A Variety of Options
Different topic tonight… I was on business travel this week, at the airport I stopped in a bookstore to find reading material to get me through at least the 2.5 hours to my destination.
Admittedly the bookstores in airports are smaller, but most of them have a fairly wide range of material. I look for books to enlighten me as opposed to grieving the Spirit within. Have any of you realized this is NOT an easy task?
I found a nice selection of different books on Islam, Wicca and other religions… but wait, where are the books on Scriptural Christianity? There’s even a whole section devoted to “New Age”, yet no section for Christianity. I can find a wide variety of novel type books offering alternate views of Jesus, yet nothing on the Jesus of the Bible. There are several books about religious tolerance, but have you noticed they aren’t very tolerant of Christianity?
The majority of this material is designed for one purpose only… to provide an alternate option to salvation. Oh yeah, haven’t you heard? Man can now set the rules… anything he wants them to be… If we don’t like one commandment, well, we’ll just ignore it or we’ll make up our own stuff… more palatable, more to our liking; stuff that makes more sense to us. We say to ourselves… Wait! Why do this God’s way? We can form Him to our image and then be able to basically do what ever we want. Isn’t that great? We can lay out the rules of whatever philosophy we want, we can even restate history (as is the case in one popular book) to our liking. And then we’ll be really free! Won’t we?
In college I took anthropology and the Professor told us that the one thing that was found in every society, ancient and modern alike was evidence of religion. Isn’t that interesting? Every society looks for God. I’m sure you can remember hearing about Roman and Greek mythology… so just imagine everyone, everywhere always trying to find God… lends credence to the old saying, “nothing new under the sun”, doesn’t it? (Which by-the-way is Ecclesiastes 1:9.)
Do you have any idea about why every society shows evidence of religion? The first chapter of the book of Romans tells us that God made the truth evident to us. Another Scripture passage says He wrote knowledge of Himself on every heart. In Romans it goes on to say, “For 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.”
Man has not changed… even today, s/he tries to account for God; even the atheist who tries to push Him away. If God truly didn’t exist why would the atheist work so hard to try to kill Him? Under the guise of “tolerance” others work just as hard to make Him not matter, to make truth about God irrelevant.
All of this boils down to one thing and one thing alone…………..
People simple do NOT want to be accountable for their actions. They don’t want to acknowledge that they are (1) much, much less than holy ( hey this is me too... I’m right here beside you – I’m not better than you) and (2) folks don’t want to accept that there’s a huge price to pay for not being spotless in God’s eyes.
Even though you spend your whole life living by a creed, any creed, or none at all… what will you say when you are finally face-to-face with God? God gave you free will for a reason, He doesn’t want robots…. How have you used your gift of free will?
If you really want to know truth about God… you don’t need me… all you have to do is honestly ask God to reveal the truth about Jesus to you… find out for yourself. Because when you do see God, He isn’t going to be asking you about what I did with the truth…. He’ll be asking you.... about you.
The last part of that section of Romans 1 says, "... so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools..."
What book did I buy? "Taming Your Tongue".... :-)