THE FINAL ACT

 

It seems that as the West has become more modernized and affluent, it has less use for the Christian faith. In a TEDS Talk, David Voas lays out the evidence for the gradual but “unstoppable decay” of Christianity.

Using several charts, he detailed the slow but sure decline of Christianity in the USA, Canada, and New Zealand from around 1910 to 1990, arguing that it will not come back. Voas offered some reasons for the corrosive effects of modernity, including the growth in multiculturalism and material security. (It is also worthy of the note that the decline of Christianity is negatively correlated with the precipitous growth in the incidence of depression.)

Interestingly, Voas’ statistics parallel the Biblical prophecies. Paul prophesied that:

·       …in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. (2 Timothy 3:1-5 ESV)

It seems evident that in the midst of our comfort and affluence, these “fruit” are becoming more apparent. How will these changes impact the Church? Jesus’ prophecies weren’t reassuring:

·       “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” (Matthew 24:9-12; 10:21-22; 13:20-21)

This will be a time of the rejection of the Biblical faith (2 Thess. 2:3; 1 Timothy 4:1), which stands in opposition to the loosened morals of the day, and intense persecution, as almost the entire Book of Revelation affirms. In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus explained the various reasons that some will reject the Biblical faith:

·       The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” (Mark 4:14-20)

What determines whether they remain and leave? Their response to what is sown (the Word of God, Scripture)! If they abandon the Word of God, they abandon God. If they embrace this Word, they embrace God and bear His fruit.

All this will happen according to the will of God, but why will He allow this persecution and apostasy?

Wondering how I might finish this essay, I took a break to drip some coffee. In my clumsiness, I spilt the spent grounds on the kitchen floor and had to clean them. However, in doing this, I cleaned the floor, which desperately needing cleaning.

Was it a good thing that I split the grounds? In retrospect, I would have to answer “yes.” Is it a good thing that God will allow the horrid persecution and the falling-away from the faith? He promises that He will shake the heavens and the earth to remove those “things” that can be shaken loose from His Kingdom (Hebrews 12:25-29; Hagai 2:6). He will separate those faithful to His Word from those who are not (John 15:7-14).

I delight in the Word of God. However, I am grieved by this very consistent and plain warning. Even though this is the will of God, I am deeply troubled by the prospect of this great apostasy. May it open our hearts of compassion towards the lost so that we will cry out for their souls!

WHAT MUST WE DO TO GROW SPIRITUALLY?

I’m glad that God has made it obvious to me that any good that had come out of my life was not of my own doing (James 1:17). Let me give you one example of this. When I was first saved 41 years ago, I was continually distressed with what I saw about myself. I didn’t want to serve God and had little heart for His people. To no avail, I would answer many altar calls to be healed of my selfishness. However, years later, I suddenly noticed that this had changed (and was changing). I just wanted to seek the honor of the Lord and to build His Church.

This took me by surprise. Clearly, these new desires didn’t come from me but were His gifts – entirely. It was also clear that these changes and others weren’t the result of my spiritual disciplines. I suspect that if had become obvious to me that Christian growth was the result of my own efforts, it would have gone to my head – the last thing that our Lord wants.

I have learned that spiritual growth is the fruit of the Spirit. Paul had confessed as much:

·       But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. (1 Corinthians 15:10 ESV)

Jesus also claimed that without Him, we can do nothing (John 15:4-5). However, this is hard for us to see but essential to understand so that our hopes will reside in the right place – in our Lord.

We tend to have wrong expectations, and, because of this, we grow discouraged. Therefore, I would like to list a few popular and seemingly Biblical hopes that will disappoint. Then, I’d like to close with what I think is a Biblical understanding of obedience in regards to spiritual growth.

Here are some misconceptions about spiritual growth:

1. ABSTAINING FROM FOODS AND FASTING TRANSFORMS US:

o   But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. (1 Cor. 8:8)

o   For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. (Romans 14:17)

The Bible never gives us the slightest indication that fasting purifies us or enables us to better receive or hear from God. However, fasting and other forms of humbling behaviors serve as a plea to God.

