Q&A 4: What does the Bible say about worldviews & political systems? Part II

As we started last week, we're stepping through excerpts from a booklet that Chester McAuley had put together. We'd covered part one last week, and we'll be addressing part two this week, which should wrap up this handout. So the handout that you should have is Part one from last week, and then part two from this week. I think last week's was five pages, this is six. And continuing on with world views and the political and economic philosophies that go along with the various world views.

So I think he's got some valuable insights for us. The thing that he starts off this portion with, he says, there are five major themes in every secular school in the country. By secular, I mean any viewpoint that does not incorporate the concepts of the Bible as fact. This means that many schools that are religious by name and association are in reality secular in philosophy. A believer should be alert to these following areas of human viewpoint. Those who espouse them are unlikely to vocally assert, I'm a humanist, but the viewpoint is sure to show through if it is there. The truth is that a great many schools that even have the name Christian somewhere in it or some Christian implication, a great many of them have major inroads of secular and humanistic thought. I find it difficult, for example, to recommend to you very many Christian schools. Christian colleges, even in Christian private schools, are a challenge.

What do I mean by that? An example would be John Doyle. He's somewhere here today but I don't see him here right now. He was at a Christian school and they were teaching the long age of the earth and he had to actually challenge them to take a fully biblical viewpoint in the Christian school. This is disgusting. I heard about that, I just was really shocked.

But a great many Christian schools accommodate the secular viewpoint. I talked to one fellow who was visiting at Holly Hills, Nancy and I had, he and his wife over for lunch or dinner or something like that, and he said that his professor at the Christian University had said, if anybody tells you that they know what the Bible says, that's heresy.

At a Christian university. So this is the kind of thing that is coming across even in so-called Christian schools. Even in some Christian churches. Yes, in Christian churches as well. And what happens is a lot of the staff at a lot of these Christian churches, of course, they're going to the Christian schools and getting those ideas, carrying them over into the churches. You're quite correct.

So anyway, it is not simply a matter of, you know, that's out there in the secular schools. it has crept into the so-called Christian schools significantly. I was speaking this last week to a fellow from Denver Seminary who was a first-year Denver Seminary student and he was looking to have me mentor him through the program there and when I got through telling him all the different problems with you know, that are at the school, he decided that, well, and I decided too, I probably might not be the best one to mentor him because there's an awful lot of what's being taught that I would significantly disagree with.

And it's just this secular and human viewpoint that's creeping in. Okay. worldview, their humanism. Under that title, humanism is a way of thinking where all doctrines, attitudes, and all ways of life center wholly upon the values and interests of man. It's man-centered. It's all begun by, you know, what does man think, what can man know, what's valuable to man, etc. Okay? And that viewpoint is significantly the religion of a great number of public schools and frankly a number of so-called Christian schools. It says here, man is the object of humanism and he is also the source of it.

One who believes in divine viewpoint can find no partnership with humanism. Humanism is man-centered. The Bible is God-centered. 1 Corinthians 2, 5, and 7 speak of the wisdom of man and the wisdom of God as standing in contrast. What is the contrast between the viewpoint, wisdom of man, and wisdom of God? What's the contrast?

There isn't that. What's that? There isn't that. Or it's so intense. It's been a while since we went through 1 Corinthians chapter 2. What is the distinction between the wisdom of man and the wisdom that comes from God? From above. The viewpoint biblically is God has revealed truth. the viewpoint from humanism is that truth is centered in man. It's man's viewpoint that determines truth. Whereas the Bible says it's God's viewpoint that determines truth. Yes? I don't want to get into the politics. Oh, why not? Oh, I'm sorry.

Because of the large outturn this last time, the interpretation of the Bible and what God is saying to us? We're actually stepping into a realm, we may get there, but it's a little ahead of where we are now. Let me just respond briefly. What has happened is people have gone from a tendency to view the Bible literally to viewing it from a man-centered standpoint and figuratively, and one of the things that gets lost is absolute truth. And so the tendency to interpret the Bible from a man-centered viewpoint is also transferred over into interpreting the Constitution from a man-centered viewpoint. The problem with that is rather than the Bible or the Constitution being seen as a fixed document, it becomes subject to modern manipulation. Yes, that's right.

