Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Apr 29, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

The great comedian Tim Allen, Buzz Lightyear himself, sat down with fellow comedian Bill Maher for a long conversation about their careers, and at one point discussed the credibility of Christianity. Maher’s at best an agnostic, but Allen clearly believes in God, and has struggled for years to get to the truth about the nature of things. I didn’t realize what a deep thinker he is. He wrestles seriously with the ultimate questions of life, and won’t settle for facile answers. It’s a real battle for him, and at times not coming up with answers has made him depressed. He’s a genuine seeker.

At one point in their conversation he brings up the Apostle Paul’s journey to his belief about the story of Jesus being true, and Allen is trying to wrap his mind around it all. Part of what prompted his thoughts was a trip to Israel to where it all happened, and he’s blown away that the gospels are actual history, that those things really happened in space and time. While he’s clearly not fully embraced the Christian faith, he’s also clearly compelled by it. What his thinking reveals to me is someone who intuitively understands something that cannot be denied, that we have to believe something, and it happens to be one of my favorite apologetics perspectives about realizing Christianity is true, which we’ll explore below.

His almost testimony reminds me of the actual testimony of Vishal Mangalwadi he shared in a wonderful conversation he had a few years back with Jordan Peterson. He’s Indian, the land of the Hindus, but he became a Christian in high school, and then rejected it in college because the very smart professors he encountered said it was basically hogwash. After he’d gotten out of college as a skeptic, his sister talked him into reading the Bible. His entire experience of coming to Christ was through multiple readings of the Old Testament, especially the historical books about Israel. Every time he read it he came to a different conclusion about what the nature of the Bible is and what it could mean. Eventually he saw the genius in it, the story of Isreal and their God, that could only be explained by being true revelation from God. He realized one of two things about the Bible must be true. Either it’s what it claims to be, the revelation of God to man, or it is a product of man, primarily stories of human fiction.

If it’s the latter he concluded there is no such thing as truth, and Christianity is the same as all the philosophies and other religions he studied, just fruitless searches for meaning in a meaningless universe. He and Allen both realized that without God’s revelation the very possibility of truth and knowing anything about the nature of reality is impossible. That’s why Allen was depressed and despairing over ever really knowing what life’s about. As Leon Morris said in his book, I Believe in Revelation:

[T]he view that what matters ultimately is what appeals to the individual’s experience or reason is a profoundly pessimistic view. It means that we have nothing from which to correct our errors, no way of knowing what is true or false once we have accepted an idea. If man’s mind is the measure of things there is no way of getting back to the right way once that mind has gone off the wrong track.

Both Mangalwadi and Allen knew this in their bones, and that the revelation of God in the Bible is the only answer to man’s dilemma, which which leads us to one of my favorite apologetics tools.

The Consideration of the Alternative
Simply put, if we don’t believe one thing, we must believe another. There is no in between where we get out of having faith, of deciding if one thing is true then everything else is not. As Geddy Lee sings on Rush’s Free Will, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Exactly. If Vishal had decided the Bible was not God’s revelation, then he was saying it’s a product of man. It’s either/or, one or the other. There are many scholars in the history of biblical criticism who didn’t get this. They claimed God spoke through some of what we read in Scripture, not all of it, and lo and behold, they were the ones who decided which Scripture was which! Convenient, that, and completely arbitrary.

Being deep philosophical thinkers, both Allen and Mangalwadi realized something most people never do. They intuitively grasped that if there is no God there is no truth. This is an undeniable fact of existence that the entirety of atheistic Enlightenment rationalism missed. All these atheists just assumed truth exists while denying God who is the Truth exists, and thus the ground of all truth. You can’t get truth from dirt because if all we are is lucky dirt, then you can only get, well, dirt! Atheistic materialism posits all that exists is matter; there is nothing beyond matter, no transcendent or spiritual reality beyond the material. Logically that means any moral assessment of reality, like goodness, beauty, and truth can only be mere preference, what each person prefers, like flavors in ice cream, or taste in music or food. There is simply no way around that conundrum for the atheist. Over the years I’ve marveled reading atheistic thinkers like Marx or Nietzsche or Freud, and how it never seems to occur to them that their atheism is problematic when it comes to their assessment of things being true or not.

Which brings us to another issue in the consideration of the alternative, the burden of proof. Once we realize, or accept, that if one thing is not true something else must be, the burden of proof shifts from only one side of the equation to both. Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud never thought, even for a second, that they had to prove or justify their belief in a God-less universe. To them it was as axiomatic as water flows downhill, just the nature of things. For most atheists, reality needs no explanation; it’s just brute fact. There is no why or justification behind good or evil, truth or lies, beauty or ugliness; they just are. They, however, were wrong because without God there can be no transcendent standard for what is morally right or wrong, or for what is true or not, or if beauty or ugliness even exist. All things become inclined to the tyranny of personal preference, or tyrannical preference on a societal level. So, in Hitler’s Germany, or Mao’s China, or Stalin’s Russia, genocidal murder of tens of millions of people was for them legal and morally justified. And if there is no God who’s to say it wasn’t?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis’s first section is on “right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe.” People, he says, will quarrel about one thing or another, and each appeals to a standard that assumes something beyond their own preferences. As he says about people making claims of fairness:

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it.

In other words, people without being taught it know that some objective standard exists to which each person can appeal, regardless of what they personally believe. In fact, we can only know what a crooked line is because we know it is not straight, and that the straight line exists. This puts the atheist in the unenviable position of trying to argue for a standard he claims doesn’t even exist. All he can ultimate says is, I don’t like it!

This means we must never accept the burden of proof double standard placed upon us by the materialist atheist. As I often say, there is no such thing as an unbeliever—all people live by faith. This applies to any counter claim to Christianity’s truth claims. For example, when the skeptic says the Bible is myth or fairy tale, made up stories, he has to provide evidence that is the case. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. Since the beginning of biblical criticism going all the way back to Spinoza in the 17th century, critics have just blithely assumed the Bible could easily be made up, that obviously the default assumption should be that for the most part it’s merely human fiction. We must challenge that assumption and force them to provide evidence beyond their blatant anti-supernatural bias. For example, I made the argument in my book Uninvented that nobody could make up a Jewish Messiah like Jesus, and laid out extensive arguments why. Now let the skeptic make counter arguments. They can’t because there are none!

