s kid, etc., . . . and go to work again and again and again.

God knows all about these distractions and yet He expects and enables us to grow. The simple disciplines are vital: read your Bible, pray, speak kindly, encourage a Christian, share the Gospel with an unbeliever . . . that last one is coupled to a promise (Matthew 28:18-20) that Jesus will walk with you in that endeavor. (It’s true! It works!)

As I’ve written before, growing / sanctification is like a helical staircase. It seems like you’re going round and round in the daily / weekly / monthly cycles of life, but as you do what the Bible says to do, you tend to be what the Bible says you ought to be. Do – be – do – be . . . Your Bible study gets richer as you practice living it and you live it richer as you know your Bible better. The same goes for praying and caring for others, the way you treat others in your family and church and business, and neighborhood, and so on. Suffusing all is the Biblical perspective, a constant, intentional, disciplined awareness that you are a saved sinner, adopted into God’s family, an heir of His Kingdom, one heartbeat from Heaven and an incomprehensibly rich and meaningful life for eternity in a restored New Heaven and New Earth.

If you drift from this perspective, you wallow in the mud that unbelievers view as ‘normal life.’ You have no other choice. You may as well surrender to happiness, a happiness modulated with a burden for the oh-so-many souls around you whose perspective makes this miserable Earth the best they will ever experience, whose end is judgment, destruction, the Lake of Fire. So, yes . . . do good, be happy, and preach the Gospel as if this is life-and-death for lost souls.

Schaeffer suggests two reasons why professing Christians might not bring forth the fruit in their lives that they should. The first reason is ignorance which comes in five varieties. First, the Christian may have been taught about justification, why and how to be saved, but discipleship was neglected, the meaning of Christ’s work in day-to-day life. This was my experience as a 16-year-old. I was born again and I knew it and I knew how and why. But no older Christian I knew cared to teach me ‘what next?’ I wasted about six years and that cost me in many ways.

Secondly, regarding ignorance, the new believer may be left with the impression that the Christian life is to be lived in his own strength, so “Hang in there!” “Tough it out!” This is the impression fostered by much of fundamentalism, especially the IFB churches. (Independent Fundamental Baptists) Where is the Holy Spirit? (“Well, we can’t talk much about him or people will think we’re wacky Pentecostals!”)

A third ignorance goes the opposite way, that once you’ve trusted Christ, you can live any old way you feel like. These antinomians fill evangelical churches and mostly indicate false converts who want a ticket to Heaven but were never challenged to repent from the sins that corrupt their lives.

Fourth, but this is getting rarer, some seek a ‘second blessing’, a sinless perfection that never comes, or tempts you into the dangerous delusion that you’ve achieved it. I’ve met such fellows. They are very hard to talk to.

Schaeffer: “Fifth, he may never have been taught that there is a reality of faith to be acted on consciously after justification.” When a truly born again disciple grasps that the reality of the Christian life is the only reality in God’s creation, it’s a door that opens to purpose and meaning, and an assured hope that overwhelms the trivial troubles of life.

Of course, you’ve got to work to keep that door open. It seems to be mounted on stiff-spring hinges. That’s why Paul confessed that he died daily.

This connects to Schaeffer’s other reason we don’t bear much fruit. It’s not simply the truths, the doctrines, that are important. “It is always doctrine appropriated that counts.” In justification, that’s obvious. Many know the facts of the Gospel, but mental assent doesn’t save. This deceit will be shocking to many churchgoers who face the Great White Throne Judgment.

Sanctification is parallel to justification in this sense. “In justification we must see, acknowledge, and act upon the fact that we cannot save ourselves. In sanctification we must see, acknowledge, and act upon the fact that we cannot live the Christian life in our own strength or our own goodness.”

In justification, our part is faith. God’s part is grace. In sanctification, our part is faith. God’s part is grace.

But . . . “This does not mean I disappear. We do not just sit and wait for a stroke of lightning from the sky.” We’ve got the Bible, meeting with God’s people, prayer, the indwelling Holy Spirit. These are not mechanical means, a dead religious repetition. Just showing up for church doesn’t cut it. Faith . . . trust . . . must suffuse our consciousness. That’s hard work, actually. But it’s hard work in justification, too. Consider: Truly humbling your proud heart, examining the guilt and pride and pleasure taken in sin and repenting to provoke God’s saving grace . . . that’s the hardest work of all.

Perhaps this is the sense of our Lord’s reply when religious folks challenged Him:

“Then said they unto him, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God? Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him who he hath sent.” John 6:28-29

Yes, believing in the Biblical sense can be hard work! Yet the Bible teaches that it’s as ‘easy’ as drinking water or opening a door. It’s volitional.

Justification is once for all . . . that explains the metaphor ‘born again’ . . . while the Christian life is moment by moment. That’s the big difference. You can’t escape the moment by moment and so the volitional work of maintaining perspective is difficult. The world won’t help you, will it? It would be nice if other Christians helped, but churches (in the West) aren’t designed for much help here.

“No one lives his whole life at a time.” My IFB church experiences are notable. It seemed that the Sunday services, including passionate altar calls on Sunday morning and Sunday night, were designed to give everyone a big dose of self-willpower to help you coast until the Wednesday night service. I could feel the passion on Sunday night, but by Monday morning (shower, breakfast, work, a day full of annoyances), it was vapor.

Similarly, today we hear much talk of contentless ‘faith.’ Faith in Faith. Vapor! Christian faith is content-full, resting upon Christ’s finished work on the Cross and the historical space-time fact of His resurrection. We consciously hold onto the perspective that we live as if already raised from the dead . . . moment by moment. Monday afternoon needs its own faith in the Lord Jesus.

Schaeffer warns against the mechanical, the rote. “Anything that has the mark of the mechanical upon it is a mistake. It is not possible to say, read so many chapters of the Bible every day, and you will have this much sanctification.”

Sanctification is intensely personal and communicative. We must be in regular communication with the Lord, even though it seems one-way most of the time. The ‘feedback’ we get, the two-way part, is found in God’s word and the leading of the Holy Spirit. We can neglect neither. Many do, making the Christian walk entirely intellectual, as if simply ingesting Biblical doctrine is enough. And many neglect God’s precious word, pretending that they are led continually by the Spirit. You know the type.

Let’s say you climb the sanctification helix steadily, but then sin trips you up. Something is gone, peace and quietness are elusive, but you remember what you had. Are you toast? Nope, justification is once for all time. The Bible’s teaching is simple and clear, and restoration of the erring child to his loving Father in Heaven is instantly available. I mean, wow. God is instant to wipe the slate clean and restore perfect fellowship as soon as we act, act in humility and faith. I wish we all were so instant when offenses arise. This seems to be the era in Western Christendom for Christians to take offense as quickly as the lost, and to hold grudges as dearly.

Schaeffer: “I must go back to Him as a Person . . . He is not just a doctrine or an abstraction; He is a Person who is there.” And yes, we need help even in this, and we can ask for help. Schaeffer describes faith as an “active passivity.” I’m not sure I like the phrase very much, but it does make a suitable point. In restoration, along with sanctification and justification, “we cannot do it of ourselves, but neither are we sticks or stones. God has made us in His own image, and He will always deal with us on that ground.”

Schaeffer camps on the principle that true spirituality, which includes holiness, is not merely emotional, but rather built on content, true content as opposed to false, content learned and grasped by the mind.

Consider Romans 1:22-29. In v. 22, “Professing to be wise, they became fools,” this is an internal process. In v. 24, “Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves,” shows the consequence . . . first an idea in the thought-life, then the result in behavior. In v. 25 the rebel looks at truth and rejects it in favor of a lie. In v. 28 the rebels “did not like to retain God in their knowledge,” and so “God gave them over to a reprobate mind.” The mind that rejects knowledge gets warped. God won’t chase us after a certain point, but leaves us to our own perverted distortion of reality.

In Eph. 4:17 we see the command, “that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind.” All unbelief couples to a denial of reality – insanity – whether evolution or Hinduism or Marxism or Roman Catholicism, etc. Then, vs. 18-19 . . . “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.”

Failing to understand truth, the rebel cannot find God. His heart – the seat of his desires and decisionmaking – keeps the mind dark. Why? Once yielded to sins of the mind and flesh, the rebel wallows. I meet these folks all the time. Especially the middle-aged or elderly rebel, whether atheist or religious, rejects truth promptly and with derision. He’s hard.

In contrast, the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer is internal, pointing and cajoling and pricking the conscience to embrace reality. Consider Mark 7:15-23 wherein Jesus teaches that evil starts within the individual, with thoughts, and proceeds outwards into theft, covetousness, adultery, murder, pride, etc.

Schaeffer observes that man distinguishes himself from the animal kingdom in that “he lives inside his own head. He has an internal world of thought that is unique.” And not just man. Consider Isaiah 14:13-14 . . . “For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”

Man’s internal problem is no different from Lucifer’s. Yet man is redeemable. Those who reject forgiveness, though, will share Satan’s fate. Hell was created for Satan and his fallen angels. Foolishly, most men and women will share in that judgment.

There seem to be no limits to the ways that man can distort reality. Christian Science makes everything only a thought-world. Eastern religions make everything mere illusion or a dream of some mystical not-really-personal god. God is personal. He created an objective existent universe outside of Himself and actively holds it together (Col 1:17). God thought first and brought forth creation.

Schaeffer recalls Michelangelo’s fresco of the creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The fingers of God and Adam do not touch. Man is not an extension of God’s nature, but has a separate objective existence. Interestingly, God’s other arm is thrown backward, covering some cherubs (Renaissance visualizations of angels) and a beautiful girl. “Most people have felt that this is a representation of Eve. She is not yet created, but she is in the mind of God . . . Michelangelo meant that before God created Eve He had already thought about her.”

So the real battle for men is in the world of ideas. All heresies and all vicious governmental policies start with ideas. From ideas burst forth music and art, architecture and technology, political parties and charities. “Where a man will spend eternity depends on his reading or hearing the ideas, the propositional truth, the facts of the Gospel.” The content of the Good News can be expressed rationally and embraced or rejected. Man has such spectacularly free will that he decides whether God is true or a liar. The wrong decision can persist, however, only while breath lasts.

The Christian must speak truth clearly, boldly, bluntly, flamingly. Why are so few Christians interested in learning to speak truth, in learning how to speak truth more compellingly, more powerfully? Don’t we care about our children, our neighbors, our nation? Why don’t Christians think more, read more, discuss more, even debate more? Why is church life so utterly devoid of content?!?

Schaeffer: “Do we not understand that even right entertainment can be the wrong integration point and be just as wicked as wrong entertainment if I put it in the place of God? There is nothing wrong with sport. Many sports are beautiful, but if sport becomes my integration point and my whole life turns upon knocking one second off my time on a downhill race, I am destroyed.”

Whether Olympic athletes or pro tennis or football players, or even astronauts, the investment in vanity is tragic. How much more for their fans . . . or Fantasy Footballers . . . or those addicted to Youtube, Facebook, etc. Hey, I like a candy bar on occasion, but obsessive indulgence kills.

Most older people I witness to don’t have questions. They do have ill-founded assertions. They hate questions that challenge those assertions and have little or no patience to consider whether they got it wrong so long ago. When Jesus told us to be like a little child, He was encouraging us to ask questions and be willing to accept good answers. What child doesn’t have questions? It’s the old and the dead who don’t.

In Schaeffer’s position paper, Two Contents, Two Realities, delivered to an evangelism conference in 1974, he writes about the intellectual questions that unbelievers have: “Maybe not everybody in your church or your young people’s society can answer them, but the church should be training men and women who can . . . It is part of what Christian education ought to be all about.” Indeed. And we’ve got to bring the young people out on the street to contend for the Gospel to validate their training.

Sigmund Freud did not really believe in love, insisting that the end of all things is sex. Freud wrote to his fiancee, “When you come to me, little Princess, love me irrationally.” Schaeffer suggests “that no sadder word could be written.” Freud denies that he has real love in his heart, denies that he is made in the image of God. Freud is damned by his own denial of reality. He has rebelled against his own heart because he has rebelled against God. In denying God he has denied his own uniqueness as a man, and sees himself as mere creature, mere animal. His heart cries out, “I am man!” But his mind corrupts his heart and denies his God-given manhood.

Man is finite and so cannot be God. But when man rejects God he denies that he is anything more than an animal . . . worse, anything more than a clump of molecules in motion.

