Heart Disease

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1)

My daughter gave me a book for Christmas by one of the notable atheists of our day, Christopher Hitchens, titled “god is not great”. (No, that’s not a typo; he refuses to capitalize God). In the book, he makes his case for the non-existence of God, and he does so in a very intelligent and substantive way. Of course, he is dead wrong, but many of his arguments are compelling enough to provide the skeptics of God and the Bible with plenty of ammunition for their position. There is a lot of the typical nonsense about contradictions in the Bible which really are not. These are things I have heard repeatedly for years from all sorts of places, and they are totally bogus. For example, the skeptics complain that the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke “contradict”. As a result, the Bible cannot be trusted because of all those errors. Well, hello, Einstein. Do you have a mother and a father? Then you have two genealogies, and I hope to God they contradict. If not, maybe we have another problem to discuss. I have heard that “two genealogies” complaint from several different sources. It’s funny how these “free thinkers” all think alike!

The subtitle of Hitchens’ book is, “How Religion Poisons Everything”. It is amazing how totally dead on right someone can be and at the same time be so totally and tragically wrong. He makes the case powerfully that religion is the root of virtually every conflict and problem on earth. He cites all the “holy wars”, ethnic cleansings, and conflicts just in the last century, and shows how each one was launched in the name of some “god” with justification for torture and genocide. The facts he presents are well researched and accurate. But the conclusion he draws blaming God for the problem is wrong. Religion does poison everything, because it is man’s attempt to buy off God without trusting his Son to save them from their sins. I have a personal relationship with the God of the Universe through my Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ, and not a religion. In fact, the word “religion” plays a very inconsequential role in the Bible. It only appears in four places, and only one has anything positive to say. James 1:26-27 says that a man who uses his religion for purposes such as Hitchens reports on has a vain religion. The passage has nothing to do with a personal faith in the risen Saviour, and even if someone employed their “religion” in the correct way as James reports, that alone won’t get them a smell of the glories of heaven because it is based solely on works and not faith. Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us clearly that our salvation is based on faith and not works. The other three places religion shows up in the Bible (Acts 13:43, Acts 26:5, and Galatians 1:13-14) are all in a negative context. All three of them support the conclusion of the atheist skeptic who claims religion is the source of all of man’s problems. So Mr. Hitchens actually lines up with the Bible when he makes his case against religion. Again, as I have said more than a thousand times, man lives by the Bible whether he believes it or not.

As for the “atheist” – he spends more time talking about God than the average Christian does. In a frantic attempt to drown out the claim of God upon his life, he screams, “There is no God!” He thinks if he can do this long enough and loud enough, that God will just go away and leave him alone. But as the bumper sticker said, “God does not believe in atheists, therefore atheists do not exist.” The problem is not in the head, it is in the heart. “The fool hath said in his HEART, There is no God.” An atheist can’t see God like he can’t see a bowling ball in a bathtub. He isn’t looking, and he doesn’t want to look. Seeing God in your life is like seeing your own shadow. It is right there all the time. The only way to ignore your shadow is to get in total darkness. Even then, your shadow still exists, you just can’t see it because you have placed yourself in conditions that will not allow you to see it. If you have doubts about God, come out of the darkness. And by all means, stay away from religion. Place your faith in the only man who lived sinless, who, by the way, was murdered by religious zealots, and condemned their religion as forcefully as Mr. Hitchens does today. Let the glorious light of the risen Son of God be your guide.