NO GOD, NO LOVE; KNOW GOD, KNOW LOVE

#1 · May 27, 2008, 7:57 am

Quote from Forum Archives on May 27, 2008, 7:57 am
Posted by: bhfbc <bhfbc@...>
NO GOD, NO LOVE; KNOW GOD, KNOW LOVE

May 25, 2008

TEXT: 1 John 4:7-21

This is Memorial Day weekend and, even though a lot of people probably think that it is a national holiday devoted to racing, it is really a time set aside to remember and honor those who lost their lives in service to their country. Over the years, Memorial Day has expanded to typically include the remembrance of any loved ones.

One of the realities of this kind of memorial devotion is that it is unique to the human race. No other animal group on the planet carries on a tradition of memorializing their dead. No other animal group that I am aware, and someone can correct me if I am wrong, is capable of grieving over the loss of a loved one in clearly definable and identifiable stages. In fact, not only do humans mourn the loss of loved ones, we also have the capacity to mourn the loss of life anywhere, such as with the recent catastrophes in Myanmar and China. Animals in America are not expressing concern about the loss of life from cyclones and earthquakes, but humans are. These and other character traits are clearly human characteristics and cannot be accounted for in any other way than acknowledging that they have been built into us by the Creator. John testifies that God is love, and that we love because he first loved us. The only reason that we can know love is that we know God.

In stark distinction to this logical and believable explanation for human characteristics that set us off completely apart from other animal species, atheists would have us believe that the motivation for human emotion and characteristics are more pure and honest when derived from humanistic instead of religious worldviews. For example, Christian apologist Gary DeMar shares an e-mail he received from a frequent sender: The atheist nation of China mourns for their dead and undertakes a huge humanitarian effort which proves their system of shame and honor is vastly superior to the Christian system of dogmatic and silly superstitions. Christians absolutely hate it when other people show more concern for their fellow humans than the Christians do. Christians only pretend to love their fellow humans and do so only because they think they have to, not because they actually want to. Once again atheism trumps Christianity as a much more viable and sane worldview. This is why Christianity is a dead religion that is disappearing faster than the snow in Greenland. Nothing could make an atheist happier than the demise of Christianity.

(http://74.255.56.30/blog/?p=88)

Now there are a lot of obvious fallacies in that e-mail, and I will not take the time to address them all. But what does stand out starkly to any logical thinker is the idea that any shame and honor system as described is anywhere close to compatible with an atheistic, humanist, evolutionist worldview. The only way that an evolutionist worldview can even conceive compassion and love is to appropriate the concepts from religious systems that specifically identify good and evil and distinguish right from wrong. Nothing from the theory of evolution, which views humans only as carbon units with electricity animating meat and bones, can account for systems of shame and honor or compassion, mercy, and love. In fact, it is just the opposite. The cultures of both Myanmar and China do have historical religious heritages with teachings about right and wrong, and their current regimes have been attempting to weed them out. Survival is for the strongest, not the meekest, according to evolutionary theory. In fact, as terrible as the toll of the cyclones in Myanmar and the earthquake in China have been, the atheistic regimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Ho Chi Minh communists in Vietnam accounted for the torture and murder of many times more people. And to this day, many still living who were involved in the slaughter of their own people continue to justify their actions. Evolution is a deeply nasty process. Standing in sharp distinction is 1 John 4:8, Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. No God, no love.

A leading atheist and evolutionist - at least in his own mind - Richard Dawkins knows full well that human characteristics of compassion, mercy, and love do not fit with the evolutionist worldview. In fact, they are incompatible. Writes Dawkins, The theory of natural selection itself seems calculated to foster selfishness at the expense of public good, violence, callous indifference to suffering, short term greed at the expense of long term foresight My paradox comes from the un-Darwinian fact, which any of us can observe in our own circle of acquaintances, that so many individual people are kind, generous, helpful, compassionate, nice Human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection Let's put it even more bluntly. From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb. Yet, Mr. Dawkins persists and insists that super niceness what we call compassion and mercy and love should be a trait that is not weeded out by natural selection. Continuing, he has written, And yes, it is the kind of dumb that should be encouraged - which is the purpose of my article. How can we do it? How shall we take the minority of super nice humans that we all know, and increase their number, perhaps until they even become a majority in the population? Could super niceness be induced to spread like an epidemic? Could super niceness be packaged in such a form that it passes down the generations in swelling traditions of longitudinal propagation? (http://richarddawkins.net/article,20,Atheists-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins)

When there is no God, meaning that when God is rejected, there is no love. 1 John 4:19 tells us simply and plainly that we love because he first loved us. We cannot know love if we do not know God because God is the standard of love. Without this standard, it is impossible to determine what love is. Consider pumping gasoline into your car. These days, we want to make sure that we are getting a gallon when we pay for a gallon. Unless those pumps are calibrated with a known, standard gallon, then we are at the mercy of someone elses measurement. The station owner might decide that a gallon measure is about a quarter less than the standard. Or the customer might decide that a gallon is a quarter more than the standard. Without a standard, we just have no way of knowing what a gallon is.

