The "Wise" Leading the Blind

"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools ..." (Rom. 1:22)

What an indictment of the human race! According to Paul, "What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse" (Rom. 1:19-20). Human beings have an innate recognition of God. Simple logic dictates this. Human beings around the world are fundamentally religious, regardless of their culture or circumstances. Atheists are made, not born. Nonetheless, the human race as a whole and Americans in particular have decided to be "wiser" than that. "Although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened" (Rom. 1:21).

A prime example of the really "wise" today is Dr. Peter Singer, a professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Dr. Singer suggests, in his advanced "wisdom", that there is no reason to defend children in the womb because they aren't people yet. But Dr. Singer takes it further. He holds that there is no reason to protect disabled children either because they aren't human either. It would, in his estimation, be perfectly moral to use these children for experimentation. But "human" isn't really significant to Dr. Singer; he holds that people are no better than other animals, and to suggest they are is simply speciesism.

Now, the "less wise" of our society would mostly reject the "wise" doctor's views. Oddly, they do so at their own peril. You see, while they would suggest that we need to defend children and that people are more valuable than animals, they do so with a complete inconsistency of their own position. Our society has decided that humans are evolved, not made, and that God is irrelevant to the discussion. If He exists at all, He has no place in matters of law, politics, morality, or the public exchange of ideas. So humans are simply some steps beyond lower animals which are merely some steps beyond bugs which are just some steps beyond amoeba. Dr. Singer says that animals and humans are of equal worth, and that is consistent. Society cries, "No! People are more valuable," ignoring completely that they have no basis for such a claim. Instead, the rule of Evolution is "the survival of the fittest." Now, our society has laws in place that protect children and the elderly. We have Child Protective Services and the Disability Act and rules against elderly abuse because we believe that the role of humans in general and government in particular is to protect the "less fit." So we claim to toss out God and then act as if there is one. We hold that humans are evolved animals but pass laws to treat them as if they're something more. We make rules to protect them against ... the primary rule of our origins. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools ..."

On 60 Minutes last Sunday, Joel Osteen talked up his new book, Become a Better You. The reporter who interviewed him, Byron Pitts, had some interesting questions.

"You said 'I like to see myself as a life coach, a motivator to help them experience the life of God that God has for them. People don’t like to be beat down and told 'You’ve done wrong.' What do you mean?" Pitts asks.

"Well, I think that most people already know what they’re doing wrong. And for me to get in here and just beat ‘em down and talk down to ‘em, I just don’t think that inspires anybody to rise higher. But I want to motivate. I wanna motivate every person to leave here to be a better father, a better husband, to break addictions to come up higher in their walk with the Lord," Osteen says.

Joel, for all his good intentions, is mistaken when he says, "I think that most people already know what they’re doing wrong." He has ignored the accusation that "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can understand it?" (Jer. 17:9). He missed the fact that the primary problem of natural man is the suppression of truth (Rom. 1:18). He has missed the point that God has surrendered Man to his own foolishness -- "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools ..." And if we follow Paul's logical progression of Romans 1, we find a series in which God "gave them up" (Rom. 1:24, 26). In other words, people do not know how sinful they are, and to fail to tell them the problem is to fail to offer them a real solution.

I think we're in trouble ... real trouble. Some years ago I taught on a Sunday evening on the passage in 2 Tim. 3 about "the last days" and the moral conditions of that time. As I was teaching it I realized that I wasn't just talking about our society; I was talking about many churches. If people have a tendency to suppress the truth, if they have a tendency to surrender God, believing they are wise, and become fools, if they suffer from a deceitful, wicked heart, and if God is capable of giving them up, then we are in the process of being given up. We have managed to qualify ourselves for that. The really scary part to me is this: Humans face judgment on the last day, but nations face temporal judgment. We know that final judgment for us doesn't occur until after we die, but no nation has that assurance. And if America and the church continues to profess to be wise while becoming more and more foolish, perhaps a Hillary is exactly what is needed for God to finish the job of terminating the good that was once a nation predicated on "In God we trust."