Video of the week – Abandoned by God

John MacArthur: 1 Corinthians 1 „Men, by wisdom knew not God.” Human wisdom, just on its own doesn’t get there. Then you add that the god of this world blinded the minds of them that do not believe and you’ve got a compounding blindness. And then you add the fact that they are blinded by virtue of the sweeping, dominating elements of their culture.

It’s always about truth. Always. From the garden, it started out as a war on truth. God says, „You eat the fruit, you die”. Satan says, „No you won’t. You shall not surely die”. There it is. Adam and Eve believed Satan. They thought God was lying to them. That started the truth war, it’s going on today. It’s always about the truth. Simple, this happens when you suppress the truth.   What truth? Real truth, as Francis Schaeffer used to say, ‘The true truth”.

Biblical truth, you suppress this, it’s where you go. You take the word of God out of the place of supremacy, and you suppress the truth. Deny its truth, deny its veracity, deny its authenticity, deny it’s inerrancy, deny it’s inspiration, deny it’s sufficiency… Deny it’s clarity- that’s the latest one- that nobody really knows what the Bible means anyways, „It’s a wonderful book, God gave it to us, but, we really don’t know what it really means”. That’s convenient.

Only in the modern world do we not get it. We go back to God. The massive first cause of everything. That’s in the fabric of being human. You know you have to work hard for a couple of hundred years to convince a society that that’s nonsense (belief in the Bible) and that what makes sense is that nobody x nothing + everything. And though it doesn’t make sense, it works in a totally immoral culture because if there’s no Creator, there’s no judge.

So, reason is the first thing that shows you God. The second is morality, which is built into the fabric of all of us and has to be cultivated to the point that a society of people  reason that they don’t need God, and their sense of morality has been totally perverted.

God only wants one thing out of a nation. Listen, and believe this book (the Bible). There’s only one solution and that’s the truth. The truth by which God saves, God sanctifies. And, if this nation will respond and listen to His truth, God will open the floodgates and we might be the greatest recovery story in history. But, there’s no other way, than that „people listen to Me, and walk in my ways”.  But, it’s not gonna happen if there is famine of the word of God. Pray, that the word, as Paul said, would have free course and that it would run with all its power across this land.
Many thanks to Gabi Bogdan for this video.

Ravi Zacharias and Friends

Apologetics Beyond the Pew: A Conversation with Ravi Zacharias and Friends
Source http://tiu.edu/ Carl F.H.Henry’s Center for Theological Understanding on April 12, 2010. This lecture was given before Ravi Zacharias’s trip to  Romania and Armenia (2010).

• When you look back upon the landscape of  the last 25 years, or 30 years, there were voices, sounding forth at that time,  of the changes that were coming. I remember listening to Everett Coop and Francis Schaeffer in the 1980’s sounding the alarm of what were then being seen as the moral underpinnings from which extensions would be made and decisions would be made. Who would have ever thought that you would hear ethical theories that we now listen to from the voice of Peter Singer and others. Not just liberal in their thinking, but radically so. At the end of a spectrum of thought, where we not only do not know how to define human life, but, we define it in ways that could actually be stunning and shocking. And, once the shock value is gone they become common ideas and carried into ramifications.
• We no longer can define what life is. We cannot define what sexuality is. We do not know how to define what marriage means. I remember when Chuck Colson had invited me and a few others to New York some months ago, from which emerged the signing of the Manhattan Declaration, I remember phoning my wife from New York and saying, „I never dreamed of the day when you would have a room full of men and women trying to define a thing like life, marriage, sexuality. Things that you thought would be self evident or that would have some input of the sacred…now totally desacrilized and almost defying any kind of definition or any kind of parameter. But people like Schaeffer warned us of this.
• Zacharias lists 4 changes he believes have come about in the last 25-30 years:

