Idolatry Produces Soul
Bondage – Judges 3:8
We
continue our study with the first cycle of disobedience, discipline and
deliverance under the first deliverer, which is a pretty good translation of
the word “judge.” The term “judge” doesn’t
nave the connotation in Hebrew of a judicial or a judiciary official as it does
in the English language, although that was one aspect of their responsibility,
more often than not they are portrayed as a military leader and a leader of at
least a portion of the nation. So we
get into this first cycle with the first judge, Othniel, and last week we began
to look at the issues involved starting in Judges 3:7, “and the sons of Israel
did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and forgot the LORD their God, and served the
Baals and the Ashtaroth.”
As
we began to look at that we made several points in order to orient ourselves to
the time. Remember Scripture must
always be interpreted in the time in which it was written and one of the things
that we saw here is that the purpose, one of the purposes for writing the book
of Judges was to show the Israelites why they had failed under a theocracy when
they had maximum freedom, operating under the Mosaic Law, under a concept of
government known as a theocracy where they did not have a physical human king
who would operate in authority over the nation and in 1 Samuel 8 there is the
warning that now that you have failed as a theocracy and you want a king like
every other nation, then you are going to have your taxes raised and you are
going to thereby lose and limit your freedoms.
We
see tremendous application politically for that today; I think that we see in
our culture today, especially in this political season and election year, we’ve
seen this over the last decade, we want to be like all the other nations, like
the European nations and other nations who succumb to socialism, we want to
have a health care policy like they have, we want to have cradle to grave
security, and the more you look to a central government to provide security for
your life the more you give up freedom.
And you can never have freedom and security at the same time; they are
mutually exclusive because true freedom means that you have not only freedom to
succeed but the freedom to make bad decisions and fail and absolutely ruin your
life and end up destitute and living under a bridge somewhere. But if you want somebody to come along and
guarantee that you can never suffer the consequences of your bad decisions,
then that is also going to limit your ability to succeed. And when that is imposed upon a nation then
the result is a loss of freedom.
But
what destroys that is not a political problem, it is not an economic problem,
it is not an education problem, it is a spiritual problem and what we see over
and over in Judges is that the reason that they have military failure, the
reason that they have a loss of freedom, the reason they have political failure
and the reason they have moral failure…moral failure isn’t even the cause. That’s
one of the problems with so much of the so-called Christian right is they’re
out there wanting to impose a morality on people who have at the core a
negative volition toward God and then it becomes nothing more than a Pharisaism
and it’s a pseudo freedom and a pseudo
morality because it’s not grounded in positive volition.
The
only source of freedom is the positive volition of a nation towards God and
when a nation goes negative toward God then there is a loss of freedom. That is the issue. So since the issue is spiritual the solution is spiritual; it’s
not political, it’s not economic, it is not caused by mandating some sort of
moral code on everybody, it’s not caused by going in and renovating the
education system, all of those things may be necessary and I’m not saying that
it’s not a good thing to pursue those particular tracks but they are not the
solution and they never will be the solution because what we see in this
chapter is that the real causative force in human history is volition; volition
towards God, that determines everything.
And
that concept of volition has been destroyed in our culture and people are doing
everything, because that’s part of paganism, is to reject the divine
institutions and to systematically attack them and when you attack the core
divine institution which is volition, then everything else begins to fall. And when you attack volition what you are
attacking is human responsibility and you basically say that people are no longer
responsible for their lives and decisions and somebody else is going to come in
clean up the mess, it’s not really their fault, it’s their parents fault or
it’s the system’s fault, it’s education’s fault, or they were born in this
place instead of that place, and what the Bible says is all of that is purely
secondary; the real issue is how they have responded to whatever environment
they are in and if they do not respond positively toward God and toward
doctrine then the result is always going to be failure and bondage and
servitude.
There
are also tremendous lessons built by analogy from this for the spiritual
life. Last time I said this is going to
take a while to go through this because we have to keep our eye on the ball and
keep focused on where we are going which is tying this into the spiritual
life. But in the meantime as I keep
digging into the text I keep thinking about all sorts of applications for our
present time.
Now
I keep thinking about this passage or this phrase in verse 7, that “the sons of
Israel forgot Yahweh, their God,” and the emphasis there is on the sacred
Tetragrammaton, translated with small uppercase letters which indicates that it
translates Yahweh in the Hebrew, which refers to the covenant God of Israel who
is the One who entered into a covenant with them, the Mosaic Covenant, in which
He promised certain blessings for obedience and divine discipline for
disobedience. But when it says that
“they forgot the LORD,” it seems kind of a weak
statement there and we must parallel it with a verse back in Judges 2:11-12
where it says, “And the sons of Israel,” so it’s basically the same thing, that
“the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served the Baals, [12] And they” and there the
verb shifts and it’s a different verb, I pointed this out last time, there the
verb is ‘azav which means to forsake,
to reject, to abandon. So when we look
at the word “forget” in Judges 3:7 it doesn’t mean to just have temporary
amnesia or some sort of momentarily overlooking God and you woke up that morning
and you were just too busy, oops I forgot to have my devotions this morning,
forgot to read my Bible or got too busy and my, look how fast the time
went.