One of the things we do when we go through and study the Bible is we ask the question, What did the original author intend that his original readers understand? We ask that question. And that's why I'll go over, you know, here's the historical background and here's the cultural background, because we want to understand what the original authors intended, not just how does it make you feel. Okay?

If that is lost, The same thing also gets lost with, for example, documents like the Constitution. We're no longer asking what did the original author's intent. We're not asking that. We instead find ourselves looking at Muslim Sharia law. We find ourselves looking at what are the Europeans doing? to interpret our own Constitution, rather than going back and saying, what was the original intent?

What did those authors intend? And in fact, we have in writings, including the Federalist Papers, a great deal of information about what the original authors of the Constitution intended. The same thing with the Bible. We have lots to help us understand what the original authors intended, and to get a very good understanding of what they meant. And I think that's by God's intent. Why is it that, for example, the New Testament documents we pointed out, we've got 25,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament. The number two, right behind that, is 643 copies of Homer's Iliad. We have so much to work with to understand the Bible and to make sure we've got the right and correct document.

It's absolutely astounding, but people want to dismiss it because they don't like absolute truth. Yes? Pardon? Oh yeah, we have this incredible arrogance and yet at the same time we've dismissed, we've cut ourselves off in our culture. from the ability to know things with any certainty, with any solid understanding. Everything is cut loose and now very, see it's not, the dangerous part, it's subject to manipulation. That's where it's very difficult.

I just read an hour yesterday a reading on Sharia law, and there's not a major difference between that and ultra-liberalism. because the Constitution is laid out, and the Constitution states it as almost the Bible states it. It is solid, it's truthful, and it's immutable, as is the Bible, and is the Constitution that we use for our government. Where today, the Europeans, having the Northern came back down too long ago from that area, particularly... I had been in Eastern Europe for a few decades and you're seeing them starting to rejoice because they're starting to get out from under the old communism as we move toward that and they are... glad to get out from underneath that at the same time as I say we move into it and at the same time they are starting to now be influenced more and more by Sri Lanka. Well we're having that implemented in parts of this country. We have a very active Al-Qaeda Cell operating in Denver. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we need to move on here. Yeah. Okay. I know it's the second paragraph Here under the worldview humanism.

Therefore the most important link a student attending college should establish and maintain His association with a pastor is able to teach the Word of God. I would I would say I would say you could add to that That before they go it is better to have them prepared. I When I headed off to college, I did have some access to some good resources and I also had some preparation so that when I went into the classroom, I looked at it as a missionary opportunity in these various philosophy and sociology classes. I looked at it as a missionary opportunity and I wasn't just sitting there, you know, taking what the professor said.

And in fact, people did come to the Lord through the efforts of myself and other students coming into the classroom with that mindset. The reality is the professor isn't telling me anything I don't know or I haven't heard. And the reality is there are lots of very good answers for the challenges to Christianity. And what I was amazed about was to find that the professors as well as many of the students were unaware of those good answers.

Okay, let's take a look at the next one. Worldview secularism, closely related. Humanism and secularism are similar. Secularism holds to a view of life based on the premise that biblical considerations should be strictly excluded from one's viewpoint. Humanism says, I'm going to center all my thinking and viewpoint upon man. Secularism has a similarity, but it says I'm going to exclude anything spiritual or religious from my viewpoint. Similarity, but it has the idea of I'm simply going to set aside anything that has a spiritual or religious viewpoint or perspective at all. It is purely worldly.

What's that? You can't do that? They try. What are you thinking of when you say you can't really do that? The reality is life becomes very meaningless. I saw a study recently that's very interesting. It was a study of suicide rates in comparison to beliefs in atheism or agnostic belief. And as a generalization, the trend was, the higher the percentage of atheism in the country, as a generalization, not statistically tight, but as a generalization, the higher the level of suicide in that country. Life becomes meaningless and shallow and superficial.

Okay, let's take a look at page two there. This worldview can be of different types. One type might be deliberate secularism, where the word of God is set aside with scorn. This finds expression, for example, when a teacher assigns a student to write a paper on any subject of his choice, but prohibits use of the Bible. Unfortunately, another type of secularism infiltrates Christians.

