Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

• John 3:5-8

You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.

• Matthew 10:22

The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil.

• John 7:7

“The reason we do not see the need to be born from above is that we have a vast capacity for ignoring facts. People talk about the evolution of the race. The writers of today seem to be incapable of a profound understanding of history, they write glibly about the way the race is developing, where are their eyes and their reading of human life as it is? We are not evolving and developing in any sense to justify what is known as evolution. We have developed in certain domains but not in all. We are nowhere near the massive, profound intellectual grasp of the men who lived before Christ was born. What brain today can come near Plato or Socrates? And yet people say we are developing and getting better, and we are laying the flattering unction to our souls that we have left Jesus Christ and His ideas twenty centuries behind. No wonder Jesus said that if we stand by Him and take His point of view, men will hate us as they hated Him.”

• Oswald Chambers, The Highest Good (Daily thoughts for Disciples, May 23)

I found this devotion from Oswald Chambers rather amusing.  He had his argument in that great minds, those of philosophy and “thinking,” had devolved instead of evolved in the past 2,000 plus years.

I could list some recent theologians and philosophers who have contributed to the field in the past few hundred years, but as Rev. Chambers so well points out, the vast majority are profoundly forgettable, or some we should forget although they are often quoted.

And when I was growing up, we never thought about locking our doors.  Now everyone seems to have a cave man mentality.  You lock up everything and you distrust 9 out of 10 people that you meet; maybe it is 70:30 at church, at least you might feel safe around 9 out of 10.  Our society has devolved into anarchy.

But while the devotion looks like it could have been written yesterday, Rev. Chambers died over 100 years ago, in Cairo, Egypt in 1917.  He saw the growth of interest in the field that misrepresents itself as science.  I say “misrepresents” because all of Darwin’s basic principles, that must all be true for evolution to work as an explanation of the origin of man, have been proven to be impossible or proven to be so ridiculously improbable to the point of lunacy.  But because the secular world feels it must combat the Biblical view, it is the only view that is allowed in public schools.  Why?  Because it eliminates God from the equation.

This is not an accidental side effect.  Lyell in his book on Geology and Darwin both had an agenda to eliminate the Bible from any thought on their chosen topics.  They developed theories that at the time of writing their books, there was no scientific evidence or instrumentation to prove or disprove.  As far as origins are concerned, there can be none.  We have not invented time travel, nor will we ever do so.  That is pure science fiction.

But in every theory that has arisen, there are questions.  When scientists discover soft tissue in dinosaur bones, they are silenced.  When carbon dating is proven highly inaccurate, those in power simply shrug.  Every “proof” on the side of millions of years or evolution come from texts that quote other texts until you get back to the original texts that were mere theories.

Origin science, which is hardly science at all, has not had free speech in a long time.

And it seemed Oswald Chambers saw it coming.

We who believe the Bible to be accurate will be hated, just as they hated Jesus.  Yet, we must stand firm to be saved.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.