What Are the Alternatives to Christianity? If we go to the big picture when we look for an explanation of reality we might think there are many alternatives vying for our allegiance. The skeptic will tell us there are thousands of religions all claiming to be the one true path to God or whatever is ultimate, but that’s not true. All religions basically accept Jesus in some form, as I say, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. But only Jesus makes the completely exclusive truth claim that he is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that “no one comes to the Father except through” him. When you get down to it, there are only three ultimate options: theism, atheism, or pantheism. Two of these alternatives are impersonal. Atheism is material, therefore not personal. Pantheism is spiritual, but not personal. In a world filled with persons and personalities, these are not credible. Only theism is spiritual and personal. And of the great theistic religions, only Christianity because of the Trinity is truly personal. It is no coincidence that the world created by the Triune God is inhabited by persons.

Whenever I am tempted to doubt, for what psychologically healthy person doesn’t doubt at times, I consider the alternatives. There is no other plausible explanation, no other religion, or worldview, that has close to the explanatory power of Christianity, and we’ve only scratched the surface in this section.

The Power of Explanatory Power
If you haven’t heard this phrase before, it’s something you’ll want to become familiar with. The term comes from the Philosophy of science, and means what “provides a better explanation” for X, Y, or Z. For example, is a Creator or chance a better explanation for the bumble bee? In science it often comes down to probability, or what the likelihood is of one thing being the case versus another. 

Explanatory power is associated with something called abductive logic. “Abduction or, as it is also often called, Inference to the Best Explanation, is a type of inference that assigns special status to explanatory considerations.” Douglas Groothuis in his book Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism, gives us some real‑world examples of the practical power of abductive reasoning:

This kind of argument is often used in . . . courts of law. In court cases, various kinds of evidence are arrayed in support of a judgment concerning the guilt or innocence of the party on trial. One accused of larceny must give a better explanation of his whereabouts during the crime in question than does the prosecutor. If this kind of reasoning is common, useful and acceptable in other contexts, its use in the philosophy of religion should not be excluded.

C.S. Lewis put this concept best as he normally does. In a talk given on, “Is Theology Poetry?” he said the following with poetic simplicity:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

Light always does this. Lewis’s sun metaphor is illuminating, pun intended, because the Christian worldview sheds light on everything. Light is a common biblical metaphor. Unfortunately, light is so common and easily produced in the modern world that we take for granted what a powerful function it plays in our lives. Think about it: light lets us see what’s actually there, even though we all have different perceptions of things. For example, when you turn on the lights chances are you will not run into the couch. Instead of sitting on nothing and falling on your behind, you can just go sit in the chair. Notice when the lights are on, you also have depth perception; three‑D is so much more impressive in reality than on a movie screen. When the lights go on, you can see color. All of a sudden, everything is defined!

The Apostle John tells us about Jesus, that

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome (or understood) it. . . . . 9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 

John’s claim is that Jesus is the one who allows us to see reality as it actually is! As we get to know Jesus and his word and his world, we will bump into fewer chairs. We’ll stop running into things we can’t see and stop trying to convince ourselves, and others, that there really was nothing there after all. Why do you think it is that psychotherapists do such bang‑up business, especially among the rich and famous, and increasingly among the young and not so famous? Their clients are confused! (There are over half a million “mental health professionals” practicing in the US.) If you lived in spiritual darkness you would be confused too, running into walls and couches, wondering if this thing you’re feeling is the door to the garage or the bathroom. It would be so much easier if someone would just turn on the damned lights! God has, in Christ!

That is explanatory power. Lewis gives us an example of how explanatory power works. He beautifully contrasts Christianity as an explanatory framework with what he calls the “scientific point of view,” or swallowing “the scientific cosmology as a whole.” This view assumes reality is solely material, and it provides zero explanatory power:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio‑chemistry, and bio‑chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test.

For former atheist Lewis, the question is which cosmology, or what account of why things exist, best explains what actually exists.

The West has been indoctrinated into a secular, basically materialist cosmology; it is assumed everywhere we go, in everything we see or hear. A perfectly innocuous example comes from a golf tournament I watched on TV. The first PGA tournament of the year is always in Hawaii, and they were broadcasting the beauty and grandeur of the islands. The commentators, watching a large gray whale frolicking in the sea, remarked how beautiful this magnificent creature is, how majestic and awesome a sight. However, what they couldn’t say was how incredible and awesome must be the God who created that whale—the God who thought up the concept of a whale in the first place, and water, and oceans, and gravity, and an earth and moon, and human beings who could be blown away by the experience of it! A professional announcer today wouldn’t think of injecting “religion” into such an environment. As my family will attest, at times like that I yell at the TV and say something like, “What about the God who created it!”

It is this God, the Creator of all things, the Triune God of Scripture, and of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior that will finally put all the puzzle pieces into a big beautiful coherent picture for Tim Allen. Let’s pray for him that he makes it all the way to finding what he’s always been looking for.

The Hound of Heaven and Sanctification

The Hound of Heaven and Sanctification

Apr 22, 2026 | Theology

Whenever I tell my story, my testimony about God’s working in my life, I always use the great late 19th century poem by Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven. When I was first exposed to it many years ago, it captured my experience of God perfectly, and that was before I’d embraced Reformed theology and Calvinism. It was doubly applicable after that. Here is the first stanza which is absolute perfection when it comes to describing not just my experience, but that of many Christians I’ve known and whose testimonies I’ve heard:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’

Labyrinthine is such a great and apt word nobody would use anymore. I just learned looking it up, that labyrinth like many great words goes back to ancient Greek mythology meaning maze or elaborate, confusing structure with intricate passages that is very difficult to get out of. How perfectly does that describe sin! He also perfectly captures the emotional roller coaster of trying to live our lives outside of obedience to the will of God, even at times when we deceive ourselves into thinking we are living according to that will. We sinners can justify anything in our self-delusion. And since God will not let us go because he died for us, for his people, we can’t escape! This fact is an important piece of the story of the Hound of Heaven for our entire Christian life, which I’ll get to below.

