Sermon from October 17, 2004

Our Christian doctrine of creation teaches us that the heavens and the earth serve as the setting in which God seeks to be united in covenant love with mankind. Humans hold this exalted place, because God made them in His image. He implanted in man a measure of His mind, will, power and freedom. This makes it possible for us to know and love God, to govern His creation, and to respond to Him in communal solidarity. Starting today, I want to explore what a measure of the mind, will, power and freedom of God looks like in us at street level.

The Natural Law
Without fanfare I would like to begin with two series of statements. At the end of each I’ll tell you what I make of it, and you’ll be able to tell if you and I place the same meaning on what follows.

A Hindu teaching says, “The poor and sick should be regarded as lords of the atmosphere” (This and all the following quotes and their sources come from C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 115ff.). An ancient Babylonian saying teaches: “Whoso makes intercession for the weak, well pleasing is this to Samaš.” A Babylonian list of sins asks, “Has he failed to set a prisoner free?” A Hindu command: “One should never strike a woman; not even with a flower.”

An Old Norse tale rebukes the god Thor: “There, Thor, you got disgrace, when you beat women.” The story is told among Australian Aborigines that “in the Dalebura tribe a woman, a cripple from birth, was carried about by the tribes-people in turn until her death at the age of sixty-six.” ... “They never desert the sick.” It is said of a Native American tribe that “you will see them take care of ... widows, orphans, and old men, never reproaching them.”

The Roman writer Juvenal wrote, “Nature confesses that she has given to the human race the tenderest hearts, by giving us the power to weep. This is the best part of us.” Did you ever make your way through the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece, Beowulf? A line in it reads, “They said that he had been the mildest and gentlest of the kings of the world.” And finally, Deuteronomy 24:19 says, When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

The theme common to those quotations is gentleness and mercy towards those weaker than you. It is striking that they come from different places on earth and different times. How did disparate cultures, existing apart from each other in space and time, find unity of moral sentiment about showing mercy?

Let’s try one more theme on for size. The Roman orator, Cicero, said, “There are two kinds of injustice: the first is found in those who do an injury, the second in those who fail to protect another from injury when they can.”

An ancient Egyptian said, “To take no notice of a violent attack is to strengthen the heart of an enemy. Vigor is valiant, but cowardice is vile.” An Anglo-Saxon writer wrote, “Courage has got to be harder, heart the stouter, spirit the sterner, as our strength weakens. Here lies our lord, cut to pieces, our best man in the dust. If anyone thinks of leaving this battle, he can howl forever.”

The Roman, Seneca, said, “Praise and imitate that man to whom, while life is pleasing, death is not grievous.” Confucius said, “‘The Master said, Love learning and if attacked be ready to die for the good way.’”

The theme common to those quotations is the duty to risk one’s well-being for a good cause. It is striking that they also come from different places on earth and different times. How did disparate cultures, existing apart from each other in space and time, find unity of moral sentiment about courage and cowardice?

The Apostle Paul put us on the right track to an answer when he spoke to an adoring but fickle mob of Pagans on his first missionary journey to Asia. He had said to a man crippled from birth, “Stand up on your feet!” God had healed the man, and he had begun to walk. The crowd began to adore Paul and Barnabas as gods. To stop them Paul said this:

“Men, why are you doing this? We too are only men, human like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them. In the past, he let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy” (Acts 14:15-17).

The key phrase in verse 17 says, “In the past, he (God) let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony.” As part of that testimony, could it be that at creation God wrote into the human heart a uniform moral sense that shows itself at all times and in all cultures? The evidence I shared earlier suggests that He did. There are hundreds more examples like the ones I read.

The Apostle Paul actually went further. Look with me at two astonishing verses in Romans 2:14-15. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the (Old Testament) law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)

Paul said the human heart has a uniform moral sense that shows itself at all times and in all cultures. Even the pagan world had an awareness of the same morality, which the chosen people, Israel, had received by divine revelation.

The important question revolves around that line in verse 15 that says, the requirements of the law are written on their hearts. The question is: who wrote them there? The answer goes back to Paul’s statement in Acts 14:17. “Yet he has not left himself without testimony.” God, our Creator, wrote them there. This remarkable uniformity of conscience that unites humanity is one way we participate in the mind of God, and by which He governs all of human life.

Theologians call this phenomenon Natural Law doctrine or the Law of Human Nature. Jesus captured the heart and soul of thousands of ways in which the Law of Human Nature is expressed from culture to culture and from age to age. He said, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Everyone measures and is measured by the Golden Rule.

You will point out of course that humanity has denied and does deny, has neglected and does neglect, has distorted and does distort the Law of Human Nature. That’s what makes the study of evil necessary though unpleasant. We use our God-given freedom to prefer ourselves over the One who made us in His image. That self-preference contradicts the Law of Human Nature and can lead to horrendous evil. Until it is dealt with, the union between God and man in covenant love must wait.

