Have you ever thought about why people do not like Christians? Why do coworkers think we are stupid for believing that Jesus is real? Why do people attack church as being lame, boring, or a crutch? Why does everyone from our neighbor to our favorite teacher think so little of the Bible, God, salvation?
And the bigger question is, “Are they right?” Most of our non-Christian friends seem happier and appear to more accepted by their neighbors and family. Being a Christian often seems to bring more troubles and problems than being a nice gal or a moral guy. Will embracing the world’s morality bring us peace?
No, We should serve the Lord our God for he is the one true God. This is the message of Psalm 2. And this is the message that we must act upon.
And if we hope to serve the Lord, we must first stop fearing the world. Psalm 2:1-3 asks:
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rules take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed, saying, “let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.
With his questions, the Psalmist is touching on the futility, the pointlessness of the world’s wisdom. No man is able to lead another man to heaven. We cannot find salvation on our therapist’s couch. We cannot eradicate sin, sorrow, and disasters through government planning. The grand hope of new ideas that have inspired everyone from Plato to President Trump always fail. Humanity excels at handing out awards but fails to truly change the human condition. The poor remain, the lack of education remains, and the violence remains.
These men and women are set on a vain path because they are ultimately fighting against God. They are trying to break their connection to God and against his anointed one, the Messiah – Jesus. They are like a dog on a leash desperate to be free of all of God’s demands. They reject God’s decree that they need Jesus to save them from their sins and busily get together for the purpose of gnawing through their chain which connects them to the God of the universe.
All the secular ideas about how to end war, about how to overcome poverty, and about how to gain peace, all have one purpose. They are designed to free humanity from God.
Humans want the freedom to determine their gender. They want to be able to decide what is right and wrong; they want to be able to choose which companies are bad and which companies are evil. The world comes together to achieve greatness so that it does not have to worship God. The people of the wolrd want to boast, “God we fixed all our problems. We did it without you. We do not have to obey you. We do not need you. We have done it all. We have loosed the bounds. We are free.”
The people of this world are not seeking after God. The philosophies, the ideas that get tossed around Facebook, that we hear in the school yard, and write about in our class notebooks are not innocent. They are not morally neutral. They are opposed to God. The most humanitarian effort, the greatest attempt designed to help others through providing food for refugees, through giving clothes to the homeless, and through free physchological evaluations when devoid of the gospel is nothing more than the people of this world shaking their first at God. All these attempts to achieve goodness are nothign more than humanity proclaiming to God we can do life, “My way.”
While we can and should join with worldly people who seek to help the hurting, we must never forget that they are opposed to God. We must never buy into their philosophies. We must not embrace their view of God, humanity, or creation. We can agree with their conclusion that the frog appears to be green but we cannot agree with worldly philosophy that declares man to come from the frog. We can agree with the doctor who declares that addiction enlarges certain aspects of our brain. But we cannot agree with the worldview that says addiction can be only overcome by legalist set of rules. We must affirm the gospel worldview.
All who do not affirm that God is ruler of the universe, work against him. If we are going to follow the God of the universe, we cannot fear the world. They will disagree with us about our greatness need. They will answer the question of “What is our purpose; and, how do we know it?” very differently from us. And they will not be open to divine insight.
They are taking counseling together far away from God’s throne room. They are opposed to the thoughts of God. We must realize that the world is against all who seek after God.
We cannot be friends with this world if we are friends with God.
Who have you befriended?
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