It can be seen in two ways. First, there is an agnostic secularism, which says it's not possible to interpret the Bible with certainty. I was talking with Brad recently, and he said he had a Christian friend who gets together regularly with him, or at least until his move to Fort Collins, who just says, you just can't know the truth. There's no way to know. And a part of that is adopting a secular viewpoint. God gave us these things so that we might know. Here's the Gospel of John.

These things are written so that you might believe. Anything? These things are written so that you might believe anything. Is that what he means? No. These things are written so that you might believe specifically in the truth of the Gospel. In that believing in the truth of the gospel, you might have life through his name. And by the way, you have to know who his is. There is a certainty. There are places in the New Testament, for example, John writes, these are written so that you might know. It is basic to an understanding of the Bible. Certainty is God's intent.

God did not intend for us to look at the Bible and come up with six or eight different viewpoints and then just throw up our hands. Nancy and I were in a position one time in Carson City where I was just kind of checking out different churches. I called up one pastor and I wanted to get his viewpoint on future things. He says, oh, I'm a pan-millennialist. I said, what? He says, I just teach everything and figure out it'll all pan out in the end.

I was not impressed. That's not where we went. The last paragraph there of that section right before the title, Worldview Socialism, is a second intrusion of secularism into Christian attitude may be called ignorant secularism. One has nothing but human viewpoint because it has never been replaced and corrected by divine viewpoint. Why not? Because of the neglect of the study of the text of scripture. It is possible by being quiet about God's Word, not talking about what to believe about God's Word, okay? It is possible to end up with a secularism by default.

And Nancy and I have seen that, you know, in various households. One of the things, you know, Nancy and I will talk, and we of course recognize we didn't do everything right when we were raising our kids. I'm going to a parent that has. But one of the things that we did deliberately is we talked about spiritual things. We talked about God's Word. And I'm not saying we had any kind of regular program to do it. We actually didn't have some regular devotions or anything. But we just, in the course of living, just talked about spiritual things. And, in fact, Randy was talking to our daughter Becky not too long ago, and he was just saying, remember when mom and dad used to just go around the house and they would be singing?

It wasn't Mary Had a Little Lamb or anything like that, right? We would be singing. What? Spiritual things. There was a deliberate talking about spiritual things. Lack of that in whatever situation we're in leaves by default a default secularism where people just don't know. Why? Nobody talked about it.

The next one down in the middle of page two is Socialism. Socialism is a view of economics that advocates governmental control of the means of production and or the distribution of goods. The opposite of socialism is capitalism. What is the usual justification for socialism? Or what are some of the justifications that you have heard?

The government needs to take care of people. Okay. Alright. So everybody gets the same opportunity. Alright. In other words, the idea is everybody gets the same opportunity. Okay. And you share the wealth. Share the wealth idea. Yeah, the share the wealth idea is a part of socialism. Now, one of the things that. I guess you could ask about that.

Among the Jews, let's take a look at this. Among the Jews, we've talked about recently how the Jews were required to leave the corners unharvested in order that the poor people might come in and harvest. They were not allowed to come back in and go through their field a second time. They had to leave anything that they didn't pick up the first time. For who? For the poor, right? There were, as we see in the accounts in the New Testament, both during the time when Christ had his ministry as well as the apostles, people who were begging there in the temple courtyards or similar areas.

How is that different from socialism? I think the difference is a matter of there are people that are poor and have nothing they can do about it. for those that were less fortunate that had no way of taking care of things themselves. But most of the people that the government wants to take care of under liberalism are people that can get out in a wheelchair or whatever it might be do it themselves. They don't have to have the government do it for them. Let's ask this question.

In gleaning, where it was required of the Jews not to do the corners and not to go a second time in the field where they did harvest, how did the gleaners get the food product? They worked for it. So that's one difference is the gleaners still had to work to get what they got.

That's part one. Part two is, Who was the government official who was involved in this process? There wasn't any. And that's the other aspect of it. One, there was still a matter of working for this provision through gleaning. And there was two, no government official who was involved in overseeing it, involved in checking, involved. That simply wasn't there. So you had a more direct relationship. People still were not getting something for nothing. If they could work at all, that was a part of the process. That example shows up as early as the book of Ruth, where Ruth is out there doing gleaning out in the fields.