Without God, we have no way of knowing what love is. Thats why atheistic, humanistic evolutionists have no basis for determining love without being subsidized by the standard they reject. Mr. Dawkins and other atheists cannot live with the consequences of their morally bankrupt worldview, so they must dream up something like super niceness so our world wont self-destruct under the weight of cold evolutionary logic. While calling compassion dumb, Dawkins maintains it should be encouraged. How does anyone know whats nice and whats not? Maybe the modern-day eugenics movement was being nice in attempting to breed out the genetically inferior, and Hitler was being nice when the National Socialist government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. In less than two years after its implementation, more than 150,000 German citizens were forced to undergo the procedure, preparing the way for the genocide to come. (Harry Bruinius, Better for all the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and Americas Quest for Racial Purity, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 17)

The reality of morality, and that includes the morality of love, is that without a standard, there is nothing by which any morality can be measured. The sad and sobering truth of human action is that when the boundaries of moral standards are removed, the value of human life is the first casualty. Thus, the rationalist state could condemn citizens virtually at random to the guillotine in revolutionary France. The Khmer Rouge could force millions into their extermination camps for re-education. The atheist regimes of North Korea and China and Cuba can imprison, torture, and execute anyone at anytime for any reason because they rely only upon the state as the source of all power. In such regimes, there are only the human standards of relativism and equivalency to guide their morality. By rejecting the absolute moral standard of God, they give themselves sinful human beings the authority to establish moral law. The result is either chaos and anarchy or totalitarianism. Take your pick. Atheism and evolutionism are bankrupt worldviews that are anti-human. No God, no love.

However, as long as God shows his face to his human creation, there will be standards by which we can measure all morality. Regardless of how imperfectly even believers may apply Gods love, we still know what the standard is. Now this is not an excuse to not love as God has loved us; I am merely emphasizing the truth that Gods love is the standard regardless of human frailty and failure. Therefore, it is our duty and our privilege as followers of Jesus Christ to love one another better. How do we do this?

Well, know God, know love. If we want to know how to love better, then we should know God better. The better that we know God; the better we can love one another. God is love. Not Pastor Chuck, not any of the deacons, not any other member of First Baptist Church or any other church. Love comes from God. God is love. Know God, know love.

God has made it relatively easy for us to know Him. First, read His Word, the Bible. Study it. Listen to it. God is in it from beginning to end. Are there passages that are hard to understand and comprehend fully? There certainly are. Thats why we have skilled scholars of various disciplines to help us understand some places. But what God wants us to know about Him best, He makes plain and clear. Take todays Scripture from 1 John 4:7-12. You have heard me read it and use several verses. What is difficult to understand about these verses? Very little, if anything at all. God is love.

John 3:16 is probably the most well-known verse in the world. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. God loved us so much that He made the necessary sacrifice at tremendous personal cost to redeem us from our sin. What is so hard to understand about that? We either accept it or reject it. God makes it easy for anyone who seeks Him to find Him. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest Matthew 11:28.

We are human only because God has breathed His breath of life into us. We are human only because God has placed His Spirit in us. We are human only because God loves us. We are not human because of some humanistic, atheistic, evolutionary fantasy. That belief and the worldview it spawns leads only to death. In fact, it leads to worse than death; it leads to an eternity in the fiery lake of burning sulfur the second death. (Revelation 21:8) Those who die without Gods saving grace will know soon enough what it means to live without God and without love.

You know theres some Biblical teaching I dont completely understand. There are unfortunate moments when I revert to living for myself instead of for God. There are times when I do not even know how to respond adequately to the challenges of atheists and evolutionists. But I do know this: God is love. And even more than that, I know that God loves me. I know that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. What more do I need to know? Thats more than enough knowledge to make a decision to accept or reject the love of Christ. I choose accept. What about you? Know God, know love.

