Now, I know that Christians have a reputation for being the most stylish people in the room, but the title of our little chat today isn’t about wearing fashionable eye-wear, though I’m more than happy to give you some tips. Here’s one; monocles are out right now.
What the title “Putting on Christian Glasses” means is that being a believer in the God of the Bible should change the way you see the world; it should change the entire story that your heart preaches to you about the nature of the world in which you live… like putting on the right pair of glasses after decades of wearing the wrong pair of glasses.
In 1 Kings 18, we have a popular story in which the great prophet of Yahweh,[1] Elijah challenges the priests of the storm god Baal to a contest of deity—answer prayer with fire. The winner of the competition will prove true god. In verse 21 he makes the famous announcement, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.”
The wording here seems slight to the English ear—A wavering between two opinions as if Yahweh or Baal is chocolate or vanilla, Coke or Pepsi, Daniel Craig or Sean Connery. Choose! This couldn’t be further from reality. The nature of the contest is a contest between two worldviews, a contest between two radically different perceptions of reality, of the nature of time, the limits of human beings, the possibilities for human society, the character of law and order and the future of the human soul. No aspect of life is left untouched by it. It speaks to morality and ethics, reason and philosophy, purpose and meaning.
If Baal is god, then the entire system of paganism is true, humanity has no meaning, time is taking the world nowhere, the individual came from nothing and is going to nothing and nothing that he or she does in the interim has any real purpose other than the continuation of a meaningless species and the stupefying quenching of the anxiety born of this reality. (Sounds almost exactly like atheism) If Baal is god, then outcomes are not primarily decided by moral and ethical choices, but rather by the tenuous, self-interested ritual manipulation of divine power players whose own short-sighted, petulant, ego-maniacal antics make life a perpetual torment for humanity… and intentionally so. If Baal is god, then humans are on their own in a universe without meaning.
If Yahweh is God, however, then everything is different… EEEVERYTHING!!!!!!
I don’t know how old you are, Dearest Believer, and to be honest, I’m just too polite to ask, but if you were born after 1980, there is a better than average chance that the worldview you absorbed from society had more in common with the one believed by those Baal worshippers than the one preached by the Prophet Elijah. Western Civilization was imperfectly built on a deepening Biblical story about God, Man, and Reality, but a growing atheist view of reality has been waging war against it from within for centuries and has largely taken root in Millennials and GenZ.
In answer to the questions, “Where did you come from?” “What are you?” “What’s wrong with the world?” and “How can it be fixed?” two whole generations have been nurtured on humanism and answer these questions like atheists would. The atheist answers, apart from a thin veneer of scientism (Not real science) look more than a little similar to the answers of old world pagans who, like them, sacrifice their children to the gods for the promise of a little more prosperity… a little more security.
Even those who claim to believe in God have embraced the central point of humanism—man is morally autonomous… i.e. free to do as he pleases. Those who believe that man is morally autonomous, believe that truth is found within in the guise of “my truth.” Moral goodness is measured in the thrall of passions, in the heat of wanting whatever it is that they want… sex, the same sex, to be a different sex, money, power, control. Love is assessed in moments of arousal—“Love is Love—If it feels good do it.” This is a destructive short-game which defines freedom as freedom from restraint and freedom to do as one pleases, freedom to create one’s own reality and the right to demand that others honor that confession. Would you call it freedom for the astronaut to cut his tether to the craft in outer space? In a moral sense, these do. They celebrate the path of death and call it freedom.
Man is not his own master, however. Truth is not within us, something of our own declaring. We each stand before One Holy Creator of all, owing Him everything. The world is His for He made it. We stand there, as His special creation, made in His image, and endowed with all the rights and responsibilities of that status. We stand before Him amid a sea of His beloved creatures. Our primary purpose in life is to wake up to Him, to strive to be like Him, imitating His character and participating in the fulfillment of His purposes in the world. He has revealed all this to us in Holy Scripture… the Bible. We strive to be free FROM our own destructive passions and desires, our own selfishness, so that we can be free TO fulfill our purpose as His special creation whom He loves beyond measure. Our freedom is the freedom TO discover and walk on the path of life that He has laid before us.
Put on those glasses. It may take time to wrestle through your own thoughts about God, Man, and Reality, but strive for that corrective. “Let God be true and every man a liar.”[2] These glasses aren’t always fashionable, but they reveal truth, meaning, and purpose.
[1] Yahweh is the chosen personal and covenant name chosen by God in Scripture. It comes from the Hebrew word YHWH which is a word of “Being.” As spelled, it means “The Creator.” He is the uncaused-cause of all that is. You will hear this name on occasion in Church so you may as well learn what it means now.
[2] Romans 3:4 in the New Testament.