It doesn't bring them to be equal. Yes, there isn't some ideal target where, OK, now we're going to equalize everybody. That's correct. This simply says there is provision for the one who is poor. If they're willing to work and if they're able to work, then there's provision for that. There isn't a sense that I've got to balance everything out so that they're all the same. Yeah, that's quite correct. So it's an important distinction.

Some have even said, well, look at the early Christians, how they shared everything in common. Why is that not socialism? You find that, you know, this is Acts, you know, chapter two. Pardon? It's not truly in common. What's that? It's not truly in common. Okay. How do you say that?

Because, as we said, they didn't. Okay, but this is even among the early Christians. They did share, but how is that different from socialism? Well, I'm talking about in Acts chapter 2 and 3 and 4 where the Christians were sharing things in common. Yeah?

Yeah, it was a fellowship rather than a government mandate. And also it was grace, not law. There wasn't somebody saying, you know, you're going to do this, It was people motivated by grace to share. There was no government there to say, you know, we're going to enforce loving. We're going to enforce loving, and by the way, we've got our take to take as well.

Another pattern I would suggest is nobody went into debt. And what typically happens in the socialistic environment, I've not seen an exception, is there's some debt accumulation in order to make this all happen. It's assuming future income flows, and so you have this bureaucracy as well as a debt overhead that neither the Christians nor the Jews had in place.

Okay? Okay, so the opposite of socialism is capitalism. Capital is simply what one has to offer someone else for something in return, such as money, land, talent, knowledge, or work. Who owns capital? Under the free enterprise system, the individual owns it. Under socialism, the government owns most of the capital. Under communism, the government owns all of it. Notice that only the free enterprise system recognizes fully your right to individual ownership.

One of the things that we have already encountered, and in other studies of the New Testament you will encounter as well, is an appeal to, you know, the worker is worthy of his wages. You know, it's one who works gets paid. That the one who works in the field ought to be able to work in hope of reaping from what he has sown. So what's the divine viewpoint in this matter? I'm looking at the second paragraph there. Two facts can be established. First, the Bible teaches the right of private ownership. Second, God's Word gives each believer the responsibility to be a good steward of his material possessions.

The Ten Commandments carefully protect some of man's most valued possessions. You shall not murder is a protection of life. You shall not commit adultery is a protection of one's family. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor is a protection of one's reputation and also of truth. You shall not steal the protection of one's property. Note that the commandment not to steal assumes the right to property.

Acts chapter 5 also pictures the right to property. Peter tells Ananias concerning his land, while it, the piece of land, remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Ananias had the right to private property. He did not have to give it away.

We're also clearly instructed to be good stewards of our possessions. And I think this is a key point. The Bible, from the beginning to the end, teaches stewardship, personal responsibility for things that have been entrusted to you. Yesterday, we had a seminar on finances. And one of the things that comes across is there is this principle of stewardship that's carried out and conveyed in Scripture. from the very beginning chapters to the very ending chapters of the Bible.

And the principle is this, everything that is put into our hands is something we're entrusted with. Ultimately, my money isn't mine. Ultimately, my kids aren't mine. But I have a stewardship, a responsibility for them. They're all things put in my trust. Right? All things entrusted to me.

And so there is a sense of responsibility for them. The tendency under some of these socialism and the various shades of socialism is to look upon the government as taking away that responsibility from each person. There is less sense of responsibility. As a matter of fact, There is under socialism a tendency to look at it not only as a responsibility for finances and economics that's shifted over to the government, but even for raising kids.

In Norway they have a list of approved names for your children. I'm not kidding. A list of approved names. You may only name your kid from that approved name list. you name your kid anything else, two things happen. One, is they randomly go and pick one of the names from the list and assign that name, so you don't get to use the name, and secondly, they charge the parents with child abuse.

Okay? Ah! Heaven sakes! So anyway, you get one of these generic names, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, you know, the machine cranks on. Okay. Page 3. Relativism. This has nothing to do with your relatives. Relativism means that absolute knowledge is not possible. The Bible is a most absolute book, therefore a believer cannot tolerate relativism. One of the things that I was amazed as I was going through studying through the Greek series is the specificity with which many things in the Bible are stated.

You know the verse where it says, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me. They started looking at the Greek grammar there, and it says, I, in contradistinction to all else, am the singular way, and the singular truth, and the singular life. No one comes to the Father at all except exclusively by me.

