If we’re to raise our kids in a hostile 21st Century secular culture so that they maintain their Christian commitment throughout their lives, we need to continuously show them how reality affirms what they believe. This sounds so ridiculously obvious, but I think many Christians would not be quite certain what I mean. What follows is a simple example.
The Bible tells us that man was made in God’s image, male and female he created them. Then something very bad happened. The first humans rebelled against their Creator, and sin and death entered the world, just as God predicted it would. At the heart of this fall from grace is the temptation of Adam and Eve we read about in Genesis 3:
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The line that runs through the center of the sinful human heart is, “you will be like God.” The battles we see played out throughout history, in the human heart and among human beings, is who gets to be God. All sorts of ugliness follows the wrong answer.
A phrase you’ll come across in Christian apologetics is explanatory power. In other words, what best explains something. No worldview has more explanatory power for the world as we find it than Christianity. It’s not even close. C.S. Lewis put it best per usual:
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.
Human nature is one of those things that Christianity explains so powerfully. If the Bible is true, we find that human beings are fundamentally religious. That is, they must worship something. We read throughout the Old Testament that the human race, including God’s people, were constantly tempted to idolatry. They worshiped something, anything, other than the true God himself.
Modern secular human beings like to think of themselves as beyond all that “religious” stuff. They consider themselves enlightened and having no need for anything beyond the practical realities of everyday life. Then we look at how people actually live their lives, and we find that they are always worshiping something, be it sports teams or athletes, musicians or movie stars, career, money, or power, other people in the name of love or lust, and the list goes on. Scripture predicts this perfectly.
I was reminded of this when I read a short piece recently by prescient social commentator Walter Russel Mead. Mead says that when God goes away, superstition takes his place, which is exactly what the Bible anticipates. Commenting on a New York Times piece about enlightened Europeans who would never grace the door of a church, he writes:
People who think themselves too rational for religious belief end up believing in “astral forces”, ghosts and other phenomena. Sometimes these superstitions take the deadly form of political ideologies that fanatical believers take up with religious fervor . . .
There is no such thing as a non-religious person. The question is who or what will we worship, and who or what will be our God. Not only does the Bible tell us this is the case, thousands of years of human history demonstrate it.
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