TV Program

Current Episode

The Barren Victory

SERIES: Even These Believed #1 of 5

2007-03-04

PRODUCTION #: 1041

SPEAKER: Shawn Boonstra

Some people describe it as a heavy weight on their shoulders.

"You have to go to church."

"You have to keep God's law."

"If you sin, you'll go to hell."

"God is always watching to see if you make mistakes."

"Christianity is a long list of do's and dont's."

"Preachers want your money; religion wants your money; those deacons coming down the aisle toward you want your money."

And the list goes on. Impossible expectations. Fear. Hopelessness.

Some people finally close their Bibles, lock their prayer closets, shred their church membership card, and make an agonizing decision: "That's it. From now on I'm an atheist. If I have to endure all this baggage, all this dread, I simply won't believe. I'm through with it."

Is a divorce between you and God the answer? Have "born-again" atheists found a renewed peace and optimism? Or has their desire to get away from hell brought them face-to-face with a hell of their own making?

There is one thing I know when I put on my necktie, pick up my Bible, and stand in front of this television camera. I realize I'm not preaching God's Word to very many atheists!

For almost half a century we have been on these airwaves, proclaiming the existence and the power of God. And sure, there have been doubters and skeptics and maybe some scoffers who have tuned in.

But you probably fit the profile of our typical viewer: you believe in God, or you?re certainly sympathetic to the idea that He exists.

You probably believe like I do, and you want to live your life like Jesus did: "By every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God."

We believe those words. And yet, doubts sneak in sometimes. They really do. Sometimes we all wonder if it's all true.

Have we been fooled? Have the preachers and the founders of our churches deluded us? Maybe their faith is simply wishful thinking "blindness" and we have all inadvertently done like Jesus warned in Matthew, chapter 15: we've been the blind followers of blind leaders, with the entire congregation doomed to fall into the nearest philosophical ditch.

In a coming program, as you and I get into our Bibles, I'd like to share with you one of the great turnaround stories of all time: where hardened atheist and scholar, C.S. Lewis found faith instead of surrendering it. (You don't want to miss that great story; it's one of my very favorites.)

But today, I want to talk about something that happened later in his life, after many years of a fulfilling Christian walk, C.S. Lewis made an amazing confession. Doubts really do come along. The pendulum swings. Some days it's easy to believe in the existence of God; but other times you think to yourself, "Where in the world is He?"

Here is what's really interesting. Listen: the pendulum of inner questioning, doesn't just swing for Christians. It swings for atheists, too! Let me share C.S. Lewis' direct admission, and remember that he lived on both sides of this river. He was both an atheist AND a Christian.

Notice: "Whichever view we embrace, mere feeling will continue to assault our conviction. Just as the Christian has his moments when the clamor of this visible and audible world is so persistent and the whisper of the spiritual world so faint that faith and reason can hardly stick to their guns, so, as I well remember, the atheist too has his moments of shuddering misgiving, of an all but irresistible suspicion that old tales may after all be true, that something or someone from outside may at any moment break into his neat, explicable, mechanical universe. Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality: disbelieve in Him and you must face hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all."

He goes on to conclude that you and I, if we're believers, have to fortify ourselves against doubts. We have to "train the habit of faith," as he puts it. We have to spend time daily looking prayerfully at what we believe, fixing our minds on the reality of God's love for us.

But the question I really want to look at now is this: how has atheism come to be such a force in our world? How do intelligent men and women-scholars, philosophers, educators, take the leap of faith into the void of believing in an empty universe?

Sometimes Christians are a little bit arrogant when we read Psalm, chapter 14 and verse one, where the Bible says: (Psalm 14:1 NKJV)

"The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God."'

We love to call the atheist a fool. And yet our history books tell colorful stories of brilliant people who have gazed at the stars and then said: "It means nothing. The planets and galaxies got here by themselves, and so did we."

