Poison Ivy

When my grandchildren come to visit and want to walk in the woods, the first talk we have is about poisonous plants. I show them poison ivy and explain how harmful it can be. It grows on vines twining on tree trunks and can spread out over the ground. The carbolic acid in poison ivy can create a lot of human misery. If you have ever been afflicted with a case of poison ivy, you can remember the itching, reddened skin, and the blisters. I have known some people who have gotten it in their eyes. You don’t want this to happen to your children or grandchildren. The plant easily disguises its danger. Its leaves are red in the early spring, then shiny green, and in the autumn it turns red or orange. If you are going to venture into the out-of- doors, you need to recognize poison ivy’s three leaflet design and beware.

But there are even greater dangers facing our children and grandchildren. We must prepare them to detect those ways of thinking that will do harm to soul. Like poison ivy there are poisonous systems of evil thought spread out over the landscape of life. One of the most pervasive injurious philosophies is the thought that all that exists is matter. Matter is all there is and that’s all that matters. It is presented more deceptively beautiful than that, but make no mistake about it. It is deadly. The famous astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, articulated this viewpoint rather bluntly: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” One abysmal teaching of naturalism is its view of death. There is no life after death. In the words of Bertrand Russell, “No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.” Try to let that thought bring comfort to you on your death bed. To ignore the eternal is the greatest of tragedies. This interpretation of reality can be found in theology (atheism), ethics (ethical relativism), biology (Darwinian evolution), and economics (socialism). It flourishes in state colleges and universities. There are even forms of it in Christian educational institutions. There is no safe place.

Another variety of noxious thinking is commitment to pleasure seeking. The idea is that life is to be defined in terms of personal fulfillment through the experience of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is not a new concept. It is as old as Satan’s appeal to Eve in the Garden of Eden; “Eat this fruit and you will be happier than you imagined possible.” The tricky thing about a philosophy of self-gratification is that few will claim to be card-carrying pleasure-seekers. They will instead be found pursuing pornography wherever it can be found, living from one movie or one great meal to the next one. Feelings drive them. They seek those things that make them feel good; methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, and sexual partners outside of marriage. Hedonism is encountered wherever one turns. It is the premise of countless television commercials and movies.

A first cousin to hedonism, which is essentially a philosophy of despair, is the outlook on life that says nothing has meaning. Hopelessness feeds the pleasure seeking mentality. But it also nurtures the dark, angry persuasion that nothing is valuable. Contemporary art and music are filled with gloominess. The philosophical term for this is nihilism (the rejection of objective reality, moral, laws, etc.). Nihilism is naturalism’s (secular humanism) gift to the world. If we are as humans nothing more than a highly sophisticated form of chemical soup, then let’s just go ahead and plan our funerals. The attempt to live as if life is meaningless may be appealing to some, but it is unlivable. It is futile to deny our very nature which demands meaning.

That everyone has truth in their own way is a poisonous perspective of recent vintage. It sounds user-friendly and offers the appearance of solving the truth wars. Instead of there being only one true truth there are many truth constructs. According to this reasoning, objective truth does not exist. Abby (“Dear Abby”), a queen of newspaper advice, says “in my view, the height of arrogance is to attempt to show people the ‘errors’ in the religion of their choice.” Though Abby is not counted among the academic elite, she has expressed the judgment of what is known as postmodernism. If you have wondered how and when the values of “tolerance,” “openness,” and “inclusion” were crowned, you have to look under the rock of denial of all absolute truth claims.

These are only a few of the poisonous systems of thought that are calling for the allegiance of the next generation. We have some work to do. Our youth need to see a Christianity that is the real thing. They need answers to their questions. They need to be thoroughly grounded in the faith of historic Christianity. They need to know how to recognize the poison ivy of thinking that only increases the pain of hopelessness. “O taste and see that the Lord is good; how blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!” (Psa. 34:8).

Dr. Howard E. Dial
Berachah Bible Church