Mark
4:39–41 “[Jesus] awoke and
rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ And the wind ceased,
and there was a great calm. And [the disciples] were filled with great fear and
said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey
him?’”.
I
read that with Darwinian Evolution effectual decline of the Christian influence
on society, it is a sad fact indeed that many of the most influential thinkers
in recent centuries have been unapologetic atheists. These individuals, who
lived at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century—including
men such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre—attributed
ultimate causation to impersonal forces and not the personal, omniscient,
omnipresent, and omnipotent God revealed in the Bible. Despite their advocacy
of atheism, however, one fact persistently confronted them: mankind is
incurably religious. How did they explain this?
The
article stated that Freud theorized that the fear of impersonal forces gave
rise to belief in a supreme being. He noted that it is impossible to reason
with natural forces such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes. On the
other hand, human beings can reason with other personal beings. We can beg
personal deities for benevolence and favor, including protection from the natural
forces we cannot control. Thus, Freud asserted, humanity made natural events
personal in order to avoid them. We invented a god of thunder, a god of
tornadoes, and so on in order to reduce our fear of being destroyed by them. By
worshiping these gods, we came to expect favor from these deities, and thus our
fears of nature were assuaged. In time, said Freud, this polytheism evolved
into monotheism, which allows us to focus on placating one Supreme Being
instead of several different gods.He had to come up with something other than "God is real", so fear fit his replacement theory.
Indeed,
we fear the awesome power of nature, but men and women fear something—Someone—far
more. At one point during His earthly ministry, Jesus and the disciples were in
a boat on the Sea of Galilee when they ran into a horrible storm. All of the
men feared the storm except Jesus, and His followers could find no reason for
His willingness to sleep instead of worrying about the weather. After the
disciples woke our Lord, He silenced the storm. Yet a strange thing happened.
We would expect that the disciples would have been afraid no longer, but their
fear intensified. They trembled before the One who had saved their lives.
The
article concludes that there is nothing humanity fears more than the holiness
of God. We all know that His purity calls for our destruction, but we who know
Jesus understand His great mercy. By the Father’s grace, all those who trust in
Christ alone can endure the holiness of God. Moreover, we can rejoice in it as
we seek His face. When we trust in Jesus, we are His holy people by God’s
decree, and over time, we become holy in our experience as we put sin to death
and grow in likeness to Christ. In Jesus, we have a twofold hope: We can stand
in the midst of God’s holiness unafraid. But we can also become holy as we obey
Him in the Spirit’s power. This latter holiness does not get us into heaven;
only on account of Christ’s righteousness can we be declared just before God.
Still, we do grow in holiness as we follow Jesus.
In
Christ, Brian
No comments:
Post a Comment