1705 What Does It Take to be God?
Easter has come and gone but God just will not leave people alone. But then, people will not leave Him alone either. American popular culture is riddled with religious confusion. At this polarized time in our history, this matters and it matters a lot. The moral base of a people rests in its understanding of, if not respect for, the spiritual universe.
Liberalized Christianity aides and abets that uncertainty. It throws millions of answer-seekers into the arms of a guidance for life and faith which is based on puny divinity and evolutionary religion.
According to liberal theology, God doesn’t seem to know how to get His message across. He breaks through here and there and humankind ends up catching pieces of the puzzle through myriads of religious offerings amidst reams of disinformation. Thanks to the efforts of so-called “higher” critical thinking, there exists a pervasive assumption that all religions are generated as much from culture as they are from any divine influence.
The issue really has to do with starting points. In liberal doctrine, Biblical religion is automatically studied and taught as evolutionary (along with all other world religions). It is said to have “advanced” from superstition through idol worship and polytheism to a final one-god insight. It rests on lifeless assumptions of naturalism and a dismantled Bible, defrocked of supernatural faith.
The damage to our culture hits lives because liberals have masterfully taught that questioning their convictions testifies to naïve anti-intellectualism. Historical Old Testament accounts of Adam and Eve or of Noah and the flood are blazing targets because supernaturalism is questioned at every turn. By abandoning the plain sense of the Bible’s text as history and truth, they cripple the authority of the one moral masterpiece which has most influenced the whole of western civilization. This is, frankly, a different gospel of creaturely making.
The story of God offered by this religious branch of self-appointed experts is unbelievably judgemental. Contrary to the apostles’ teaching (1 Corinthians 2) and in the name of mature faith, the wisdom of scholarship is awarded the power to judge Scripture. Through it, man claims the right to determine, through his incredible powers of critical thinking and deduction, what is true and what is not true. He thus exercises foolish intellectual “wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1) and the sacred text becomes nothing more than a collection of ancient God-flashes, religious insights and second-hand stories with God as the supreme consort and managing editor.
If God (and therefore Christianity’s Jesus Christ) gave or even allowed men to claim His truths simultaneously in the all great “scriptures” of world religions, they are either all correct or some of them are flawed. Since they all massively contradict each other about the Divine and eternity, rational thought demands that God would be confused, imperfect (less than God) like humans or possibly even deceptive. Thus liberalism declares Muslims, Hindus, Christians, pagans, atheists and every other religious belief to be wrong-headed if not deceived.
Liberalism’s pronouncement that all religious beliefs contain truth and that “all paths lead to God” is understandable because it is rooted in a universal compulsion to crown all mankind with salvation. But in doing so, this theological brand becomes exactly what it abhors, arrogant and closed-minded.
So what does it take to be God? This is the core of everything. Is He (It) Brahman, Allah, Jehovah, the Toa or the Oneness of all living things? Universalists love to believe that the only sensible choice is “all the above”.
In the end, if human personhood, significance, and yearning for eternity mean anything, humanity’s God must have been his Creator – having personhood, eternal, loving, just, gracious and infinitely everything else that holiness and righteousness demands. Such a God would have loved enough to act and not sit idly by rationing light beams through human clutter while mankind haplessly navigates millions of contradictory clues.
The earthly martyrdom of God-Man Jesus, instead of each of ours, should have left men scrambling in rabid thankfulness to His cause. The big reveal, when God showed Himself on Earth to men as one of them face-to-face, should have taken care of the questions, excuses, and challenges. Instead, a personal presence and work of salvation as an act of total grace was not enough.
If the purity of Jesus’ Scripture, the Gospel-before-revision, and His saving work is not defended against emasculation in the public square, false tolerance, false diversity, disunity, and hopelessness will continue and worsen. We will ultimately lose our country’s very soul.