The Book of Hebrews is written to help Christians who, in the face of growing persecution and pressure from Jewish religious leaders, have begun to waver in their determination to remain followers of Jesus. In addition to warnings about the consequences of Christian Apostasy, Hebrews celebrates the superiority of Jesus over the institutional approach to religion favored by many. He presents faith in Christ as something worth suffering for. In Hebrews 12, the author uses the saints of old and Jesus Himself as an example of faithful suffering. Death on a cross was one of the worst deaths they could imagine, but Jesus willingly went to the cross because on the other side of that suffer was a great prize.
12:1-3 says, “THEREFORE, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary band lose heart.”
The phrase who for the joy set before Him endured the cross summarizes much in the book.
God made man with fundamental pain-pleasure responses. In our corruption, these responses are easily bent, easily exploited for manipulation, especially when they are robbed of a context of insight and hope. What a person is willing to endure and what pleasures he is willing to forgo are completely dependent on the context of hope and understanding of consequences which surrounds them. What will I get if I endure this pain? What will I get if I forgo this pleasure? It’s not rocket science or brain surgery.
Now one of the biggest complaints that atheists make about the way they are described by non-atheists is the idea that atheism is a system of thought. They imagine that “NOT believing in something” cannot possible entail a system of thought. The atheist, however, wherever he is, whenever he is, shares a common answer to the most basic question of reality—Where did I come from?/What am I? Atheism is, therefore a worldview and worldview shapes almost everything about the beliefs and values a person has.
There tend to be a few streams of thought away from the common answer to the first of all questions of reality, but history tells us that in large groups where atheists gain power, one predominates. These are not isolated categories, but graded reactions. One may easily give way to the others in the right circumstances. They are kin.
- Destroyers: We have short-game nihilists. For the nothingness set before them they endure nothing. These blow themselves up slowly or quickly but the general pattern of their existence is animal cunning and aimless wandering. Actions are taken without an ultimate sense of consequence, and rewards are found in instant gratification. What isn’t discovered doesn’t matter.
- Adapters: We have those accepting the common definitions of a “good end” provided by the Judeo-Christian religious communities (or some version of it provided by their own community) who seek dialogical moral reasoning for getting there. These have a larger context of consequence and reward than straight up nihilists but not much larger. Practical means to practical ends with a rather self-absorbed mechanism for judging them. These often seek to master the rules of community around them. For the short-terms gains set before them they endure some discomfort and forgo some pleasures. What isn’t discovered, however, doesn’t matter.
- Dominators: We have long-game nihilists who seek to sate the fundamental desires of human nature with cheap and dysfunctional government solutions. Put committed atheists in enough group cooperation and this is by far their greatest inclination. For the Utopia set before them they virtuously commit atrocities, and seek unbounded consequence free pleasure by forcing other people to pay for it. They build a context in which discovery doesn’t matter… they no longer have to act out their baser desires in the shadows… “freeeeeeedoooooommmmmm!”
Let’s face it; temptation is pain. To want and not have is pain. Even good men, devout men, struggle with temptation. People want and want badly and only the powerful anchor of hope for rich reward and fear of consequence keep people at times from blowing up their own lives and the lives of others.
Here, the Judeo-Christian worldview is powerful. There is a reason that, under its auspices, Western Civilization grew more productive faster than any civilization in human history. There is no close second. Even the many failures of those involved could not keep a lid on the human thriving that spread and spreads among any people who open themselves up to its core values and the beliefs that underpin those values. For the joy set before us, Western Civilization endured restraint and sacrificed instant gratification. For the hope set before us, Western Civilization overcame ages long patterns in human institutions like slavery and mercantilism, eventually rewriting the conquest narrative of every society into a missional plan for lifting up the faltering. Atheists have built nothing. They have a long track record of borrowing, a long history of polluting and degrading, a consistent paradigm of death and destruction and oppression. Of them, we might easily understand that for the nothing set before them they endure nothing… and, failing to endure the pains of temptation toward the sating of their darker natures, they reap the rewards of those unchecked natures, whether those rewards come short or long.