1. The popularization of the death of God of the atheistic mindset and the willingness (popularizations) to live with its ramifications a la Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett and Harris who say what Huxley said, „I want this world not to have meaning because a meaningless world frees me to my own exploits of sexual and political freedom. (Hypocrisy is the charge that vice brings to virtue …deep in their own thinking they know some things are wrong)
2. It is the third world’s attack upon Western ideas with the pantheistic and postmodern underpinnings to it that has actually made the ideas that shaped the West look juvenile and everything else that comes from abroad look very sophisticated. I have a question for people like that. „Why did you come to the West?” Because there were some moral assumptions that were a quest of the Judeo-Christian framework; even if you didn’t want to give credit to the world view  that framed them, you liked what you saw in the outworking. Do you know that the Chinese government has just commissioned writers to rewrite the history of missions in China because the leadership in China recognized that Missions has not been given a good and fair name? They want to acknowledge the benefit that Missions has done in the last century, principally in two arenas: in education and health and well being for the Chinese people. Think of this statement, „We take these truths to be self evident that we are all created equal…with inalienable rights for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Let me ask you this question, „Do you know of any other world view that would have framed that statement, other than the Judeo-Christian faith?” There are ideas in the Gospels that are not presented anywhere else. Take for example that no where else is there an offer of sacrifice, or of forgiveness,  such as the cross of Christ.
3. The power to inform through the visual. We now take truth through the eye gate not through reason and so it comes through the back door of the imagination. We’re intended to see through the eye with the conscience. Most people see today with the eye, devoid of a conscience. We’ve got a visually conditioned culture. On the movie Avatar- brilliant in cinematography and now English movies are just beginning to resemble Hindi movies. That’s all it is. Bollywood was 30 yrs ahead on this kind of stuff and 30 yrs ago we would have sat and laughed at this kind of stuff and now it is so engaging. Isn’t it interesting? A Hollywood technocrat, who sees the military as the culprit for destroying lives has never bothered to ask how many souls and consciences Hollywood has destroyed.  We’ve got a generation raised with the visual that has never cerebrally addressed these issues of systemic contradiction.
4. A youth oriented world as a culture molding point, which means the young ought to really be an audience to whom we speak and how we speak to them. The question is how we reach a generation that thinks with its eyes or listens with its eyes and thinks with its feelings? That’s the challenge.

• I’ll give you 3 simple responses

1. We are going to need an apologetic that is not merely heard, but is also seen. If the Christian life is not seen, it will become nothing more than theoretical.
2. An apologetic that is not merely argued but that is also felt. You cannot have a persuasive preacher if the preacher is not coming through as being persuaded. woe be to me if I preach not the Gospel. Passions are very real, therefore the passion for the Gospel will also have to be real, if it is to appeal to a generation that lives so much with the pathos and the reality of the felt word.
3. It is an approach that rescues not only the ends of bringing them into the knowledge of Christ, but the means where we do not compromise the Word in process. The Word has a lasting, abiding value as a carrier of truth.

Related articles

• Ravi Zacharias – How to measure your choices a recent lecture at Lee University
• RAVI  ZACHARIAS  Page 

Does this generation really want the truth? Part 1 – a message especially for (University) students

Narration for video below byRavi Zacharias, visiting scholar at Cambridge University,and  frequent speaker to University students at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford.

His ministry’s vision is fourfold: Evangelism, Apologetics, Spiritual Disciplines, and Training that comes alongside the Church or concerned Christians worldwide so that the mandate of I Peter 3:15 might be fulfilled—to set apart Christ in our hearts as Lord and always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within us, with gentleness and respect, all for the glory of God.

NARRATION (from video) PART 1- The problem in Universities

What has happened to truth in our day? Where did we lose out, where did we go wrong? What has become the malady that best describes why we are on the wrong track? This arena of lies and falsehood where we are risking the whole next generation with a false sense of entitlement.

Skepticism is the hallmark of University education today. You can go to campus after campus and they deny even the very possibility of ‘knowing’. Fascinating, isn’t it? You come out of the University education at the end of it basically saying, “You cannot believe anything! You cannot know anything!

Intent is prior to content. Question is: Does this generation really want the truth? Revelation displaced by reason. Truth subverted by agnosticism. Rationalism fails, existentialism fails and lastly the propositionalism (is) replaced by the visual.

This is possibly the darkest reality of our time. So the young scholar sitting before the professional lectern is absolutely convinced that truth is nearly relative and what has happened is that he (the young scholar) has lost sight of the fact of what Jesus said about the eye. He said, “Let your eye be single, the eye is the lamp of the body”. William Blake put it in these words, “This life’s dim windows of the soul distorts the heavens from pole to pole and goads you to believe a lie, when you see ‘with’ and not ‘through’ the eye”.

We are meant to see through the eye with the conscience, we are told to see ‘with the eye’ devoid of a conscience.  And in reality, nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing so monotonous and boring as evil, but in our imagination it’s the other way around; ‘fictional evil’ is very intriguing, attractive and full of charm. The poles have been reversed, good has become boring, evil has become intriguing.

Author of Video shows Names of Persons and Locations mentioned in Bible verses, and pictures of artifacts from archaeological digs which centuries  later proved the existence of aforementioned.

Part 2 is coming tomorrow.