These historians and leaders, authors and statesmen, don't appear to be fools at all. So if they don't believe, how can you and I stay on a safe path?

There's a book I find very helpful called, The Real Face of Atheism, by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias.

He paints an interesting word picture for us. Way back in the late 1950s, the Soviet Union was first in space with their Sputnik rockets.

In 1961, they went into space again, and cosmonaut Gherman Titov, speaking to reporters and fascinated crowds at that year's World's Fair, boasted: "I never saw God up there." Which prompted a comic in the crowd to reply: "If you'd just stepped out of your capsule for a closer look, you'd have seen Him!"

So a brilliant scientist, a man learned in the properties of space, time and matter says: "I saw no God. There is no God."

Just seven years later, the United States made their mark in the "space race" when they sent Apollo 8 all the way to the moon and back. The citizens of the world saw a breathtaking picture on their TV screens.

In the words of Ravi Zacharias: "They saw Earth rise over the horizon of the moon, draped in a beauteous mixture of white and Out of, bordered by the glistening light of the sun against the black void of space."

Now get this: And in the throes of this awe-inspiring experience they opened the pages of Genesis and read for the world to hear, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.'

Here are two different stories. Two philosophies. Two teams of bright, capable, educated, cream-of-the-crop people, and as they hurtle through deep space, one group sees God and the other group sees nothing but a vacuum and an occasional large rock.

Mr. Zacharias goes on to make a thought-provoking claim, borrowing a line from philosopher Mortimer Adler: "More consequences for life and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from any other basic question."

Now, let me lean a bit closer and give you some encouragement. If you are tempted to put God on a shelf and walk away, hold on! If the craziness of world events, or the hurts in your own life are making you want to surrender your faith, please give God's promises a second look.

If you've had the unfortunate experience of living under a religious cloud of oppression that well-meaning, or maybe even sinister, people created for you, consider the possibility that God is loving and good even when His frail children and His self-appointed representatives are not.

Why do I ask this? Because so much is at stake! Does God exist? Does He care? Does He have a purpose for your life? That is the biggest trilogy of questions a man or woman can wrestle with. The stakes are so high, but the rewards are, too.

I believe our human race began in a garden called Eden. I believe that with all my heart. I believe what it says in Genesis, chapter one. How, then, did we get so far off course that men and women made in the image of God, stopped believing in Him?

I can't put the picture of one person up on the screen and say, "This man started it. All the unbelief started with him."

Because there have always been those who didn't believe.

"Atheism has never lacked a spokesman," Ravi Zacharias says, and he's right about that.

But what have been some of the main "spike points" in the stream of human history, the moments when Lucifer moved entire populations away from a belief in a loving God?

I remember as a boy hearing about a scientist named Galileo leaning over a balcony railing and dropping two weights down to the ground below. Would the ten-pound rock hit the earth ten times as fast as the one-pound pebble? No, they both hit terra firma at the same moment, proving his theories about gravity.

But when Galileo began to explore and explain the Copernican theories about space and planetary orbits, that the sun was the center of our solar system, with the earth traveling in a path around it instead of the other way around, well, the official Church was not pleased. Because it was in conflict with religion's 15th-century interpretation of the Bible. Galileo was interrogated and disciplined. He was placed under house arrest. In fact, he died in 1642 with a stain against his name; not until 1992 did Pope John Paul II act to remove the stigma and label of "heretic."

What happened is that other scientists, who were studying the laws of nature and physics came to this conclusion: Religion is the adversary of reason. Our test tubes show this and that, but the Church tells us to be quiet.

And the church is wrong about that; ergo, what the church tells us about God, and creation, and the Garden of Eden, those things must be wrong, too.

Zacharias concludes with these words: "Critics have never allowed the church to forget the Galileo blunder, and have consistently expelled it from the halls of academic credibility."

We then come to a brilliant young philosopher named François-Marie Arouet, one of the leading minds of the Enlightenment period. You say you don't recognize the name?