Rev. Charles A. Layne

First Baptist Church

PO Box 515

179 W. Broadway

Bunker Hill, IN 46914

765-689-7987

bhfbc@bhfirstbaptist.com

www.bhfirstbaptist.com
-- To unsubscribe, send ANY message to: abesermons-unsubscribe@welovegod.org   

Posted by: bhfbc <bhfbc@...>

May 25, 2008

TEXT: 1 John 4:7-21

This is Memorial Day weekend and, even though a lot of people probably think that it is a national holiday devoted to racing, it is really a time set aside to remember and honor those who lost their lives in service to their country. Over the years, Memorial Day has expanded to typically include the remembrance of any loved ones.

One of the realities of this kind of memorial devotion is that it is unique to the human race. No other animal group on the planet carries on a tradition of memorializing their dead. No other animal group that I am aware, and someone can correct me if I am wrong, is capable of grieving over the loss of a loved one in clearly definable and identifiable stages. In fact, not only do humans mourn the loss of loved ones, we also have the capacity to mourn the loss of life anywhere, such as with the recent catastrophes in Myanmar and China. Animals in America are not expressing concern about the loss of life from cyclones and earthquakes, but humans are. These and other character traits are clearly human characteristics and cannot be accounted for in any other way than acknowledging that they have been built into us by the Creator. John testifies that God is love, and that we love because he first loved us. The only reason that we can know love is that we know God.

In stark distinction to this logical and believable explanation for human characteristics that set us off completely apart from other animal species, atheists would have us believe that the motivation for human emotion and characteristics are more pure and honest when derived from humanistic instead of religious worldviews. For example, Christian apologist Gary DeMar shares an e-mail he received from a frequent sender: The atheist nation of China mourns for their dead and undertakes a huge humanitarian effort which proves their system of shame and honor is vastly superior to the Christian system of dogmatic and silly superstitions. Christians absolutely hate it when other people show more concern for their fellow humans than the Christians do. Christians only pretend to love their fellow humans and do so only because they think they have to, not because they actually want to. Once again atheism trumps Christianity as a much more viable and sane worldview. This is why Christianity is a dead religion that is disappearing faster than the snow in Greenland. Nothing could make an atheist happier than the demise of Christianity.

(http://74.255.56.30/blog/?p=88)

Now there are a lot of obvious fallacies in that e-mail, and I will not take the time to address them all. But what does stand out starkly to any logical thinker is the idea that any shame and honor system as described is anywhere close to compatible with an atheistic, humanist, evolutionist worldview. The only way that an evolutionist worldview can even conceive compassion and love is to appropriate the concepts from religious systems that specifically identify good and evil and distinguish right from wrong. Nothing from the theory of evolution, which views humans only as carbon units with electricity animating meat and bones, can account for systems of shame and honor or compassion, mercy, and love. In fact, it is just the opposite. The cultures of both Myanmar and China do have historical religious heritages with teachings about right and wrong, and their current regimes have been attempting to weed them out. Survival is for the strongest, not the meekest, according to evolutionary theory. In fact, as terrible as the toll of the cyclones in Myanmar and the earthquake in China have been, the atheistic regimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Ho Chi Minh communists in Vietnam accounted for the torture and murder of many times more people. And to this day, many still living who were involved in the slaughter of their own people continue to justify their actions. Evolution is a deeply nasty process. Standing in sharp distinction is 1 John 4:8, Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. No God, no love.

A leading atheist and evolutionist - at least in his own mind - Richard Dawkins knows full well that human characteristics of compassion, mercy, and love do not fit with the evolutionist worldview. In fact, they are incompatible. Writes Dawkins, The theory of natural selection itself seems calculated to foster selfishness at the expense of public good, violence, callous indifference to suffering, short term greed at the expense of long term foresight My paradox comes from the un-Darwinian fact, which any of us can observe in our own circle of acquaintances, that so many individual people are kind, generous, helpful, compassionate, nice Human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection Let's put it even more bluntly. From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb. Yet, Mr. Dawkins persists and insists that super niceness what we call compassion and mercy and love should be a trait that is not weeded out by natural selection. Continuing, he has written, And yes, it is the kind of dumb that should be encouraged - which is the purpose of my article. How can we do it? How shall we take the minority of super nice humans that we all know, and increase their number, perhaps until they even become a majority in the population? Could super niceness be induced to spread like an epidemic? Could super niceness be packaged in such a form that it passes down the generations in swelling traditions of longitudinal propagation? (http://richarddawkins.net/article,20,Atheists-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins)

When there is no God, meaning that when God is rejected, there is no love. 1 John 4:19 tells us simply and plainly that we love because he first loved us. We cannot know love if we do not know God because God is the standard of love. Without this standard, it is impossible to determine what love is. Consider pumping gasoline into your car. These days, we want to make sure that we are getting a gallon when we pay for a gallon. Unless those pumps are calibrated with a known, standard gallon, then we are at the mercy of someone elses measurement. The station owner might decide that a gallon measure is about a quarter less than the standard. Or the customer might decide that a gallon is a quarter more than the standard. Without a standard, we just have no way of knowing what a gallon is.