As I say often, God is never in a hurry. His pace is never perturbed; it’s relaxed and infinitely persistent, in history and in our lives. We sense him, we turn our heads knowing he’s after us, yet we continue trying to find fulfillment in anything but him. It’s the craziest thing, but exactly what we should expect if the Bible is true. We are born rebellious sinners whose natural inclination, like Adam and Eve, is to run away from him. He will never, however, let us find any kind of ultimate gratification in anything that excludes him. The very same thing we can enjoy with and through and because of him, will betray us without him. All sin, as Augustine said, is good perverted. In one of the greatest sentences ever penned, also by Augustine, he wrote in his Confessions:

You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

The irony of this statement is that in many cases, a la the Hound of Heaven, he has to hound us into finding that rest.

God’s Sovereign Salvific Plans in Sanctification
As I mentioned above, I’m a Calvinist, and have been so since February of 1985. It was pretty much an instant conversion because once I was introduced of God’s sovereignty in our salvation, not only did I start to see it everywhere in the Bible, I saw it everywhere in my life, specifically in God bringing me to saving faith. I knew in some sense it applied to my sanctification as well, that my inner transformation and growth in holiness was God’s work and responsibility, not mine. However, I didn’t quite understand my part in all this, that I am responsible to seek God and obey his law. I recently wrote a post on The Christian Life of Pursuit, how the Christian life is a verb, what we are commanded to do now that we are those who belong to God, his holy ones, set apart for service. Christianity is a doing religion flowing out of our being, who we are, who Christ saved us to be. An example of one verse among many is from 1 Peter 2:

24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

All of this is, of course, God’s working in us, but it is still our work. Just because God is sovereign and in control of all things, doesn’t mean we are not responsible beings with agency whose choices really matter and have real consequences. This is what most Christians misunderstand about Calvinism, that because we affirm God’s sovereign control of all things, that means human beings are robots, that it is just a Christian form of determinism. It’s not. It is a mystery, how God can “control” someone and them still be free and accountable. Nonetheless, it’s true, a biblical reality from Genesis to Revelation. The sovereign power of Almighty God is an important piece of the Hound of Heaven catching those he’s after, his people, which brings us to the biggest theological hangup with Calvinism for most Christians, and to me the most obviously true—Jesus died for his people, not every human being who ever lived. He didn’t make salvation possible for all people, but made it actual for his people.

This means Jesus only died for them, what we call limited or definite atonement. This idea offends many Christians because they think it somehow not fair that God wouldn’t offer salvation to all people, and make it possible that they could believe in Jesus and be saved. God, however, is not obligated to be fair, whatever that means. If justice is what it means, then every human being should be justly condemned and damned. We’re born guilty, and nothing we can do will change that; the penalty must be paid. Over my decades as a Reformed Christian I accepted this, but I don’t think I fully understood the implications. Then at some point God opened my eyes to two verses that transformed my perspective on our sanctification in salvation. This first is part of the birth narrative in Matthew 1 where Joseph has a dream and an angel tells him what the name of Mary’s child is to be:

21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

I noticed two things. First, Jesus didn’t come to make salvation possible for all people, but actual for his people. In theological terms Paul calls this election; God chooses whom he will save. Then I saw that it wasn’t from sin in general, but the word Matthew uses is plural, sins. God in Christ didn’t just save us from the guilt and penalty of sin, something that was done with animals in the Old Covenant, but from the power of sin as well, something the blood of bulls and goats could never accomplish. Augustus Toplady in the classic him wrote about how Christ’s death provides the “double cure” for sin, saving us from both God’s wrath and also to make us pure. It’s as we say, a twofer. And because our sanctification is part of God’s sovereign plan in salvation, the Hound of Heaven will inevitably make us holy, more like Christ in the process, like it or not.

The other verse is from the Apostle Paul, I Corinthians 1:30:

It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

It’s a package deal! Back in 2012 I had been going through a bit of a dry time in my faith, partly because I forgot that the Christian life is one of pursuit. So one day I decided no matter how rotten I felt, I would read the Bible and pray every morning, and that I have done ever since. In due course I discovered it made all the difference, and at some point God opened my eyes to this verse. I realized, not only was my justification not up to me, but either was my sanctification. I of course was and am involved in both, but both are the ultimate responsibility of God, the Hound of Heaven. The one part of this we will not be involved in is our redemption, our resurrection because we will be dead. But from the moment we are raised spiritually from the dead in our justification, God works throughout our lives to make us increasingly holy, set apart for good works unto him. As Paul says in Ephesians 2, salvation is the gift of God, and that includes sanctification, as he says:

10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

How does this happen? God.

The Transformation is God’s Work
The first Reformed theology I read not long after my “conversion” was Charle’s Hodge’s Systematic Theology. I’ll never forget the simple sentence for his definition of Christianity: “The work of God in the soul of man.” For much of my Christian life I thought my sanctification was a matter of my willing it. If I just tried hard enough I could overcome my sin, but I found that my experience was much like the Apostle Paul’s as he describes it in Romans 7:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Yet as he discusses the law and the sin dwelling in him, he declares something I felt many times:

24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

I often felt nobody could deliver me, including God, but the answer that frees us from despair and will deliver us is obvious:

25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Some commentators think Paul’s description of his struggle with sin is prior to his becoming a Christian, but I don’t think it is. Even after we come to Christ, sin still lives in us, in our flesh as Paul calls it, the body of death we are stuck with in this fallen world. Because of this we can understand why the first of Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis had to do with daily repentance:

Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said “Repent”, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

Somewhere along the way on my journey from 2012 when I learned this, I started to begin every morning prayer repenting of my sin, following it with prayers of thanksgiving. The struggle still exists and always will while we live in this body of death, but now we realize our sanctification is as much the work of Christ as is our justification. This truth is why Paul follows the chapter of our struggle with sin with the assurance of forgiveness and the possibility of transformation in chapter 8:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

I realized I can’t change myself, but God in Christ can change me. That does, however, require something on my part. It is within our power to abide in the true vine (John 15) that we might bear much fruit. So, knowing I was too weak and pathetic with little will power, focused on what I knew I could do. Initially, my prayers were inspired by Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” I figured like the tax collector I could beat my breast and say that. In due course my process every morning became reading God’s word, which along the way also started to include Scripture memory, then prayers of repentance, thanksgiving, and supplication.