That's what the Greek is saying. That is very specific. I don't know where you go from there, but who knows what it means. Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. This is as absolute as you can get. The use of the verb, we know, permeates the letters of Paul and John. We know this, we know that. we know with certainty. The very purpose of divine revelation is to give us certainty.

Another worldview, one that they tried to push down my throat when I was going through the geology curriculum, was uniformitarianism. It teaches that the history of the cosmos is one of continuous and unbroken development. The present is the key to the past, was the dictum that They tried to teach us, and it said that you use everything in the present to look towards how the past occurred.

The uniformitarian viewpoint excludes, excludes the idea of any divine interaction or intervention. The Bible teaches a great deal of divine interaction and intervention. They're in direct conflict. The uniformitarian viewpoint is, guess what, an assumption.

Can I, from a scientific standpoint, can I prove what did or did not take place without making assumptions, can I prove what did or did not take place a million years ago, assuming there is such a thing? I cannot scientifically verify what did or did not take place a million years ago. Can't do it. There's no way. How do I arrive at this conclusion? Presupposition. Matter of fact, I'll put a word in front of it. Unverifiable presupposition. That's what's behind uniformitarianism and It goes along with an entire...

Of course the Bible has proved that the Earth is this old. Of course the Bible has proved that evolution is true. Of course science has done that. No. The Bible doesn't support it. Science hasn't supported it. There's no way to verify it. It's presupposition. That's what it is. It's unverifiable presupposition to say that I can know anything by verification in the prehistoric past. So this uniformitarianism was not science demonstrated. It was not science verified. It was not science examined. It was an assumption. And that's all. And that's all.

But what I found when I went out into the field and looked at lots of fossils and geological sites, I found things that could not be easily explained by uniformitarianism. And were better explained by what the Bible describes. Uniformitarianism or the theory of evolution. And that was basically the idea is they taught evolution in the geology program.

And it's not because the facts support it, they don't. But because that's the only thing they can come up with based on the assumption of the present is the key to the past. The laws that are in place now are the laws that have always been in place and nothing has ever changed that.

Isn't it also just not accepting God? Not accepting God? Yeah, it basically is an assumption that excludes God. If God exists, God is irrelevant because he is, by the assumption, not allowed to touch the universe. So it excludes God in the assumption, not by the facts in the assumption. That's where it excludes God. That's why I had to drop out of geology. I just couldn't stomach it anymore. That's why I switched to civil engineering.

We got the next one on page four here. The ultimate there. Matter that is just there. Of course the question is how did it get there? turns into non-living matter and then simple forms of life ultimately to man as he is now. That's the theory of evolution. It is not based on observation of the facts, it is based on unverifiable assumption, unverifiable presupposition. Then what happens is you go to the area of political science, you get in the area of politics and assume that man evolved. What possible conclusions could a person reach about what ought to be done in politics if you assume that man was evolved?

One nation under God? No, no, wait a minute. We better scratch that. We can't do that. We were endowed with our Creator? No, no, I can't do that either. What are we going to do here? Constitution? Yeah, basically the basis for how our country was founded, and we'll talk later about, you know, was this a Christian nation, but the basis for how our country was founded gets set aside. The basis for what has held our country together in earlier decades and times is set aside. And let's ask this question.

Is the politician ultimately accountable to God if there is no God? What is to control a politician's range of possibilities? What is to control that politician's sense of consequences for his actions? If that politician sees himself never appearing before God, But when this life is over, it's all over. What will control his actions? Only his own feelings or desires. And it can easily go to, what can I get away with? Do I have the power to pull off what I want to pull off? How far can I push it? And there is the problem.

Your point's well taken. You get out there in the business realm. They have classes in business school on business ethics. I think they're worthless because they don't have any basis for ethics. People have been through that and we still have our Enrons and Worldcoms and the last round of fiascos that we had in the financial realm. Without an understanding of God and the morality and ethics that goes behind it, without a sense of personal responsibility before the creator of the universe, what do you want to do?

What can you get away with? What do you think you might get away with if you're a high roller? And therein lies the problem. Business, personal relationships, family relationships. politics, military. What can I get away with? What limits it? Not much.

