Dear Church Family,
A cosmic battle continues throughout the universe. A victor has been declared, but the losing side refuses to concede. The war features good versus evil and truth opposing falsehood. An honest look at the world leads one to think evil and falsehood dominates good and truth by a wide margin.
I have good news. Please do not believe that “honest look” for it presents many lies. As the Bible teaches only that the Christian worldview that focuses on “It’s all about God and His glory!” can truly present an accurate analysis of the world. Bill Edgar in his book “Truth in All Its Glory” addresses this good news. He gets right to the point when he says the Bible “aims at nothing less than recounting the way things are. From the creation, to the fall of humankind, to the new creation in Christ, the story told by good theology is the right account of reality. It is at once sobering, convicting, and life-giving.”
Dr. Edgar goes to show that though the effects of Adam’s sin are many, fallen man “still has that insistent, clamant desire to prayer God: ‘You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,’ Augustine tells us. Our desire to praise God is so deeply ingrained that it has led some skeptics to assert that all belief in a deity is merely a projection of our needs, the translation of human aspirations into the image of a heavenly father.”
He further diagnoses that all humans have a “hunger for God (that) takes many forms in our present world.” Sadly John 1:10 reports, “[The one true light] was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.” Jesus is the good and the truth that people seek, but their spiritual blindness keeps them from seeing Him. They yearn for the good though they often choose the evil. People say they prefer truth, but readily reject it and believe lies.
There remains danger “by making God all too human or by making humanity all to divine…we can begin to see how critical it is to get it right.” While there are many things that can be called good such as “family, culture, friends, the arts, all that human life possesses that has worth, our highest good is not in these things but in knowing God and being known by him.”
No human philosophy, nor science, nor lifestyle can bring us to true knowledge of God. Only the Bible and the Holy Spirit have the power to accomplish that. Jesus has been declared the victor. He has shown us God’s goodness and God’s truth. May the truth of God’s Word bring us to a deeper knowledge of God and may we be known by Him!
Living by grace to His glory,
Pastor Gillikin