At some point I realized that any real, substantial change and transformation of who I am was the supernatural work of God in my soul because of the work of Christ. I still had choices to make, the most important being to ask, seek, and knock, that I might receive, find, and the door opened to me. Then obey in whatever feeble way I could and trust God for the inner transformation to make me want to obey. It is important to understand the power and the beauty of the gospel isn’t that God in Christ just changes our actions, but that he changes our desires and affections and abilities. The inner transformation required to live the Christian life, what we call sanctification, is every bit as up to him as is our being born again in the first place. As Paul says in Philippians 1:

6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

The good work he began in us and will continue in our sanctification is just as supernatural as when we were raised spiritually from the dead to eternal life. I love my 1978 NIV translation of Romans 4:17 as it relates to our sanctification and transformation. Speaking of Abraham he says:

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.

He literally call things that have no existence into existence, like this universe and us in it. If he has the power to do that, our paltry little sin problem is nothing for him. That’s why Paul’s declaration of deliverance is so exuberant: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

 

 

 

 

“The Universe” and the Demise of Secularism

“The Universe” and the Demise of Secularism

Apr 15, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

One of the many evidences secularism is dying is a phrase you’ll hear in popular culture, most often in TV shows and movies: “The Universe.” As in, “The Universe” is telling me something, or telling me not to do this or that. It’s funny how an impersonal material force can somehow communicate meaningful messages to persons. The reason people attribute power and will and intelligence to mere matter is because atheistic materialism, and it’s offspring, secularism, for all intents and purposes is dead, especially among the youngest generation.

Having been a consumer of popular culture all my life, this is something new, but it doesn’t surprise me. Secularism as the dominant societal ethos in the West has proved itself vacuous and unable to speak to the deepest needs of the human heart. As it developed and became dominant in the 20th century, God increasingly became persona non grata, merely a personal option among an infinite variety of options to find meaning in life. It hasn’t quite worked out like it was planned.

Where we are in this dying age of secularism reminds me of the beginning of Charles Dickens’ iconic work, A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859 and set during the French Revolution of the 1790s. It could very well describe our own time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Until, that is, the blood flowed and heads came off at the behest of the merciful Madame la Guillotine. We’ll remember that period became known as “the Reign of Terror.” The secular reign of terror isn’t so bloody, but its promises are just as hollow as the revolutionaries who brought so much misery and suffering to France. Secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting, yet its cheerleaders still believe it’s our only hope for societal flourishing. Looking at a little history will help us understand why.

Secularism and the Societal Myth of Neutrality
Secularism does its damage on a personal and societal level. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” space, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence. Unfortunately, most Christians still believe in this myth, thus the hysteria over “Christian nationalism.”

Secular understood classically in the medieval world prior to the Enlightenment simply meant the mundane as opposed to the sacred. The Reformation rightly critiqued this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred as unbiblical, but the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers ended up affirming the same dichotomy, only now religion ended up becoming dangerous to social harmony. As Christianity’s influence waned in Western civilization, secularism came to dominate the public square as a force hostile to Christianity, and in due course became the dominant worldview of the West. The hostility is expressed in manifold ways throughout government and every area of culture. We saw this played out in America in the autopen presidency of Joe Biden, and are currently seeing it play out throughout secular Western Europe.

It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. And make no mistake, secularism on a societal level will always and everywhere lead to tyranny. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point; its true nature can no longer be hidden by empty promises. Their description of secularism is helpful:

Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (an apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.

I could not agree more. The so called “secularization thesis,” that as science and knowledge progress religion will eventually disappear, has been completely discredited. The world is arguably more religious than ever, even if the West is less so. The authors further state the obvious:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

I could not agree with this more as well, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year. Only Christianity gives us the true basis of liberty, as America’s founders knew full well.

Secularism and the Personal Myth of Neutrality: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Secularism on a societal level assumes the myth of neutrality on a personal level as well; one feeds the other. It’s ubiquitous and easy to spot, but I’ll use one example to make the point, a piece from the 2011 print edition of The New Yorker Magazine called, “Is That All There Is? Secularism and its discontents.” Author James Wood, a committed secularist, admits secularism has its problems, but not enough for him to discard it.

As a secularist, Wood clearly considers himself not “religious,” and therefore believes he is neutral regarding ultimate issues. Since he believes he isn’t “religious,” he also believes he doesn’t need faith. The secularist’s definition of faith is, however, fallacious and biased, something along the lines of what Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, declared: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith in this view is basically wishful thinking, and not “scientific,” as if science could answer metaphysical questions of meaning; it can’t. That would be known as a category error. Science and philosophy do different things and address different issues, and most secularists are terrible philosophers. The bias is specifically anti-supernatural because secularists are naturalists or materialists, i.e., they believe the material is all there is. They are, however, every bit as “religious” as the religious.

In other words, the un-believer doesn’t exist. One of my pet peeves is referring to certain people as believers and others as unbelievers. The word believer is biblical, but it’s a word we need to retire in our secular age. Using it allows the “unbeliever,” the secularist, the false impression they don’t have faith just like every “believer.” All human beings by the nature of their finite created existence are believers and live by faith; the issue is what or who they believe in. In the apologetics task against secularism, Christians must learn to refer to people either as Christians or non-Christians, not believers and unbelievers.

Throughout the article Wood contrasts religious “believers” with atheists, and at one point refers to “Both atheists and believers . . .” Ergo, atheists don’t have to believe anything! It’s almost comical how ridiculous the contrast it. Without the slightest evidence atheists believe all material reality basically created itself, everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Talk about a leap of faith! Wood might even say he doesn’t need the “crutch” of faith like many atheists, but atheism and secularism are their own rickety crutch. You’ll see throughout his piece something else secularists are especially good at, begging the question, a logical fallacy meaning to assume the premise as the conclusion, a form of circular reasoning. A great example of this is early in the piece when he lays his cards on the table claiming, “God is dead, and cannot be reimposed on existence.” The bald assertion is never defended, just asserted, as if it need not be defended; but it is a statement of faith. We must question the unexamined assumptions of the secularist and secularism wherever they rear their ugly head.