Well, in 1717, some of his writing was just a bit too smart-aleck, and the regent of France said to him, "I will wager that I can show you something that you have never seen before."

"What is that?" the poet replied, rather snippily. The answer turned out to be the inside of the Bastille. And while he was incarcerated there, this 21-year-old genius adopted the pen name Voltaire.

In his book, The Story of Philosophy, author Will Durant gives the legendary thinker his due.

"To name Voltaire," he quotes Victor Hugo as saying, "is to characterize the entire eighteenth century." Italy had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had Voltaire; he was for his country both Renaissance and Reformation, and half the Revolution." "With Voltaire, France began to think," he adds a bit later.

Now, what happened when this keen thinker and his pen escaped from the Bastille and took up his writing again? By most accounts, Voltaire was a kind and generous friend. His plays and books and pamphlets were visionary and compelling. He took just three days to pen the famous play, Candide, with its fictional scholar, Pangloss, "Professor of Metaphysicotheologicocosmonigology." (Just imagine if I had tried that title in the original French!)

The play made a huge splash, and convinced a lot of people to question their faith.

Some people have noticed, however, that the seemed able to defend either side in any debate. Will Durnat suggests that he was a master of dialectic thinking, which is "the art of proving anything, and therefore at last the habit of believing nothing."

So here's the question. Was Voltaire really an atheist? The answer is no. He was a huge admirer of Isaac Newton, who was a devout Christian. But Voltaire came to the point where he finally rejected in its entirety the possibility of anything supernatural. Miracles? No. Virgin Birth? Impossible. A resurrection on Easter Sunday? No.

Now, remember C.S. Lewis, who came out of atheism and grew into one of Christianity's most eloquent defenders. He observed with keen and tragic accuracy that the first step toward so-called liberal theology and then eventual atheism is this: deciding that miracles are simply impossible. Anything supernatural must be ruled out.

And that's exactly what happened to Voltaire. He denounced organized religion and the power of the clergy. And frankly, given the circumstances of his day, I can understand why he did it. He saw real abuses in organized religion, and soon took to signing his letters and articles, "Let us crush the infamous one," his way of protesting the sins of the hierarchical church.

He sometimes encouraged friends to pray, but stopped believing that prayer had any supernatural power or results. He finally concluded with bitter cynicism as he saw how powerful people "used" religion as a tool for control: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

Voltaire died in 1778. Some 15 years later, a world looked on in horror as his homeland experienced one of its darkest times: the French Revolution. The nation's legislature, echoing the cynical sentiments of its favorite-son philosopher, went even further and formally renounced any belief in God at all. Bibles were gathered and burned. Public worship was outlawed. The Reign of Terror and the guillotine claimed the lives of thousands. In just three-and-a-half years, it was clear that official atheism was a road to wreckage and ruin. There was no hope in atheism.

And history shows us a number of examples where bright lights like Voltaire take just the first steps away from having faith in God. They begin to wonder; they begin to doubt. They find what they believe are mistakes in the Bible and inconsistencies in the church.

I've been in churches myself long enough to know that there are sins and sinners in the church. I'm one of them myself. But these atheists who have departed from their earlier faith often look on in horror as an entire generation or nation slides right past them and into absolute heartbreak and destruction.

Remember that men like Voltaire and his American friend, Ben Franklin, were still deists. They still believed in some sort of God. But they were also "men of reason," part of the Enlightenment. Science had to fill the void left behind when intangibles like miracles and prayer were rejected.

Then our world took a destabilizing lurch toward the abyss with the arrival of Charles Darwin. His theories about evolution and "survival of the fittest" were more than just questioning miracles and prayer: they were a frontal assault on the very existence of God. If a person was scientifically minded at, the old ways of thinking about God had to be deliberately abandoned.

In his autobiography, Darwin confesses to some anxiety as he slowly shed his beliefs in the Bible and in God. Again, the first things to go were the miracles. If something couldn't be verified by science, why, it must not be true. Then his confidence in God's Word fell away.