Without God, we have no way of knowing what love is. Thats why atheistic, humanistic evolutionists have no basis for determining love without being subsidized by the standard they reject. Mr. Dawkins and other atheists cannot live with the consequences of their morally bankrupt worldview, so they must dream up something like super niceness so our world wont self-destruct under the weight of cold evolutionary logic. While calling compassion dumb, Dawkins maintains it should be encouraged. How does anyone know whats nice and whats not? Maybe the modern-day eugenics movement was being nice in attempting to breed out the genetically inferior, and Hitler was being nice when the National Socialist government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. In less than two years after its implementation, more than 150,000 German citizens were forced to undergo the procedure, preparing the way for the genocide to come. (Harry Bruinius, Better for all the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and Americas Quest for Racial Purity, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 17)

The reality of morality, and that includes the morality of love, is that without a standard, there is nothing by which any morality can be measured. The sad and sobering truth of human action is that when the boundaries of moral standards are removed, the value of human life is the first casualty. Thus, the rationalist state could condemn citizens virtually at random to the guillotine in revolutionary France. The Khmer Rouge could force millions into their extermination camps for re-education. The atheist regimes of North Korea and China and Cuba can imprison, torture, and execute anyone at anytime for any reason because they rely only upon the state as the source of all power. In such regimes, there are only the human standards of relativism and equivalency to guide their morality. By rejecting the absolute moral standard of God, they give themselves sinful human beings the authority to establish moral law. The result is either chaos and anarchy or totalitarianism. Take your pick. Atheism and evolutionism are bankrupt worldviews that are anti-human. No God, no love.

However, as long as God shows his face to his human creation, there will be standards by which we can measure all morality. Regardless of how imperfectly even believers may apply Gods love, we still know what the standard is. Now this is not an excuse to not love as God has loved us; I am merely emphasizing the truth that Gods love is the standard regardless of human frailty and failure. Therefore, it is our duty and our privilege as followers of Jesus Christ to love one another better. How do we do this?

Well, know God, know love. If we want to know how to love better, then we should know God better. The better that we know God; the better we can love one another. God is love. Not Pastor Chuck, not any of the deacons, not any other member of First Baptist Church or any other church. Love comes from God. God is love. Know God, know love.

God has made it relatively easy for us to know Him. First, read His Word, the Bible. Study it. Listen to it. God is in it from beginning to end. Are there passages that are hard to understand and comprehend fully? There certainly are. Thats why we have skilled scholars of various disciplines to help us understand some places. But what God wants us to know about Him best, He makes plain and clear. Take todays Scripture from 1 John 4:7-12. You have heard me read it and use several verses. What is difficult to understand about these verses? Very little, if anything at all. God is love.

John 3:16 is probably the most well-known verse in the world. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. God loved us so much that He made the necessary sacrifice at tremendous personal cost to redeem us from our sin. What is so hard to understand about that? We either accept it or reject it. God makes it easy for anyone who seeks Him to find Him. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest Matthew 11:28.

We are human only because God has breathed His breath of life into us. We are human only because God has placed His Spirit in us. We are human only because God loves us. We are not human because of some humanistic, atheistic, evolutionary fantasy. That belief and the worldview it spawns leads only to death. In fact, it leads to worse than death; it leads to an eternity in the fiery lake of burning sulfur the second death. (Revelation 21:8) Those who die without Gods saving grace will know soon enough what it means to live without God and without love.

You know theres some Biblical teaching I dont completely understand. There are unfortunate moments when I revert to living for myself instead of for God. There are times when I do not even know how to respond adequately to the challenges of atheists and evolutionists. But I do know this: God is love. And even more than that, I know that God loves me. I know that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. What more do I need to know? Thats more than enough knowledge to make a decision to accept or reject the love of Christ. I choose accept. What about you? Know God, know love.

Rev. Charles A. Layne

First Baptist Church

PO Box 515

179 W. Broadway

Bunker Hill, IN 46914

765-689-7987

bhfbc@bhfirstbaptist.com

http://www.bhfirstbaptist.com

-- To unsubscribe, send ANY message to: abesermons-unsubscribe@welovegod.org