Kent Philpott - Are You Being Duped ?

M y editor says, You have been duped if you think you have read your last chapter. I admit to adding a few additional subjects and lumping them together in this last chapter. Although their treatment is brief, a book on being duped would not be complete without touching on these final topics.

Before we consider the five shorter subjects, let me ask again: Do we know what we are doing? While on the cross Jesus uttered these words: Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). This is how we are: we do not know what we are doing. We, the duped ones, go our own way and continue to rebel against God and his law. We work against our own good. We would not do so if we knew what we were doing.

Why do we reject the God who loves us? Perhaps we have rejected the church as we know it, God as we have come to understand him or Christianity as we have experienced it, but who would knowingly reject a gracious and compassionate Saviour?

Now why would I pick such a topic? Well, I personally fell for this. Maybe some of you are fascinated with the idea of UFOs, or are at least avid science-fiction fans. Maybe in the back of your mind you wonder if the God of the Bible is only a local deity, maybe the product of the earthling mind, and that superior organisms, somewhere out there, know better.

I got hooked on the movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In my view, the remake of that movie, with Donald Sutherland, was even better than the original. The original version came out in 1959 when I was a very impressionable teenager. Under the influence of this sci-fi film, I began to think that aliens would arrive and prove that Christianity was a big fraud.

Our culture has drilled into us the acceptance of aliens. Think of it: Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, the Alien series, ET and many others they have conditioned us to accept the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. More than that, we have UFO cults, some of whose adherents get excited about the myths surrounding Roswell, New Mexico, where an alien spacecraft is supposed to have crashed. (The government is thought to be safeguarding the alien remains.) I suppose a large number of Americans believe there are aliens out there that might show up at any time. This might influence a persons view of Jesus; it certainly did my own.

Attraction to the existence of aliens is not for eccentrics alone. Consider the effort on the part of the scientific community called SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Laser beams and radio signals are being sent into the nether regions with the hope of making contact with whatever life might be out there. Well-meaning people are determined to make contact with, or find evidence of, intelligent life somewhere else in the universe.

As yet, there has been no contact and I doubt there ever will be. It is interesting that Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great English Baptist preacher of the latter part of the nineteenth century and an amateur astronomer, was not concerned about the possibility of life elsewhere than earth. Why I am a Christian (Evangelical Press, 2002) contains an essay I wrote in which I quote Spurgeon on this point. Someone asked Spurgeon if he expected to find life on Mars and he replied (authors paraphrase), It wouldnt surprise me one bit. His point was that God is the Creator of the universe, and there is nowhere that he does not reign as Lord. So, Spurgeon reasoned, if life is discovered somewhere else, we will find that it owes its existence to the very same God who revealed himself in Scripture.

Some people are excited about the possibility of microbes being discovered on Mars. If that were so, would it come as a shock? After all, the same laws of physics, chemistry, and so on, apply throughout the universe. The strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity and electro-magnetism are universal. But some people will uncritically accept what is in fact an unproven speculation and conclude that if any life form is found other than on earth, however primitive, it will prove there is no God.

I will pursue this subject one step further and briefly describe an aspect of my view of evolution. I do so knowing that some Christians will reject my argument, and perhaps my Christianity as well, but I want to state that it is possible to be a Bible-believing Christian and not discard all evolutionary concepts.

Science keeps pushing back the time when human life appeared on the planet. It used to be 40,000 years and then it was 75,000 years. That date was moved back to 100,000, and just recently, some were willing to go back a million years. One million years ago, it is conjectured, there were creatures who walked upright, had large brains and were intelligent. It is claimed these humans were not only capable of thought, but left behind primitive forms of art and religion as well.

The problem is that some people will think, The Bible demands a short history for both the creation of the world and human beings. Therefore, the ancient history of the universe proves that the Bible is wrong. Or, some might reason, Since we see that life forms change, since we see fossil evidence for the evolving of organic life, the Bible has got to be wrong. However, it matters neither when advanced human forms appeared nor what abilities they had. It does not matter that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and that the earth has been around at least five billion years. The issue is not anatomical likeness; it is not the capacity to make tools, do art or engage in abstract reasoning. The issue does not have anything to do with dates and times, rather the issue is creation in the image of God.

How God created, or when he created these are details. Perhaps Gods creation of the first humans in his image is recent, or ancient. It does not matter. Personally, I think intelligence, or better, self-awareness and abstract reasoning capacity, goes with being created in the image of God. However, let us not be duped into thinking that science, aliens or logical philosophical models prove that the biblical revelation is false.

I imagine that some of us, at some point in our lives, have experienced self-loathing. There was a time in my life (1980-1982) when 1 struggled in a way I never imagined I would. In fact, I felt as if I did not care about myself any more. Maybe you can remember a time in your own life when you felt that way.

A significant personal loss can have a radical impact on the way we feel about ourselves. For example, a traumatic event occurs a death in the family, a divorce, a severe injury, the termination of a job, the family home burns down and the result is that you do not care what happens to you. This is a dangerous time emotionally, spiritually and physically.

You may not literally say to yourself that you no longer care, but unconsciously you begin to live your life as if you do not. You take risks that you normally would not. You make commitments that would have been inconceivable before. You become accident-prone and may experience thoughts of suicide. You simply give up on yourself; you give up on life. Perhaps depression takes hold of you. The whole thing can drive you right into the ground.

Our text is John 10:10. It is a shocking verse. Jesus said, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. The context of this passage is pastoral sheep, sheepfold, shepherd and sheep-stealer. Sheepfolds of that day were made from field rocks piled up only a few feet high. Sheep would be brought into the folds each night through a single narrow entrance and they were then relatively safe from predators. The low wall had no razor wire or other impediment, so it was possible to climb over it, and every once in a while a thief would steal one of the sheep.