One of the tragically humorous things about the human mind is its capacity to forget as much information as it retains. The more we advance, the more we seem to look around just to find ourselves where we've already been.
The distracted might not notice, having all their energy invested in "progress," but the reality is that we are not "avant-garde," we are ignorant. This includes, perhaps especially, many in the church.
The phenomena our culture faces, the loss of truth (where a man can be a woman, the Islamic State is not Islamic and the church is the problem that must be driven out the fabric of society) is not new. Isaiah wrote about it between 701 and 681 B.C.:
"Woe to those who call evil good and good
evil, who put darkness for light and light for
darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet
for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20)
Calling evil good doesn't make it good. Calling what is false true does not make it true. For something to be true, it must be true. Aristotle said it this way:
"To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false; but neither what is nor what is not is said to be or not to be."
Within the church, the same assertion can be made of the Bible. To say of what is repugnant to God that it is not, does not make it so. When we do so, we only set ourselves, like those of old, on a course to prove God right at the cost of much pain in our lives.
We are erecting an idol while Moses is on the
mountain; we are refusing to take the Promised Land for "there are giants in the land." Painful lessons usually follow such actions. We will
discover truth again, but it will be costly.
Many progressive Christians are on that journey today, and if sincere, they will rediscover the new heresy they so desperately seek; only to join Chesterton in the farce so many others have starred in. Here is how he put it:
"I am the man who with the utmost daring
discovered what had been discovered before …
I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to
be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to
be some ten minutes in advance of the truth.
And I found that I was eighteen hundred
years behind it. I did strain my voice with a
painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my
truths. And I was punished in the fittest and
funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I
have discovered, not that they were not
truths, but simply that they were not mine.
When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up
by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive
me, that I did try to be original; but I only
succeeded in inventing all by myself an
inferior copy of the existing traditions of
civilized religion … I did try to found a heresy
of my own; and when I had put the last
touches to it, I discovered that it was
orthodoxy."
My fellow reader, if we would only heed God's call to humility in thought and action, clinging to His every word with passion, we would be able to regain our composure in a much shorter period of time, while avoiding the enemy's pitfalls.
His trick, the enemy's that is, is today as it was in the beginning: "Did God really say …?" (Genesis 3:1). How many times will we fall for it?
The lessons of the desert can be learned by wisdom instead of experience. But it looks like we have chosen the latter.
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