Outside the Box

2 Timothy 2:24-26 “A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people.  Gently instruct those who oppose the truth. Perhaps God will change those people’s hearts, and they will learn the truth. Then they will come to their senses and escape from the devil’s trap. For they have been held captive by him to do whatever he wants.”

Our church’s Wednesday night Bible Study is taking a tour though the ‘Focus on the Family’ 12 weeks of lessons in the “Truth Project”. This last week, the lesson was looking at Christian Philosophy and Ethics. The Professor Dr. Del Tackett points to the opening Bible passage to state that our culture has been taken captive by the devil’s traps. Proverb’s 23:7 says; “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” There is a formal and vital connection between our ideas about the philosophical nature of the world and our understanding of right and wrong behavior. When astronomer Carl Sagan launched "Cosmos," an epic 13-part TV series, he stated: "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Come with me.", but this is deceptive language and empty philosophy that equated to simply saying: “There is no God.”

Colossians 2:8 “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.”

The warning from the Holy Scriptures to Believers is “Beware, because we can be taken captive by lies. This form of knowledge is “assumptive language” of truth claims, caught and bought without opinion, so that we will buy the lie. With an unfounded assumption that there is nothing beyond matter, energy and time gives a contemporary culture the picture that reality is a “closed box” – a “cosmic cube” – in which there is no room for anything that cannot be sensually or materially perceived. The problem is that with the lid of this cosmic box closed with sovereign Creator God excluded, is that philosophy is deprived of a universal reference point and thus crippled in its “scientific quest for reality.” As a result, it cannot answer the most basic questions about right and wrong behavior. What does it look like? The “nothing beyond star stuff” Cosmic cube implications are that nothing exists outside the cube. The God-rejecting world system is looking for answers to life’s questions inside the box of a cosmic cube, when the answers are outside the box with God. 

Romans 12:2 “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

In Christ, Brian