Eternity in the Heart of Man
Now, the Law of Human Nature is not the only testimony to Himself that God has left in the human heart. If what we just considered is the moral testimony, the one I want us to think about next is the spiritual testimony. Man seems to be incurably spiritual. What do we make of our hunger for the spiritual? Are we on to something, or is this hankering after gods and angels and the mysterious an illusion? Atheistic humanism has tried to convince people (not very successfully) that it is an illusion. No one tried to do that more persuasively than Sigmund Freud.

Freud said, “Religious ideas, which are given out as teachings ... are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of these wishes” (quoted in Armand Nicholi, The Question of God, 41). All religion is nothing more than wishful thinking. Freud’s ideas found a ready audience.

But let’s turn Freud’s statement around and use it against him. Why is his atheism not wish fulfillment? The wish to be free of ultimate accountability can also be very strong. The wish to live one’s life without regard for the moral sense that everyone experiences is most appealing at certain moments to many of us.

So, we have as much cause to suspect Freud of wish fulfillment as he does to suspect us. Maybe it’s Freud and his company of atheists who are deluded. God have mercy on them.

Suppose our hunger for spirituality is not an illusion but evidence of God’s presence in our being. Christians go further and say that God is not only present in our being; He is in pursuit of our being. The hunger for spirituality we cannot escape is God’s image in us, causing us to hunger for Him until He and nothing else satisfies this permanent hunger of our hearts. This universal longing for God is another way we participate in the mind of God.

Isn’t that what Paul meant, when he said to ancient Athenians, From one man he (God) made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’” (Acts 17:26-28).

Another haunting verse from Ecclesiastes 3:11 makes a similar claim about God’s creation of human spirituality. It says, He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

You will point out of course that humanity has grotesquely distorted these longings for spirituality and immortality. That’s what makes the study of evil necessary though unpleasant. We use our God-given freedom to prefer ourselves to the One who made us in His image. That self-preference has led to idolatries of all kinds.

Man has exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Created things, which point us to our Creator, have become objects of our longings for immortality. But, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.”

God “has not left himself without testimony,” said the apostle. He has left in the human heart both a moral testimony and a spiritual testimony. He has also left the testimony of reason. This is closely related to the human act of subduing creation, which is our theme for next Sunday. So, I’d like to wait and present it in that context.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Several years ago, I saw the movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. It tells the story of a young scientist (Ellie Arroway, played by Foster), who finds extra-terrestrial life. What riveted me was the statement at the end of the movie by the late Cornell astronomer, Carl Sagan, supporting the search for extra-terrestrial life. In fact, the movie was based on Sagan’s book by the same name.

This is the Carl Sagan, who inspired the acclaimed PBS series, Cosmos. At the beginning of that series, with a crashing surf in the background, Sagan declared ex cathedra, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” It was the traditional atheism of another brilliant scientist, using his access to the public to insinuate personal opinions about faith, as if they had scientific proof.

I find Professor Sagan’s search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) a symptom of what happens when the spiritual testimony in a person’s heart is turned away from its Creator. It tries to find something else to treat as transcendent.

Ray Bohlin, president of Probe ministries in Richardson, TX, has made some interesting observations about Sagan’s book and the movie. He says that when Ellie meets an extra-terrestrial, “she arrives at a large docking space station. She is somehow transported to a beach, resembling a picture of Pensacola, Florida she drew as a child. Eventually, a figure approaches. It is her father. The alien appears to her in the form of her father. He tells her that they thought this would make it easier for her.

“It’s fascinating that Sagan often complains that if God exists, why doesn't he make himself plain? Why not a cross in the sky or a mathematical formula in the Bible? Why is everything so obscure? ... Isn’t it interesting,” asks Bohlin, “that ... in Sagan's own story, when a superior intelligence wants to make contact with us, they put us in familiar surroundings, take on our form, and speak our language?! If they appeared to us in their true form, we would be repulsed. Isn’t that precisely what the Father did for us in sending Jesus to live among us? It appears that Carl Sagan has unwittingly answered his own objection” (www.probe.org/docs/contact.html).

So powerful is the moral and spiritual testimony to Himself that God chiseled into the human heart that Sagan, who denied the God of the gospel, testified inadvertently to the truth of the gospel. C. S. Lewis captured the irony: “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful. . . . There are traps everywhere . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous” (Surprised by Joy, 191).

What Lewis meant in his playful comment, Augustine said with elegance. “For thou hast created us for thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted till it may find repose in thee” (Confessions, 3). Our sense of fair play and our longing for the transcendent go down into the structure of our humanity like electrons into the structure of matter.

David B. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, recently wrote this: “What we call the ‘culture war’ is, after all, only one outward manifestation of a spiritual war that is being waged at all times and in all places, but whose first battleground is the heart” (First Things, June/July 2004, 41). There in the heart of man God created an irreducible witness to Himself. Christians recognize this witness for what it is, fall at the feet of Christ and carry forward the union of God and man by confessing, “My Lord and My God!”