I was doing some personal research on
evangelizing and discipling persons with diagnosed personality disorders when I
stumbled onto a cringe-worthy article. The author’s premise was that psychopathy
is clinically measured by a certain ten-question test, which he proceeded to
apply to the God of the Judeo-Christian heritage. His conclusion was that God
is 80 percent psychopath. A few of his conclusions were based on what he
considered to be God’s childish and conscience-devoid behaviors throughout the Old Testament.
Obviously, this came from an
atheistic, anti-Christian source. My first inclination was to slip quietly away
from my computer lest it go up in smoke. That was followed by a state of bewilderment
over the hateful and blasphemous hubris of the author. However, when those
initial reactions passed, would you like to know where my mind settled? I was taken
back by the NAKED STUPIDITY of this writer.
The following represents the questions I would have for him in a private conversation:
“Now, help me to get this straight. You
are an atheist. You reject the existence of a single Creator of all that is.
That means, of course, that no matter how much you pontificate to the contrary,
you will NEVER offer a lucid explanation
for intricate design within creation, for a reliable measure of right and
wrong, or for the origin of a human conscience. Yet, you hypothetically (and
condescendingly) allow for the existence of God so that you can measure His
mental health. In the process, you make no allowance for any notion of His
sovereignty or omniscience, i.e., His
standing as ‘God,’ while you sit in judgment over His morality and behavior. Is
that correct”?
As I sat in Sunday School yesterday, we
were studying 1 Corinthians 1-2,
touching upon the contrast between God’s wisdom and man’s wisdom. I was staying
engaged as best I could, but the subject matter itself was causing thoughts of
this article to fire through my brain. My burden to write became rooted in the
desire to post a simple reminder that the world delights in attempting to make a
follower of Christ to feel foolish. Paul could not have been any clearer in
preparing believers to expect this from their contemporaries. Allow me to add this
note of encouragement to Paul’s words: This world provides nothing that should
cause you to feel foolish in the least, not when you consider that its sinister
agenda is to make you feel stupid for trusting the Bible over the so-called wisdom
of the age.
The greatest ploy to that end these days
seems to be to pit faith in God against faith in science. That is actually a
mantra in our day: “I don’t believe in God, I believe in science.” (It is interesting
to me how many wannabe independent thinkers latch onto mantras, but I digress.)
This is, of course, a false dichotomy. There is typically no conflict between
what Sir Francis Bacon called “the book of God’s words and the book of God’s
works”, that is, between scripture and nature. The controversy enters when the
world’s wise men, in their attempt to cast off God, endeavor to make the case
that their own faith-centered notions about origin are science when they are
nothing of the sort.
Science rests on observation in the present.
Distinct worldviews determine what any given man will do with the data he observes.
The same rock that persuades one man that the earth is billions of years old compels
another man to give glory to His Creator Who brought all things into existence
in six days. Neither response lends itself to an empirical scientific
conclusion.
So, why can intelligent design not work
its way into school textbooks? Why do the so-called educational and scientific
television networks, as well as most entertainment and news networks, simply
push the evolution narrative so matter-of-factly under the guise of “accepted” science?
There may be a number of reasons, but do not dismiss the most basic one, that
man tends to dismiss God because the notion of God, especially, a moral Lawgiver
and Judge, is not palatable to human self-will.
No one ultimately rejects the existence of
God because he believes in science instead. Again, that is a false ultimatum.
On the contrary, he will uncritically embrace a frame of reference that rejects
God because to acknowledge that, “God is,” is troublesome on many fronts. He
would prefer to believe that his own ancestors crawled out of primordial slime,
billions of years in the past, than to believe that he must be accountable to a
deity. And, when confronted with the statistical absurdity of his own evolutionary
beliefs, he would rather slap onto the process another 30-60 billion years,
hoping that the math might work out this time around, but it never does.
Too many believers are too easily shaken
in their faith in God, not because of science, but because of the noise of this
age. They fear that they might look foolish if they are too open to those
around them about their faith in God. They might look for ways to blend the far-more
popular notions of evolution with their Christian beliefs in an attempt to look
less foolish. They do not realize that in some circles that may render them
looking even more foolish.
That is the rub, Christian. You must decide
in which circle you wish to reside. Does the judgment of this world about your
intelligence really matter to you? The Bible teaches that the beginning of
wisdom is the fear of God and that the man who is persuaded in his heart that
there is no God is the true fool. How difficult is it to wrap your head around
that? Whose assessment of how bright you are means the most to you, that of your
peers or that of your Creator?
Above all, never be rattled by those who think of
you as a fool. Do not let them undermine your confidence. It should never surprise
us that they would try.
… The
person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit
of God but considers them foolishness,and cannot understand them because
they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all
things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for,
“Who has known the mind of the
Lord
so as to instruct
him?”