C.S. Lewis said something that underlies the impossibility of neutrality in the Christian understanding of reality:

There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.

In other words, there is a spiritual war being waged on the vast plane of reality, and only one side wins.

Making the Secular Plausible: Epic Fail
The reason “the universe” is showing up in popular culture as a character directing the lives of people in some way is because secularism is no longer as plausible as it once was. The sociological concept of plausibility structures is helpful for us to understand what is going on, to get the big picture.

All societies and cultures have a structure of the plausible, all those things in the culture, entertainment, law, media, education, family, religion, etc., that make reality seem real and natural and normal to us—just the way things are. The truth of the seeming is irrelevant. What is plausible is what makes the worldview of a people, how they understand who and why they are, and people in the West inhabit a secular plausibility structure. God for them is for the most part irrelevant.

Since we’re talking about popular culture, the indoctrination into secularism, both personally and societally is insidious. Watch almost any TV show or movie, and God is invisible, unless used as some kind of curse. Treating God as if he’s irrelevant is far more effective in secularizing people than your typical atheist talking points, and we’re all more susceptible to the lies and illusions of a secular view of reality because of it. An irrelevant God is the secular cultural air we breathe, and the dominant cultural messaging, which is why the personal and societal effects of secularism are ubiquitous and profound.

James K.A. Smith in his book summarizing the magisterial tome of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, entitled his book, How (Not) to be Secular. He has numerous helpful insights into the nature of secularism. In speaking of plausibility, he mentions Taylor’s “conditions of belief,” saying there was “a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.” It’s not so much what people believe, as what is believable. These are reflected in “the default assumptions” of a people, ideas unexamined and taken for granted by everyone, and thus most secular people don’t think they assume anything at all! Commenting on the “conditions of belief,” Smith gives us a helpful perspective on the implications for faith:

Taylor not only explains unbelief in a secular age; he also emphasizes that even belief is changed in our secular age. There are still believers who believe the same things as their forebearers 1,500 years ago; but how we believe has changed. Thus faith communities need to ask: How does this change in the “conditions” of belief impact the way we proclaim and teach the faith? How does this impact faith formation? How should this change the propagation of the faith for the next generation?

Even though Smith makes my previous point referring to believers when the whole paragraph is about belief, he does say later, “[I]t’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise.” And in this sense, everyone is a believer.

In simplest terms, secularism means “no God.” It doesn’t necessitate atheistic materialism, although all atheists are secularists. The vast majority of people believe God exists, but He has no practical relevance to their lives because all that matters is flourishing in this world. The dominant secular faith is called moralistic therapeutic Deism (MTD), meaning God’s there, He wants us all to be nice, and the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. If we get in a pickle, then we’ll bring God into the picture, otherwise not so much. Finally, this MTD faith believes good people go to heaven when they die.

This God is no threat to secularism because it is a religion of secularism. What’s important is the here and now. Why worry about all that stuff we really can’t know and everyone disagrees about anyway. Thus God’s invisibility in popular culture. The problem with this shallow secular religion is that people know it doesn’t meet their deepest emotional and psychological needs for meaning, hope, and purpose in life. It’s based on nothing but wishful thinking, nothing solid, nothing real, like soap bubbles, as soon as you catch them, there’s nothing there. It’s just preference as worldview, which is why an increasing number of people in the West are turning back to faith in God, to Christianity, the only true, solid, and real thing in this world and the next. Is it another Great Awakening? We’ll see, but it is an epic fail for secularism.

The reason it is epic is that it started somewhere in the 17th century with rationalism, and then developed over the next 300 to 400 years, eventually displacing Christianity as the dominant faith in the West. All the cultural elites believed we could order a prosperous and flourishing society without any reference to God. It’s obvious by this point that isn’t true. The 20th century was the bloodiest in the history of the world by far, and the 21st isn’t starting out much better. We’re the most prosperous societies the word has ever seen, and people are miserable. The universe won’t save us; only God in Christ can, he who died for our sin, and rose again to conquer death that we might live with Him forever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Christian Life of Pursuit

The Christian Life of Pursuit

Apr 8, 2026 | Theology

Being a Christian is not just an ontological state, meaning what I am, my being, but also very much about what I do. It is the indicative, what God has done for us in Christ, and the imperative, what we must do. The Christian life is a verb, what we are commanded to do now that we are those who belong to God, his holy ones, set apart for service. Christianity is a doing religion flowing out of our being, which Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:17, is now a new creation. Jonathan Edwards said we don’t seek God and then find Him. Like Adam and Eve, by nature we run away, we hide. Rather, God saves us in his sovereign mercy and grace, and then the seeking begins, as I call it, the Christian life of pursuit.

We Protestants over the last several hundred years have developed a kind of Christianity where justification by faith in effect becomes the entirety of the gospel. When we use the word gospel, the good news, what we tend to mean is being made right with God, our sins paid for by Christ, and his righteousness being credited to us. Therefore, we now by faith have a relationship to God, and our alienation from him by our sin is laid aside. So far so good. But Christianity is far more than coming into a saving relationship with God through Christ. I imagine that sentence might raise a few eyebrows among faithful Evangelicals, but it’s true. One of the reasons Jesus uses the metaphor of salvation as being “born-again” is because when you’re born, you’re just starting life. You don’t stay a baby your whole life, physically or spiritually. In fact, the writer to the Hebrews rebukes Christians who think this way (Hebrews 5):

11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

The phrase the NIV translates as “you no longer try to understand” is also translated as “dull of hearing” or “too lazy to understand.” Lazy is the best translation of the Greek here, and it speaks exactly to what I’m talking about. Can we be honest? Most Christians are too lazy to do the hard work of growing into the maturity of the Christian faith. Or they are distracted by other things in life that appear more important, or as someone called it, “the tyranny of the urgent.” In the parable of the Sower, Jesus explains it this way (Matt. 13):

22 Now he who received seed among the thorns is he who hears the word, and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and he becomes unfruitful.