2.    PHYSICAL TRAINING AND DISCIPLINE CARRY OVER INTO A DISCIPLINED SPIRITUAL LIFE:

o   1 Timothy 4:7-8  Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

While bodily training will help the body, it will not make us more spiritual.

3. SELF-DENIAL AND HARSH TREATMENT OF OUR BODIES TRANSFORM:

o   Colossians 2:16-23  Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

Self-punishment is a denial of the sufficiency of the Cross of Christ. We cannot pay for our sins, since they have already been paid for.

4.    PURSUIT OF A MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD TRANSFORMS:

o   1 Corinthians 14:6  Now, brothers, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching?

While the Spirit is always working supernaturally in our lives, there is not a single verse that instructs us to experience God or to seek mystical experience. Instead, these are granted sovereignly by God. Instead, we are instructed to seek Him through prayer and meditating on His Word. Consequently, even the speaking in tongues did not transform unless it was accompanied by the knowledge of God.

5. MOSAIC TEMPLE OFFERINGS TRANSFORMED THE ISRAELITES:

o   The gifts and sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper. They are only a matter of food and drink and various ceremonial washings--external regulations applying until the time of the new order. (Hebrews 9:9-10)

Instead, our conscience is cleansed by the once and for all offering of Jesus for our sins. This alone enables us to draw near in confidence (Hebrews 10:19:22).

God has to initiate the entire process of transformation. This includes salvation and sanctification:

·       He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. (Titus 3:5)

·       For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephes. 2:10)

·       Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Philip.1:6)

What then is our role? Are we mere puppets? Certainly, the Bible teaches much about necessity of obedience. The Bible conveys this in many ways – countless ways. Here are just a few:

·       What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. (James 4:1-3)

·       About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:11-14)

If we do not ask, we will not receive. If we do not use what we have, we will lose it, and the list goes on. However, I want to suggest that God must do the heavy-lifting. Why? Because we are incapable of adding an inch to our height or a day to our lives, at least by ourselves!

Instead, we should regard our necessary duties as a plea to God to change the things that we are unable to change, to provide what we cannot provide.

I am grateful for the knowledge that Paul had received from the Lord:

·       Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God. (2 Corinthians 3:4-5)

Nevertheless, obedience is essential. Consequently, I must humble myself if I want my Savior to raise me up and transform me:

·       Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:6-7; James 4:6; Luke 18:14; Matthew 24:12)

Transformation comes in His timing. It is His work. All we need to do is to open the door through our obedience to His Word. I like to think of us as midwives. It doesn’t matter how skilled or hard-working we might be, we can only bring forth new life if it is already in the uterus. Despite the fact that our Lord calls us to be His partners, it is He alone who grants the increase:

·       And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will. (2 Timothy 2:24-26)

Let us keep our eyes on Him as plants that follow the trajectory of the sun. To Him be all the glory!

THE ABSENCE OF TRANSITIONAL FORMS AND ITS EMBARRASSMENT FOR EVOLUTION

If macro-evolution is a fact, evidence of gradual change among the various species should be found in the fossil record. Evidence of transition should claim the spotlight. However, it is precisely this record that fails to reveal such evidence. Casey Luskin has written:

·       In the Origin of Species, Darwin explained that his theory led him to believe that “[t]he number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous.” However, he understood that the fossil record did not document these “intermediate” forms of life, asking, “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?” https://evolutionnews.org/2015/01/problem_5_abrup/

Instead of finding entire lines transitional forms (intermediate links), we find stasis – evidence that species have not changed – the very thing that creationists would have predicted.

