Liberalism And Self-Righteousness

How can we know anything about anything

To try to explain truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. George Macdonald

Do we have to make a choice between science and the Bible?

NO!

That is NOT where the problem is, but that is what everyone seems to want to talk about.

Take science as an example. How can we know anything about the created material world around us?

How can we know anything from what we can see using natural sciences?

We all see the same things in the material world, but we don't come to the same answers.

Why is that?

How can we know anything about the Bible and what it teaches? Every person believes different things about the Bible and how it should be read.

Why is that?

Same scientific facts. Different answers.

Same Bible. Different answers.

Why is that?

The true question is this: How do we come to our answers that we get from what we can see through science or what we can read in the Bible?

How do we think about what we see using science or what we read in the Bible?

How do we analyze what we have seen and read?

How do we interpret what we have seen and read?

We use logic, but logic always has a foundation. Jesus talked about building on the Rock. That Rock is Jesus Christ. He is the true foundation. There are also the false foundations of the ungodly.

An example might help.

Question: Why do you believe in evolution?

Answer: Because my science teacher told me that evolution is scientific fact.

Question: Why do you believe your science teacher?

Answer: because he agrees with the textbook he assigned us to read.

Now, we have asked, "Why?" twice.

If we continued to ask, "Why?" we would come down to the foundation of this person's thoughts.

When we get down to the foundations, there are no more questions that can be answered. So where to the foundations come from?

There are three possibilities.

things that we make up, pulled from the air
demonic lies
divine revelation

Question: Why do you believe in creation?

Answer: Because God revealed this to me. He spoke to me through the Bible and gave me His faith so that I could believe Him.

See how quickly we got to the foundation. This is a belief that has a foundation that is solid and that cannot be moved.

In reality, the things that we make up, that are pulled from the air, are actually from demons and all the lies of demons spring from the prince of demons, Satan. So these are one and the same.

Divine revelation comes from the Almighty, Creator, God, Jesus Christ. So there are only two choices, but how do we know there are only two choices? Because God has revealed this truth to us.

The question then is how do we tell the difference between the revelation that comes from God and the lies of Satan?

The answer is that everyone who sincerely wants to do the will of God will know.

Jesus said, "If you really want to obey God, you will know if what I teach comes from God or from me"

The rejection of the revelation that comes from God is not an intellectual problem. It is a moral problem.

Jesus said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you: For everyone who asks receives; and he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks it shall be opened." *

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to those who ask him? Matthew 7:7-11 *

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. You can set the truth before someone, but you can't make anyone believe those things that they don't want to submit to. They have to want to obey God.

How frequently it is brought to our attention that nothing good can be done if the will is wrong! Reason alone fails to justify itself. Richard M. Weaver

Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32)

"If we are not prepared to buy the truth at the cost of our own humbling we shall not receive it"

Lies appear to have no price upon them. They seem cheap and they abound everywhere. But for the truth there is always an obvious price to pay.

"[God] has set a day when He will judge all the world's people with fairness. And He has chosen the man Jesus to do the judging for Him. God has given proof of this to all of us by raising Jesus from death" (Acts 17:31).

"There is a judge for the one who rejects Me [Jesus] and does not accept My words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day" (John 12:48)

That also stands for every person who speaks the utterances of Jesus. When we hear them, we hear Jesus Christ, and we either accept or reject. Every person who follows Jesus Christ is commanded to only speak His utterances and not their own.

"When we love others, we know that we belong to the truth, and we feel at ease in the presence of God" (1 John 3:19)

Ravi Zacharias did two open forums in a university. On the second night, one man told him that he had brought two Atheists in the night before who said that the arguments presented were so strong that they could not contend with them, but they were going to remain Atheists because that is what they prefer to be true.

In another case of just listening to an unbeliever and drawing out his reasoning, the unbeliever finally came to his foundations.

They turned out to be assumptions that were pulled from the air. When asked why he believed his basic assumption, the unbeliever looked startled and blurted out, "I guess I'm making the whole thing up." It was quite a revelation to him since he hadn't even known that he had any assumptions. However, he decided to remain an Atheist because he didn't want God to rule over him.

Liberalism and Self-Righteousness

Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion organization stated that the proof against original sin is that over half of all the people on earth are women and women do not sin. She said this during a debate with David Barton on the PAX TV program, Faith Under Fire, July 2, 2005. Of course, she was provoked by David’s statement that the Founding Fathers of America were Christians and that they took precautions to limit the power of government knowing that all human beings are sinful by nature and cannot be trusted with too much power. David’s assertion, of course, is easily verifiable in source documents that are readily available. This assertion that human beings are sinful goes against the very most basic tenet of Liberalism and is the very reason that the religious leaders crucified Jesus. Had Jesus pointed to them (the religious leaders of His earthly lifetime) as being righteous in their own right, they would have left Him alone, but instead He told them that their works were worthless to God and that they had need to repent. In the same way, David Barton’s statement of the Founding Father’s belief in human sinfulness brought an emotional response in Annie Laurie Gaylor that was so strong that she lost her composure to the point that she exposed her primary belief—the human goodness presupposition. Of course, she had an interesting twist. She apparently knows, probably through sad experience, that men are sinful, but she also is quite convinced that women are perfect.

... the view common to totalitarian movements, that human nature is infinitely malleable so that a new, better, and perhaps perfect nature can be produced by the rearrangement of social institutions. Since actual humans resist attempts to remake their natures, coercion and, ultimately, violence will be required. The initial rhetoric of the movement [the sixties rebellion movement], however, before disillusion set in, was one of peaceful aspiration.

The talk of brotherhood, of man’s unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love, and of radical equality was, and proved to be, dangerously unrealistic. Without reference to a supernatural Being, SDS was proposing, largely through politics, to bring their secular vision of the kingdom of God to fruition on earth, now. It is an ideal that the most devout and active Christians have never remotely approximated for any community larger than a monastery, and probably not in any monastery.

SDS’ search for a shortcut to heaven was in the spirit of millenarianism, a phenomenon well-known in history of Christianity.

Liberalism is centered on a belief that human effort can bring about perfection and a utopian society. The Bible tells us that human efforts to be perfect will always end in frustration. The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit of God gives us the power both to will and to do His good pleasure. There is no need to change God’s laws so that we can appear to be perfect because we have just re-defined perfection to be exactly what we are and what we want to be doing at the moment. There is no need to try to hide all of our faults, but rather to confess them. There is only a need to cast all of our cares upon Him, for He cares for us.

Liberal Christians sometimes get the idea that one of the functions of the Church is to use the government to coerce unbelievers into to paying to help the poor or less fortunate. Christians never had a responsibility to use the government to coerce unbelievers into helping anyone. The Church is not to coerce unbelievers into righteousness. Christians are to yield to the Holy Spirit to the point that righteousness springs forth from the Christians. Then, Christians will reach into their own pocket and help the less fortunate. It won't be through a government program. It won't even be through the self-effort of the Christian. It will be through the power to God in the believer both directing and doing the actual work through the believer. The idea that Christians should push for government social engineering programs is anti-Bible.

Liberalism And Self-Righteousness

How can we know anything about anything

Liberalism and Self-Righteousness

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