It
doesn’t mean that, it’s a much stronger word and it really reflects what Paul
talks about in Romans 1 where he says that they rejected the truth, suppressed
the truth in unrighteousness and then exchanged the worship of the creature for
the worship of the Creator. And then
“professing themselves,” which indicates at the same time they’re claiming to
be wise and intelligent and academic which refers to academic and intellectual
arrogance, “professing themselves to be wise they became fools, by exchanging
the worship of the creature for the Creator” so it is an intentional removal of
God from the thinking. Now that can be
done in several different ways. It can
be done either in a sophisticated well-thought out systematic way or it can be
done in an unsophisticated way. Now
most of us do it in more of an unsophisticated way, we just decide that God’s
not going to play a major role in our life right now and somehow it’ll work out
anyway and we just sort of rationalize God out of the picture at this
particular moment.
But
there is a systematic attempt to remove God from the picture that is much more
heinous and is usually involved at a larger level called the cosmic level. And the Scripture, in the New Testament you
have Satan’s system of thinking referred to as cosmic thinking, from the Greek
word kosmos which means an orderly
systematic cohesive plan and purpose, and what that means is that Satan has an
agenda and his agenda is to blind the minds of men. Notice it does not say their emotions, it does not say to
physically blind them, but it’s to blind their thinking, to put blinders on
their thinking so that they cannot think accurately and the way to do that is
with false concepts, and these false concepts sound good and look good and
they’re thrown at us left and right, so much so that they basically make up the
cultural air that we breathe. And of
course Scripture says that Satan is the prince and power of the air, so there
is just a little analogy there and we imbibe worldly thinking on a day to day
basis and if our radar is not on then we’re not aware of how these things are
influencing us because 9 times out of 10 the subtlety is the result not of what
is said, but what is not said. See,
most of us have a very difficult time focusing on what’s not present and when
things are left out and we don’t really know what’s not there, it’s very
important to pay attention to what is not said sometimes.
Back
in the 70s and since then there’s been a tremendous debate among evangelicals
about the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture. And one of the catch phrases of the so-called Neo-evangelicals
who were defining away the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture is that
they would write a doctrinal statement that would just say we believe that the
Bible is the Word of God and is infallible in all areas of faith and
practice. Well what’s not said? “All” areas, see they’ve limited it, that
the authority of God was only to “all areas of faith and practice,” but if it
has to do with history or science, or meteorology or ancient history or
civilizations then it may not be authoritative, it’s only in areas of faith and
practice. So it’s what’s not seen
that’s there and yet many people, because they’re not taught to think
critically and how to operate on their spiritual radar and exercise
discernment, they just get sucked into this kind of false thinking and you don’t
even know it. It’s extremely subtle and
that is why Satan was called, when he indwelt the serpent in the Garden, the
most subtle of all creatures.
Now
when I looked at this last time I began to emphasize the fact that this entails
something more than simply dismissing God or rejecting God or putting your
emphasis on the cultural values of the Canaanites that surrounded them, but it
would also involve an intentional and definite act of rewriting history. Remember, this generation is the generation
just following Joshua. We are told that
Joshua has died and all of the elders have died so this is the first generation
that comes up after the death of Joshua and the elders, so they are not
eyewitnesses as a generation. I want
you to notice that the Scripture clearly comes along characterizing and entire
generation. So that gives us the
authority to characterize generations by spiritual characteristics. It doesn’t mean it’s true of every single
individual in that generation but the preponderance of the people, the majority
of the people do fit the profile.
So
just like with the Exodus generation the majority of them were believers, that
doesn’t mean that every single of them was a believer but they were all
characterized by two things; they had all trusted in the gospel as it was
known in the Old Testament but they had all rejected any desire to live the
spiritual life as it was known in the Old Testament, so they were spiritual
life failures and that’s why they ended up wondering through discipline in the
wilderness for forty years. Now that
occurred, as far as the timing of the events in Judges 3:6, the Exodus was
approximately 808 to 90 years earlier.
For us that would be something comparable to the events of World War
I. I know that for those of you who are
under 30 World War I is ancient history; for some of you Vietnam is ancient
history. But that just shows how you
have already succumbed to a degree to historical revisionism. It was Henry Ford who said history is
bunk. But people who forget history, as
Hegel said, are doomed to repeat history.
And the one thing that we have learned from history is that we learn
nothing from history, yet history is crucial to understanding who we are,
what God has done and where we are going.
It
is only as a Christian, as a believer that you have a frame of reference for
understanding the value of history because history is the outworking of God’s
plan and we have history only because of divine revelation that has given us
the criterion to be able to interpret history.