That's why in the last century atheism is responsible for something on the order of a hundred million deaths. People killed in mass. Mass graves in many cases. Other cases, no graves at all. We have a section there, why evolutionary theory is incompatible with divine viewpoint.

The scripture emphatically teaches that man is the direct product of a creative act of God. Genesis 2.7 reads, then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. Genesis chapter 2 as he goes to say here isn't just a repetition or a second creation account. It is like a zoom lens account of that sixth creation day. And it speaks specifically of how God made them male and female and the process that God went through to do that.

There was an immaterial part of man and then excuse me, a material part of man and then an immaterial part of man added to that. This divine viewpoint offers an explanation of the origin of man's body and the life principle. Man was made in the image of what? God. Man was made in the image of God and that is a pivotal insight. Is man made in the image of God and fallen in need of a savior? Or are we just some sort of a cosmic accident? And what we do and don't do doesn't matter that much because after all it's just biology and chemistry. And personality is really just an illusion. And the sense of right and wrong is just artificial.

The differences are huge, really big. Let's look at page 5 there. This is true, or can we make such a statement? Jesus, as recorded in the Gospel of John, said, truly, truly. Perhaps in man's modern perspective, he should have said, maybe, maybe. Or, I feel, I think. I think, I feel. Or something like that. It's important to understand the way men think in our day.

We cannot resist an enemy that we cannot identify. Believers are clearly enjoined to love not the world. By many, this is sadly perverted into a bitter-about-everything, overly suspicious attitude that places taboos on everything. It's almost everything. The problem with this sort of attitude is its failure to properly identify what the world really is. Most men and women are living today much like a sick man who feels great pain but does not know its source. In these last two sections, we'll attempt to identify the problem and then prescribe the remedy.

Clear identification of a thing is based on contrast. It is a simple matter to distinguish an apple from an orange because of the contrast in color. It's not quite as easy to distinguish one particular orange from another, however, because of similarity.

Speed in an airplane is not easy to sense because of the absence of fixed objects passing the window. A car is a different matter since we can see how rapidly telephone poles pass by the window, or let's hope they're passing by the window. Fixed points show us our speed. For the Christian, the Word of God is the fixed point by which we can determine our direction and speed. Apart from knowledge of it, we are left adrift.

An experiment was done where they would take a man in a rotating chair, really good bearings so he'd spin really well. And they took this man and they blindfolded him. And then they began spinning him until he got the sense from being spun in the chair that he was standing still. Because after a while, spinning, if you're in the chair with your eyes blindfolded, seems like everything's fairly normal. Then they would slow down his rate of spinning and he felt like he was going the other direction. When in fact he was going the same direction at a lower rate of speed.

Man's own intrinsic sense of what's happening can be very easily fooled. And therein lies the problem. It's also the problem with relativity. People can easily be tricked as to what's going on, what are their bearings, what direction are they headed in. What do they do when they have someone that's blindfolded and they want them to get disoriented? They'll go and spin them around several times so they don't know what direction is what, right? Human beings are like that. We can easily become disoriented.

We need a fixed reference point, else we get lost. It just seems that unless you have this fixed reference point, you can have no discernment whatsoever. That's right. How can you discern things without a fixed reference point? How can you tell anything without a fixed reference point? We as human beings need to have that reference point given to us.

It's apparent. Even the logicians will come to a place where in order to do logic you have to do what? Have a premise, right? I'll have a major and a minor premise. And sometimes those aren't verifiable. The system of mathematics starts on unverifiable assumptions. Human beings are made to be given their perspective and understanding. We don't automatically have it built into us.

We have the Bureau of Standards where human beings establish a standard. With great precision, arbitrarily. How long is a yard? They've got this standard. Here's how long a yard is. It's quite arbitrary. They'll have the arbitrariness with great precision. It is quite possible for people to become disoriented and not understand where they are.

When you're flying by your instruments, one of the things they have to teach you is don't trust your feelings, right? But what does our culture do? It goes around telling people, trust your feelings. People act based on how they feel. I'm mad about that, therefore I'm going to do this. Oh, but I really want this, therefore... And so the feelings are the gauge in our culture. We have in great part been trained to trust our feelings.

