He who is against God, or even against a god, is against himself. What should be an obvious extension of that position, but not widely acknowledged, is that the same person is also against making the world a better place.
For the sake of discussion, I am assuming that our general idea of a better place is a better place for people. Of course, I am aware that there are those whose overriding vision is to make the world a better place for cows, pigs, and chickens, prairie dogs, and mice, not forgetting their own vegetarian dogs and vegan cats. For now, let’s go with the idealists who have people in their sights for the better world.
When you pride yourself in wanting to make the world a better place, what appears first to your mind’s eye? It is better amenities: prettier cities, nicer places to live, better medical resources, more exotic brews? If so, these belong to a fallacy.
Honestly, where do you find these already nice things getting better? You surely have noticed that they are getting better where the wealthy are investing in their own environment. For example, there is currently only one Starbucks coffee house to be found on Chicago’s sprawling West Side. So, while the enfranchised multiply their franchises and update their dwellings with the latest accoutrements, poorer people can scarcely dream of access to such a better world. Covid realities temporarily brought these forgotten people, our fellow humans, to our consciousness via news stories.
It is a fallacy strengthened by personal comfort preferences to define that envisioned “better place” in terms of better amenities. What is needed – and this, too, should be obvious – is better people. What is desperately needed is people with a better core, not a better condo.
Think carefully about this; to strip the human core of God is to strip it of any grounds for hope, any confidence for committed love, any basis for faith in human nature.
Who puts faith in a bad core? It is akin to building a structure with termite infested lumber.
Nevertheless, man’s illogical tendency is to choose being afraid of any god-idea. The alternative to this awaits just above his head…that healthy fear of the Living God which is an awe at his terrible greatness, his indescribable perfections, and his redeeming propensity toward his creation.
Creator God is particularly predisposed to bring healing to the pinnacle of his creation. That would be you and me. We are beings that are human, not animal, beings each of whom bear the inerasable branding of their creator upon their soul. Try to deny this imprint and you will quickly discover that its blatant apparentness will rise up and attack you every time you leave your little intellectual closet and go out and mingle with real people.
We have constructed, around our house, a few dry-stacked walls. They are low walls, about two feet high. They border flower beds, shrub beds, and a patio. One of them is in the front yard near the public sidewalk. Children have often used that shrub bed as a hiding place for games of hide and seek.
We came home one day to find several stones, mostly the size of a loaf of bread or larger, tumbled down. We inquired of the local street urchins and tracked down the culprit, a little boy of about four years old. We gently confronted him. He confounded us with his reply.
“I did it all by myself! I’m strong!”
He was very proud of his accomplishment and had no concept that he had deconstructed something that had been functioning quite well.
The godless humanists of our day are doing the very same thing. They are proud of their own power in bringing down the foundation stones of belief in God, especially in elementary and secondary schools, clearing the remaining rubble in colleges and universities. Then they proudly pronounce a resulting advancement of humanity bragging, “We did it ourselves! We’re strong!”
They surely did. Teen suicides increased over the same period of the erasure of God from educational blackboards. Violent teen crimes increased, and more teens grew up to become adult criminals. Heartless killings in depressed neighborhoods have become commonplace. Rich kids, with abundant amenities, have dealt with spiritual disorientation and purposelessness by trying mass shootings in a quest for significance or to punish the happy for their happiness.
Fathers have abandoned families and marriage has become a joke. Our governments have approved and encouraged both of these deteriorations of crucial foundations for a better society.
Families themselves have been blended into confusion, more often than not providing the children caught in the middle with anchors pulling in opposite directions. No wonder that, as soon as these kids get old enough, they either choose one anchor over the other on practical considerations alone or, with shouts of relief, cut the chains to both.
Corruption in businesses and corporations has never been eliminated nor significantly reduced. Business journalists would quickly become bored if it wrong-doing had become a thing of the past. Elected politicians on both sides of the swamp keep getting caught in their indiscretions and crimes. Someone suggested that Illinois select their next candidate for governor from a penitentiary to save taxpayers the legal costs of getting the next one a bunk there.
These realities are a miniscule sampling of the degradations and deteriorations that have paralleled the removal of god-ideas, let alone the living God, from the core of the next generation.
In a bad bargain, our culture has traded solid construction on firm foundations for the wrecking ball of unbridled relativism and individualism. Through the elimination of all wholesome standards, we have discarded the blueprints for building any better standards, the kind of salvaging standards which our completely fractured society has now been successfully pre-programmed to reject.
We have learned to destroy citizen freedom in the name of personal freedom. We have no idea how to harness the now unleashed self-referencing personal freedoms for the needed wholesome restraints. The most recent conspicuous expressions of these new freedoms are the urban uprisings of the frustrated who became bent on destroying the brick-and-mortar possessions of the destroyers of their humanity. Where is the gratitude?
Therefore, we are no longer a whole humanity united in identity and dignity by our Designer. We have now been reduced to sub-tribes, each one believing that this is their day to prevail over all other tribes.
Only on this the tribes agree,
“Give me my place and perks for free,
The better world is all for me
Oh, you’ll see,
Yes, you’ll see”*
This shapes the new electioneering.
The “better world” we say we are working toward has become no more than a sound bite without teeth, an improbable dream. Why? Because we are fully into the process of making the world a worse place. Our progress in this is plain to see. “We are doing it ourselves!”
Now, tell me how you are trying to make the future people of this world and its current inhabitants better people? How are you working to shape their core to make them better human beings, and not just better culturally adjusted people? Are you being driven by current cultural trends that turn freedom inside-out, transform gender into degeneration, and by knocking your heels to politically correct values that are pollutingly incorrect?
If it will take a critical mass of us to “make the world a better place”, then this is no mere hypothetical discussion. You are significant in your providentially assigned sphere. You have a choice of several product assembly lines for churning out the people who will determine if we and they shall make a better world. You can choose to manufacture they-owe-it-to-me bums, or educated belligerents, or greedy braggarts, or family bastards**, or angry bullet shooters. Instead, you can join the production of anchored believers in the good God who alone can make broken people into beautiful people at their core.
If you are on the wrong assembly line, if you are contributing in the wrong way, you are in the process of destroying yourself as you help others destroy themselves…and this world.
Consider this:
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 1 Corinthians 1:20-21 NIV
If you’ve been sucked into the wrong thinking of any of the endless anti-god varieties, suck yourself out. The muck is thick and sticky. You will need an extraordinary resolve.
Lift your eyes above the petty but proud little minds of men. Reach high for the alternative. Send a prayer in the direction of truth and hope. Don’t quit until you discover the self-revealing God who will be knowable to you through the revelations preserved in the Bible, the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.
You can do no better than this. ~dkb~
*a little limerick by your author
**per the Oxford languages definition of the noun, “an unpleasant or despicable person”
'ink Again 