(via @Aalbertsonn/IG)
One whole area of wise living that these temperate men get discipled in is: to recognize, understand, and resist the growing list of unbiblical beliefs, and the post-Christian rules by which America now lives. Just to name a few:
1. Wise men see and resist our foolish world’s NARCISSISM or self-centeredness. Foolish people live for themselves.
Remember Christ’s story about the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21)? Foolish decision-making always starts with the premise of "what is best for me?" Wisdom from God leads us to start all decision-making with the desire of “What is best for God?” “What magnifies Him?” and “What glorifies Him?” That is a man of temperate wisdom.
2. Wise men see and resist our foolish world’s UNIVERSALISM or the belief that salvation is not exclusively in Christ alone. Foolish people think that no idea or belief is invalid, so they do what is right in their own eyes—not God’s (Judges 17:6; 21:25).
Foolish people think that there really isn’t any ultimate truth. Foolish people believe that there are many "true" systems of thought, that lead to many roads to God. Wisdom from God’s Word causes us to start with God as the source of Ultimate Truth (John 14:6). We then see that Jesus is the incarnation of Truth and is the only One that can lead us into truth by His Word, and His Spirit of Truth (John 16:13) within us.
Probably there is no more powerful communicator of false beliefs to be resisted than the constant false teachings of modern movies. Listen to what the New York Times reported the week of Christmas:
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters and the Gospel According to James [Cameron].
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.
If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms [of life and death on Earth]. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
(GEM-06; 100214AM)
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