Recall the imagery of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders. He sees you walking by and asks you to carry the world for a while. You’re squashed. You’re not capable. How are we squashed in life? Pump a tire too full and it blows out. The high pressure finds a weakness and the break occurs there. “Since the Fall, we all have points of weakness. With some of us it tends to be physical, and with some it tends to be psychological . . . The central overwhelming pressure is that of needing to be the integration point of all things because we are not willing to be the creatures we are . . . We refuse to bow before Him in the midst of our moment-by-moment lives.”

Life ‘works’ only when we face the reality of who we are in relation to God. It was hope that I craved as a young man, a young atheist. Now I understand to some measure and appreciate the ‘Big 3’ . . . faith, hope, and charity. Faith and charity get much press, but hope was the big one for me. I craved hope. When I discovered that I could have an assured hope, I was all in.

Now I have no fear of non-being, of non-existence. I have no fear of meaninglessness, and no fear of death. Quite often as I grow older, I long to be home. That’s not my prayer, though. My prayer is to hang around for a few more days and get out some more tracts, try to encourage another believer, etc. But my heart yearns for a better country, my true home. The unbeliever has no assured hope, the atheist none at all, and the religious merely a vague wish dependent on his imagined good works . . . although I don’t see many good works in the culture.

I’ve just scratched the surface on Schaeffer’s treatise. True spirituality is a life-long quest for every believer. At least it should be. It must be. Our days are short and therefore precious. Let the prayer of the aging believer be, “Now also when I am old and grey-headed, O God, forsake me not; until I have showed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.” Psalm 74:18

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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124. Where does music come from?
June 1, 2018

Did you know that of the 9,000 species of birds, about 4,000 are songbirds? Birds are extremely skilled musicians. Birds sing to mark their territories, for courtship, and for recognition between a courting pair. Birds sing duets and even matched duets, in which two courting pairs devise a song involving split-second timing for all four participants! A nightingale can have a repertoire of 300 different songs.

A blue jay can sing both notes of a major chord simultaneously! How? We humans have one set of vibrating membranes in the larynx, but birds have two sets. Each set of vocal chords receives air independently from each lung. The brain is wired accordingly, so the two voices can speak at the same or at different times.

When we sing, we have to be careful about taking breaths. But songbirds take mini-breaths so short that the gaps are not noticeable. Canaries can produce music from the left lung while they use the right lung for breathing!

The evidence of design in songbirds is overwhelming. Birds did not evolve from reptiles – the differences are enormous. Their brains, bones, feathers, muscles, lungs, and hot-blooded metabolism are all optimally designed for what they do. And it’s clear that much of birdsong is intended for beauty.

Scientists have discovered that human brains, too, are wired for music appreciation. This is not true for chimps and other large-brained animals. Harmony and melody are tied to universal mathematical and physical principles.

People of all backgrounds and beliefs speak of the soul of music. Music is tied to emotions and relationships. Your body, brain, and hands are especially suited for playing instruments like the violin, guitar, and piano. We compose music and our personalities yearn for spiritual expression in song. Our vocal chords make the most beautiful sounds in creation.

What is music for? Music is evidently part of God’s nature. In Zephaniah 3:17 the Bible says that God will express his “joy over thee with singing.” That is, over His born again children, those who have sincerely repented from the sins in their lives and trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior . . . with changed lives that prove that heart and mind are transformed.

That’s why Jesus was born, as Charles Wesley wrote in a great hymn, “Born that man no more may die; Born to raise the sons of earth; Born to give them second birth. Hark! The herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn King.’”

It’s interesting that Lucifer was designed with musical instruments, tabrets (small drums) and pipes built into his physical form. He was a walking orchestra! Perhaps, also, the original congregational song leader in Heaven, before he rebelled and was renamed Satan, the Adversary . . . our Adversary.

Satan perverts everything he can. He hates God (a job he wanted) and hates God’s image-bearers (you and me). God intended music as a gift for us to lift our spirits, glorify God, and encourage each other. Much of the world’s music scoffs at God, glorifies the Devil, and promotes illicit sex, drinking, drug use, rebellion, racism, sexism, and violence.

That rock or pop or rap or country music you love . . . ever listen to the lyrics? Have you noticed how many popular musicians have led debauched lives and died young, simply living the lifestyle they glorified on stage?

The Bible’s psalms (songbook) is rich in praise of God and instructive in the virtues of truth, respect, self-sacrificial love, forgiveness, wisdom, faith – everything that gives meaning to life. The psalm writers knew that music is a declaration, in the soul and in the spirit world, of who is worthy of our affection and reverence.

What music do you love? What music do your children listen to? Who do you want to be? It starts with knowing and loving God, but that starts with simple humility. You and me – we’re sinners, unworthy of God’s presence, unworthy of Heaven, destined to spend eternity with the ultimate rebel, Satan, in the Lake of Fire . . . unless . . . you repent and trust Christ.

Repent from what? Ever get angry or insult someone? Jesus calls that murder of the heart. Murderers are headed for Hell. Ever lust after someone not your spouse? That’s adultery of the heart. (Porn counts, too.) Ever tell a lie? Jesus warns that liars will be cast into the Lake of Fire. Those are just three of the Ten Commandments.

Jesus Christ – God in the flesh – suffered God’s wrath on a cruel cross. He was innocent, yet intentionally offered Himself in your place. Three days later, He raised Himself from the dead. That’s credibility. He offers you eternal life if you repent from the destructive sins in your life and trust and follow Him. Your life will change now and for eternity. As the John W. Peterson song goes, “O it is wonderful to be redeemed, justified, forever reconciled!”

A reference for birdsong plus other topics: Hallmarks of Design: Evidence of Purposeful Design and Beauty in Nature, by Stuart Burgess

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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125. I Don’t Want to Change!
July 1, 2018

Distressed at the way the discussion was trending, Mr. Heart cries out, “I don’t want to change!” This is a pivotal moment in the plot of The Board, a short Christian film that illustrates the complexity of human beings – God’s image-bearers – when confronted with a big decision, especially whether to respond to the Gospel. I heartily recommend that you pick up this DVD, a low-budget but well-done production by the folks at Bethesda Baptist Church of Brownsburg, Indiana, in 2008. I wrote an essay to analyze this work which you can find in the 2014 archive, by scrolling down to Blog #25, April 15, 2014.

I recently read a sermon preached by Martyn Lloyd-Jones in 1963, entitled “Mind, Heart, and Will,” which I found in the book, The Christ-Centered Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He takes off from Romans 6:17 . . . “But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you.”

Let’s unpack that verse in reverse order. The lost man, who was once the servant of sin, was challenged with doctrine / teaching / Biblical truth regarding his lost condition. His heart responded to the truth, provoking his will to obey the message. The Bible gives us deep insights about who we are. What is a man or a woman beyond the biochemical? There are dramatic differences between you and any creature in the animal kingdom.

The Mind / Heart / Will model is a useful way to think about how we act, react, learn, choose, behave, and live our lives. With your mind you observe, analyze, interpret, and reason, using experiences, logic, and common sense. Your heart, as I see it, is your center, the whatever-it-is in you that processes what your mind does and integrates that with emotions and conscience and the pressures from our surroundings. Your will includes the determination, the gumption, and the character you have to see something through, something your heart is set on.

What The Board does is to expand this simple model, adding additional Biblical elements, namely memory, emotion, and conscience. The film represents you or me, let’s call him ‘Dave’, as 6 characters meeting in a boardroom: Mr. Mind, Mr. Memory, Mr. Heart, Mr. Emotion, Mr. Will, and Mr. Conscience.

How is Dave going to respond to his friend at work, who shared the Gospel with him? Here’s the way Martyn Lloyd Jones (MLJ) sees it: “Man is a wonderful creature; he is mind, he is heart, and he is will. Those are the three main constituents of man. God has given him a mind, he has given him a heart, and he has given him a will whereby he can act. Now one of the greatest glories of the Gospel is that it takes up the whole man. Indeed, I go so far as to assert that there is nothing else that does that; it is only this complete Gospel, this complete view of life and death and eternity, that is big enough to include the whole man. It is because we fail to realize this that many of our troubles arise. We are partial in our response to this great Gospel.”

I’ve been thinking about how the 6-ply model meshes with MLJ’s 3-ply model. I think that’s fairly simple. Mr. Memory is not some Intel chip that simply offers data on command. Our memories are partial and selective, and influenced by who we are, what we believe, what we like, what we’re afraid of, and so on. Mr. Memory is tied intimately to Mr. Mind, because we typically learn and analyze via pattern recognition, as I’ve detailed in my October 15 and November 1, 2017, blogs. Memory is a record of experiences and Mind is, therefore, entirely dependent on Memory, not just on the raw data, but on how our memories are shaped by who we are and, the inverse, how our memories shape us.

Mr. Heart’s ear is tuned to the loud voice of Mr. Emotion more than to any other board member. Mr. Conscience’s voice is almost a whisper for many. Most people are driven far more by emotion than by reason, after all. If Emotion dominates the Board, then Dave is in trouble. A small child’s Mr. Emotion starts as a muscle-bound tyrant. As the child grows, the parents train their child’s Board or trouble is assured. Also, the child’s Will tends to be much stronger than that of the parents in modern families.

Mr. Conscience hopes to influence all the other board members, but is closest to Mr. Will. “Don’t do that! It’s wrong!” “Yeah, keep on doing that! That’s good!”

MLJ observes that some folks respond to the Gospel intellectually, weighing ‘Christianity’ as a philosophy against various competitors. In our day there aren’t many people of consequence in this category. Rather, there are multitudes of nominal professing Christians, who see the value of holding to some aspects of Christian ethics and morality, but whose lives are driven by other concerns. Mr. Mind pays lip service to the Gospel, but Mr. Heart uses other criteria for decisions.

I recall a fellow church member long ago who worked for many years on a detailed commentary for the book of Romans. He had no interest in sharing the Gospel with lost people, but he supposedly knew everything there was to know about Paul’s message to the Romans. He had no interest in real fellowship with other believers, but he was an expert on Romans. He apparently didn’t know what Paul was talking about! In short, Mr. Mind was brilliant, but the rest of his Board was disabled, and the book of Romans is for the whole person.

For someone to be saved, the Board must vote unanimously in favor. Once saved, for a Christian to grow and stay in balance, the entire Board must grow together. Heart and Mind and Will must be in sync. Most of Western ‘church’ design is antagonistic to this. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches work to produce emotional experiences. The emergent movement, striving to tap into historic Roman Catholic mysticism, also appeals to Mr. Emotion.

The Devil has a huge variety of product offerings. Mysticism may work for some, but a high-decibel ‘worship team’ will appeal to others. The winsome ‘teaching pastor’ tickles the mind while the overall experience strokes Mr. Emotion. Mr. Heart says, “Yeah, I like it here. I’ll stick around.” And the megachurch has another member without ever challenging him on his lost condition and never explaining sin, judgment, Hell, Heaven, repentance, faith, the new birth, and a transformed life.

Note the verse following our key verse, Romans 6:18: “Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.” That never happens to the new church member. That was never the goal! And it was never explained.

The IFB churches (Independent Fundamental Baptist) are a little different. They appeal primarily to the Conscience and the Will. “Hurry up, make a decision! You might die tonight, you dastardly sinner! Hit the altar now!” Mind and Heart are largely bypassed. It’s enough to get him to the altar, get him baptized, and get him coming back to church every week so he can show up, shut up, and pay up. Once ‘saved’, then “Hang in there! Tough it out! Duty, Duty, Duty!” Even for the truly born again within the IFB churches, the preaching pattern orients toward Will and Conscience, not the whole man.

MLJ recounts a meeting he had with a number of pastors who worked in the inquiry room for a famous evangelist, dealing with anyone who responded to the invitation. They would ask the fellow why he’d come. A typical response was that he “didn’t know” or “I have come because the preacher told us to come.”

This professional evangelist, like many, was gifted in story-telling and dramatization. He appealed strongly to the emotions and people were moved, “but there seemed to be no conception of truth; there was no relationship at all to ‘that form of doctrine which was delivered.’”