You do not have any culture in the ancient world develop history until
the Jews come along and under Moses and the Pentateuch and Joshua and the
writer of Judges and Samuel do you have the first true writing of history in
God’s plan, in human history and in the ancient world. And by history I don’t mean simply recording
past events. That’s what is known, more
technically as a chronicle, you’re just listing events but you’re not trying to
assign any meaning to it, you’re not trying to gain any lessons from them, you
are not trying to decide, well what are the ultimate causative factors in
history, you are simply stating what happened.
Well, that’s technically not history, that is being a chronicler, and
there were some examples of that. But
then when you look at the ancient world, you look at what we have in the
remains from the Assyrians, from the Babylonians, from the Egyptians, they
never had history; they had myth and legend because they had no absolute
framework from which to understand objective reality. We’re going to have to look at why because they not only did that
in the ancient world but we have a much more modern sophisticated form of it
going on in the world around us today.
So forgetting
God not only involves a personal act of negative volition in rejecting God and
actively substituting one thing for something else, but in order to justify
that in our own minds you must somehow rewrite the past. It has been only 40 years since the tribes
of Israel have entered into the land, and if you remember when Joshua led the
nation, the tribes across the Jordan River and God parted the Jordan River,
just like they did the Red Sea and they walked across on dry land, when they
got to the other side and they first entered the land, God said take one stone
for each tribe and build a rock cairn that will be a monument and testimony for
all subsequent generations so that when they see that, and the children come
along and say daddy, what’s that, he’s going to say well that tells us that in
history God operated. You see, that is
the importance of history; history is the realm in which God operates and if
you destroy historic objectivity then what you do is destroy the objectivity of
Christianity. It is an attack on our
beliefs. So that is why history is a
very important issue.
Now
the liberals have understood this, and of course Satan has understood this, and
liberal theology began to attack the historicity of the Scripture and the
gospel and the historical reliability of Genesis 1-11 as early as the early 17th
century. Now there may have been some
isolated attacks earlier than that but that’s when it really become more
systematic and enters into the mainstream of academic thought in western culture,
and it begins to build from that point on and they understood…see the attack,
if you notice, while it developed a scientific aspect later it’s not till the
1850s that Darwin published his Origin of
Species, you have really the attack on Christian begins in the realm of
history. That’s why I’ve always said
history is the most important subject for Christians. It’s the most important thing for you to understand and if you have
kids who are studying history in school probably the place that they’re getting
the most fiendish, subtle destructive attacks against establishment thinking
and doctrinal thinking is not in biology and geology, it is in the classroom in
social sciences and in history, and as parents you need to really be aware of
what’s going on there because that’s where a lot of history is being reshaped
to teach all of this modern social political agenda.
There
is an American history textbook that’s been written a conservative Christian by
the name of Marvin Olasky, who is down at the University of Texas, he is also I
believe, an advisor in George W. Bush’s campaign but he is a believer and I’ve
head him on some various talk shows, he’s quite articulate but he has written
an American history from a Christian framework. And that’s important as parents, you ought to put your kids on a
summer curriculum and teach them these things because they’re not going to get…
for those of you who are over 40 your kids are not going to get what you got
when you were in school and you probably didn’t get what your parents got in
school and you don’t even know what you don’t know. So you ought to make that a priority.
In
Judges 3 we see one of the first generations that engages in historical
revisionism and they forget God because they are fundamentally anti-history and
what we learn from this is a principle is paganism always seeks to reshape and
mold history to its own agenda and plan.
So let’s get into a new doctrine here, the historical revisionism and
post-modernism.
Point
number one: history is the outworking of the plan and purposes of God for human
history. That’s our basic definition;
history is the outworking of the plan and purposes of God for human history
therefore history is objective and the events of history and the meaning of
history are rationally and cogently discernable. It’s not merely subjectivity, you’ll hear many people say well,
that’s your opinion, and that’s their opinion and every historian has a
different opinion. That is because they
are coming from a frame or reference.
Historical facts don’t change but people may invent historical facts,
they may look at a thousand pieces of data and choose five and then use those
five as the basis for interpretation.
That’s what historians do; they look at everything but they’ll pick five
or six representative things and then use that to interpret history. But if you don’t have God’s divine viewpoint
framework then you will be distorting history and it is only when you come at
history from God’s divine viewpoint framework that you’re able to accurately
interpret history.
There
are lots of different philosophies of history, from Hindu philosophies and
ancient Greek philosophies which were basically cyclical which went along with
their paganism, that history really isn’t going anywhere, to modern views of
history which are all distortions of Christianity. Augustine had the greatest impact on our understanding of history
when he wrote his famous book, The City
of God, because he showed there that history was directional, it was going
somewhere, it was God’s plan and it had a destiny. But what happened over the years, because of the residual effect
of Christianity in western culture, people like Marx and Hegel still held onto
this directional idea but then they changed everything else in terms of its
underlying meaning and causation and man was no longer, volition was no longer
the major issue.
