The
Importance of Your Thinking; 1 Cor. 2:6-10
Human history plays a vital part of the cosmic conflict that takes place
and Satan is attempting today to blind the minds of the lost to the truth of
the gospel. He does this through various means: through various philosophies,
religious systems, to blind men to the existence of God—and that produces
things such as atheism, or through false substitutes of gods through
polytheism, pantheism, and various other religions that promote different
concepts of God. Just because somebody is talking about “God” does not mean
that they are talking about the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a Trinitarian God, a God who is defined
through two key terms in the Scriptures: His holiness, which has to do with His
righteousness and Justice, and the other term is His love. God is the one who
defines everything in His creation, and so when we align our thinking with His
thinking we understand reality as it is. When we go to some other source for
truth and we think that we find it in some religious system or we find it in
some philosophical system, or elsewhere other than the Bible, then we are
operating on a system that is basically a fantasy. It is not grounded in truth
and therefore there will always be a problem, there will be inconsistencies,
and our life will never be what God intended it to be because we are not living
on the basis of His creation as he created it.
Christianity is basically related to thinking. Believe in Christ has to
do with thought; that is what belief is. Belief is not an emotion, although one
of the ways Satan seeks to distract from truth is to muddy up the waters with
vocabulary, and we live in a generation today where people often want to
express what they believe by what they feel, like “I just feel this way about
that.” The Bible teaches that there is this contrast between the thinking of
the world and the thinking that is expressed in the Word of God, which we
sometimes call divine viewpoint, because the Bible in its entirety reflects a
consistent integrated whole. There is no contrast, no conflict, no discord
between the forty plus writers of the Scriptures; they agree and compliment each
other throughout the Bible. So the Bible in its entirety presents a unified
thought of God, about everything within His creation—not everything in the
sense that He gives us a comprehensive or exhaustive historical analysis or
scientific analysis, but He gives us a framework for understanding everything
in His creation.
Throughout the Bible we see this contrast between the thinking of the
world and the thinking of God, and one passage where we see this very clearly
is in 1 Corinthians 2:6-10 NASB “Yet we do speak wisdom among those
who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age [a)iwn] nor of the rulers
of this age, who are passing away…” The focus there is on a finite, temporary
foundation, where as the wisdom of God comes from the thinking of God. God is
eternal, omniscient, and infinite, and therefore the thoughts that are based on
His revelation are thoughts that are based on absolute truth that never
changes. The more we wish to live biblically and to think biblically the more
we are going to come into conflict with the culture around us wherever we are
because the culture around us, wherever we are, is going to express and
autonomy and an antagonism to God in different ways.
“… but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden {wisdom} which God
predestined before the ages to our glory;
When we study the whole issue of the cosmic system we have to answer
certain questions:
1. What do we learn
about ultimate reality from what a person says? In light of what they say, how
do they view ultimate reality? Is ultimate reality impersonal or personal. If
it is impersonal, like the “force that you have with you” in Star Wars movies,
then you have ultimate reality in the universe of the impersonal, so where did
personality come from?
2. Are we just living
in a world governed by impersonal forces (in which case that has tremendous
implications for who man is)? So we have to understand the nature of external
reality itself isn’t just mechanical processes, immaterial forces?
3. What does that say
about mankind? If there is no personality we are nothing more than a cosmic
accident, just a chance collection of atoms and protoplasm, and there is not
eternal, nothing distinct about man, he is just the result of inanimate forces.
And that has a lot to say about responsibility, how we view volition, how we
view criminality. All of these things are going to change, depending on how we
see ultimate reality.
4. What happens when a
person dies? Do they just go into the ground and that is it, or is there
another life afterwards?
5. Why can we know
anything? How do we know anything with certainty? This gives us the whole issue
of truth. All kinds of claims can be made, but we have to be able to weigh
these things and evaluate them. How do we know what truth is all about?
6. How do we know
right from wrong? This gets into values. Every system starts with values. If
ultimate reality is just matter then how do we ever get to right or wrong? We
can’t! It would just be personal preference, just a choice made by individual
cultures. That is what has happened in our world today with multiculturalism,
it is consistent with the foundation of Darwinistic origins. If we start from
just matter and everything is just the product of time plus chance then right
and wrong are simply terms we use to express personal preferences or cultural
preferences. But if ultimate reality is God and God is holy and righteous in
His very nature, then what he expresses is absolute truth and it can’t be
changed, and it is going to be expressed consistently throughout His creation.
7. What is the meaning
of history? Is history just the accidental events of human decisions or is it
actually going somewhere, is there some ultimate resolution? The Bible teaches
that all things will be resolved in judgment by God.
So we start with these and as
a Christian we begin with an understanding of God as a personal and infinite
God. He is personal, and that means He is able to have relationships with
people. If God is personal that has to imply that God is capable of social
relationship. That involves persons.