Then he compares it to the seed that bears fruit:

 23 But he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”

The question is, how do we become the seed that bears fruit a hundredfold, and do we really want that. As I’ve discovered over my growing number of years, we always do what we want, what is important to us.

Making Our Calling and Election Sure
The inspiration for this post, and its title, came from a sermon I recently heard on 2 Peter 1, which is Peter’s answer to that question. To alter a line from The Princess Bride that applies to the Christian life: We are men of action; laziness does not become us. This of course applies to women too. In other words, we do not take our relationship to God for granted, just has a husband or wife or parent should never take their relationships for granted. Great relationships take work, effort, and sacrifice. The wonderful thing about the Christian life is that we’re not on our own. The God who saved us has provided us everything we need in this divine life he has called us to. As Peter says,

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

Everything pretty much covers it all. But notice where these things are found, in our knowledge of him, of God, which is why every Christian is called to be a theologian, which means the study of God. Out of His love for us and His almighty power to do whatever he says, his faithfulness to those promises gives us the ability to live a holy life. In Christ we’ve already escaped the ugliness and misery that sin causes. We don’t have to live in the corruption and ugliness of sin. When we do sin, John tells us to confess our sin, name it, and that God “is faithful and just to forgive us our sin, and purify us from all unrighteousness.” It’s God’s job to do the cleansing, and our job to be obedient.

We must always remember, sin never delivers on its promises and lies every step of the way to destruction. Of course still being sinners our obedience will always be imperfect, but that is why the gospel includes both justification and sanctification, as Paul tells us in I Corinthians 1:30. But Peter tells us that in order to overcome our inclination to sin we have work to do, as he says, “make every effort”:

5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. 

I like Strong’s extended definition of that phrase: “properly, swiftness to show zealous diligence, i.e. one’s “best” (full effort by making haste).” We need to be like young Olympic athletes determined to be the best it is at what we do. We are called to moral virtue which we are compelled to because of our faith or trust in Christ, but it can’t stop there. If it does, it’s merely moralism that becomes legalism.

I find it interesting that Peter puts knowledge so high up in the list, it is that important. That means doing something people think they gave up in high school or college, study, and also something people are less inclined today in the age of the ubiquitous screen—read. Like books, with, of course, the foundational book being the Bible. But depending on our interests, reading books on history and philosophy and apologetics, how to defend our faith, biographies, current events, science, whatever. Remember, not only is the entire Bible, as Jesus said in Luke 24, about Christ, but so is everything in life. C.S. Lewis put it best as he always did:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but also because by it I see everything else.

Jesus himself is the unifying principle of all knowledge. As Paul tells us in Colossians 1, not only is Jesus “the image of the invisible God,” he created all things, and that “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

And finally, as we look at the other virtues we’re exhorted to act upon, it is all tied up in the perfect ribbon of love, that which is a perfect summation of all the law and the prophets, and the entire revelation of God in Christ. Jesus himself told us what is required to live a life worthy of him, to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,” and all the other needs of life will be added. God and his kingdom first, and then everything else will follow. Toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus piles on the verbs:

7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

All of this screams, do not take our relationship to God for granted! Everybody takes time for what is important to them. Let’s look at why we might take it for granted.

Antinomianism: Confusing Justification with Sanctification
The word antinomianism means anti-law, nomos in Greek, and it’s been a concept debated since the Reformation and the Protestant focus on salvation by grace alone through faith alone. There has been a tendency to downplay the law because we’ve been granted Christ’s righteousness in justification. Calvin explained a proper understanding of God’s law when he was the first to describe what he called the three uses of the law. The first use, the one most Christians are familiar with and accept, is the law as a mirror. It shows us our sin, and how ugly it is, and drives us to Christ. Because of our modern focus on the gospel, there is a tendency to do what the antinomians do, ignore the law. Supposedly we don’t need the law anymore because that’s part of the Old Covenant and not the New. We might conclude God’s law is no longer applicable to the Christian because of the gospel. As I heard a pastor once say, “The Ten Commandments are not your friend.” The law, supposedly, is our enemy because the only thing it can do is condemn us because we can never live up to its demands. It drives us to Christ who is our righteousness, and we’re done with it.

The problem with this perspective is that God’s law for the Christian is in fact now our friend. I’m currently reading a book on antinomianism by Mark Jones, and he states the confusion well:

Antinomians typically fail to make the distinction between what the law requires and what the gospel requires, and only focus on the former. Not surprisingly, they are flummoxed by so many passages in the Bible that seem to speak of the saints obeying god’s law “with their whole heart.”

Jones adds further that as the gospel has both the indicative and imperative in it, “the antithesis between the law and the gospel ends the moment someone becomes a Christian.” Law and gospel are no longer in contrast, no longer in tension.

The gospel in fact requires a holy life as we see throughout the New Testament, and this passage from Peter is only one small example. Christian antinomians seem to forget that our relationship to the law in Christ has completely changed because the law is no longer written on tablets of stone but written on our hearts. As the Lord tells us Jeremiah 31:

33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

For Christians, the law is no longer there merely to condemn us because we often come up short, but rather it is now there for our sanctification, to help us to become holy. When we are saved, reconciled to our God, transformed from God’s hated enemy to beloved children, we want to obey the His law, we long to be obedient, even as difficult as that can sometimes be given the sin that remains in us. We can now say with the Psalmist in Psalm 119:

97 Oh, how I love your law!
    I meditate on it all day long.

This, for Calvin, is the third use of the law, our sanctification, the second being to restrain evil in society. As he says in the Institutes:

The third, and principal use, which pertains more closely to the proper use of the law, finds its place among believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already lives and reigns.

The law being a reflection and extension of God’s character and being, was never meant to be our enemy, even has God himself was never meant to be our enemy. Now redeemed and renewed, the law is our friend, our guide, our north star, meant to bless us in our obedience which God Himself makes possible by the power of the Holy Spirit within us.