So
we have to understand that if history is the outworking of the plan and
purposes of God then we must, in evaluating history, maintain a Creator/creature
distinction when it comes to history.
And by that I mean that God is going to be distinct from the creation
and it is God who is going to give meaning, purpose and value to the creation. So if God is removed from the equation, then
meaning, value and purpose comes from inside the creation, and that is the
exchange of the Creator for the creature.
So you enter into intellectual idolatry.
Now
I know for some of you this sounds like its pure philosophy but it comes home
to roost, every time you read an editorial in the newspaper, every time your
kids go to a social studied class, some of you are going to college, every time
you go to a history classroom because your professors and those teachers have
been trained in colleges and universities under professors and historians to
teach this way and it is shaping the thinking of people. If you go to museums, the museum curators
have gone to Cambridge and Oxford and Harvard and Yale and they have sat under
these professors and so it has shaped their thinking and their
interpretation. So you read the
newspaper, you watch something on the Discovery Channel and that’s the
perspective from which they’re coming and if you don’t understand the issues
then you don’t have your radar up and you just naturally suck in all sorts of
human viewpoint that has subtle effects on the way we think so we have to
understand this. This is crucial, it’s
not just a matter of understanding abstract philosophy, it’s a matter of
shaping and protecting our own thinking.
So we have to understand this; if history is the outworking of God’s
plan, then history is objective, the events of history are objective and
rationally discernable.
Point
number two, since history is the objective arena within which God operates, to
destroy objectivity destroys meaning in history. And when you destroy meaning in history, then you destroy the
ability to have an objective knowledge of God.
And that’s what’s happened in the culture around us. Once you lose objectivity, that God is no
longer the God who works and operates in history, then the only way to know God
is to know your own impressions and subjective feelings, and where are we today
in Christianity and in the culture as a whole?
There’s emphasis on emotion as opposed to objective knowledge, because
modern man has given up on the fact that you can know truth and you can know
truth objectively that applies to everyone in any culture, in any
situation.
This
is a chart that we have to understand, I want this grilled into you. Above this thick line, this is an
impenetrable line of demarcation between God the Creator of all things, and
those of you who come out of liturgical church backgrounds, whether it’s Roman
Catholic or Episcopal or Presbyterian, where you quoted the old creeds, the Nicene
Creed, the Apostle’s Creed, it always starts off, “We believe in God the Father
Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.”
They don’t start with the gospel, they start with creation. Everything starts with understanding God as
the Creator and that means He is radically distinct and different from
everything I the creation. So I draw a
heavy thick line separating the Creator from everything in creaturely
existence. Now everything in creaturely
existence not only includes objective concrete things such as animals and
plants and trees and man, but it also includes all of the intellectual ideas
generated by the creature, such as reason and rationalism, experience and
empiricism, our interpretation of experience and empiricism, and what happens
is when we take God out of the picture then we have to generate all value and
criteria from within this box beneath the heavy line. And that assumes and presumes that we are omniscient, that we
have all the data we need in order to formulate any kind of interpretive scheme. That is not only unrealistic; it’s the
height of arrogance. But what we have
below the line is man’s intellectual background, reason, experience,
empiricism, whatever his intellectual theory might be, intuitivism, mysticism,
would be included there. There you also
have the events, like historical events as well as scientific data, values,
feelings, impressions, intuitions; all of this is in the creaturely realm.
Now
what happens is when you take God out of the picture then there is nothing
above the line that can give meaning, value and definition to the data in that
box. That box can only have meaning,
anything in that box can only have meaning in reference to something that is
outside of the box. So when man comes
along and tries to interpret history, tries to interpret the events of history,
since there is no longer any objective criterion, all he is left with is
subjective criteria. So how then do you
know anything happened? Well, it seems
right to me. The Scripture says there
is a way that seems right to man but the ends thereof are death. It makes me feel good; it gives me an
intuitive sense that this is right. So
all of a sudden you’re grounded in subjectivism and then that comes over into
the religious realm because God is no longer presented as the objective actor
in human history.
I
covered that last time, the great distortions of the gospel today are along the
lines of invite Jesus into your life and He’ll solve all your problems. Well, there’s an element of truth to that
but that’s not how the gospel is presented in the Scripture. The gospel is presented in the Scripture as
something that God did in human history on a particular afternoon, 14 Nisan
according to the Hebrew calendar, 14 Nisan the year 33 AD or perhaps 32, we’re
not exactly sure but whatever the year on a particular date in time between
12:00 noon and 3:00 p.m. in the
afternoon the skies were darkened and God the Father judicially poured out upon
Jesus Christ on the cross all the sins of the world, so that Jesus Christ paid
the penalty, sin is no longer the issue for the believer. It has been paid for objectively and
verifiably in human history, and because He who knew no sin became sin for us,
God the Father at the instant of our faith alone in Christ alone imputes to us
the righteousness of Jesus Christ. So
that because we have received this imputed righteousness we are now justified
by faith. That’s a historical reality,
it is not presented in terms of how you feel, or in order to solve your
problems; that’s an appeal subjectively and that’s a false gospel. It is distorted by the pressure of our
external worldly cosmic system. And it
shifts the emphases in the gospel and that distorts it.