The typical IFB evangelist presses for decisions, hammering at the conscience and demanding a surrender of will. MLJ: “It seems to me that to talk about deciding for Christ is a denial of the text that we are considering . . . If a great bombardment is made upon the wills of men, there are certain wills that are sure to respond . . . Pressure has been put on the will . . . And later on they will begin to ask questions; the devil will see to it that questions are raised in their minds. And they will find that they do not have an answer . . . these are people who decide to take up Christianity instead of being taken up by Christianity.”

The result of such out-of-balance exhortation is false profession. Mind, Heart, and Will, informed by Memory, Emotion, and Conscience must be engaged, convinced, in sync. The whole man gets saved or there is no salvation.

To be saved I must understand the Gospel and it must move me to change . . . to repent . . . to transform (with God’s help) my attitudes, my worldview, and my direction in life . . . and the proof of this change is that I act and act consistently as a matter of will, informed by a reborn conscience.

MLJ declares that two out of three is not enough. “It is equally wrong to have the head and the heart only without the will, or the head and the will without the heart, or the heart and the will without the head . . . A great Gospel like this takes up the whole man, and if the whole man is not taken up, think again as to where you stand . . . What a Gospel! . . . It can satisfy man’s mind completely, it can move his heart entirely, and it can lead to wholehearted obedience in the realm of the will. Christ died that we might be complete men, not merely that parts of us may be saved – not that we might be lopsided Christians but that there may be a balanced finality about us.”

“. . . ye have obeyed from the heart that doctrine which was delivered you.”

What had happened? They heard and embraced the truth. It wasn’t just an emotional experience or an appeal to the will. “It is doctrine first . . . The apostles were not sent out simply to produce results and to change people. They were sent to preach the Gospel, to preach the truth, to preach and declare Jesus and the resurrection.”

Modern churches are obsessed with growth. We visited a megachurch a few years ago that had acquired a number of members who came from Roman Catholic churches. I asked a leader what their process was to teach these people what the true Gospel was, to challenge them on their lost condition. The answer was that there was no process. Everyone was welcome! Wow . . . who cares whether they are saved or lost or understand anything at all!

What about the truly born again Christian? Well, sanctification works the same way. To grow, the whole man must grow. MLJ: “Truth comes to the mind and to the understanding enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Then having seen the truth, the Christian loves it. It moves his heart.” The mind grows in knowledge and wisdom. The heart grows in love toward God and compassion toward men. Acting in accord with God’s word develops and strengthens the will. The Christian grows and desires yet more truth and has more capacity to love it and act on it. And so we climb the sanctification helix . . . as if we’re on a helical staircase, going round and round – mind, heart, and will – but always rising.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones insists, “God made man in His own image, and there is no question but that the greatest part of this image is the mind with its capacity for apprehending truth. God has endowed us with that, and God sends truth to us in that way. But God forbid that anyone should think that it ends with the intellect. It starts there, but it goes on. It then moves the heart, and finally the man yields his will. He obeys, not grudgingly or unwillingly, but with the whole heart. The Christian life is a glorious life that takes up and captivates the entire personality. Oh, may God make us balanced Christians, men and women of whom it can be said that we are obviously, patently obeying from the heart the form of doctrine that has been delivered unto us.”

That’s where MLJ ends his sermon . . . and I love it. Let me close this essay with a couple of elementary, but vital applications, which I expand on in the essays within the Discipleship and Evangelism sections of this web site.

First, when you share the Gospel, you must emphasize the doctrinal content of the Gospel. Don’t ‘sell Jesus’ on the basis of personal peace or happiness or a better marriage or potential prosperity or even Heaven. The lost man is a sinner who needs the Savior. The sinner must see his sin as vile and his judgment as certain. He must also see the Savior as his only recourse, and true repentance and faith and a transformed life as the only rational path. His mind must comprehend, his heart must respond, and his will must see it through.

Second, your weekly Christian life – we all live essentially on weekly cycles – must include doctrinal / intellectual content. Your heart must be moved, not just once and then you coast, but regularly. And your will must reveal your heart by reaching out to the lost and encouraging other believers. That’s evangelism and discipleship / fellowship. That’s what the New Testament is all about.

Please consider . . . Your church is designed against these principles. Where is the intellectual content? Where is the in-depth Bible study? Where is apologetics? Where is historical and cultural analysis based on Biblical principles? When is the heart challenged and stimulated? Where are the opportunities to substantively encourage each other, teach each other, exhort one another, and team up with all of your collective resources to preach the Gospel to every lost man, woman, and child in your community?

For the sake of your own service to God, for the sake of your spouse and children, and for God’s sake, what are you going to do to build your whole man?

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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126. How to be an intellectual
August 1, 2018

Is it reasonable that butchers, barbers, and construction workers might qualify as intellectuals, whereas tenured professors, published authors, and revered media pundits might not? Indeed! Outrageous, you say? Not so much.

Bradley Green’s book, The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life, has a simple theme . . . “The Christian vision of God, man, and the world offers a particular, unique understanding of what the intellectual life might look like.” Furthermore, it is the only foundation for an intellectual life that is in touch with the reality in which we live.

Accordingly, the brick layer who intentionally grounds his purpose for living on God’s word, and works it out in his family, his business, his politics, his attitudes, and his hopes and dreams, lives an intellectual, philosophical, and practical life that pleases the God he knows is there. In contrast, the academic or pundit, well-credentialed with degrees and well-read in degenerate and skeptical literature, misses the point of this life and will be shocked by the judgment to come . . . regardless of how well he phrases his unbelief or how clever he mocks the reality of who he is and to Whom he is accountable.

Green’s theme is right on the mark. It’s a corollary to Biblical presuppositionalism, namely, start with the Bible and build on that foundation, especially regarding what people think of as intellectual pursuits. Philosophy, after all, is the basis for anything people regard as intellectual. And philosophy is typically divided into three major topics, metaphysics (where we came from and what life is all about), epistemology (how we know what we think we know), and values (ethics, morals, what’s right and what’s wrong).

We live in an age of increasing fuss and fury, as you’ve noticed. Why is there all this conflict in our nation and in our culture? It’s about competing worldviews, competing philosophies. Take the Gospel out of the culture and chaos grows. Every man does that which is right in his own eyes.

Green: “Ultimately, where the Gospel is not holding sway, it should not surprise us to see the subtle or not-so-subtle disintegration of, or rejection of, meaningful intellectual engagement and activity.” Consider current political discourse, featuring name-calling, screaming, intimidation, and even violence. It’s frustrating to watch when an honest reporter attempts to get a liberal politician or pundit to answer a reasonable question, and the leftist refuses to answer. No debate, no reasoning, no civility. Yet Americans seem not to notice. Reason is disrespected. And the Marxist game plan is always to deceive, always to lie. It does seem to be working.

Green quotes Anthony Kronman who laments that universities have “given up on the meaning of life.” But of course they have, since an evolutionary / atheistic worldview allows no meaning. John Sommerville writes, “Universities are not giving us much practice at formulating worldviews, in their haste to fit us for our jobs.” That’s both true and false. It’s true in that the engineering or business major focuses on acquiring skills for the career. But every student suffers through social justice indoctrination in courses outside her major. In those courses a definite worldview is pushed.

Furthermore, God has established the institutions of the family and the church to build the worldview of each generation’s children. If they fail, the generation fails.

Green quotes Oliver O’Donovan: “So Western civilization finds itself the heir of political institutions and traditions which it values without any clear idea why, or to what extent, it values them.” In politics, liberals and conservatives often talk about our American values. We don’t share so many values anymore. Right-to-life vs. abortion-on-demand, big oppressive government vs. individual liberty, marriage between man and woman as a God-given institution vs. 94 genders doing whatever they want and demanding that the rest of us celebrate it . . . which values are right?

Robert Jenson: “It is the insight of the whole line from Rousseau to Nietzsche that reason undoes itself because it undoes God, without whom reason – as every other interesting virtue – is groundless . . . The university is to be democracy’s temple, but it is to house no God.” Where does virtue come from? All virtues reflect God’s very character and the conscience He implanted in every image-bearer. Defy that principle and you defy reality. Kick God off the campus and anti-reason prevails.

Green observes that the Biblical doctrine of creation indicates that a real world exists that can be known. Some Eastern religions insist that all is illusion, although their devotees cannot actually live that way. I have talked with Intel engineers who subscribe to Hinduism. Think of that! They design computer chips that must work and work reliably in the real world and yet when they get off work, they insist to me that all is illusion, sin is imaginary, immorality doesn’t count, etc.

Furthermore, “God is a speaking God who has created us as knowing creatures.” So true knowledge is available. “Education is concerned with coming in contact with ‘the truth of things’.” The Christian cares about what is, not merely how he would like the universe to be. We therefore see others as lost or saved and work to reach the lost, to tell them the truth, and to encourage the saved on Biblical grounds. Josef Pieper: “The essence of knowing would lie . . . in the discovery of reality.” The Christian faces reality and tries to do some good within it.

Green contrasts the Christian view with gnosticism, ancient beliefs that pervade much of false worldviews today. Gnosticism sees the world as evil, but the Christian sees it as created good, but fallen due to sin. Gnosticism sees evil and chaos in the world system as inherent from the beginning, but the Christian sees an ordered world that still allows virtue and still contains beauty despite the effects of sin. In gnosticism, intrinsically good man should manipulate and transform the world apart from any transcendent God. The Christian is to be a steward of God’s creation with an assured hope of a restored Heaven and Earth under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Finally, the gnostic sees man as sinless, but the Christian affirms the reality that sin is ever present and God’s laws are paramount, paramount because of Who declared them, because that’s how reality works.

Graeme Goldsworthy: “God made every fact in the universe and He alone can interpret all things and events.” As created beings, we are not autonomous.

History is vital to the intellectual. “The whole book of Deuteronomy is a lesson to the Israelites before they enter the Promised Land. Do not forget the past! Do not forget what the Lord has commanded you and what He has done for you.”

The historical reality is that God’s Son, Jesus, became a man in space and time. The historical fact of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ informs and motivates every aspect of the Christian life. Denial of this history fosters any and all irrational worldviews.

The vitality of history gets quite personal regarding individual memory and thought. Richard Weaver: “The intellectual value of anything depends upon our ability to retrieve from memory.” John Lukacs: “All human thinking – conscious and unconscious – depends on memory . . . There is no function of the human brain that is not connected with memory.” Soren Kierkegaard: “We live forward, but we can only think backward.”

Green observes that today there is little emphasis on memory because our culture sees little value in the past. An attack on or diminution of the value of memory is an attack on mind and rationality. Weaver: “The preservation of society is therefore directly linked with the recovery of true knowledge.”

I’ve read recently that you must check your smart phone at the gate of some concerts and other public events. Observers have noted the fidgety near-panic of many in the crowd who must wait phone-less for 20 to 60 minutes before the event starts and distracts them from their addiction. And so the technology that brings to us a world of true and false, but typically trivial information, destroys reflection, thought, and conversation. Also, statistically, the info stream drives the masses more and more into group think . . . an anti-godly group think.

Green: “The Gospel is the historical reality that shapes all the rest of history. The defeat of evil in the future is ultimately tied to the Gospel itself.” In denying the historical Gospel, the unbelieving world grabs other values and drives communities and cultures and nations in chaotic and dysfunctional directions, ultimately enabling the antichrist to step in. That’s why the world is going crazy. Whichever party you vote for . . . and you should vote, at least to minimize evil . . . nobody in power in any nation cares to stand on Biblical ground.

So don’t get excited or depressed about politics. Get excited about whatever freedom we have left to share the Gospel. It’s still a lifeboat that can save one or two in your sphere.

Modern education, from Kindergarten through grad school, works to cut students off from the true past. “This war on the past is fundamentally anti-Christian in that it is essentially a gnostic obsession with the immediate.” We must therefore take responsibility for our own children and the children in our churches. Who is doing that?!? Who is intentional in teaching true history and in teaching how to contend for it?

Alasdair MacIntyre: “What matters is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” The community for intellectual life must be the local church. The family can do much, but the family is not enough! God gave gifts to the church. No one family has a full set. But find me a church that is organized to use its gifts as God intended. Their weekly program is designed to prevent this! And find me a church that is more than fluff on history and apologetics!

Decades ago C. S. Lewis spoke on how modern culture and education shapes boys and girls without virtue or heart: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Without the Gospel as foundation and as central to the construction of character, there is no hope. Do it for your family, at least, and demand that your church give it a try.