As I said above, there is a tendency to confuse justification with sanctification. We, in effect, equate the gospel with our getting right with God, being born-again, justified by Christ’s righteousness being imputed to us, but that’s only the start of the gospel in our lives, the good news. Transformation is also good news, and that too is, in Paul’s favorite phrase, in Christ. He tells us in I Corinthians 1:30:

30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption. 

What Christ accomplished in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, not only freed us from the guilt of sin, but also from its power. In the same year America declared independence from England, 1776, Augustus Toplady wrote the beloved hymn Rock of Ages about our independence from sin in Christ, from the guilt and power of sin. The first stanza says it beautifully:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Save me from its guilt and power.

 

 

 

The Existential Crisis that is The Passage of Time

The Existential Crisis that is The Passage of Time

Apr 1, 2026 | Explanatory Power

I think about time all the time. You might think this happens more as you enter your elderly years, but I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. Well, not in biblical time, but in regular old human time. One of my favorite sayings is that God is never in a hurry, as we can see from him making promises that take thousands of years to come to fruition. Take the promise to Abram, for example, in Genesis 12. God promises him that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him, and then it takes 2,000 years for that promise to finally be fulfilled in Christ. That’s a long time! Inconceivable to us who are stuck in time. I vividly remember, although this only occurred to me recently, that when I turned 24, I really experienced time for the first time. Yeah, sorry about the repetition of that word, but It’s an obsession of mine. It reminds us every moment of every day that it will not stop, that it endlessly marches on, seemingly quicker and quicker, until it does indeed stop, for us.

Speaking of 24, my sister is almost four years older than me. As she moved into her later 20s she started bemoaning getting older, and I’d say, no big deal, happens to everyone, deal with it. Then on my 24th birthday back in 1984, I distinctly remember thinking, oh crap, I’m getting older; I’m mortal too! Nobody gets outta here alive, including me! Prior to that moment time, getting older and heading inevitably to death, was theoretical. All of a sudden, it wasn’t. And I was only 24! Kids, yes, kids, who are 24 appear to me now like they’re in high school. Speaking of kids, another moment this hit me was in the job I got after I graduated from Seminary in 1988 at a small Christian liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania, Messiah College (now University). When I started there I was 28 and the kids who attended were six to ten years younger than me, but by the time I’d been there five years, they were now eleven to fifteen years younger. One day early in a new school year as I was walking on the campus, I looked around and said to myself, “When did they let all these high school kids in!” They looked so young. Then it hit me, that they appear younger to me now that I’m a bit older. Think how they look now over 30 years later, like children, which of course they are.

Another one of the moments I look back on, although it took some years for me to realize it, was when I was probably in my mid-30s. My wife and I were involved in an Amway business for the decade of the 90s, and we’d go to big seminars from time to time. This one was in Miami, and Tim Foley, who played with the great Don Shula Miami Dolphins in the early ‘70s, was on stage. He was talking about “the three-to-five-year plan,” a plan that didn’t quite work out for us. Given my later obsession with the swift passage of time I’ll never forget what he said, how he said it, and my response. “For you youngsters out there, you think five years is a long time; it’s not!” And I said to myself, “Well, yes it is.” Oh, how wrong I was.

The passage of this mystery process of moments rushing by us is theoretical when we’re younger, something that really only happens to other people. It just isn’t real to us when we’re young. I encounter young folks in their 20s and 30s who when I lament time’s swift passage say they get it, but they have no idea. Not really until you get into your 40s does it move from the theoretical, it only happens to other people, to it’s happening to me! Then as it continues to press on you find as you go to the doctor or dentist that, apparently all of a sudden, they’re all younger than you!

I’ll share one last anecdotal experience you oldsters can possibly relate to. Our youngest son, speaking of 24, turned that age February 1. He’s now married with a baby recently born, but he was probably 19 or 20, and one day I was talking to him, as I’m wont to do as an old person, about the swift passage of time. I was getting frustrated because it’s impossible for a 20 year-old to understand, to see it like I do, and I said, “Oh, you can’t relate!” And he replied, “Then why do you keep telling me that?” Priceless. And I blurted out, “Because that’s what old people do!”

A Brief History of Time
The passage of time is no doubt trippy, in that old 60s/70s druggy term, but what is it? Why does it exist? As Christians, how are we to look at It? Do we deplore it? Worry about it? Curse it? Ignore it? Using the phrase “existential crisis” in my title kind of gives away my answer. Existential doesn’t just mean existence, but comes out of a 20th century philosophy called existentialism, which Wikipedia defines well: as “a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explore the human individual’s struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence.” It’s the swift passage of time that pours lemon juice on that wound. It’s a war we can’t win against an incomprehensible enemy. Death, specifically our deaths, but also the very concept of death, brings any idea of the meaning of our lives into question. Without God life becomes a Woody Allen movie, leading to despair, denial, or resignation.

The great Augustine of Hippo, the 5th century Bishop and one of the most profound thinkers of all time, tripped out on time as well. In Book 11 of his Confessions as he is contemplating God and this mystery he says:

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

Time he says is a paradox. The past no longer exists, nor does the future, and we can’t quantify the present—it just is. The instant it happens it becomes the past that no longer exists; very strange. He talked about God’s creation in which time exists, and says if the present didn’t pass away like it does on this created earth, then that would be eternity. So time “tends not to be” because it’s constantly vanishing as it comes into being. As I said, trippy.

Einstein in the early 20th century added to the trippiness when he postulated that time and space were relative. Basically, that means time passes slower for fast-moving objects compared to something at rest. I’m not sure Einstein’s theory, supposedly proved by experiments, applies, but as we get older time does appear to move faster. Remember when you were young, summer vacation, all of maybe three months, seemed like forever. When we were kids, we would play outside all day until it got dark, and as teenagers would sing with Zeppelin and Robert Plant that “Dancing days are here again as the summer evenings grow.” After all, we have, it seemed, forever. As the decades pass and the years pile up, years seem like months, months like weeks, and weeks like days. Christmas seems upon us not long after New Years.

