A lot of people today think that there is a conflict between
science and religion.
No, there’s no conflict, though there are problems sometimes
when one or the other goes beyond their proper bounds.
Science deals with things that it can measure. Things it can quantify in some way with
numbers. It doesn’t do so well with
things it can’t measure. Like God.
Science has nothing to say about God. Except maybe to look at the things He’s made
and say, wow!
But science says that God didn’t create the world. Not because they proved it, but because they
assume that everything has a natural cause.
So the universe came into existence by itself, through random and
necessary interactions of inert minerals and chemicals. Again, they can’t prove any of this, but
given their assumptions, that’s the only thing they can conclude.
But what has happened in our society is that God has been
totally pushed out of the picture, and we no longer look to God to answer problems
that happen in our society and our country.
In 2 Chronicles 6, the Bible lists a number of things that
people today would never attribute to God, things that God does, but the Bible
says that He does do these things. And
they all are meant to bring a response to God from us.
I know some people will question my theology here, because
these things in the Bible have to do with the nation of Israel which had a
particular covenant with God. Yes, I
know all that, and I’m not going to take the rest of the video trying to make
the case why this applies to us today.
If you don’t think God does this stuff today, then frankly you
won’t have much left in the Bible for yourself.
In verse24, 24 “If Your people Israel
This is a side note,
that we’ll talk about in other lessons, but in Exodus 19, God says to Israel: you shall be My own possession among all
the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; 6
and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’
These very exact
words are used in the New Testament are applied to Christians, in Titus, I
Peter, and elsewhere.
In verse24, 24 “If Your people Israel are defeated before an
enemy because they have sinned against You.”
Our country came out
of World War 2, looking like a champ.
The world’s leading superpower.
Five years later, we fought a war in Korea, and we didn’t win. We declared a ceasefire that still exists
today with no resolution to the conflict.
We brag to the world how we stopped the Nazis and ended their program of
mass extermination, but we failed to stop North Korea which has become one of
the most brutal nations in the world, the number one persecutor of Christians.
We spent ten years
fighting in Viet Nam, lost 50,000 soldiers, and then gave up and let the other
side claim the victory. We went in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and both countries are still a mess and when we leave them
completely, they will return to what they were before if not worse.
Wow, what
happened? Nobody is going to write the
history of the United States and explain that our military failures had
anything to do with God, but dozens of times in the Bible God talks about that
very thing.
Verse 26: 26
“When the heavens are shut up
and there is no rain because they have sinned against You,
You never hear a
weather person end their broadcast, saying, now let’s pray for the people in
this area here who have a high chance of tornadoes over the next few days. We think our science explains the origin of
these disasters, but we never think that God can or wants to do anything about
them. The Bible, many times, speaks of
God bringing famine or some disaster as a wake-up call to a nation.
I resisted that idea
for a while. I said, first of all, that
nobody would think that God is doing anything here. They will just attribute it to climate change
and never think about God. And then too,
Christians are affected as much as the non-Christian here. You don’t think there weren’t a lot of
Christians who were affected by those floods in Michigan when the dams gave
way?
But then I thought
more about it. Our nation has
representative government. We don’t have
rulers who rule over us; we have representatives who represent us. Well, my representatives in my government are
big promoters of abortion. You don’t
think God’s paying attention or that He doesn’t care about that. I expect to talk about abortion pretty soon
here.
So, yes, I can see
God using natural disasters to wake up Christians to pray for our country.
Verse 28: 28 “If
there is famine in the land, if there is pestilence, if there is blight or mildew, if there
is locust or grasshopper, if their enemies besiege them in the land of their
cities, whatever plague or
whatever sickness there is,
I looked up pestilence and plague to see just what those
words describe:
pestilence: 1:
a contagious or infectious epidemic disease that is virulent and
devastating
I looked up
virulent. I like looking up words. It means:
1 a: marked by a rapid,
severe, and destructive course 〈a virulent infection〉b: able to overcome bodily defensive
mechanisms:
plague? 2 a: an epidemic disease causing a high
rate of mortality: PESTILENCE
Science tells us what we have, how it can spread, and how it
affects us. But the whole thing happens
at the microscopic level, which means that we cannot actually see what’s going
on around us. But we act like there is
nothing that God is doing, can, or wants to do in this matter. We talk about these things running their
course or about coming back again later.
But we don’t pray about it, against it. As a nation and rarely as a church. And we don’t see it as having anything to do
with us as Christians or with God.
I saw a video recently about how the world has changed since
people aren’t going out as much. How
nature is getting along just fine without us.
In fact, nature is doing much better without us. How we need to remember that we are not the
masters of nature. we are its guests.
The very people who will tell us there is no God, only
nature, will attribute to nature characteristics that we used to attribute to
God. After all, we call her Mother
Nature.
Our nation was built on a belief in God. After all, He was the one who gave us the
unalienable rights that made us willing to go to war with England, the world’s
superpower, in order to get them.
Now that’s all been swept aside, and we make up our own
rights now, and God is entirely left out of our public discussions and
thought. Science tells us all that we
need to know.
And we, the Church, the Body of Christ in the world, have
lost our voice in the world. We have
nothing to say to the world. We think we
can change the world by working silently in the background, hoping we might win
enough people to Christ to sway the nation back to God.
I wish I could say it’s working. But I think we’re mistaken if we think that
everything we hear about in the news has nothing to do with God or us.
We have the Bible. It
tells us these things over and over again.
We are the light of the world, the salt of the earth.
But we see the world now as the world sees it, and we have
lost our voice.
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