Green moves on to telos . . . what’s the point of life, what’s the goal, what’s the purpose, the meaning? He cites British philosopher Roger Scruton, who observes that in this age we have scientific and technical mastery over much in our world, “but its meaning is hidden from us. We have knowledge of the facts, and knowledge of the means, but no knowledge of the end . . . We no longer know what to do or what to feel; the meaninglessness of our world is a projection of our numbness towards it.”

What is Scruton’s solution? Should we turn to some transcendent source of meaning, like God? No. We should turn to culture: “The high point of culture . . . is to recuperate by imaginative means the old experience at home.” Scruton alludes to historic Christian themes, but only as metaphors. He even refers to Confucius because that allows us to live life as if we live in a divinely created and governed world.

Scruton: “Even if we have no religious beliefs, we acknowledge the existence of sacred things, and endow our gestures with a nimbus (a halo or aura) of the supernatural. Living thus we peer serenely into the eternal.”

But this is all hocus pocus, hooey, phony-baloney mysticism! Francis Schaeffer has written much about this, observing that the secular man, denying God, yearns for the transcendent and so makes irrational leaps of faith toward . . . something . . . something undefinable, yes, but there must be something because the human spirit goes beyond the chemical constituents of the human body. By the way, I’m surprised that Green never cites Schaeffer, although it seems he must have learned from him in a variety of ways.

Hey, folks, never get intimidated by the liberal theologian or philosopher or pundit or whatever. They aren’t in touch with reality, no matter how loquacious their prose. And when pressed, they do admit yearning for something more than the dirt of the Earth.

Green affirms that “our lives – whether we consciously recognize it or not – are going somewhere. And if that is the case, if all of life is viewed against the landscape of a certain telos or goal, then even apparently nontheological matters (such as music, history, mathematics) have their ultimate end in God himself. There ultimately are no ‘non-theological matters’.”

But the modern secular mind is filthy with nihilism, skepticism, and intellectual dead ends. They live in God’s created world and walk as image-bearers with a conscience they cannot deny. So when they act and profess that they are autonomous, “there will be some type of ‘cognitive dissonance’ between their intellectual life and the world as it really is.” People yearn for meaning, don’t they?

What transforms the perspective? What transforms the mind? What enables coherent in-touch-with-the-world intellectual development and discourse? Only salvation. Only redemption by the Cross and Resurrection. Only the indwelling Holy Spirit. See Romans 12:1-2 and Romans 8:1-10. Scripture is explicit that there is only One Way.

This simple Christian truth leads to deeper truths connected with human language.

Robert Jenson: “We serve a talkative God, who does not even seem to be able to do without a library. In His service, we will be concerned for talk and libraries.”

Douglas F. Kelly: “Cultures wish to avoid ultimate reality by taking refuge in linguistic games and theological systems, rather than facing external reality, which might just cause them to have to face the living God.”

John Milton: “I am inclined to believe that when the language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation. For what do terms used without skill or meaning, which are at once corrupt and misapplied, denote but a people listless, supine, and ripe for servitude?”

Green’s major thesis on language is that the Christian worldview “is the only one that can account for the meaningfulness of words.” We are all ‘wordish’ creatures, thinking and speaking and typing in words. Yes, we like images, too, but our vital concepts and thoughts are tied to words.

He quotes Walker Percy who says, “If you do not learn to read, that is, read with pleasure, that is, make the breakthrough into the delight of reading – you are going to miss out . . . No matter what you go into – law, medicine, computer science, housewifing, house-husbanding, engineering, whatever – you are going to miss out, you are not going to be first-class unless you’ve made this breakthrough.”

Of course, our language has to be in touch with reality. In today’s political buzz, our leaders and media and academics corrupt the language and use language corruptly. Language is used to manipulate others, which will bring God’s damnation on the manipulators, who thereby treat others as if they are not image-bearers. Such manipulation fills our media today, destroying culture and destroying community. What’s the mood in America today? The end of that road is tyranny and the Antichrist.

The postmodernists who infect our campuses see no foundation for language. Postmodernist philosopher Jacques Derrida sees the universe as chaotic, meaningless, and godless; therefore, words have no substantive meaning, nor do they reflect an eschatological purpose. Interpretation of language is a cultural game. Words have alternate meanings, varying from moment to moment and from subculture to subculture. After all, words are defined by other words and there is no end to that. How could anyone claim absolutes in history or morals or life’s purpose since all we have are ever-fluid words?

Of course, Derrida wants us to take his words seriously. This is the fatal flaw in the postmodern deconstruction of language. They want to exempt their own language from meaninglessness. But on what basis?

The Christian view of language is straightforward. God conveys His truth to us via language through Scripture. “Thus saith the Lord . . .” is to be taken seriously. So seriously that the Lord Jesus Himself is called the Word . . . God’s incarnate communication to mankind. In the Gospel accounts, Jesus professes that He does what the Father tells Him to do. In John 16:13 Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will come to speak what believers need to know after the Lord Jesus departs.

Green: “If the Trinitarian God is truly a speaking God, and we are made in His image, it follows that our speech in some way reflects this Trinitarian character of God. That is, language is not simply a human artifice. Language is foremost a gift from God whereby we image or reflect God in the world. Although language is utilized by humanity, it has its origin in God. God made this poignantly clear when He multiplied languages at Babel.

C. S. Lewis suggests that words are not simply human constructs randomly attached to various objects or ideas. Rather, there is a structure to reality enabling a definite connection between material elements and a spiritual reality. An example is the symbology of water in baptism, signifying the new believer’s overwhelming by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Water was not chosen arbitrarily as the symbol. God designed water into the universe to correspond with spiritual reality. It’s not just that God knew that water would be a good symbol; rather, He built water into the world’s structure.

Our language doesn’t always get it right, of course, but our attempts conform to our wired-in conviction that reality is ordered and meaningful. Our conscience twinges when language is used corruptly, if we strive to keep our conscience healthy.

Similarly for the parables, Green argues that the Lord Jesus used physical structures wired into reality to invoke spiritual lessons. Consider the seed and the sower, the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the prodigal son. In the latter, the very nature of God’s Fatherhood and man’s brotherhood . . . yet constrained by man’s spectacularly free will . . . is wired into how man lives in this world.

Lewis proposes that modern man faces a decision: either we are creatures in a designed and meaningful universe, or we are not. If we are, then poetry and art and love and justice . . . and life . . . have meaning. Lewis sees the typical modern as a “half-hearted materialist” who believes in a meaningless universe, but irrationally insists that what goes on in his head is meaningful.

Language is at the heart of this, for it is the expression of who we are and how we relate to God and to others. Green: “When we come to see all communication as ultimately a part of the life of glorifying God, our words take on a grand significance.”

Consider how seriously God takes our words in Ephesians 4:29 . . . come on, look it up! Also, Matthew 12:36-37. Look it up! The judgment of one’s soul is based on his words, both for the saved and for the lost.

The believer’s words are essential to the communication of the Gospel that can save the lost. The Gospel must be conveyed in words and, in contrast to Derrida’s cultural games, the Gospel can save anyone in any culture if the words are clear. Also, discipleship is about words fitly spoken. Where do these words originate? In God.

Green makes an interesting observation that the novel – the literary novel – is a creature of the Christian West and is almost nonexistent in the Buddhist, Taoist, and Brahmin East . . . and also in Marxist countries! Eastern philosophies see the self as illusory and life as misery and reality concealed. But novels are about selves and happenings in an ordinary world.

Christ is Lord of language. Language is a gift from God, rooted in His Trinitarian character. Language, thereby, is rooted in our character. The language of the Christian – indeed the language of his thoughts – must reflect the One we love and follow. How about this week? What language will you use with your spouse, your children, your co-workers, your fellow believers, and the lost you encounter along the way? Design your words. Deliver them with grace and wisdom. Thank God for His wonderful gift.

drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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127. Rules for Life
September 1, 2018

A father sought the counsel of a psychologist because his son wouldn’t peacefully go to bed. About 45 minutes of fighting every night made both father and son miserable. The psychologist guided the father through the arithmetic. Forty-five minutes per day, seven days a week – that’s about five hours per week, twenty hours per month, and two hundred and forty hours per year . . . which is a month and a half of standard forty-hour work weeks.

The psychologist was Jordan Peterson, who includes the anecdote in his 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I saw Peterson interviewed recently on the Fox and Friends morning news show and decided his most recent book might be interesting. It is, but I don’t recommend it.

Peterson could be described as a secular social conservative. He quotes more from the Bible than from any other source – by far. But it’s clear he’s an atheist. He sees all religions as ancient cultural wisdom, whose mythical sources lie in our supposed evolutionary past. ‘What works’ in personal or social psychology, in his view, is the natural outflow from a million years of human evolution.

For example, he cites Matthew 6:28 – 6:33, wherein Jesus counsels us to have no worries over tomorrow. God clothes the grass of the field, God knows what we need, and our primary responsibility is to focus on God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. Do that, Jesus assures, and the small details of life will follow.

Peterson explains, “Aim continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth. Attend fully to the future, in that manner, while attending fully to the present. Then you have the best chance of perfecting both.” But Peterson believes in no literal Heaven and no afterlife at all. He uses ‘God words’ to connect with man’s spirit, but believes in nothing beyond the material. It’s all about your best life now, in a materialistic world.

Jordan mentions Hell, too: “Life is hard enough when it is going well. But when it’s going badly? And I have learned through painful experience that nothing is going so badly that it can’t be made worse. This is why Hell is a bottomless pit. This is why Hell is associated with . . . sin. In the most awful of cases, the terrible suffering of unfortunate souls becomes attributable, by their own judgment, to mistakes they made knowingly in the past: acts of betrayal, deception, cruelty, carelessness, cowardice, and, most commonly of all, willful blindness. To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.”

Get that? Hell is the worst of life on this Earth. Similarly, to Peterson, Heaven is the best of life on Earth. But this is all that is. And hey – that’s depressing, if true. To Peterson, Christianity is a useful myth that, if followed at least in form, can make life more pleasant and satisfying. But don’t you dare believe it to be true!

Yet, Jordan Peterson offers a good number of practical insights that correlate with reality. Reality, after all, is God’s reality. This is God’s creation and His image-bearers have responsibilities to each other. Peterson sees human tragedy and works with people to give them useful tools to fix or to cope, and offers perspectives that often sound Christian, but are merely narratives to help us get by in a meaningless universe. True hope must be based on reality, though, on Biblical truth, on the assured hope of a resurrection for God’s born again children. That truth is so powerful. It’s sad that Peterson doesn’t get it.

In this essay I’ll comment on two of his 12 chapters. The first is JP’s “RULE 5: DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM.” The chapter is about child raising. If you know me well, you may have observed that I have written very little about child raising. I have learned that it’s almost impossible to give advice that will be heard. Even Christian parents, who are supposedly serious about their Biblical faith, abhor the practice of discipline. Even if they nod at the idea of discipline, very few are willing to do it.

Peterson sees parents today as terrified by their children. Since the 1960s, parental discipline of children has been despised by the culture and the state. Parents are pressured to be hyper-sensitive to short-term emotional suffering in their children. They’re scared to death of damaging the child by speaking firmly or – Horrors! – spanking them.

Consider the anecdote above, about the child who fights bedtime. Despising discipline wrecks the life of parents and produces a lifetime pattern of whining in the child. We see these ‘grown-up’ children populating the campuses today. How did they become snowflakes in the first place? Whining gets results if there is no one to play the adult.

JP observes that parents are fearful that their children won’t like or love them. “They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get it . . . A child will have many friends, but only two parents – if that – and parents are more, not less, than friends. Friends have very limited authority to correct. Every parent therefore needs to learn to tolerate the momentary anger or even hatred directed towards them by their children, after necessary corrective action has been taken, as the capacity of children to perceive or care about long-term consequences is very limited. Parents are the arbiters of society. They teach children to behave so that other people will be able to interact meaningfully and productively with them.”

“It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child.”

Peterson does not get into the specifics of discipline. I empathize. If you want to follow Biblical admonitions for corporal punishment, it’s not hard to figure out how to do that carefully, deliberately, without anger, etc. And yet the child must know that the consequences for his willful, nasty behavior are just too uncomfortable for him to engage in it.

Your little child may look small, but his will is a monster. His will is bigger than your will, because his will is unconstrained in the early years. The parent has all kinds of constraints, but the child doesn’t . . . unless you train him. Show him the boundaries. Make him feel the boundaries.