"Disbelief crept over me at [a] very slow rate, but was at last complete," he admits.

He once suggested that it would still be accurate to call him a theist, someone who believes in God. Later in the same chapter, however, he decided that "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."

For human beings to figure out how this universe started was about as likely, he wrote, as a dog "speculating on the mind of Newton."

Once again, we can look back in history and see how a man's personal doubts spread out beyond his own sphere of power. Darwin himself was a conflicted soul; he wasn't sure. But many who embraced Darwinism took his questions, his, I don't really know's, his doubts and planted their own flag firmly in a hostile, defiant, complete atheism.

And that brings me to Karl Marx. Darwin's theories were a perfect fit, conveniently dove-tailing with his own theories about man and political struggle. He said that, "religion was the opiate of the people." And when he read Darwin's theories, he was very excited. In fact, Marx asked Darwin if he might be allowed to dedicate his own life work "DAS KAPITAL" to the British scientist.

And then atheism reached its pinnacle, the highest point of its anger, in the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche.

In a book entitled simply Antichrist, he writes with unbridled passion: "I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground, and too petty."

How could the son of a Lutheran minister, the grandson of Lutheran clergy on both sides of the family say something like that? Only heaven knows that dark mystery, but the tragedy is this: Nietzche didn't have these thoughts in a vacuum.

Sigmund Freud read them and created vast psychological models based on Nietzche's atheism. So did Carl Jung. In addition, three notable political leaders devoured his writings with rabid fascination. Their names were Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and one Adolf Hitler. The fruits of atheism are a pretty sober menu.

Nietzche himself looked at the kingdom erected by his own theories, and it frankly terrified him.

Ravi Zacharias writes: "[He] wanted to look life squarely in the eye, with no God to obstruct his vision, and the picture he saw was agonizing to his mind. He saw no vast mind behind the framing of this world; he heard no transcending voice giving counsel to this world; he saw no light at the end of the tunnel, and he felt the loneliness of existence in its most desolate form."

No wonder this gifted, articulate genius ended up spending the last eleven years of his life completely insane. And before the curtain of madness closed about him, he predicted bitterly that the "God is dead" dogma he himself had proclaimed in the 19th century would lead to the 20th being "the bloodiest century in history."

Sure enough. Historians have suggested there were more casualties, 180 million, in that 100-year span than in the 19 previous centuries combined.

There's a heartrending scene we find in the last book of the Bible. We've found out today that you can have a high IQ, you can be a scientific genius, and still be what the Bible calls a "fool". We take these brains God gave us, and we use that brainpower to decide that God doesn't exist.

And here in Revelation 6, the wise men, the intelligentsia of the world finally see that God's kingdom is real. And all of a sudden, all of the things they said about heaven and miracles being delusions turn out to be delusions themselves. They are left with nothing but despair and self-chosen death. (Revelation 6:15, 16 NKJV)

"And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!"'

Now, follow me carefully. That's a good King James word, wrath, and it simply describes the grief God feels, the holy anger, when the deadly domino effect of these steps away from His love leads us to the hopeless midnight of atheism.

How much better to hold on to the promises of God! We all have questions, but hold on. I don't know how to explain every verse, but still, hold on. I see tragedies all around me, and can't always square them with the tender mercies of a loving God. But still, hold on. When you feel your confidence ebbing away, have enough faith to ask God to give you faith! He promises to do it, right now.

PRAYER:
Lord, we are Your frail, confused children, but today, we love you. We can see where a world without God is headed. We choose to believe in you despite our questions. We choose to hold on to the hand we can't feel with our skin, but can trust with our hearts. Send your Holy Spirit to keep us holding on, and trusting in you always. In Jesus' name, amen.

Scriptures Used in “The Barren Victory”

"The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"
—Psalm 14:1 NKJV

"And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!'"
—Revelation 6:15, 16 NKJV