I’m sure people have been perplexed by time since God created it, but secularism which developed over the last several hundred years did something unique to time. It gave people the impression they could evade its consequences. Yes, everyone knows in the end it can’t be escaped, but they hope by ignoring it just maybe it will leave them alone. This is nothing new, although secularism made it more widespread. Blaise Pascal writing in the mid-1600s as if it was 2026:

In spite of all these miseries man wants to be happy, and only to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how can he go about this? It would be best if he could make himself immortal, but since he cannot do this, he has decided to stop thinking about it. Being unable to cure death, misery, and ignorance, men have decided that in order to be happy, they must repress thinking about such things.

Files this under the more things change . . . .

One of the reasons Charlie Kirk’s assassination had such a profound impact, especially on young people, is that a young vibrant man in the prime of life, only 31, was cut down. That makes death not so theoretical after all, and as secularism’s deceits fade away faith becomes a more plausible alternative for many young people. Secularism and the rise of science, technology, and modern medicine gave people the impression we have some control over what happens to us in time, but that becomes increasingly difficult to sustain in an apparently random and chaotic world. As Pascal added, “The last scene of the play is bloody, however fine the rest of it. They throw dirt over your head, and it is finished forever.”

The Ultimate Question Mark: Death
It’s impossible to escape the question unless we are determined to ignore it, and many are, unfortunately. If they thought like I did, they wouldn’t. Have you ever watched an old movie from the 40s or 50s and suddenly realize almost everyone you’re watching is now dead. I always do. The movie is like moving life that doesn’t move captured in amber. Life, and time, however, keeps moving. Or having grown up in the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, I look back at the baby boomer generation, at those who reveled in youth and rebellion, and they are now tottering old senior citizens. I loved the band The Who in the 1970s. In a song called “My Generation,” Roger Daltrey in the flush of youth sings, “I hope I die before I get old.” Keith Moon did! At only 32. Bassist John Entwistle died young, at 57, and Daltrey and Pete Townsend are now entering their 80s. They didn’t get their wish.

In spite of the ignorance of youth and the deceits of secularism, the fear of death haunts us at every moment. Why do we fear it so? What is it about our ceasing to exist that terrifies us? That is the question. Why is it that animals and insects intuitively fear death even though they can’t think? Shouldn’t we be the least bit curious as to why that is? Given our mortality and its ever present reality in our world, it seems to me a good question to ask is, why does death exist? If we can find the answer to that question, maybe it will also lead us to the answer as to why we exist in the first place, and what it all means. Why is there something rather than nothing. Philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in the 20th century called it “the fundamental question of metaphysics.” He asked: “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” Good question.

Yet even in the face of e death’s certainty most people believe death, and its associated suffering, requires no explanation. It’s just a brute fact. But why does death seem so wrong? We may not feel outrage at the funeral of a great grandmother, but go to the funeral of a five-year-old and you will feel wrongness . . . viscerally . . . deeply . . . painfully. Which worldview holds the most compelling explanatory power for the anguish of death, atheistic materialism or Christianity? I rest my case.

We know the Christian explanation. God created reality good, his creatures rebelled and fell into sin and death. Therefore, sin and death are an aberration, not the way things were supposed to be. It feels so wrong because it is wrong! Far from seeing death as part of the Disney “circle of life,” or “natural,” just the way things are, we are all repelled by death as if it were an aberration because it is. When confronted personally with the possibility or actuality of death, no one treats it as “natural.” Viscerally we all hate death. Jesus hated death too.

Jesus stands before the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11), whom he would raise from the dead in minutes, and John writes, “Jesus wept.” This seems like a strange response when he knew he would shortly bring his friend back to life. To me these may be the most profound words in all of Scripture. Jesus is looking at the ultimate consequence of his creation marred, looking upon the ugliness and smelling the stench of the wages of sin, and he hates it! It broke his heart. And the Greek in this passage indicates that he wasn’t just sad, he was angry, as well he should have been. The image of God in man had been defaced, and it is a tragedy, literally, of biblical proportions.

Yet, strangely enough, the Bible never anywhere apologizes for, or is embarrassed by death. In the Book of Job, the most direct confrontation questioning the pain of sin and death in Scripture, God refuses to apologize or even explain anything! How can you explain the unexplainable? While we are never privy to the eternal Trinitarian councils as to why God created everything and allowed this disease to infect his creation, we know that the plan all along was to solve the problem. Jesus knew that too, but that didn’t mean the pain and perplexity and sadness of death isn’t real.

When something goes wrong most people want to know why, but the uncomfortable fact that we die and know it’s wrong seems to elicit little curiosity. For some reason it doesn’t occur to such people to ask why, or question what death means. In fact, if looked at correctly, death is the ultimate question mark, and God provides the answer. If what the Bible tells us isn’t true about life, death, and everything else, what is the alternative explanation? We must always consider the alternative because something must be true about death; it’s either a brute fact or some kind of aberration. Yet no other religion except what we find in our Bibles gives us any answers. For them death and suffering and evil just are, and we have to deal with it. There is no explanation and no ultimate solution. Least plausible is the view of the God-less, of the materialist-atheist.

I once heard William Lane Craig lay out the implications if atheism is true:

  • Death is the end; the dirt is our future.
  • There is no ultimate purpose in life
  • There is no ultimate justice
  • There is no basis for morality—Darwinian morality is all

Atheist‑materialists admit that we all experience purpose, long for justice, and act in moral ways. They expect us to believe that atoms coming together by chance for no reason at all explains the complexity of purpose, justice, and morality. I don’t think so. I, and almost every person on earth, don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. In 2026 the absolute poverty of the atheist‑materialist worldview is more apparent to more people than ever before.

Thankfully, when confronted with the question we have an answer: Jesus who conquered death, then tells us we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. Our hope isn’t an immaterial bodyless eternal life in heaven, but eternal life in a material resurrected body on this earth. There are many passages in the Bible about the resurrection and this life to come. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but one certainly comes from the man I mentioned above who experienced horrible suffering with no answer as to why. Yet says, and we can affirm along with him (Job 19):

25 I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
26 And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
27 I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!