Worlds Apart

I recently received the following statement made by a youth worker. He said, “I have ministered to my kids every week for a year and I’ve come to this conclusion: we use the same words as our young people, but they mean totally different things. Words like truth, tolerance, respect, sin, the Holy Spirit, moral judgments, and salvation have a completely different meaning to my kids than they do to me. We were working from two different premises and I didn’t even know it. I’m convinced unless I can get my kids to rethink these most basic Christian concepts, I’ll never make it to square one with them.” The article, in a comment on these words, went on to say, “Families and churches may present the truth of Christ to our youth but most kids will interpret such presentations through the distorted prisms they have adopted from the culture around them.” These “distorted prisms” are the multiple non-Christian worldviews that have gathered around our cultural table. At one time Christianity sat at the privileged right hand of our culture and generally controlled worldview presuppositions and societal institutions. This is no longer true. Nihilism, Eastern pantheistic monism, naturalism, the New Age, and postmodernism have flowed into our collective interpretation of reality to create one grand stew of moral relativism and incoherent sensibilities.

It would be to our advantage as Christians to visit again the basic tenets of Christian Theism. These have been ably presented by James W. Sire in The Universe Next Door. This very useful “basic worldview catalog” sets forth “the essence of each worldview in a minimum number of succinct propositions.” The following propositions need to be pondered and impressed upon the young people for whom we as a church are responsible. This is not a statement of faith. That is a different matter and also must be given adequate attention in another place.

1. “God is infinite and personal (triune, transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign and good.)” This concept is foundational to everything. Keep in mind, in a world apart, the naturalist believes that “matter exists eternally and is all there is. God does not exist.” The church of Jesus Christ must make much of God. Ignorance of the character of God is the mother of a million heresies. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the Old Testament is the constant attention given to the perfections of the Creator of the universe (Ex. 3:14; 34:6, 7; Deut. 6:4). And it is because of who He is that He rules sovereignly over all His creatures (“nothing is beyond God’s ultimate interest, control and authority”).

2. “God created the cosmos ex nihilo to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system.” The universe is not the result of chance through time (Isa. 45:18-19). Naturalism says, “The cosmos exists as a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system.” The reason we live in an orderly and understandable world is because God made it. And He governs it. He is not like some disc jockey who lets the music play while he does other things. This world will not destroy itself through global warming. Humans can make significant changes in their environment but do not ultimately determine it course.

3. “Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness and creativity.” When this truth is denied and humans are placed in the zoo along side of apes as our next of kin, there will be frightful consequences. If all we are is a collection of molecules, then why not experiment with embryos and manage behavior by the drug recipes. Christianity is the champion of the dignity of human life (Gen. 1:26-27).

4. “Human beings can know both the world around them and God himself because God has built into them the capacity to do so and because he takes an active role in communicating with them.” How do we know what we know? Knowledge is possible because God made our brains and the natural world we observe. But we are dependent upon our Maker to reveal to us what we need to know. He has done this by general revelation (the created order) and special revelation (the Scriptures). The ultimate revelation of God to us is Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:2-3). Life is not meaningless because God is there and has spoken. Those who refuse to listen to Him consign themselves to the dank dungeon of despair. For those who came of age during the sixties and seventies the dismal lament of John Lennon’s “Nowhere Man” was intoxicating to many (“Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to, isn’t he a bit like you and me?”). God exposes the lie of existentialism (“existence precedes essence”) by His powerful and clear Word to us in the Bible and in Christ.

5. “Human beings were created good, but through the Fall the image of God became defaced, though not so ruined as not to be capable of restoration; through the work of Christ, God redeemed humanity and began the process of restoring people to goodness, though any given person may choose to reject that redemption.” Our world is broken and so are we. We don’t think right. We can’t get along with other people and our imagination creates idols. How did all this happen? Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God hijacked the beginning of a good story and turned it into a tragic drama. Sin slithered into the plot line and rendered man incapable of properly relating to his Creator. But God came to the rescue and provided a Savior in whom redemption is found. The road to eternal damnation is not the only one out of town. There is the narrow way of eternal life in Jesus Christ.

6. “For each person death is either the gate to life with God and his people or the gate to eternal separation from the only thing that will ultimately fulfill human aspirations.” The secular humanist, however, assures us that “death is extinction of personality and individuality.” When humanity is treated to a steady diet of such an outlook, the grave will have to be decorated with deceptions to make it palatable. One is left with such funeral bromides as “he (the deceased) lives on in you,” and “she abides forever in our memories.” No amount of sentimental language can alter the reality of human immortality. The fictions of reincarnation and personal extinction leave the grief stricken with hopelessness (1 Thess. 4:13). God has spoken boldly in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (“Death is swallowed up in victory.” 1 Cor. 15:54). Death has been defanged through the physical resurrection of Christ. Therefore, where sin is pardoned, death has no sting. The hungry jaws of hell can be avoided through faith in Christ.

7. “Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving).” The Christian worldview is not ambiguous regarding good and evil, right and wrong, and truth and error (Isa. 5:20; Psa. 119:68). Christian theism and other worldviews are worlds apart with regard to the foundation of values and virtues. We either see ethical issues through the lens of God as the measure of good or through the lens of human reason. Without a belief in God anything is possible and this is being demonstrated in the continued cultural decline. The lack of moral clarity is evident in discussions about premarital and extramarital sex, euthanasia, stem cell research, and abortion, to name a few.

8. “History is linear, a meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for humanity.” Christian theism asserts that history is a story written by God. Human history began in the Garden of Eden and will end at the Great White Throne Judgment at the end of Christ’s kingdom on earth. Our modern world would have us believe that there is no metanarrative (the big story that explains everything) and insists that we have only the stories of individual cultures which are nothing other than power-plays and attempts to control others. David Wells in his excellent work, Above All Earthly Pow’rs, summarizes this postmodern rebellion by saying, “There is now no narrative which connects together the events of life into a single form of meaning. From a world that was once centered, we now have one that is decentered (p. 79).” Christians, we have much work to do. The church and the home must be truth-centers that show the next generation to think through the biblical paradigm of history and the glorious purposes of God.

This has been an all too brief summary of the tenets of Christian theism. As you can see, such a worldview is worlds apart from all other interpretations of reality. We who are Christ’s people, the church, must take our task seriously and prepare our young people for that “other world” of the high school and college campus. We are responsible for teaching the truth revealed in God’s holy, infallible, and inerrant Word.

Dr. Howard E. Dial
Berachah Bible Church