We’ve all been in horridly uncomfortable social or public situations in which parents let a child run amok, or let his mouth spew hellish noise. The parents are willing to make everyone miserable rather than deal with their child. It’s quite disgusting, isn’t it?

Peterson’s point is significant. If you don’t discipline and teach your child, he will grow up in a world that hates him. Are brats happy? No. Are snowflakes happy? No.

Here are a few pointers from my experience. When a child misbehaves in the home, drop everything and deal with it immediately. You must invest in immediate discipline. It’s never convenient. Don’t threaten, don’t say ‘next time’ – that teaches the child that he can get away with his crimes one or many times before you mean it. Deal with it now.

The child determines the severity of the discipline. You have to dial the degree of discipline to find the level at which the child truly regrets his behavior. That will vary from child to child. It’s not the level that you feel comfortable with. It’s the level that makes him sufficiently uncomfortable so that repentance is his only reasonable solution.

Verbal rebellion must be disciplined. He must be accountable for what comes out of his mouth. If the behavior persists, you’re simply not finding the right level to deter him. If he can get away with verbal rebellion, he will break all other boundaries.

JP: “Imagine a toddler repeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such a thing? It’s a stupid question. It’s unacceptably naïve. The answer is obvious. To dominate his mother. To see if he can get away with it. Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.”

The author notes that it’s also no mystery why people take drugs. The mystery is that they don’t take them all the time. Life hurts. A million things can go wrong.

Regarding the toddler above, it’s the same for any act of rebellion. And whining is rebellion. Yes, whining / complaining is rebellion. Recall how the Lord reacted to the whining of the Israelites in the wilderness after He had rescued them many times. Whining was a capital crime in the Lord’s eyes.

Don’t allow whining. Whining is a discipline-worthy offense. Why do you think this country is filled with leftist whiners, not just on the campuses, but in Congress, in the media, in teaching positions. Just look at their parents. And the whining is now morphing into activist violence all over the land.

“If I can hurt and overpower you, then I can do exactly what I want, when I want, even when you’re around. I can torment you, to appease my curiosity . . . How hard can I hit Mommy? Until she objects. Given that, correction is better sooner than later (if the desired end result of the parent is not to be hit).” Hitting others is not a long-term success strategy. It’s best if that is learned young.

The longer you take to begin discipline with a child, the more you will have to invest later . . . exponentially more! You’ve got to be diligent and consistent when they’re young. It’s like the old motor oil commercial . . . Pay me now or pay me later. Namely, do a simple oil change now or rebuild your entire engine later at 100 times the expense.

Caveats? Of course. Don’t forget to love, teach, show affection, forgive, etc. Invest in all those virtues. If you neglect the positive stuff, you’re headed for disaster, too. But that side of the coin is not our subject today.

A final point from this chapter. JP endorses physical discipline. Those that insist on no physical punishment are out of touch with reality. “A woman can say that the word no can be effectively uttered to another person in the absence of the threat of punishment. A woman can say no to a powerful, narcissistic man only because she has social norms, the law and the state backing her up. A parent can only say no to a child who wants a third piece of cake because he or she is larger, stronger, and more capable than the child (and is additionally backed up in his authority by law and state). What no means, in the final analysis, is always ‘If you continue to do that, something you do not like will happen to you.’ Otherwise it means nothing. Or, worse, it means ‘another nonsensical nothing muttered by ignorable adults.”

The other chapter I’ll comment on is “RULE 9: ASSUME THAT THE PERSON YOU ARE LISTENING TO MIGHT KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON’T”.

Peterson has much to say about dysfunctional conversations, in which people don’t listen properly to each other. But I’ll focus on what he loves – those rare opportunities when people get together to explore a topic, a generally complex topic that everyone is interested in. To do this right, all act on the premise that they have something to learn. “This kind of conversation constitutes active philosophy, the highest form of thought, and the best preparation for proper living.”

I connected with JP’s thoughts here because they resonate with New Testament discipleship, something quite foreign to modern church experience. As I’ve written about extensively on this site, Western churchgoers endure a mostly passive experience, not just in the scripted ‘worship services’, but also in small groups. Whatever the gathering, it’s rare for the participants to do any study or prep ahead of time, it’s rare that there is a substantive topic to discuss, and it’s exceedingly rare for the people to engage with thought and energy.

God’s design for the church, though – structured via city-wide networks of house church (small group) gatherings – is intended for serious study, serious thought, useful and substantive topics, and active participation. Everyone gets engaged, everyone’s gifts get developed, and everyone encourages one another. Sigh. Why don’t American Christians get this?

Peterson, not thinking about Christian discipleship at all, sees enormous value in conversations wherein people discuss ideas that are core to their life on planet Earth and that inform their words and actions day to day. “They must be existentially involved with their philosophy; that is, they must be living it, not merely believing or understanding it.”

Most conversations, Peterson observes, serve to buttress some existing order. Most people aren’t looking to learn things in conversation, and certainly aren’t open to shifting paradigms. “The conversation of mutual exploration, by contrast, requires people who have decided that the unknown makes a better friend than the known . . . A conversation such as this is one where it is the desire for truth itself – on the part of both participants – that is truly listening and speaking.”

In contrast, I’ll mention a recent ‘field trip’ we made to a local Baptist church, whose proud motto is, “Where Preaching Is Priority.” We enjoyed the traditional hymn singing, and everyone we met in the few minutes before and after the service were friendly enough. But, true to their motto, the centerpiece was a 45-minute sermon which, unfortunately, had about five minutes of serious content.

More disturbing was what wasn’t mentioned from the pulpit. The sermon focused on why Christians should love their church. The preacher spoke truth from Scripture about how we should love the church because Christ loves the church, indeed He died to establish it. What was missing during the 45 minutes were specific examples of church members who had demonstrated love for one another. The prime identifier of the New Testament believer is that he loves the brethren. The Lord Jesus was big on this point, as you may recall.

Yet to love one another, opportunities must be taken, even created. Time must be allocated to get to know, to encourage, and to pray for one another. Preaching simply cannot be ‘priority’!!

The experience reminds me of a book I read some years ago, entitled That’s My Crowd!, by Shelton Smith, an IFB preacher and the editor of The Sword of the Lord (which I still subscribe to). The book has twenty-some chapters, each expanding on a distinguishing characteristic of Independent Fundamental Baptist churches. As I recall, there were chapters on the IFB love for Biblical inerrancy and the KJV, on separation from the culture, on zeal for preaching the Gospel, and many others. What was missing was a chapter on how the brethren (and sister-en) love each other. It simply wasn’t there. At least Smith was honest about that. But how could it be there, when the IFB program is so pulpit-centric?

Peterson concludes his chapter on ‘discipleship’ with the admonition that when we truly listen, our wisdom consists not merely of the knowledge we already have, but in living a pattern for the continual search for knowledge, “which is the highest form of wisdom.” He cites the Delphic Oracle of ancient Greece who revered Socrates as “the wisest living man, because he knew that what he knew was nothing.”

Peterson: “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.”

Amen. The Christian life is meant to be . . . alive. Life grows, life matures, life enriches. We have to do that intentionally. Design your day, design your week and, if you have children, teach them to design their days so that they learn to listen, and that they learn to live.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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128. What is the purpose of freedom?
October 1, 2018

Benjamin Franklin: “Nothing brings more pain than too much pleasure; nothing more bondage than too much liberty.”

James Madison: “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.”

Albert Camus: “Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh no, it’s a chore . . . and a long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.”

Sean Hannity recently honored war vets on his TV show, concluding with the thought that they “died so we could have this great life.” What did he mean by “this great life”? Is it all about making money, watching sports, arguing about politics, buying toys, just doing whatever you feel like doing? That would be the impression you might get from the media.

The idea and the glory of freedom is pervasive in our modern world, especially in the West. Driven largely by America’s history, culture, and prowess both militarily and economically, the ideas of free thought, free speech, free vote, free market, and free choice are the highest virtues for many. And yet, “Unfettered freedom could be the Achilles’ heel of the modern world, dissipating into license, triviality, corruption, and a grand undermining of all authority.”

So says Os Guinness in his 2012 book, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. In this essay I’ll pull some nuggets from Guinness’ book and interpret them from a Christian worldview which, by the way, Guinness would profess. But he falls short in significant measure.

Guinness identifies the dilemma: Freedom faces a fundamental moral challenge. It requires order and order requires restraint, but anything beyond self-restraint restricts freedom. “Thus the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart.” Now that’s Biblical! “The law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient . . .” (1 Timothy 1:9)

American political discourse is void of this wisdom. In response to mass shootings, or sexual abuse / harassment scandals, or opioid abuse or whatever, those who pretend to be leaders or thinkers in our land insist that laws, especially overpowering federal laws are the only solution. But these elements of decay in America are moral and spiritual at their core. Regarding school shootings, for example, the 2^nd amendment existed in the 1950s . . . actually, it has been in force since the 18^th century . . . and there were as many guns per capita in the 50s as there are today.

What’s different about today? We’ve had three generations of children indoctrinated in the public school system, taught they are evolved animals with no soul, accountable to no God, taught to value self-esteem above care for others, and taught to wallow in violent, sexual, narcissistic entertainment media and music. We’re not coasting on a Christian heritage anymore, weak though it may have been in the mid-twentieth century.

Machiavelli suggested that political restlessness, which is in abundant supply today, is rooted in human appetites that are “insatiable” because human beings are “able to desire everything” but unable “to secure everything.” As a result, “their desire is always greater than the power of acquisition.”

With self exalted above all, consumerism stokes this restlessness, and manipulative politicians inflame victim groups to demand redress. And so, personal and national debts go exponential. Offense and anger become sport because “I want it all and I want it now because I feel so strongly about it.” The natural inclination toward self-love tempts to domination, not self-restraint.

Guinness observes that in a democratic republic, the citizens choose their rulers, “so freedom depends constantly not only on the character of the nation’s leaders, but also on the character of its citizens.” The secular citizen sees freedom only negatively, as freedom from constraint. Moral standards become arbitrary hindrances, and so must go. An unwanted pregnancy leads to a dead baby, because it’s just so inconvenient. Foul language boundaries in media disappear . . . I recall a time when TV language standards prohibited the simplest cuss words. Now anything goes. Children learn that disputes are won by who cusses the loudest. Of what value is reasoned debate?

Regarding consumerism . . . American culture once valued hard work, savings, thrift, and delayed gratification. I recall the little bank book I received when my mom helped me open my first savings account. Even into my college years, the idea that I might get a credit card so I could have my desires now, rather than wait for payday, or for a certain level of savings, would have been unconscionable. Americans are now perpetual debtors, both individually and nationally. Both China and India chide our nation for its addiction to debt, with our debt going to finance consumption instead of infrastructure. Consider that: We are the biggest debtor nation in history, while our roads and bridges and other infrastructure are falling apart . . . also our military hardware. Readiness is down because ships, tanks, and planes are cannibalized to keep others somewhat operational.

Such freedom to live in debt “is short-lived and suicidal . . . freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning, and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster.”

My wife and I watch TV travel shows that illuminate cultures across the globe. It’s clear that much of American culture infests other nations, particularly the decadence of Hollywood and the coarse immorality of pop / rock / gangsta rap music. American obsession with decadent do-anything-you-feel-like freedom has, bizarrely, infected people groups around the world.

After a speech by then-President G. W. Bush, a Middle Eastern leader said, “Every time the president says freedom, I see license.”

America was launched by its founders with freedoms writ into the Constitution that were astonishing to the monarchies of the world. Can these freedoms be sustained? Some have charged that the founders’ generation “mistakenly thought that the republic could be sustained by virtue alone, (but) there are many today who make the equal and opposite mistake: thinking that republican freedom can be sustained without any virtue at all and exercised without any restraint.”

Guinness relates an account by a 19^th century scholar who, in 1843, interviewed a 91 year-old fellow who had fought at both Lexington and Concord. The scholar asked him why he went to fight, whether he had taken up arms against “intolerable oppressions,” as some histories put it.

“Oppressions? I didn’t feel them.”

“What, you were not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw one of those stamps. I certainly never paid a penny for them.”

“Well, what about the tea tax?”

“Tea tax? I never drank a drop of the stuff. The boys threw it all overboard.”

“Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington, or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”

“Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.”