In fact, objective study and flying is one of those obvious evidences show that going by your feelings is in fact quite dangerous. You can end up with yourself dead and possibly many others if you have passengers. Yes. Well, one of the things I remember in the first Star Wars movie is trust your feelings. Obi-Wan instructed Luke Skywalker, trust your feelings.

It was interesting that that was the same year Debbie Boone, you know, had the song, You Light Up My Life. It can't be wrong if it feels so right. Yeah, real interesting. In the middle of page 5, they're fundamental to the understanding of our day as a recognition of the existence of absolutes. An absolute is the truth that cannot be modified in any way by the passage of time or change in environment. There are those who will hold to relativism in the moral realm. And of course what happens is they end up somewhere putting something in there that is an absolute.

One of the ways I've seen this challenged is this. There are those who say, well, all the cultures are different and no culture does anything wrong, you know, within the defines of its own culture. Each culture has a definition of right and wrong and that's fine. And so the question that's been asked of someone who says that, tell me, is it ever right to torture babies for fun? And almost always they'll have some kind of a pained grimace when you ask that. Because if the culture accepts it, that still doesn't make it right, does it? Somehow there's something in people that says, no, that's not quite right. Doesn't matter what culture you're from. So modern thinking, however, rejects this. Thus everything is relative, or at least they try to make that apply.

This represents the line of thought directly opposed to the Bible. Could anything be more emphatic and absolute than Christ's statement, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. And as I mentioned earlier, that's even more specific than the typical English translations. Without absolutes, how can we know what is good and what is evil? We cannot. Isaiah gives the sternest warning to those who call evil good and good evil.

And we have in fact come to that in our own country. A very mixed set of laws are in place. If you want to abort a baby at any stage, that's perfectly okay. However, if someone kills a woman who is pregnant, they'll charge them with two murders. What? A very conflicted set of laws. By the way, that happened recently with the Peterson case in California.

So, now let's ask this question. If you do not take the Bible as the determiner of what is right and wrong, how are you going to determine right and wrong? How would you come up with something to figure out what's right and what's wrong? How you feel about it? Yeah. And so this is completely subjective. One person might feel quite differently than another.

We've always done this. We've always done this. Okay, so the kind of momentum of culture, tradition. Yeah. How have we always done it? Yeah. Sometimes in a court of law, the court will say, well, this is how we do it. Okay. Yeah. This is our interpretation of the law. Okay. Right. Pardon? Yes. We'll have a vote. What does the majority think is correct? Okay. Which can change, right? Could change. What else? Most people do it, yes. It's not just a majority vote. It's a sort of a poll. My sense is that most people do this so it must be okay.

What else? Our conscience. Let your conscience be your guide. How well does that work? Influence? Okay. We might ask Dr. Laura. Yeah. What do you mean by influence? Media. Ah, media influence. Yeah. In other words, if I look at it, I've got an influence from various public voices or maybe even private influences to help me figure out what's right and what's wrong. Yes. Where do courts of law fit in on something like this? For instance, the ban that's killed the abortion doctor in Wichita. They took 37 minutes to reach a decision on this case. And in Kansas, it has to be not just a parole, it has to be a full 12.

Right. No room for doubt. They had to go on their feelings. people saw that there was no doubt in people's minds what happened. Nevertheless, even what you see, can you trust? So you're saying that people voted based on their feelings. Yeah, still voted based on their feelings.

That's what our culture has been increasingly conveying since about the end of World War II. Here's part of the problem. Several of you have come up with different ideas here. Sort of a poll, majority vote, influence. Which one of those is going to decide? Which one are you going to pick and how are you going to pick it?

See that's part of the difficulty is once you step into relativism, there are several ideas about how someone might decide what's right and wrong and no way to figure out which one of those ought to be. You're stuck. Moral vertigo, right? Moral vertigo. Right is wrong. Wrong is right. Black is white. White is black. Problem. Real problem. Let's pray. There's people with their noses pressed against the wall. I'm exaggerating here. Okay? All right.

Lord, we thank you that as we look at your word, as we examine the worldviews and political systems that are being offered and even pushed upon this world, We thank you that you've made your intent and your thoughts clear to us through your word. And thank you for that clear revelation to us. And we thank you that you've made it clear because you love us so much and that you desire relationship and fellowship with us. And we just give you thanks. We praise you. In Jesus' name, Amen.