So
when you go to church if the emphasis isn’t so much on what the Scripture says,
even though they may give a lot of attention to Bible study, see, they may look
good, they may talk about we have Bible class four times a week, and you can
come and they’ll talk about the Bible but they’re reinterpreting the Bible
still within this emotional subjective grid because they haven’t challenged
their own thinking. I remember coming
to understand this 25 years ago when I was in seminary, that one of the reasons
the charismatic movement has become so popular in the 20th century
is because it essentially an extremely existential form of Christianity. Existentialism says that there is really no
meaning in life, the only way I can validate and have meaning and value in life
is to engage in some action. According
to John Paul Sartre it could be something positive like helping a little old
lady across the street, or decapitating her, it didn’t matter which you did;
there’s no external value system to judge right or wrong, it doesn’t matter
what you do as long as you do something that validates your existence and
emphasizes your existence. So it has to
do with the subjective assignment of meaning, that there’s an experience and
that’s what is the criterion for whatever it is you believe, it’s that
experience that you’ve had. Well, most 20th
century Americans, whether they’ve heard of John Paul Sartre or existentialism
or Kierkegaard or Hegel or Kant, it doesn’t matter, they’re existentialists;
they’re walking, talking, breathing existentialists because they believe that
meaning in life basically comes from their own experience and their own value
system and just doing whatever it is, that’s what validates their life and if
it’s boring and dull then let’s end it because it’s all meaningless. And it’s a very depressive and very
pessimistic way of thinking. And one of
the reasons we have such a high rate of suicide among young people today is
because they are basically taught from within this type of framework.
But
what happens is somebody comes along and gives you a gospel that Jesus is going
to solve all your problems and make you feel better, they have just presented
and existential form of the gospel and so now you can go to an existential
Christian church and your religious beliefs are validated every week by how
exciting it gets, and by stimulating music that appeals to your emotions and by
a form of teaching and preaching that is designed more to emphasize the form
than the content and to stimulate you so you go home and say my, wasn’t it
good, I just feel like I was in the presence of God today. That’s just existentialism that’s been
baptized; it is not Biblical Christianity.
And it becomes popular and the reason it’s so popular is because you
don’t have to change the way you think.
You might accept Christ as your Savior and you might be genuinely a
believer in Christ but you don’t have to change the way you think; you go right
into the church and you keep being an existential person, and you keep
operating on the same existential presuppositions as everybody else in the
culture and you never really renovate your thinking by doctrine. So it’s just is a theology that is based on
emotion and experience rather than on the objectivity of the revelation of God,
even though there is a lot of talk about the Bible, there is a lot of talk about
many good things, ultimately you break it down that’s the core problem. So this is what has happened culturally and
it has its impact on how we understand history.
Thus
we can say in point 3 that with God and objectivity removed the vacuum is filled
with subjective impressions and feelings created and imposed by man upon
creation. So man looks at the data,
looks at the information, looks at the feelings and then he imposes his own
meaning upon creation rather than accepting God’s meaning and God’s definition
and that is the essence of idolatry.
You have exchanged the worship of the Creator for the worship of the
creature; you have taken God out and anything within that bottom square,
anything in there, and move into the vacuum created by the absence of God. And you can have all kinds of details of
life, whatever it might be, it might be materialism, it might be success, it
might be marriage or family, anything within the creation then moves into that
vacuum and becomes a substitute idol.
We see
this in Christian circles; I was reading a news letter, an excellent editorial,
somebody was writing and was talking about how conservative Christians have
created an idol out of the family. Oh,
but the family is important. Yes, it’s
important, but he gave examples of a Christian family he had grown up being
involved with and for years they had a motto along the lines of where the Word
of God is preached or where God is glorified, something objective and Biblical,
and they exchanged that to where the family is strengthened. See, all of a sudden now the family has
become the idol. So what happens in
paganism is there’s a very subtle attack on all of the divine institution’s and
even in some cases some of those divine institutions can be elevated to idol
status.
Point
number four, by destroying history and objectivity of meaning in history you
destroy man and any meaning and value in man.
This is where we are culturally.
You see this; I think young people are particularly susceptible to this
as they are forced to read as required reading in many literature classes
modern American writers who are writing from this dark pessimistic hopeless
existential perspective. They read this
kind of literature that is so negative and then they go out and kill themselves
and we wonder, why don’t they have any hope?
It’s because we’re drilling them with this sort of pessimistic
post-modernism in the classroom. By
destroying history and objectivity of meaning in history you destroy man, man
no longer is in the image of God, really you no longer have any reason to show
why man is different from the rock out there or why it is any better or worse
for me to kill a mosquito than to kill my neighbor, because if we’re all part
of the overall chain of being then you have no criteria for showing that man is
unique. He’s just another accident in
the chain of being.
