Fleeing The Light

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Fleeing The Light

Sunday, 30 January 2011 08:43

January 30, 2011

“FLEEING THE LIGHT”

John 3:19-21

by Dr. Ole Lillestolen

We tend to believe what we want to believe. There are some natural tendencies we do well to understand so that we can be on the alert and correct for them, like the tendency to walk in circles when we are lost. I also have a tendency forget to tell Myrna things. I don’t want to be that way, so I try to remember. But, what deeply concerns me is our natural tendency to believe what we want to believe, even about God.

Jesus tells us that “men loved the darkness rather than the light.” He says that we are naturally drawn to what is not true and to what is destructive. Sin is like cheese on a mouse trap, and we are drawn to the trap because we like the looks and the smell of the bait, even when really do know better, even when it doesn’t make any sense.

The Philosopher Blaise Pascal put our problem this way: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” No one knows who first said, “My mind is made up, don't try and confuse me with the facts,” but our fallen, sinful nature is prone to ignore the light of truth and walk in the darkness of sin. This tendency is devastating the church today, and non-Christians don’t bother to look to the church because it believes what it wants to believe! By and large, the church of today seems to have lost its way just as much as the rest of the world! What a tragedy!

This detour into darkness is an avoidable tragedy. It is also a tendency that we here at Bethany need to be especially alert to, because people are still responding to God’s light here and we still have the privilege of leading people into God’s light and into salvation through Jesus Christ.

This tendency got its start back in the Garden of Eden when Satan deceived Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I’ve often wondered about that tree and what it was that made it evil, and why God put it there in the first place. One of the things I feel like I’ve learned in my walk with God is that He doesn’t just make things for the sake of making up rules. He creates everything for a proper purpose and then gives us what we call rules so that we don’t mess things up by using those things improperly. I don’t know if there is anything to this or not, but I have been wondering if there was something about the fruit of this tree which affected the way people thought, skewering their image of reality and truth.

There are, of course, all kinds of ‘fruits’ that affect the way people think, like certain mushrooms. Maybe the fruit of this tree was some kind of mind altering drug fruit. I’ll never forget a movie on drug abuse where they filmed a person high on drugs and tried to get him to explain what he was experiencing. He unsteadily claimed to be euphoric, though he looked as lethargic as a slug. His euphoria was a mind experience which was unfettered by any reality of our world. The trouble was, this drug induced ‘alternative reality’ was destroying him!

And, what about Eve? She was entranced by the possibility of a different reality than what she was experiencing in God’s fellowship and light. Genesis 3:6 tells us: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.”

God had, however, told Adam and Eve that in the time that they ate of that tree, they would become walking dead. Eve’s mind was made up though, and she was bound and determined to not be confused by the facts! She ate, and now we are dying too!

Ultimately, this tendency is the most dangerous tendency we have. Jesus said, “this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light.” What is He telling us? He is telling us that ultimately what condemns people to a lost eternity is our willingness to ignore God and His light, in favor of doing things He warns us against. We are condemned for knowingly ignoring His invitation to do things with Him which are truly worthwhile and good!

The Apostle Paul puts it this way in Romans 1. In verse eighteen He tells us that, “the wrath of God is revealed . . . against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them.” Paul is dealing with that age old question of how God can condemn so many people to hell, especially when they don’t know about Jesus. But, Paul says that the issue isn’t how much they know about Jesus. The issue is the fact that they refuse to look at and act on the self-evident truth that God created them!

In verse twenty Paul explains that this is a problem because, “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Is Paul right? Do people willingly suppress the truth?

One of the ways this tendency is obvious is in the evolutionary understanding of the human eye. I found a diagram of the eye which showed 13 different parts to the eye, like the optic nerve, the lens, the iris, and the vitreous humor. I’m not sure why they think the fluid in the eye is humorous, but one of the parts of the structure of this transparent and gelatinous material is collagen fibers which are kept apart by electrical charges. Where do this electricity come from? But, then I found another diagram that looked at just the corner of the eye where the lens and iris is and I saw that there are fifteen different kinds of cell structures just in that little spot.

I don’t know if you are with me on this, but I get the sense that there are hundreds, if not thousands, or more, different kinds and sub-kinds of cells and structures, doing different things, maybe even just in the eye! I don’t doubt that there are millions of little biosystems working together to make up our bodies. Google says that there are hundreds of different broad kinds of cells and every kind of cell is further differentiated into sub-kinds with different tasks, like the 31 different types of hormone cells. Each had to either be created by God or had to evolve!

But, do the math! Evolutionists say that multicellular organisms have been around on this earth for a billion years. You take some two million different kinds of life forms on earth and somehow multiply each of these life forms by the number of different kinds of cells and subsets of cells and biosystems all working together, and a billion years doesn’t look like a very long time, especially since those supposed transforming mutations are virtually always destructive!

Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote that, “The theory (of evolution) rejects the notion that all organisms were designed and created.” Professor D.M.S. Watson, Chair of Evolution at the University of London for more than twenty years, said that “evolution itself is accepted by zoologists, not because it has been observed to occur or can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative; special creation, is incredible.” Why do evolutionists believe in evolution? They say because they don’t want to believe in God!

Aldous Huxley explained why he preferred the meaninglessness of an evolved world in his article, “Confessions of a Professed Atheist”, saying: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; . . . the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation . . . from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected . . . because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” He rejected God to be sexually and socially free!

Jesus said, “this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light.” But, He also added, “for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.”

Being free from the boundaries of morality is ultimately what we all want in our hearts! It is what we need to be saved from, and this is what Christ came to save us from, our natural tendency to want to do what is wrong! On the other hand, it will only be as the world sees the church fighting this battle inside the church that the world outside the church will pay attention to God’s light reflected by the church!

Sadly, the evangelical church at large is caving in to the tendency to love darkness. In a Christianity Today article Sociologist Alan Wolfe claims that now, “Evangelicals are part of mainstream culture, not dissenters from it.” Wolfe says that today’s evangelical church generally believes that in order be relevant in today’s world, “all we have to do is abandon biblical responsibility.”

Wolfe illustrates this tendency by describing a now very typical breakup of two evangelical families; these which had cooperated in homeschooling. Two of the spouses wanted to switch and the now familiar mantra used to justify breaking up his family was, “Don't I have a right to be happy?” We tend to believe what we want to believe! The trouble is, people get hurt! Yet, the world is also watching and turning away, more lost!

Jesus said, "he who practices the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God." We live in a time when the Bible seems more and more irrelevant. The question for us is: “Where do we want this church to be in ten years?” Our greatest challenge and battle to be that church will be with our own tendency to turn away from God’s light! Are we prepared to fight ourselves in order to walk in God’s light ourselves, and so also reflect His light to our children and to those around us?

To win this battle each of you will have to invite your Christian brothers and sisters to meddle in your life and pull back the shutters you’ve put up so that God’s light can shine in the darkened rooms of your heart! Without your commitment to let others meddle, Bethany and you will lose this battle with your natural tendencies to be attracted to darkness! You cannot make it on your own