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THE PENDULUM OF DOUBT #2
THE DANGER OF GENIUS
In his book, Believe in Miracles But Trust in Jesus,
Pastor Adrian Rogers tells a personal story about a man he was counseling.
This person was high up in the space industry, wealthy, very intelligent.
But his wife was suicidal, and he was seeking help.
And in the course of their discussion, it came out that this executive
was an atheist. "I'm not a Christian," he said very plainly.
"I don't even believe in God." In fact, he went so far as to
say: "I KNOW there is no such thing as God."
Well, Adrian Rogers, a committed Christian, took that on as a challenge!
"Tell me," he said, "do you know everything there is to
know?" Well, no, the man admitted. "Would you say it was generous
if we agreed that you know HALF of what there is to know?" And his
new friend conceded: that would be very generous indeed. And Rogers then
asked: "How do you know that God does not exist in the other half
of the knowledge that you do not know?"
And they went back and forth a bit, and finally the man said: "Okay,
I guess I'm an agnostic instead of an atheist. I don't KNOW if there's
a God." In other words, he was a doubter . . . which brings this
story right into our Bible discussion for the week.
And Pastor Rogers asked him, "Are you an honest doubter or a dishonest
one?" "What's the difference?" And Rogers told him, "An
honest doubter doesn't know, but he WANTS to know. A dishonest doubter
can't find God for the same reason that a thief can't find a policeman.
He's not looking."
And this space-industry executive sat up straight and said, "I'd
like to think that I'm an honest doubter." And Adrian Rogers actually
asked him to sign a pledge where he'd say to this unknown God: "God,
I'm going to study. I don't know if You're out there. And as I investigate,
I promise that I'll follow wherever that investigation leads." And
the man said, "Yeah, give me a pen. I'll sign that."
And he signed it. And the preacher said to him, "All right, now,
you go home and just study the Gospel of John over and over, and then
see what you think of it all." A few weeks later, this same man came
back to the pastor's office, fell on his knees, and became a born-again
Christian. True story.
But what does an anecdote like that mean for us? Because we have doubts
too. Agnostic moments come to most of us at one time or another; hence
the title: THE PENDULUM OF DOUBT. When our mood swings into darkness,
is it sufficient to decide that maybe God's simply living in the half-universe
that we don't know much about? Is faith that kind of leap in the dark
where we ignore our ignorance and stay the course?
I mentioned yesterday a Bible verse which talks about the hardness of
understanding or knowing God. Job was a Bible character who had to be
wondering where God had gone off to. Job had a nice little universe of
his own, until disaster took his crops and his family and his money and
everything but the shirt on his back and a cranky, atheist wife. And he
HAD to be assailed by doubts! I mean, this guy was bankrupt. He was the
first Bible character to declare "Chapter Eleven," and now here's
a question FROM chapter 11!
"Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can
you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens
— what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave — what
can you know?"
We have to prayerfully move our way around a hard concept
here, because we always say that the Christian faith is a thinking person's
religion. God invites us to reason together, to think, to be on our alert.
The Bible praises investigation; God Himself challenges us to prove Him,
test Him, study His truths. And yet, when you get right down to it, friend,
human REASON is not the safest way to fight the problem of doubt. If you
say to yourself, "I'm smart enough to use my mind to decide what
truth is, and what kind of God there is . . . and whether He exists"
— you may soon be facing an enemy bigger than you are.
C. S. Lewis, in the essay we peeked at yesterday, "Religion: Reality
or Substitute?", has some counsel on this topic. Here it is:
"When once passion takes part in the game,"
he writes, "the human REASON, unassisted by Grace, has about as much
chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has
of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace."
Now, what's he saying? Simply this: once the passion
of desire or sin enters the equation, our reasoning powers, our mental
abilities, have almost no chance of hanging on to truth. Not without some
divine help. He goes on:
"The sort of arguments against Christianity
which our reason can be persuaded to accept at the moment of yielding
to temptation are often preposterous. Reason may win truths; without Faith
she will retain them just so long as Satan pleases. There is nothing we
cannot be made to believe or disbelieve. If we wish to be rational, not
now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for
the power to go on believing not in the teeth of REASON but in the teeth
of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference."
Now, what's this all about? Let's slow down and consider
it. As a Christian, let's say, you might be convinced in your mind — your
REASON — that some things are so. You believe in the holy example of Jesus.
That's great. You believe that the Law of God is good, and that Christ's
invitation to obey, out of love for Him, is a good thing too. All right.
So far so good. As part of that law, you embrace the seventh commandment,
which talks about purity and sexual fidelity. And your reason confirms
that all of these things are so. You walk out the door each morning filled
with confidence that your mind has helped you choose a good faith system.
But now what happens? Friend, there's a being out there named Satan. He
hits you with temptation, say, in the area of lust. Perhaps he puts a
sexual temptation right in front of you. And whether you're a preacher
or a president or just a regular guy on Main Street, it can be amazing
how your reasoning powers begin to talk you out of something! Is THIS
really adultery? Is what you're doing really wrong? People don't know
about x factor and y factor and z factor which, if you weigh them in the
scales, might mean that what you're about to do isn't really wrong after
all. Perjury isn't really perjury, and this lie isn't a lie, and "is"
really isn't "is." And I'm not picking on You-know-who here,
because friend, it's the same for every single one of us. Our reason can
be pushed all over the moral playground by Satan, because our baser nature
actually wants to get talked into doing this thing! How many alcoholics
have talked themselves into thinking that one more drink will NOT be wrong,
will NOT undo all their progress? And they will come to the point of actually
believing their mind, their reasoning power, when they stoutly insist:
"I don't need AA! I'm not an alcoholic! Leave me alone!"
In the inspiring little book, Steps to Christ, Ellen White, who was a
gifted Bible student, has an entire chapter entitled "What to Do
With Doubt." And despite her many decades of study, of Christian
leadership in the late 19th century, she was the first to make this admission:
"When we come to the Bible, reason must
acknowledge an authority superior to itself, and heart and intellect must
bow to the great I AM."
In other words, reason is a good thing, but it's not
the best thing. That aerospace executive had a brilliant mind, and he
used his brilliant mind to study the great Gospel of John. But in the
end, it wasn't REASON that led him to embrace Christianity. It was an
encounter with God, who is sometimes close and sometimes mysterious. He
accepted Jesus Christ, who is a divine Person we know some things about
and WONDER some things about.
This same writer, E. G. White, adds a follow-up thought:
"God desires man to exercise his reasoning
powers; and the study of the Bible will strengthen and elevate the mind
as no other study can." But now this caution, which she took to her
own heart as a warning too: "Yet we are to BEWARE of deifying reason,
which is subject to the weakness and infirmity of humanity."
And even she admits that probably the biggest cause
of doubt in our lives is our built-in desire to sin.
Well, friend, this is rather disturbing. And for Ken and David and me
too! Cult leaders invite their followers to set reason aside, to submerge
their thinking powers, and blindly follow the leader to Waco and the poisonous
Kool-Aid. We don't want to do that, and the Bible doesn't suggest that
we should. But if our minds aren't to be supremely trusted, then where
are we? Where are the safeguards?
Well, Pastor Rogers' story does give us encouragement. Because this man
fell to his knees before this God he didn't know or really believe in.
And he allowed his human mind to bow before the heavenly mind of God.
"I will follow YOU," he promised. So that gave him the protection
of God Himself. Friend, God will protect us if we ask; He'll keep us from
following our own limited brain-power over the wrong cliff. John 16:13
tell us:
"But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes,
He will guide you into ALL truth."
There's a lot more to come, so stay tuned.
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