There’s
an ancient Chinese proverb that says that a nation that is absorbed with the
present, see that’s what existentialism does, you’re validated only in the present,
that’s what post-modernism does, it just emphasizes the present, and a country
that is absorbed with the present ignores its past, and therefore it destroys
its future. A nation that is absorbed
with the present ignores its past and destroys its future. I know that some of you, because of the way
history was always taught to you, golly, why does history get so dull? It’s because when you don’t have a Biblical
frame of reference for understanding history it is dull; it is just either a
meaningless conglomeration of facts or it’s a view of the facts that are so
distorted that something in you has rebelled against that.
Point
number five: in post-modernism the big evil is western civilization. Now why is that; see there’s this emphasis
on multi-culturalism, which means all cultures have equal value, there’s no
what they call meta-value, something large enough, broad enough to serve as a
criterion for all cultures because they’ve taken God out of the top, so
therefore everything is of equal value, whether it’s African culture, Asian
culture, Russian culture, aboriginal culture, whatever it might be, native
American Indian culture, whatever it is it has equal value and so you can’t say
that one is bad, one is good, they are all of equal value. And it’s an attack on western civilization;
it’s not really equal because everything that comes out of western Europe is
automatically evil so that’s become more and more denigrated and ran down in
the classroom and all other cultures become elevated in value, whether there is
any real objective evidence to support that or not.
Here
you have to remember that western civilization became what it did, not because
of Plato and Aristotle, not because of Roman influence, because that was all
pagan, and there’s ultimately no difference between the Romans, the Greeks, the
Africans, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Chinese, there’s no difference,
they are just different varieties of paganism.
But what made western civilization what it is is the introduction of Christianity
and its influence on all of the cultures in Europe. It transformed them. If
it hadn’t been for Christianity the Celts and the Teutons and all the various
tribes, the Vikings, would still be immersed in their old pagan ways. Now they are going back to that, but western
civilization became what it did because of the influence of Christianity. Now that doesn’t mean that western
civilization is wonderful and everything is perfect and they did everything right. There was still a lot of evil there because
it was a blend, it was a merger of a lot of Christian ideas and still had a lot
of old pagan concepts leftover, which is true of anything. You’ll never have a perfectly Christianized
society or country this side of the millennium, and that is not to be our
goal. But European culture became what
it did because of the influence of Christian, so when you start attacking
western civilization you never come right out and say we’re attacking
Christianity, but in essence all this post-modernism is, is an attack on
Christianity and the absolutes of Christianity.
What
happens under point number six is that modern historians, therefore, have to
locate the ultimate cause of history inside of history instead of outside of
history. We go back to that picture of
the box, all the details in the box.
Because they’ve rejected anything outside the box then all meaning and
value has to come from something inside the box, so one guy comes up with this
view that what moves history is economics.
And so you have an emphasis on trade.
Now that’s not saying that trade is not an important factor but is that
the ultimate causation in history. Or
he comes along and says its various social trends such as a Marxist
interpretation of history or some say it’s simply the age, or it’s political
theory, or it has to do with meteorology and that’s a big emphasis today, it’s
called geopolitical interpretation of history and it emphasizes the geography,
that one reason the Africans never had developed a great civilization is the rivers
didn’t flow in the right direction, the mountains were in the wrong place and
they didn’t have the right weather so it never could really take root
there. In other words, it has nothing
to do with man and volition and his relationship to God, what made all the
difference was just a chance happening of nature and it ended up being in the
wrong place and they could never develop because there were too many natural
barriers. This is emphasized and is
accepted by many, many modern historians.
One
example of the kind of teaching that goes on today is found in the writings of
Oxford Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
in a recent
history that he published, it came out this last year, in light of the end of
the millennium, called Millennium: A
History of the Last Thousand Years.
And this reveals the degree to which this kind of thinking has permeated
society. [tape turns] … if somebody who
is an Oxfordan is teaching this and writing about this and writing about this,
it’s the culmination of years of teaching this in the classroom, which has
turned out hundreds of historians and professors and museum curators and
influential people who’ve gone into foreign service, State Department work,
they’ve gone into politics and it is this kind of thinking that is their frame
of reference and is influencing things around them. He sees the old version of history reflecting not the truth about
the global influence of western civilization…he presuppositionally rejects the
possibility that there is truth.
So
he doesn’t really believe there is truth so that really wasn’t true, we’ve got
to come up with a new approach and he thinks that the old influence on western
civilization was merely inflated egocentrism of western commentators. And what he suggests is that the real
stability in the past thousand years wasn’t from Europe, it wasn’t the British
Empire, it wasn’t the influence of Christian missionaries who went out from
Victorian England between 1800 and 1900 who established Christian outposts that
transformed the cultures of Africa, India, and Asia. Now there were some negative things as well but the core was that
it was the missionaries that went in with the military that established those
nations and brought them out of the horrible pagan societies that they
had. And what he suggests is that the
real stability in the past was China, it had nothing to do with Western
Europe.