“Well then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

“Young man,” Captain Preston stated firmly, “what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: We always had been free, and we meant to be free always. They didn’t mean we should.”

Always free, free always. Preston and his compatriots, as British colonialists, enjoyed freedoms not common to the rest of their world. “English liberty” was much admired by many of that age. But being free, they would not stand for petty tyrannies encroaching upon that freedom. The slope is slippery if you fail to fight today’s ‘small’ oppression.

So how do you order and sustain the freedom you fought for and won? Guinness notes that the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions had visions of equality or a classless society, but they “spiraled down to demonic disorder and tyranny – far worse than any evil they replaced.” Guinness is more right than he knows . . . it is clear to me that the principals in those revolutions, notably Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, perpetrated such vicious and violent evil on their nations that can be explained only by pervasive demonic influence. (I plan to review, in the near future, a comprehensive biography of Mao that I can use to support that point.)

Guinness, citing Lord Acton, concludes that the French sought to copy the American idea of revolution, but not the American idea of government. They replaced an absolute monarch with an absolute elite from ‘the people’ “whose unchecked appetite for power became voracious and destructive.” This led to slaughter of political opponents and innocents, and dictatorship, with Napoleon Bonaparte initiating wars that afflicted much of Europe.

What the American founders did after winning freedom was to order it within a moral, cultural, and political framework in which freedom could flourish. A free people must be able to rule themselves. The founders were not “poor men who imagine that nations can be constituted with ink.” (Joseph de Maistre) Without morals founded on God’s laws, because human morality and conscience are sourced in the character of God, constitutions and laws are worthless . . . as shown by activist judges across the country today.

Abraham Lincoln was cautiously optimistic, before the Civil war, hoping that “we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which while the earth endures shall not pass away.” The Christian knows, however, that this present Age will terminate in the Great Tribulation, and only the return of the Lord Jesus Christ will establish such a kingdom. Secular man’s visions of utopia explicitly exclude any role for our Creator, whether expounded by liberals or conservatives.

Liberals, especially, are enamored with man-as-god utopian thinking, but secular conservatives are just as guilty. Consider MAGA – ‘Make America Great Again.’ What’s ‘great’? It’s clear that it means military strength, secure borders, international prestige, and an economic prosperity to enable never-ending consumerism. Where is the moral component? When will the baby-murdering stop? When will the public schools, academia, and the media desist from discriminating against Christians and ridiculing Christian values?

If we achieve all the secular goals . . . not likely . . . will America be great despite its decadence and immorality? What about the next generation, raised up within a godless yet prosperous culture? Nazi Germany, in the 1930s, was the most educated and prosperous nation on Earth at the time.

Guinness quotes Joseph Brodsky: “A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.” Salvation, success, meaningfulness, a fruitful life . . . it begins, proceeds, and finishes with each of us, individually, regardless of the chaos around us. The Christian must not only know this, but live it. Guinness: “In the inner world of the mind and heart, is a space that no grand inquisitor, no government goon, and no Google tracker can investigate or invade. There, no one can keep us from thinking, loving, believing, hoping, or hating entirely as we wish.”

Thomas Jefferson, although not a Christian, believed that the new republic could be sustained by virtue alone. Americans today go to the opposite extreme, that virtue has nothing to do with it. To the liberals, virtue is whatever postmodernist groupthink says it is. To the secular conservative, virtue is defined by a narrowly construed Constitution. But where is the moral foundation? Guinness pleads that freedom without virtue will bring the republic to its knees. There is no system of Constitution and laws that can save a nation with little virtue.

Checks and balances aren’t enough, if lawmakers or judges simply choose to define gay marriage or abortion as ‘Constitutional.’ Vice-President Mike Pence was ridiculed in the liberal press when he mentioned that he avoided being alone with any woman who wasn’t his wife. Shortly thereafter our nation experienced a wave of sexual harassment scandals that would have been avoided by simple observance of such a rule. The courts are deluged with a bevy of lawsuits and laws are proposed to somehow ‘fix’ such situations . . . but this isn’t a matter of law, it’s a matter of morality.

George Washington wrote in 1783, “The foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.”

John Adams wrote, “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families.” Indeed. Why is our government so corrupt . . . and so corruptible? It starts with individuals and families. If you vote in sync with an atheistic / socialistic / postmodernistic worldview, and send your children for indoctrination within the government’s school system, how would you expect the nation to fare?

John Adams again: “Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

When President Clinton was impeached, the leftist elite, along with many secular conservatives, insisted that the character of the president was irrelevant to his office. Many conservatives today defend President Trump’s foibles in the same way. Hey, I voted for Trump. If he establishes laws and policies that lead to more security and economic freedom, that’s a good thing. But don’t pretend that character doesn’t count.

Frederick the Great: “The passions of princes are restrained only by exhaustion.”

Albert Camus: “Integrity has no need of rules.” Without integrity, rulers will find ways to bypass law when it’s convenient. I’d rather have a ruler with high integrity . . . in the context of Biblical morality . . . even if I know nothing of his positions, rather than a scoundrel who espouses all the ‘right’ positions.

Interestingly, and hypocritically, the left attacks Trump for various character flaws, as if they are trying to convince Christian conservatives that he is too flawed for his office . . . on the basis of sinful flaws. But in the leftist worldview there is no sin, no morality . . . we’re all just molecules in motion, accountable to no one. So it’s easy to discount attacks from unbelieving hypocrites. When I voted for Trump I was quite skeptical of his character. On the other hand, I had perfect clarity about the deficient character of his opponent. And I was quite certain that, if elected, she would lead America quickly down the socialist path . . . a path we’ve already been traveling for decades.

What I really want in government is preservation of my freedom to share the Gospel in the public square, not just ‘worship’ privately in church buildings or my home. Whichever candidate is more likely to foster policies that enable freedom for Biblical living . . . that’s where my vote goes.

But America is crumbling. John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence wrote, “A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery will ensue.”

After Tocqueville visited America in the early 19^th century, he wrote to a friend, “To persuade men that respect for the laws of God and man is the best means of remaining free . . . you say, cannot be done. I too am tempted to think so. But the thing is true all the same, and I will try to say so at all costs.”

Yet respect for God’s laws is possible only for a regenerate soul. Repentance from sin and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ provoke the Holy Spirit to take residence in the soul. Only then will a man or a woman seek godly virtues, consistently. It seems that Christian conservatives, while seeking to establish moral laws and policies, fall short of preaching the foundation, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

How can God bless that? How can God bless the nation when His own born again children are ashamed of proclaiming the Gospel? Guinness, too, falls short of understanding the Gospel as the foundational element. You might object that few are likely to be saved, even if many Christians awake and obey the Great Commission. Well, if few be saved, each of those few is worth more than the world itself. And if few be saved while a remnant of Christians faithfully obey, might not God save our nation from destruction for the sake of a remnant? There is Biblical precedent.

Alexander Hamilton: “The wise politician knows that morality overthrown (and morality must fall with religion), the terrors of despotism can alone curb the impetuous passions of man, and confine him within the bounds of social duty.”

In America today Christian truth is, indeed, overthrown. With every new problem or calamity, the electorate clamor for new laws, and scream for politicians to ‘do something’. The politicians will always do something. Some will even pander to some moral principle on occasion. But who will look Heavenward and confess the nation’s sins and call its people to repentance?

Any one of us can do so, at least where we live.

The famous atheist, Voltaire, scorned religion for ‘respectable people’ like himself and his friends, but he advocated it for everyone else: “I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often.”

After a time of sidewalk evangelism in the company of an old evangelist, I mentioned that we might not find out until Heaven whether we had done any good that day. He replied that even if no one got saved from our 1-2-1 witnessing, perhaps someone’s conscience had been provoked enough to put off doing a petty crime, or to be kind to his wife rather than beat her. The preaching of the Gospel serves, at least, to challenge the conscience. If Christians in America made the Gospel pervasive, the culture would feel the impact, even if few were saved. If pervasive, there would be much talk – at the national level – about all the crazy Christians who were getting in everyone’s face.

We have the freedom to do so. Yet we despise this freedom.

That’s the purpose of freedom for the Christian, for the soul in touch with the very reality of the existence God gave us . . . to preach the Gospel. The BIG issues of life today are not about border security or tax policy or even the cheeseburgers-for-the-homeless programs in the megachurches. The BIG issue is the salvation of men, women, and children, followed by discipleship to raise up mature warriors, spiritual warriors, to reach others. That’s truly the BIG issue. All others are small. Sure, do your duty on the small issues. But how can you neglect the only issue that has eternal significance?

The subject of discipleship couples with the idea of sustainability. How does a nation keep freedom alive? Sociologist Philip Rieff sees the postmodern skepticism that has taken over American culture as unprecedented in history. Embracing the postmodern denial of absolute truth is “the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged.” Postmodern indoctrination makes our Constitution useless and, while infecting the churches, has made the Bible unimportant. In most churches people don’t even bring their Bibles to church meetings. Those that do have a wide selection of watered-down, corrupted translations to choose from.

Guinness observes that America is becoming a vast culture of singles and loners. “It’s all about me” results in narcissism, not freedom. Self-absorption destroys relationships, particularly any potential relationship with God, who is the Source of all relationships.

Guinness concludes his book fairly close to the mark, but falls short. “There is probably no chance of reordering society effectively unless there is a reforming and successful reordering of the faiths of its citizens too. That restoration, however, would require quite separate treatment and lies outside my present concerns.” But it’s not just any faith that works. Truth’s foundation is God’s character, revealed in the Bible. Communicating truth must start there. Imagine . . . a Bible-believing (and practicing) nation would look quite different from a wholly Roman Catholic or a Muslim country. Would it not? Where would you find freedom?

Freedom is precious. Within that freedom we need relationships. We need truth. We need virtue. It all starts with the Gospel. It all starts with you, if you’re truly a born again Christian, thereby called to be an evangelist in your community. If you’re not busy, get busy. If you need help, advice, or encouragement, I volunteer to be as helpful as I know how to be.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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129. Mao: A Portrait of Evil
November 1, 2018

How evil can a man be? If a man is committed to evil and attains almost unlimited power, how ruthless and cruel might he become?

Over the years I’ve learned much of the evils of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, and I have read a detailed biography of Josef Stalin. During my career as an Air Force officer during the Cold War, I was a student of the oppression and the vicious ambitions of the Soviet Union. I’ve also read a fair amount of history, marveling at tyrants in every era and on every continent, eager to shed much blood to advance their agendas.

But, in my opinion, no despot has ever come close to the wickedness spawned in the mind of Mao Tse-tung, responsible for the deaths of 70 million Chinese people – in peacetime – in his pursuit of power and revenge and cruelty . . . for cruelty’s sake.

In this essay I review elements from the personal life of Mao found in the 2005 book, Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. This book is not an easy read – that is, it is quite readable in style and quite fascinating in detail, yet the facts of Mao’s life are about as disturbing as I have ever come across.

No one was more ambitious. During his disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the 1960s, he told his chiefs: “In the future we will set up the Earth Control Committee, and make a uniform plan for the Earth.” Satan always has his candidates for the position of antichrist, whenever the opportunity might arise.

My perspective in this review is that of a Biblical Christian. Chang and Halliday write from a wholly secular viewpoint, but I see spiritual warfare in these historical accounts. Accordingly, I interpret Mao’s bloodlust and cruelty as reflections of the Satanic spirits who controlled him. Satan hates God and hates God’s image-bearers. Mao was the Devil’s agent in visiting trouble on a large portion of humanity during his life.

The biography covers much historical and political ground, of course, in telling Mao’s life story. Regarding the story of the Chinese nation before, during, and after World War 2, the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party, and the CCP’s ambition to dominate the world stage under Mao, the book has much to say. But in this limited space my focus will be on the man, himself.

Mao could not have accomplished what he did without much help, of course. There is plenty of blame to go around and, obviously, many henchmen and co-consipirators with their own demonic help will suffer the same judgment at the Great White Throne (Rev 20:11-15). The cautionary tale here is that evil will abound without limit if there are not enough righteous to stand against it. That was China’s tragedy . . . and still is today as Christians continue to suffer persecution in that land and as the Chinese president has recently acquired more dictatorial control.

Mao was born into a successful peasant family in Hunan province in 1893, where his ancestors had lived for 500 years. ‘Mao’ was the family name. The boy was given the two-part name ‘Tse-tung’, which means ‘to shine on – the East.’

