Rationalism – Satan’s Lie You Can Finding God with Your Mind, or The Worship of Your Thoughts
If you’ve ever had a discussion with someone about the scriptures, God, or perhaps mention what God’s word says on a current topic, and the person smiles and sits back at says: “Well, that’s your interpretation”, welcome to the postmodern world. It is a world of relativistic standards where truth is absolutely relative (
), especially when it comes to the thought that God may have spoken on a subject. We live during a time when people are generally willing to believe anything, unless God has said it. In his book “Broken”, Pastor Jonathan Fisk points out: Postmodern people are willing to believe human life was seeded on earth by aliens billions of years ago. They are willing to believe we’ll eventually find a pill to keep our bodies in perfect shape without one whit of exercise… They will tell stories about how one day man will merge with computer and overcome the grave altogether. They will hypothesize the discovery of the "multiverse," which we will one day open with a wormhole so we might walk directly into a place where the thing we call "God" is just another creature like us, sitting at his desk and working for someone he calls "the man." But postmodern folks won’t believe that God could actually, and did communicate with us with actual, understandable words, and He has some important things to tell us. That they scoff at and reject.
But then, that is not really a new problem or philosophy at all. In fact, its roots go way back to the very beginning. Fisk further writes: "Postmodernism" and "modernism" are new words to describe the same old problem. The belief that God's human words don't have real, ultimate meaning is an ancient idea, dating all the way back to where all of our problems got going in the first place. All the rot, the terror, the chaos, and the suffering go back to the very beginning, to the day when the first human first decided the almighty God was not quite capable of always speaking the absolute truth. It was not Adam's pride that caused the fall. Pride was only the result of his first sin: unbelief.
"You shall not eat [of it]," God had said, "[or] you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:17). The serpent deceived Adam's wife, so she ignored these words. But Adam was not deceived (1 Timothy 2:14). Adam chose to not believe God's words…The thing Adam wanted above all was knowledge (Genesis 2:17), and in order to attain it, he was even willing to learn "the knowledge of evil." Irony of ironies, the "knowledge of evil" he learned is the notion that the path to personal godhood can be achieved by learning knowledge. But this notion is a false idea. It is a lie. It is a knowledge that, no matter how much it learns, can never quite be the knowledge of the truth (2 Timothy 3:7).
This is the fall: the theoretical but false knowledge that by worshiping knowledge we shall become ultimately knowledgeable. It was this worship of knowledge that wrought an everlasting curse on Adam's world. It was this worship of knowledge that rained down plagues on Adam's children. It was this worship of knowledge that increased our pain, taught us fearful terror, and brought us under the rule of death. It was this worship of knowledge that taught Adam to think the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would make him wiser than God. It was this worship of knowledge that is still taught by the first Lie: "You can find God with your mind."
Now, this does not mean that Christianity requires that “you to check your brain at the door (far from it). But it does mean that you need to check your brain at the limits of your brain. There are some things your brain just isn't capable of perceiving or even knowing. But that does not mean those things don't exist or they are not real or they are not true. It only means you are not God. God is God, and the real God has some things He much wants to say. And He does so in HIS WORD!!!
It is in God’s Word alone where He reveals true, good knowledge that makes you wise unto salvation. His Word, the Law reveals your sinful heart and condition, your inability to help yourself. It is the knowledge that we are evil, lost and dying. And it is in God’s Word, the Gospel where God tells us of His love for us and His saving work for you in Jesus. Fisk writes: It is knowledge, but it is not "bare" knowledge. It is the power of God for salvation to all people who believe it (Romans 1:16).
But this amazing act of God for you cannot be known to you through your own reason or strength because of your inbred idolatry of the mind (not to mention the heart and the hands). It is all literally too good to be true. In your knowledge of evil, you could never bring yourself to accept it. A free pardon for your treason seems unreasonable. It would require a love that could halt even the emotions of righteous anger and wrath. It would be a kind of mercy unjustifiable in any court of law.
But Jesus preached and achieved these words as more than mere words. He infused this rule of faith,
this promise of His resurrection, with the very person of the Holy Spirit. Just as His own incarnate flesh was not merely human, so now His own human words are still breathed wherever they are spoken with a total, spiritual divinity. Like a dove descending on the wing, the Holy Spirit of God flies on the waves of sound. He lights up the rays that reflect the very ink of this sentence of promise into your eyes in order to call you by means of this Good News, even in the same way Jesus once called Lazarus out of his tomb.
God does not want you to discover Him through science or history, reason or experiment, logic or philosophy, any more than He wants you to find His Spirit through trial and error, practice and leadership, tactics and methods. God wants you to know He already has found you in Jesus. And Jesus speaks. Real words. Words He has left behind as His testimony. Words that are written. Human words that alone gives us the knowledge that makes us wise unto salvation.
Pastor