Now
in one comment by a man named Winshuttle [sp?] who is observing what’s going on
here in this trend, he states: “The most prominent individuals who bestride his
historic stage,” that is Armesto’s, “turn out to be those people most of us had
regarded as the losers and has-beens.”
For instance, he has several pages about Montezuma, who incidentally was
practicing live human sacrifices, I think the numbers are enormous, that every
day there were dozens of live human sacrifices conducted by the Aztecs down in
Mexico City and it was one of the most paganized, demonized societies that ever
existed, and needed to be removed from the face of the earth, and this guy has
several pages about Montezuma but no mention of Ferdinand and Isabella. They were the king and queen of Spain who
authorized and financed Columbus’ voyage to America; they were also the king and
queen that removed the Moslems from Spain.
But there’s no mention of them, they are some of the most important
people in all of history, yet they’re ignored in favor of Montezuma. He devotes more space to Juan and Eva Peron
than to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt combined. He has more pages on Mao Tse-tung and Joseph
Stalin than any other political figures in the book, despite the fact that
neither of them built a communist regime that survived more than one generation
beyond his own death. Saint Elizabeth
of Hungary gets more mention that Elizabeth I of England who gets none. As for western intellectuals, neither
Frances Bacon, John Locke, David Hume nor Immanuel Kant are discussed at all;
neither is Mozart nor Michelangelo. The
index does not even list the category of philosophy but does contain 13 pages
of references to Shamans and Shamanism.
Now
this is the kind of thing that is influencing our culture and it is this sort
of historical revisionism that tells us more about the deterioration and
destruction of our own society, a rejection of God, our denial of absolutes and
inability to think biblically than it does about what went on during the last
thousand years. What happens in history
is once you remove God from the picture and the possibility of objective
knowledge, then all that you have left is subjective impressions in the bottom
circle. And this creates nothing but
problems and people end up saying why is history important. Once you remove a people from its historical
roots or you revise that then it’s easy to ignore God and to deny the fact that
there is anything of objective reality in Christianity. Jesus is no longer the Savior who saved in
space/time reality; He’s simply something else that you can latch onto
psychologically to make you feel better.
So
what has happened? Point number seven,
we have exchanged the historically active objective God of the Bible for the
emotionally energizing, exciting god (small “g”) of post-modernism. We prefer to feel good than to think
accurately; we prefer to be entertained and excited than to perhaps suffer a
little stretching boredom on a Sunday morning when we get taught deep concepts
about history and historiography. We
prefer to blame others or our environment for our problems rather than accept
responsibility for our decisions; it’s not my fault, it’s the government’s
fault, it is somebody’s fault 100 years ago because they established a certain
system that made me a victim, it’s my parent’s fault because they didn’t give
me the right kind of training, education, in other words, it’s not my
fault. We prefer to blame others or our
environment for our problems rather than accept responsibility for our
decisions. We prefer to be taken care
of by Uncle Sam rather than to take care of ourselves and assume responsibility
because we might fail, so I’ll let somebody else do it. We prefer to enslave ourselves to
politicians who promise power but are not truly in a position to give power and
would never give it up if they had it.
We would rather do that than risk failure that’s inherent in having true
freedom.
By
forgetting the God of history we become enslaved to the details and the
thinking of the cosmic system which surrounds us and the result is going to be
collapse, now own national collapse as well as personal collapse because we
have forgotten, as the Jews did, the God of history.
One
of the more influential theologians of this day is a French historian by the
name of Ferdinand Braudel, Braudel writes in his book, The Identity of France, “men do not make history, rather it is
history above all that makes men and absolves them of blame.” Now Braudel and others of his camp have
influenced a whole generation of historians and thinkers. Now listen to what he’s saying. Just a few observations; he’s saying
causality in history is the structure of history and the non-personal things in
history, it’s the rivers, it’s the geography, it’s where the tides are in the
ocean, it’s the gulf stream and the various currents in the ocean and that has
more to do with shaping history than people, who cares about great leaders and
the decisions they make; that’s nothing, it’s all basically the impersonal
aspect. It’s the components of the
world, not the decisions of man that are important; man, therefore, is just a
pawn of these impersonal forces.
“Man
is just the victim,” do you hear that, it’s not you, you’re just there, it’s
not your fault, therefore man is a victim.
This is where victimology comes from.
See, Braudel was in a concentration camp during World War II, he was
French and he was taken by the Germans and he wrote most of this between 1945
and 1955, so his writings were influencing the professors I had in college as a
history major in the early 70s, because when they had gotten their degrees in
the late 50s and 60s his thinking and the thinking of others in his school was
very prominent. I remember being taught
this sort of geopolitical emphasis in history in an English history class I
took as a senior in high school. So you
see the influence that this has and now we live in a generation that grew up
under that and what are they? They’re
all victims. And we live in a society
of victims; man is not responsible, it’s not our fault, so if it’s not our
fault we have to change it, it’s the government, it’s somebody else but it’s not
our responsibility.