God’s attributes:
Righteousness means that He is perfect in all that He does’ He is absolute
perfection. Just means the application of that perfection or standard to His
creation. He is truth, i.e. there is no shifting within Him. What He says is
true; He is the standard of all things. He is love. That means that He is
capable of relations with other people, and those are governed by this absolute
quality of love. He is also immutable and is eternal life; He never changes and
He is eternal. That means that billions of years ago God would have to be love.
Before God created the heavens and the earth and all that He did He would have
to be a God of love. In eternity past God would have to be a God capable of
relationship. This takes us back to the very nature of understanding God. The
Bible describes God as a triune God, that He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
They are three distinct persons, yet one in essence. In Scripture we have this
eternal society which is the Trinity: the Father is eternal, the Son is
eternal, the Holy Spirit is eternal. So the Father loves the Son, the Son loves
the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit loves the Father; there is an eternal society
an eternal personality an eternal love operating within the Trinity that is not
dependent upon the creature at any particular time. This is why love is ascribed
to the God of the Bible hundreds of times in both the Old Testament and the New
Testament. But if we look at the Koran for instance love is never ascribed as
an attribute of Allah. There is an attempt to do that is later works of Islam
but it doesn’t work because Allah, a solitary god, can’t be eternally loving
because there is no one for him to love in eternity past. He either isn’t
loving at all, or if he is he is dependent upon creatures, which makes him less
than God.
This works itself out in the
way the different cultures express their understanding of authority
relationships. In Christianity based on the Bible—this is not to say that
Christians haven’t abused the Bible and become tyrannical—it rejects tyranny
because authority functions within the framework of love. But in Islamic
culture and society, for example in marriage, there is just an autocratic
authority line which is quite different from what we have in the Bible.
So our ultimate reality is
based on God who is a triune God that makes Him a loving God. And what is so
important is to understand this attribute of love. Scripture says that God
demonstrated His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died
for us. John
We start off when we think
about what we believe and aspects of the cosmic system and ask. What is
ultimate reality? For the Christian, ultimate reality is a personal, infinite
God who is capable of relationship, of interrelationship with His creatures, is
able to communicate with His creatures, and when His creatures sin and rebel
against Him then in love God has solved the problem through His Son. In
contrast, all other philosophical systems and all other religions fail, because
they have no solution to the sin problem whatsoever.
8. How do we know
anything? Other systems are based on inadequate or finite starting points.
There are basically four ways in which people have ever claimed to know
anything in history. The first is
rationalism where the starting
point is man’s innate ideas. Ultimately it is based on faith in human ability
to think clearly, logically, and to arrive at ultimate truth just on the basis
of his own reason. This is an independent [of Scripture] use of logic and
reason. Second, empiricism which starts with sense perception, external
experience. It is the basic foundation of the scientific method. It is just
faith in human ability to properly interpret the data that comes to man. But
something new and different can always be discovered tomorrow that changes the
thousand points of data that has already been discovered, and so it is never
eternal, it is always finite. Again, it is based on an independent use of logic
and reason. Rationalism and empiricism always fall apart. Historically they
have always collapsed and this results in mysticism, which is different from
rationalism and empiricism in that it is not logical, not rational, and it is
non-verifiable. When man tries to do anything where he grounds his thought on
these three foundations it will always fall apart. It is building on shifting
sands. The only thing that is certain is the revelation of God. God revealed
Himself through the prophets and the 66 books of the Bible and we are to think
within that framework. We are to think within the parameters that are laid out
in Scripture.
9. How does any kind
of cosmic system get developed? Everybody makes four basic assumptions in
answering certain questions. The assumptions relate to ultimate reality, they
relate to who man is, what the human race is comprised of—are we just a cosmic
accident, are we created by God in His image? These are the two broad
contrasts. We also develop certain assumptions about knowledge. How do we come
to know ultimate truth, ultimate reality, and then ethics? Ethics has to do
with our values: what is right, what is wrong. So we take the answers to these
basic areas of questioning and then they all get kind of churned around in
cosmic thought. Then this goes into a cosmic mix-master and it comes out the
other side in terms of various philosophical systems and religious systems. It
develops idea on origins, for example, and that is why we have such a battle
going on today, and has been going on for over 150 years, related to creation versus
evolution. And this is at the very core of what some have called the culture
wars. The culture wars are cosmological wars. Every view of life is affected by
cosmic thinking, and as believers we have to learn to think about these things.
What we have is something called absolute truth. John 16:7 NASB
“But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for
if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send
Him to you.
This is the essence of worldliness: thinking about all of creation apart
from God. The solution to that as a believer is the Word of God, because it is
only when we take in the Word of God, study the Word of God, that we can learn
to think about God as he has revealed Himself. We are to think about salvation
as God has revealed it, and learn to think about creation as God has revealed
it. We fight this continuously. Scripture says that three enemies: the world,
the flesh [OSN], and the devil. The word is those systems of thought that we latch on
to to justify our own rebellion, our own suppression of truth in
unrighteousness, our own desires to make life work apart from God. The solution
is to come to the Word of God and let our thinking be conformed to the
Word.