“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make straight your paths.” Proverbs 3:5-6
This is one of the most famous passages in the famous book of Proverbs. In a way of seeing this verse we can hear Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and its mighty call for the believer to be all in, to be devoted to God’s word/law in thought, word and deed. We see this again and again in the New Testament as well, most powerfully, perhaps, when Paul says in Romans 12 to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God, which is – watch this – our “reasonable” worship. In other words, we owe our entire lives to God and Jesus Christ. Talk about rights, political or otherwise, is nonsensical unless based in this foundational truth. We owe God our everything. But there’s more. He says too that we shouldn’t be conformed to this world’s thinking but be transformed by the renewal of our minds.
Paul is saying in Romans what Proverbs says here, which is that what’s declared in the Shema of Deuteronomy 6. We aren’t to be conformed to this world’s superficial values and its ever-changing customs. Instead, as we mature spiritually, and grow more dependent upon God through the study and application of His holy Word, we’re renewed in our mind by focusing on Godly values. In other words, the Bible isn’t telling us to give our hearts but not our minds. It isn’t telling us to give our Sundays but not our weekdays. It’s telling us that our heart is our full inner being – mind and emotion. In fact, emotion is what the mind really believes. The separation of the two is, therefore, the superficial thinking of the world.
To lean on one’s own understanding is the default setting of the world. We’re all confronted with the big questions. Who am I? Does my life matter? Where did I and everything else come from? What am I supposed to do? Scripture answers these questions easily and clearly – without contradiction. We are the Lord’s. He created us in His image to serve and know Him. This fact alone gives life not just meaning but abundant meaning. We aren’t a cosmic accident but a result of God’s purposeful and personal will. He made you for Himself. The God who created the heavens and the earth created you too and this gives all things their purpose and there’s no purpose outside of Him. So, what are we to do? We are to have faith in His Son, Jesus Christ and obey His life-giving Word.
This all means that we aren’t mysteries. Both the world outside of us and our inner being are knowable.
Modern education, on the other hand, tells our children that they aren’t God’s but their own. It tells us that mankind emerged accidentally out of a nearly infinite and, therefore, a personally unknowable past (billions of years ago). This makes history and individuals ultimately mysterious. Into this mystery philosophy is the search for “your truth” because, after all, the ultimate truth is unknowable. You must find your own truth, they say, which is, come to think about it, quite a bit of pressure for a person buttressed on every side by life’s frustrations. Each person is burdened with finding out about themselves and they are, by their own definition, mysterious accidents who just popped into being at a particular time and place. According to their premises there can’t be an absolute truth or meaning. If there’s no God we must lean on our own understanding and that reasoning, based on accident and chance as our origin, is fundamentally irrational. It’s in this way that mankind becomes, due to the poison of humanistic religion, ultimately irrational.
Is it any wonder why the world is in a bad way when millions of people are trying to grope their way through a dark moral universe and uncover truth, any truth, in a world where there’s no ultimate truth? Is it any wonder why sexual sin is on the rise if you tell people there is no ultimate meaning except for their own personal happiness? What else are they going to do but embrace varying degrees of hedonism? You see, when a man is told that he’s not God’s, but belongs to himself, he does know that he didn’t create himself. That fact is inescapable. So, on one level he knows that he’s an accident of the cosmos even though he knows this can’t be true because accidents don’t ask questions about metaphysics and ethics. Accidents don’t seek meaning. The whole thing is, therefore, a comic-tragedy. Humanism teaches us that everything is an accident but the individual accidents must find their own meaning.
This is the source of our confusion, depression, fear and anxiety. The source of it all is our separation from God due to sin. The answer is, thankfully, the grace of God in Jesus Christ. The answer to our spiritual/emotional angst is in the knowledge of the Scripture. This knowledge tells us about mankind’s true history and future. It tells of man’s creation in the Garden. We were created mature and in innocence. Then we fell into sin through the insistence upon having the ultimate freedom to think about life and reality on our own terms rather than God’s. The curse of sin is what we experience in our present day.
But in Christ we live in God’s grace and because of that free gift that eradicates sin’s sentence, we look forward to the ultimate age of glorification where sin and its consequences are completely gone. The true history is creation in innocence, the fall, redemption in Christ, and ultimate glorification. Rejection of this by secular humanism offers a terrible and counterfeit past, present and future that terrorizes us. It replaces willful and personal creation with unknowable, impersonal forces. It lies about mature innocence as our original state and posits instead a blank slate immaturity. It then can’t make sense of sin’s curse but seeks to find ways out of life’s sufferings – both internally and externally – with contradictory counterfeits. And it offers no eternal hope whatsoever and no assurance of salvation.
A man who relies on his own understanding is a man who relies on the logic of a mind that was forged in the fires of chance. His is an intellect that was brought into existence by a nameless, soulless goop of impersonal matter. Cosmic accidents are constantly depressed and struggle against the reality of their premises, which they must struggle to suppress from driving them mad. They go to counselors to unravel the mystery within the ultimate mystery. They take drugs, legal or otherwise. The physician might give them to you for this or that “mechanical” problem (the mind is just a mechanical part of the chance-riddled universe) or you might buy them from a friend. A prescription or a street corner dealer is the same if the goal is to escape the consequences of the psychological horrors of secular humanism.
The purpose of prayer, fellowship, study of the Word, and worship is to bring the individual to the ultimate truth. That truth is the person, Jesus Christ. That person lived and died and rose again for you. When you pray you’re in fellowship with the ultimate, with ultimacy! And this isn’t a vague, impersonal thing but the true and loving God of your soul. Thus, your depressions and fears and struggles are real but, alas, they’re redeemed in Christ and we can rejoice in them because of Him. This is the message every person of every race and nation needs to hear.
Instead, the American media, political class and educational establishment preaches a doctrine of victimhood. Each group is a victim of some other group, not of sin. If we’re victims of sin then our savior is Christ. If our victimhood stems from society, then our savior is politics. This gives rise to the messianic state. And the state’s priests are the teachers and professors; its theologians are its secular scientists studying order in a chance-riddled and, therefore, ultimately irrational universe. Its evangelists are the media.
This is why relying on the Lord will make straight our paths. We won’t wander from the truth into the dark labyrinths of secular humanism, where no one can ever exit and the goal is simply to keep moving all the time lest you stop and the terror overtake you. This is what Jesus meant when He said His yoke was easy. The yoke of humanism is slavery, victimhood, and emotional suppression. It cuts you off from truth and beauty by cutting asunder the connection of righteousness to the good life. It places people in the unhappy business of having to be theologians and prophets of the unknowable self instead of students and disciples of the God who has revealed His will through Scripture.
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