In
contrast the Bible says that the ultimate cause in history is not where the
rivers are, not where the tides go, it has nothing to do with mountain ranges,
it has everything to do with human volition.
The ultimate cause in history is God who in the divine decrees
determined that His sovereignty and human responsibility would coexist in human
history. So in terms of causation it is
not the laws within creation that move history, it is man’s relationship to
God; all of those other things, economics, politics, military, all of that is
secondary. It is impacted, though,
primarily by man’s spiritual volition.
That is why what happens in Judges is the result of verse 7; it is not
the result of bad military policy, it is not the result of a bad energy policy,
it is not the result of a crisis in health care, it is not the result of some
kind of marginalized group that has been overlooked, it is all the result of
the fact that they rejected God and rejected doctrine and the result was that
they became enslaved for eight years and they lost their freedom and went into
bondage and the only thing that changed the circumstances was when they changed
their spiritual attitude. So all of
those other things that we focus on in an election year, keep your
perspective. Those are merely
secondary, ultimately it doesn’t matter which party gets into power, it doesn’t
matter which party gets elected, until the people of this country get back to
doctrine we’re just on a slide; it may just go a little faster with one group
than the other group but we’re still on a slide to national destruction.
So
in conclusion, as goes volition, the personal volition of the people at
God-consciousness, so goes the nation; as goes the volition of the believer
toward God in the spiritual life, so goes the nation. And if we, no matter what happens in November, the nation is
going to continue to deteriorate because the nation is not positive. We have maybe more religious activity, we
certainly have more religious publication today and information available than
at any other time in human history; we have more people who claim to believe in
God and claim to go to church than any other time in human history. And yet it’s having zero if any impact on our
culture. Why? Because all these Christians, for the most part, while they have
details of Christianity in their thinking, they’re truly saved, they’re
believers, they understand some points of doctrine, the frame of reference
within which they are thinking is paganism.
And they have transformed the worship of the Creator for the worship of
the creature and so they are basically operating in some form of idolatry despite
the fact that they show up at church every Sunday morning, because they are
worshiping their emotions and not the objective God of the Bible. So what we see from this is that victimology
is the result of all of these trends of the philosophical ideas since about the
mid 1700s.
Three
principles govern post-modern history:
(1) since there are so many different opinions and view of history there
must not be any real historical truth.
That’s one of their assumptions.
(2) There are so many events that values and judgments are built into
every historical viewpoint. There are
so many events, so many things going, everybody has a different value system,
that the purpose is that we must somehow remove those values and that’s called
deconstructionism. We have to go in and
say oh, the guy who wrote that history was white male conservative so that
automatically discounts 99.9% of what he said, so we can just throw that
away. This person was marginalized,
they come out of some minority whether it’s Asian or black or native American
and they are homosexual so we have to listen to them because they’ve been
marginalized so long that we’ll elevate whatever they say, who cares what they
say, we’re going to give it value because we haven’t valued it in the
past. That’s what they’re saying is,
you have to go in and deconstruct values.
Of course, the only values that get deconstructed really are the
Biblical values. (3) The third
assumption is that facts and data are boring and uninteresting. Now they may be, but their assumption is
that all facts and data are boring and uninteresting so the issue is not having
accurate facts, the issue is being entertained.
And
in light of that what you have is a quote from Fernandez Armesto’s book Millennium, where he says: “To me the test of a good history book is not
so much whether the past is verifiably reconstructed,” in other words, that the
facts are accurate, that’s irrelevant, “or cogently expounded,” that means
well-written, “but whether it is convincingly imagined and vividly evoked.” In other words, who cares about the accuracy
of the information as long as I’m entertained and made to feel good. Now folks, that’s the same thing that’s
happening in 98% of the pulpits in this country. Who cares how biblically accurate the pastor is? I would rather be entertained and feel good
than to have to deal with somebody who gets in the pulpit and God forbid,
exegetes the original languages and makes me think in terms of grammatical
principles and teaches me about history and philosophy and makes my brain
sweat. I want to go home and I want to
feel good about God, I don’t want to learn things and have my thinking
challenged. And that’s exactly what is
happening in this country and why we are going downhill so fast, because nobody
wants to think any more, don’t confuse me with facts, just make me feel good,
just uplift me, just entertain me. And
so what has happened is that in our modern society we have exchanged God for
entertainment and emotional stimulation and we are sacrificing our freedom on
the altar of security because we’ve all become victims of what somebody else
did. And we’ve lost all concept of what
is right and true and objective and the only solution is the divine solution
which is a return to the objective truth of the Scriptures and positive
volition to God, the gospel and growing to maturity in the spiritual life.