As a 24 year-old student in 1918 he wrote commentaries on a book of ethics, in which he expressed the core character traits he would live by – His prime tenet was to exalt self above all. (Consider Satan’s manifesto in Isaiah 14:13-14.) Mao wrote, “Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.” His duty was solely to himself, responsible to no one else. He didn’t care about legacy. It was all about now. What happened after death was meaningless to him. He echoes Jean-Paul Sartre at times.

This sin afflicts all of us, typically on small scales. I was shocked recently (and that’s a rare thing at my age), when I asked a man why, in his house church, he enforced a policy in which his wife and his children were not allowed to speak during the gathering’s Bible study. In his policy the ‘church’ had little or nothing to do with his family’s spiritual growth. I asked him what the ‘church’ was for, if not for his wife and kids. He answered, “It’s for me.”

Mao saw himself as a great hero . . . “Great Heroes give full play to their impulses, they are magnificently powerful, stormy, and invincible. Their power is like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a sex-maniac in heat and prowling for a lover . . . there is no way to stop them.” Mao often said it didn’t matter if people died, that China must be destroyed in order to be re-formed in his own vision. He consciously applied that principle to the entire world, even the universe. This is pure Satanism, who rebelled against his Creator’s vision.

Mao was out of touch with reality in many ways. He insisted that women should manage the same kind of manual labor as men and should stockpile resources for periods of childbirth when they could not be as productive as usual. Mao had no tenderness toward women. He had several wives, but was promiscuously unfaithful from the beginning. When he acquired absolute power, he acquired ‘secretaries’ and ‘nurses’ for his harem, and sent agents out and about to find pretty young women to entertain him.

Mao abused and abandoned his wives and his children. He left one wife to be captured by enemy forces, who executed her. Another wife was placed in a mental institution. Anyone close to Mao ultimately suffered.

Mao and the CCP acquired political power in part from hard currency supplied by Moscow. He played the supplicant and obedient servant to Stalin when necessary, but his dream was to supplant the Russians at the top of the global communist movement. He always used as much money as he desired to set up mansions for himself, all over the country, with extensive security, including bunkers that could withstand a nuclear attack.

Wherever he went he commandeered schools, temples, and churches for personal or Party use. During the civil war, his HQ in Longshi was a beautiful 2-story mansion, once the best school for young men from three counties. “He entertained lavishly, with pigs and sheep slaughtered in his honor.” The hypocrisy of socialist ruling classes is universal. You might recall Nancy Pelosi’s comment about companies paying their workers thousand-dollar bonus checks resulting from the Trump tax cut . . . just “crumbs” in her view. Her anger derived from frustration that individuals would get to choose what they wanted to do with their income, instead of the government doling out money for political power.

Mao worked to acquire dictatorial power from the beginning, despite lip service about fighting for ‘the people.’ Such evil is easy to see when accomplished on such a large scale. Yet we should discern the same evil – and call it out – when perpetrated on a small scale. Within American political life, corruption abounds as politicians lie and leak in order to acquire power and destroy their enemies. Even within evangelical and fundamentalist churches, paid ‘clergy’ aggregate too much power to themselves, despising God’s plan for the New Testament church in which responsibilities are distributed and all the saints are to develop and use their God-given gifts.

In the 1920s the communists initiated the civil war against the Nationalists that lasted until 1949. Mao was one of many in the Party jockeying for power. In order to secure one province after another, Mao was more ruthless than his peers in using brutality to intimidate or eliminate opposition. After writing a report about the use of brutality in 1927, he wrote that he felt “a kind of ecstasy never experienced before . . . It is wonderful! It is wonderful!”

During the civil war, Mao famously told his Party members, “Power comes out of the barrel of the gun.” Leftists have always understood this. That’s why the Left pushes ‘gun control’ – what they really want is 100% gun confiscation, disarming the citizenry so the state has all of the weapons, all of the power. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were also adamant about ‘gun control.’

Mao copied, but extended the Inquisition practice of public executions, organizing compulsory rallies around them, with all the local citizens, including children, forced to watch bloody and agonizing executions, often with torture and lingering deaths, the screams driving fear into the populace lest anyone stand against Mao’s regime.

As Mao built his army he took over province after province. One observer wrote, “Before the Red Army came there was quite an atmosphere of peaceful and happy existence. The peasants had quite enough to live on. Since the Red Army came, things were totally changed. Because the Red Army’s sole income was robbing the rich . . . because even petty bourgeois, rich peasants, and small peddlers were all treated as enemies . . . the countryside is totally bankrupt, and is collapsing by the day.” The locals loathed the communists. When the Red Army left an area, they often left behind their wounded and some civilians. The locals would kill such stragglers in revenge.

Throughout Mao’s career, while he worked to acquire power, and then for the 27 years from 1949 until he died in 1976, terror and oppression included all kinds of heinous torture. I won’t go into details. Even simple descriptions horrify the imagination. Only demonically inspired hatred of people can explain it.

Mao gained power at the expense of anyone who got in the way. He continually double-crossed others in the CCP and blamed them for his own mistakes. Late in life he refused to allow his #2, Chou En-lai to have life-saving cancer surgery, just to keep Chou under his thumb. Over his lifetime he imprisoned or tortured or executed multitudes of loyal Party members – evil men in their own right, to be sure – to maintain terror and control. The charges were always bogus, with accusations such as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ or ‘collaborators with the Nationalists (or Japanese or Russians or Americans . . .)’.

One ‘small example’ of a purge was decribed in a Mao letter on Dec 20, 1931. Over 4400 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were ‘uncovered’ in the Red Army. Most were killed – all were tortured. Mao argued that if victims could not withstand torture and made false confessions, that proved they were guilty. Such is Satanic logic. The guilty men’s wives were tortured to death, too.

In one period about 10,000 army members were executed, about a quarter of the Red Army at the time, along with tens of thousands of civilians. Such events are still covered up in Chinese history: “Mao’s personal responsibility and motives, and his extreme brutality, remain a taboo.”

Isn’t it interesting that the Devil knows that man’s conscience will not tolerate such atrocities, if widely known. If brutality is ‘justified,’ why not proclaim it? But Satan knows when to hush up the evil. It’s the same today. Liars in politics or business or religion don’t stand proudly on what they really believe and what they do when no one is looking. They are smart enough to lie, knowing that what they do is evil. There are no excuses.

Mao made military decisions that decimated his own army, especially during the mythical Long March, sending divisions off to destruction if they were commanded by a rival. During WW2, Mao committed to allying himself with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, but carefully avoided any conflict with the Japanese, hoping that the Japanese and the Nationalists would bleed each other to death, and he could pick up the pieces, no matter how much China suffered. Mao: “The more land Japan took, the better.” Mao would even execute veterans who had just returned from the front lines, fighting Chiang, just to insure that terror was maintained.

Mao, along with Chou En-lai, got help from Stalin to set up the Chinese equivalent of the KGB, but made it far more ruthless. There were times when purges were relaxed. You can’t kill too many, too often, you would think. But temporary respites tended to produce resistance, and that necessitated another round of terror.

Mao’s economics were based on enslaving the population. Possessions and life savings were confiscated. Women were told to cut their hair so they could donate their silver hairpins to buy ‘revolutionary war bonds.’ Then there would be ‘return bonds campaigns’ to bully purchasers into giving the bonds back for nothing.

Women became the main labor force as men were conscripted into the Red Army. Mao decreed: “Rely overwhelmingly on women to do farm work.” Contrary to myth, Mao cared nothing for the welfare of the common people. Villages had sentries to prevent anyone leaving without a pass. “In this prison-like universe, the number of suicides was staggering. At times, no family was allowed to have visitors to stay overnight. Any family found to have done so was killed with the visitor.”

Mao (and Hitler and Stalin) couldn’t have accomplished such evil without thousands of thugs (at first), and millions (later), who perpetrated evil in their own smaller spheres. It seems that Satan’s political system is competitive. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao competed with each other and, in rising to power, out-competed those less clever and ruthless. When devils compete, people suffer and die. The devilish competition simply allows Satan to optimize his org chart.

What happened in China under Mao and the CCP is, frankly, beyond the imaginations of those of us in more blessed lands. There are times when it is refreshing to contemplate the Final Judgments, wherein every evil deed will be exposed and punished . . . in the Lake of Fire.

There ought to be a word more extreme than hypocrisy when it comes to Marxists, leftists, Democrats, liberals, etc. Mao established various ‘schools’ to train and indoctrinate new Party members. But many were disillusioned because equality was supposedly at the ideological core. Yet inequality and privilege abounded. Every organization had three levels of kitchen fare. The lowliest got about half of the meat and cooking oil allotted to the middle-rankers, while the elite got much more.

Similarly, the quality of clothes varied significantly depending on rank. Mao’s maids, for example did not qualify for any underwear or socks at all. Medicines and hospitals were ranked, too. I’ve observed that America’s leftist elite, while promoting the public school system and making life difficult for home schoolers, send their own kids to expensive private schools . . . especially in D.C.

A dissident in 1942 wrote, “I do not think it is necessary or justified to have multiple grades in food or clothing . . . If, while the sick can’t even have a sip of noodle soup, some quite healthy big shots are indulging in extremely unnecessary perks, the lower ranks will be alienated.” But even so, who cares? Torture, imprison, and execute anyone who gripes. That particular low-level dissident was imprisoned for what he wrote and eventually executed by being hacked to death.

The authors make the case that Mao went far beyond Hitler or Stalin in turning every organization into a virtual prison, with your colleagues as spies, provoking suspicion and fear everywhere. A common and long-lived practice was for everyone, including Party leaders, but excepting Mao himself, to write extended confessions about any faithless act or stray thought or anything that could be used later to justify a purge, if the confessor fell out of favor at some point. These loathsome confessions necessarily included what you remembered others saying and doing that might reflect their disloyalty. Anyone who had shown disloyalty, at a minimum would be forced to grovel publicly and profess abject allegiance.

Information from the outside world was controlled as much as possible. Chang: “Information starvation gradually induced brain death.” It was too dangerous to have frank conversations with hardly anyone. As I draft this I’ll comment that I heard in today’s news that Barack Obama, at an international ‘leadership conference,’ lamented that Americans have too many news sources. The Left hates competing . . . they want control. Ultimately, all leftists yearn for the unthinking machine that Mao enjoyed, a slave state where conscience and creativity are stifled.

Mao, like Kim Jong Un today, deliberately fostered a cult centered on his person. His principle state newspaper featured giant headlines like, “Comrade Mao Tse-tung is the Saviour of the Chinese People!” In 1943 he had a huge head of himself carved in gold relief for the façade of a large auditorium.

Mao explained, “There has to be a personality cult . . . It is absolutely necessary.”

The same sin is committed, albeit on a smaller scale and with less drastic consequences, by politicians and preachers. Most tri-fold church tracts feature a smiling head-shot of the usually-not-so-handsome senior pastor. Why glorify him? In many fundamentalist, evangelical, and pentecostal churches, abject loyalty to the ‘man of God’ is foundational, but anti-Biblical.

Mao produced famines in his country by selling food to Moscow in exchange for military supplies, both during his ascent to power in the 1940s, but also for many years afterwards as Mao strove to make China a global power. Mao finagled Russian support to create China’s nuclear weapons program, while millions died and multitudes suffered.

“Mao knew the situation very well . . . and saw village children hunting for stray peas in the stables of his entourage, and women scrabbling for the water in which his rice had been washed, for the sake of its driblets of nutrient.”

When Khrushchev visited Peking in 1958, Mao pressed him for help to make nuclear subs. Khrushchev asked how China would pay. Mao told him that China had unlimited supplies of food. Yet Mao knew that in many places people were eating dirt – literally. Whole villages died when people’s intestines became blocked.

News of atrocities was routinely suppressed . . . and still is, within China. Toward the end of the Manchurian campaign against the Nationalists, the Red Army laid siege to a city of 500,000 held by the opposing army. Mao ordered that no civilians would be allowed to flee the city, necessitating mass starvation. At the end of five months, 330,000 had died.

One army vet wrote, “A lot of us said: We’re supposed to be fighting for the poor, but of all these dead here, how many are the rich? Aren’t they all poor people?” This tactic was so successful, though, that it became a model for other cities under siege.

