Nation flying upside down
A “Strange Brew” cartoon pictured two fish in water with one commenting, “Killer humidity today, huh?” I was awash with a number of thoughts.
In his classic work, “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis writes of his struggle as an atheist, thinking God unjust. He used an illustration of a fish not feeling wet. (The fish wouldn’t have known otherwise.) Sometimes man isn’t aware of his real condition. “How filthy is man which drinketh iniquity like water?” Job 15:16.
What if our fish decided to deny the existence of water while this elixir of life is coursing through its gills? What if an individual denied the existence of oxygen while inflating his lungs with copious amounts, in order to express his denial?
A person may not be an avowed atheist, but many are living a comparable lifestyle. God and His word (which He magnifies above His name and which is settled in Heaven) have no bearing or part in their lives or thinking. Some are totally unconcerned with what is taking place. When you’ve dismantled what represents the sacred, — such as the 10 Commandments, the cross, a creche, or marriage — all that is left is the secular, i.e., flags, mascots, etc.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon gives examples of what life is like when God is excluded. He calls it living “under the sun,” rather than “under the Son.” He says in 9:11, “Time and chance happeneth to them all.” Long before Charles Darwin, time and chance would be all you have without God. As Protagoras wrote, “Man is the measure of all things”— pure humanism. By contrast, Acts 17:28 records, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Man would be autonomous, but at a cost. He has no foundation for knowledge and no way of accounting for intelligibility. Time plus chance will never give you logic, reasoning, science, morals, purpose, meaning and the list goes on.
But you may say, “Man functions as an intelligent being.” Yes he does, but not as a result of chance but of being created in the image of God. The fact students learn mitigates against their having been taught they are a product of chance. “Every man is brutish by his knowledge” — Jeremiah 51:17. He does “… not like to retain God in (his) knowledge”
— Romans 1:28.
The One man rejects, he needs in order to make the rejection (the fish needing water, man needing oxygen). Man embracing chance exalts himself as a “free thinker.” But that’s an oxymoron. Whoever heard of a free-thinking determinist?
Like the proverbial man who paints himself into a corner, man living “under the sun,” apart from the triune God, backs himself into solipsism and remains trapped in his own head.
As a nation we are flying upside down and entering a steep ascent.
BENNY BEALS
Springdale