Luskin adds:

·       Today, some 150 years later, out of thousands of species known from the fossil record, only a small fraction are claimed to be candidates for Darwin’s intermediate forms. Fossil evidence of evolutionary intermediates is generally lacking, as the late evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould admitted: “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”

However, even these few “candidates” are hotly contested. Instead of representing intermediate forms, they might simply represent entirely different species without any ancestral connection. Meanwhile, the great preponderance of evidence shows the very opposite thing, as Luskin notes:

·       Dr. Colin Patterson had written a book for the British Museum called Evolution. Creationist Luther Sunderland wrote to Dr. Patterson inquiring why he had not shown one single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. Patterson then wrote back with the following amazing confession which was reproduced, in its entirety, in Sunderland’s book Darwin’s Enigma:

·       ‘I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?’

·       ‘Yet Gould [Stephen J. Gould—the now deceased professor of paleontology from Harvard University] and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. … You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. https://creation.com/that-quote-about-the-missing-transitional-fossils

One biology textbook explains:

·       Many species remain virtually unchanged for millions of years, then suddenly disappear to be replaced by a quite different, but related, form. Moreover, most major groups of animals appear abruptly in the fossil record, fully formed, and with no fossils yet discovered that form a transition from their parent group. (C.P. Hickman, L.S. Roberts, and F.M. Hickman, Integrated Principles of Zoology, p. 866 (Times Mirror/Moseby College Publishing, 1988, 8th ed))

An invertebrate biology textbook explains:

·       Most of the animal groups that are represented in the fossil record first appear, “fully formed” and identifiable as to their phylum, in the Cambrian, some 550 million years ago. These include such anatomically complex and distinctive types as trilobites, echinoderms, brachiopods, molluscs, and chordates. … The fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla…(R.S.K. Barnes, P. Calow and P.J.W. Olive, The Invertebrates: A New Synthesis, pp. 9-10 (3rd ed., Blackwell Sci. Publications, 2001))

Why is “fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla?” It simply fails to show any unambiguous records of transition, as it should show if macro-evolution has taken place.

However, some evolutionists have countered that it is just a matter of time until the transitional histories are laid bare, but this has not occurred. Instead, evolutionists are admitting that our knowledge of the fossil record has already reached maturity. Luskin reports:

·       Paleontologists today generally recognize that while the fossil record is imperfect, it is still adequate to assess questions about evolution. One study in Nature reported that “if scaled to the … taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.

Evolutionary anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz summarizes the problem:

·       [W]e are still in the dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus — full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin’s depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations. . .(Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species, p. 3 (Wiley, 1999).

While some evolutionists argue that their darkness still castes some glimmers of light upon their theory, creationism is illuminated by the noonday sun.

FALSE BELIEFS ARE STREET DRUGS

Atheists attack Christian faith in a number of ways. One favorite way is to claim that we believe in Jesus simply because we want to believe in Him for the benefits we derive. This strategy takes many forms. One atheist just charged:

·       Is it more logical to think that your god has individual thoughts and feelings and makes judgements on every individual, or does it seem more like we personified an idea that we use to excuse our lack of knowledge of the unknown, to help calm our fear of it?

The atheist charged that I believe in the God of the Bible because I find these beliefs more comforting than others. However, we can turn this around and charge:

·       The reason that you, Mr. Atheist, are attacking my beliefs is that you too are finding this comforting. Perhaps humiliating a Christian is your form of conquest, empowerment, or one-upmanship for you. Or perhaps you are angered or threatened by the Christian God. If my personal motives are supposed to denigrate my beliefs, perhaps your personal motives should serve to denigrate your beliefs. Perhaps instead, you fear my God and fear being judged. Perhaps you are afraid of a God who can see into you, and you do not want anything to interfere with your autonomy.

Ultimately, our faith and beliefs should rest upon the evidence, just as Jesus required:

·       “If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true.  You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works [miracles] that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me.” (John 5:31-36)

Yes, we do derive many benefits through our beliefs in Jesus. However, self-deception is not a Biblical option, even if it is comforting. Besides, if our beliefs are not based upon truth, they will take and their toll and their “benefits” will be as short-lived as any street drug.