During the 1950s, as Mao built his slave state, he frequently issued orders for “massive arrests, massive killings.” He criticized one province for “being much too lenient, and not killing enough.” When they increased their execution rate, he said this “improvement” made him feel “very delighted.”

In Hunan province, Mao commented that they had “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000 and killed 1,000. The other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.”

Mao was paranoid, spending huge resources on his personal security. When he flew, which was rare, every other plane in China was grounded. When his special train moved, the nation’s railway system was thrown into chaos, because no other train was allowed anywhere near his. His food was inspected meticulously. Mao lived at the standard of the highest royalty of world history, yet had others executed for the slightest bit of embezzlement or corruption, that is, any corruption not sanctioned. A special troupe of his Praetorian Guard was formed from beautiful young women . . . Mao’s Army chief indelicately called his recruiting job “selecting imperial concubines.” Did you notice the large squad of young and pretty North Korean ‘cheerleaders’ that Kim Jong Un sent to the 2018 Olympics? Same old, same old. Mao also cornered the book publishing market by forcing the entire populatiion to buy his works, while suppressing the vast majority of authors who might have competed.

Mao was the only billionaire created in Mao’s China.

Mao started the Korean War and, when Chinese troops got directly involved, he ordered ‘human wave tactics.’ British actor Michael Caine, drafted into the war, said he had once been sympathetic to communism, but his war experience left him permanently repelled, watching the Chinese trade bodies for bullets. He concluded that the communist leadership cared nothing for their people’s lives. Most of the Chinese troops who became POWs refused to return to mainland China, and were allowed to go to Taiwan. The ones who returned suffered terribly, labeled as traitors for surrendering. Additionally, 60,000 South Korean POWs captured by North Korea were never returned, disappearing into slave labor camps.

During Mao’s ‘Great Leap,’ he ordered steel mills, coal mines, and other heavy industries to maximize production. Over 30,000 workers were killed within a few months due to serious accidents. Mao responded by ordering the populace to build backyard furnaces which, at best, might produce pig iron. People were coerced to donate any piece of metal in their possession, even farm tools, cooking pots, and women’s hair clips. Peasants’ houses were torn down to contribute timber and thatch for fuel, producing multitudes of homeless. The nation slid further and further into poverty and misery.

The ‘Great Leap’ is judged to be, perhaps, the most uniquely monumental waste of natural resources and human effort in the history of the world. 38 million people died of starvation and overwork, culminating in the greatest famine of recorded human history. 1960 was a record-breaking year in which 22 million died of hunger, the largest number in one year in any country in world history. I recall, as a child, when the starving Chinese were brought up by parents to encourage us to eat all of our vegetables. We had no idea that the suffering of the Chinese was not ‘unfortunate’ at all, but quite deliberate, and evil.

Mao said, “Death is indeed to be rejoiced over . . . We believe in dialectics (Marxism), and so we can’t not be in favor of death . . . Deaths have benefits. They can fertilise the ground.” Peasants were ordered to plant crops over burial plots, which only increased the anguish of families.

Mao wanted to export his philosophies to the rest of the communist world, but didn’t succeed. The Eastern European communists were brutal, but not suicidal. They were willing to receive shipments of food from China in exchange for hard currency or technology, knowing that the Chinese were starving. In short, they took advantage of Mao’s evil.

Mao was determined to destroy religion of all kinds, including Christianity and Buddhism. Atrocities were common. Persecution continues today under China’s communists, despite the fact that true Christians in China are the most peaceful and productive citizens. So why the illogic of persecution? It’s a spiritual war. It’s not human rationality or mere politics that drives persecution. It’s the Devil that hates God’s image-bearers.

There is much more to say about Mao’s life, not to mention the history of the period, including Mao’s manipulation of American presidents, most notably Richard Nixon and his advisor, Henry Kissinger. But I’ll end here. The takeaway for the Christian is to be aware of evil and recognize the pervasiveness of the spiritual war, even and especially in America today.

The time grows shorter until the Lord’s return. We are on Earth’s battlefield, whether we like it or not. What can we do? The Christian does battle via the Great Commission. Did you share the Gospel with someone this week? Did you hand out or place some Gospel tracts where they might be found? Did you encourage other Christians? The enemy is relentless. We should be, too.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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130. Who is the real environmentalist?
December 1, 2018

The hippies of the 1960s made a god out of nature; in fact, their vague philosophy was pantheistic if anything, making all of nature a god, while despising the God of creation. Becoming one with nature, walking barefoot, making up new rules as whim fancied, the culture became ugly, both visually and morally.

In his 1970 book, Pollution and the Death of Man, Francis A. Schaeffer observes that Christians, “who should understand the creation principle, have a reason for respecting nature, and when they do, it results in benefits to man.” Since it is “the Earth hath He given to the children of men” (Ps. 115:16), we have responsibilities for our God-given environment, even though it is a fallen world. Jesus reminds us that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father caring (Matt 10:29).

When a Christian mistreats the habitat God has provided, he is worse than the hippie, Schaeffer notes, because the hippie / New Ager / pantheist has no true foundation for his passion. I wonder whether God provided, within a corner of their respective genomes, what came to be domesticated cats and dogs, to facilitate our affection for the animal world. The dog and cat kinds include wolves and lions, respectively, but I’m sure that the mild household varieties we cherish were programmed in from the beginning.

Secular environmentalism argues pragmatically, says Schaeffer. Don’t cut down trees or cities won’t be able to breathe. Pragmatism eventually becomes ugly, though, corrupted by competing passions, economic interests, and governmental corruption. But the Christian looks at a tree and recognizes that it’s a creature made by God, albeit non-sentient. It’s not a chance construct of molecular interactions. And so we have beauty. Life is more than sustenance and reproduction. Beauty counts.

Accordingly, we can love an unlovely man or woman, knowing they are made in the image of God and that Christ died for them. We can understand their foibles, because we have ours, even more so before we came to Christ.

The Christian church ought to be a ‘pilot plant’ for modeling man’s interactions with the world. Schaeffer comments on the ugly Midlands of England in his day, where strip mining destroyed the environment. Strip mining was efficient and profitable, of course, but destructive with effects that could last decades if the land is not restored. That’s just greed. The reason to restore and preserve habitat is not just aesthetic, driven by feelings. No it’s principally a moral issue. We are stewards of the Earth God has given us. It doesn’t belong to us. We ought to take care of it.

On the occasions when I’ve had to borrow a tool, for example, I’ve always felt more stress about preserving the tool than if it had been my own. That’s conscience working properly.

In strip mining the topsoil can be bulldozed back and then seeded for farming or parkland. “What we, the Christian community, have to do is to refuse men the right to ravish our land, just as we refuse men the right to ravish our women.” Greed is not justification.

From his time living in Switzerland, the author tells of a mountain village that had never had electricity. They could choose to have it in about three months by chopping up forest and running wires. Or they could wait a couple of years while carefully routing and hiding infrastructure to preserve the beauty of their land. And so the choice was easy. That and other villages remained uncluttered, preserving beauty, even though it cost money and time. Otherwise, what values would they have passed on to their children?

Christians ought to stay, “Stop!”, when necessary and explain why. Too much of the political debate on environmental or social issues is relegated to discussion of pragmatism (cloning, for example) or traditionalism (the nature of marriage). The Christian must always point out that because God is there, and that’s why we have a God-given conscience and a sense of aesthetic beauty and morality, we take a stand. Abortion is evil because that baby is a person, a person made in God’s image, and God is there, and murder is wicked. Marriage is Biblically defined because the institution is a model for the spiritual intimacy God desires with His children. When marriage is defiled, whether by adultery or by re-definition, that’s an affront to God . . . it goes far beyond tradition.

Schaeffer sees a parallel between environmental abuse and sexual immorality. A man may see a woman as a plaything, a sex object. The Christian man sees a woman as made in God’s image, a person of infinite worth. A woman is a person, not an animal – as the evolutionist insists. The Christian man has a self-imposed limit on his own impulses, his own pleasure. Sex isn’t part of the relationship until a life-long marriage commitment has been ordained. In marriage, sex is part of the relationship’s love and friendship and mutual encouragement.

When sex is simply selfish, relationships and persons are damaged, even destroyed. Just consider how much violence and how much crime is connected to illicit sexual relationships. Most crime reports involve some combination of sexual immorality and alcohol or drug abuse. Have you noticed over the years how many tragedies reported in the news start out with someone in a bar, late at night?

If repentance and Biblical conversion were to become widespread in America, with sex constrained to marriage, and alcohol and drug abuse done away with, crime would be almost nonexistent and the economy would expand and prosper beyond imagination.

Extending these ideas to business is simple. Treat your customer or client as a man or woman made in God’s image. Be honest. Profit fairly. Who then needs lawyers?

Those that destroy God’s creation, or sin sexually, or cheat in business ultimately damage and destroy themselves. And God sees it all. But if you believe that God is not there, then there are no limits, no limits for sex, for abortion, for cloning, for lying in politics, for socialistic tyranny – the end game for man controlling man with autonomy, with no accountability.

When socialistic tyranny enslaves a nation, environmental disasters multiply. Do a little research into Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The end game of leftists wrecks the environment, along with morals or accountability in any institution. The Biblical pattern, on the other hand, distributes power, engaging the conscience of many people. See Isaiah 33:22 for the basis of America’s tripartite government. Even more so, God’s design for the New Testament church (as opposed to modern churches, whether Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, or Fundamentalist) distributes authority among peers, with leadership by example and by Biblical exposition, with no single man in power.

This all connects to a basic philosophical concept. Is the universe just a large collection of particulars, or is there a universal, the God of the Bible, who is the ultimate reference for all particulars?

Jean-Paul Sartre: “If you have a finite point and it has no infinite reference point, then that finite point is absurd.” Sartre, as an atheist, saw himself as an absurd particular in the midst of nothing but absurd particulars. If Sartre is right, then wonder is gone from everything, including you and me.

But for the Christian, there is a universal. God is there! Schaeffer: “The personal-infinite God is the universal of all particulars, because He created all particulars; and in His verbalized, propositional communications in the Scripture He has given us categories within which to treat everything within His creation: man to man, man to nature, the whole lot.”

Modern man, technological man, is proud to insist that he has no limits. When I share the Gospel with a man who espouses this fantasy, that he’s the captain of his fate, I remind him that he can’t go several days without sleep or water or without a trip to the bathroom. He’ll fall asleep before too many hours go by. He doesn’t control his heartbeat. His body is aging, his memories will fail, and his cells and organs will deteriorate over time. He will die. He isn’t the captain of his own bowels.

He hates God so much that he denies reality. His “pragmatic choices have no reference point beyond human egotism. It is dog eat dog, man eat man, man eat nature. Man with his greed has no real reason not to rape nature and treat it as a reverse ‘consumer object.’ He sees nature without value or rights.”

Schaeffer: “If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made.” This includes other people first of all. But this is simply the Holy Spirit’s message in 1 John chapter 4. The Christian treats other persons, along with the animal and mineral kingdoms, with integrity, because he is continually aware that God is there and it all belongs to Him. We’re ‘just’ stewards, yet that entails much responsibility. We ought to feel that.

Schaeffer concludes with the thought that beauty doesn’t have to be pragmatic to have value. “So if we did nothing else in our Christian view of nature than to save and enjoy beauty, it would be of value and worthwhile.”

Do we trust that God has provided sufficient resources to carry humanity through this age, until the Lord Jesus returns? Consider how much of human history would have been different without lumber-bearing trees. Consider how this technological age is only possible because of coal and oil in the ground. Consider how resilient our atmosphere is and how wonderfully the oceans serve to moderate global temperatures. God has designed-in a lot of margin to cover our abuses. Yet our responsibility remains.

Schaeffer goes so far as to avoid stepping carelessly on a buttercup, because it is part of God’s creation. I’ve had similar sentiments about stepping on ants, as long as they stay outside the house.

I believe that Schaeffer’s ‘pilot plant’ idea is extensible in future prophecy. I suspect that the Millennium will be our opportunity to do right by the world God has created for our habitat. Perhaps our performance during the Millennium may inform how God shares the rest of creation with us. It’s a big universe out there. For now, that is God’s domain (Ps 115:16). But in the ages to come, the Lord may just have mind-boggling tasks and adventures for us, in working with the ‘stuff’ of creation, perhaps all over the cosmos . . . and beyond?

drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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