Topical Studies
What the Bible says about
Secularism
(From Forerunner Commentary)
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The King James Version's and the New King James Version'swording is a bit awkward for our modern ears unless we carefully follow Paul's line of thought from the beginning of the chapter. Isaiah, whom Paul quotes, is saying the faith exists when people hear the message, believe it, and then obey it. Three modern versions help to clarify this: The Revised English Bible: "So then faith does come from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ." This helps to show that this verse is a concluding statement, an appeal to believe the facts and the logical reasoning that preceded it. The New Testament in Modern English, better known as the "Phillips' Translation": "Belief, you see, can only come from hearing the message, and the message is the word of Christ." (Emphasis ours throughout.) Moffat: "You see, faith must come from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the word of Christ." Biblical faith, a very specific faith, comes from a person knowing, believing, and using what God says in His Word strongly enough to make it a constant part of his life. Of concern to this faith is where is the information that is entering our minds and guiding our conduct coming from? Never has mankind lived in a time when powerful and frequent communication is so easily available and seemingly limitless in quantity. Radio, television, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPads, etc., pound our eyes and ears almost incessantly. Perhaps the most powerful influence is the general attitude of the people and the events in which our lives are immersed within the culture. Few people in the world seriously care any longer about what God says in His Word. This can subtly and silently affect our attitudes and conduct in daily life. Are we living our lives by the faith? Those who have some respect for God are overwhelmed in our culture's civic life, thus public reference to God has been removed from schools, courts, universities, and governments. The secularism of mankind dominates. The result is abortion, homosexuality, lesbianism, and same-sex marriage as acceptable practices. Thus, it may appear even to those who do care as though Satan has overwhelmed God and is dominating life on earth. We must understand that those not living by the faith set the world's spirit, fashions, novels, movie themes, and music in this culture. We must resist being drawn in.
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1 Kings 12:25-33
I Kings 12:25-33 records the beginning of the Kingdom of Israel's apostasy. Fearing that he might eventually lose political control over the ten tribes because of their long-standing religious ties to Jerusalem, capital of the Kingdom of Judah (verse 27), Jeroboam I instituted a state religion designed to meet his peoples' needs for convenience - and his own need for power. He built two shrines, one in Bethel, at the southern extremity of his kingdom, the other in Dan, near its northern boundary (verse 29). If not de jure, at least de facto, he exiled the Levites, the priestly tribe established by God, and installed in their place a priesthood of his own devising (verse 31). Finally, he moved the fall holy day season from the seventh month to the eighth, thereby effectively setting aside the Sabbath commandment, since the holy days are God's Sabbaths (see Leviticus 23:1-3, 23-44). All this "became a sin" for Israel (I Kings 12:30). Jeroboam's apostasy, his movement to false religious practices, took deep root. In fact, the house of Israel never departed from the practices he established. II Kings 17:21-23 records this fact: Jeroboam drove Israel from following the LORD, and made them commit a great sin. For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they did not depart from them, until the LORD removed Israel out of His sight. . . . Having abandoned the Sabbath, the God-given sign marking them as His people (Exodus 31:13-17), the folk of the northern tribes eventually lost their identification. That is why most Israelites do not know who they are to this day. The forefathers forsook the sign that denoted their connection to God. Take this line of thought to its logical conclusion: The Sabbath is a memorial to creation and, by extension, to the Creator God (see Exodus 20:11). Modern-day Israelites do not know who they are today because their forefathers, generations ago, abandoned this memorial to the Creator God. Therefore, modern-day Israelites have come to abandon more than the sign: They have abandoned the God to whom the sign points. They no longer know God. This is not an overstatement. Make no mistake: Failure to recognize who Israel is today is failure to recognize the God who made Israel! The distressing secularism running rampant in the modern nations of Israel today has its roots in Sabbath-breaking. The antidote for secularism in America is not an inane Constitutional amendment requiring the teaching of creationism in the state schools. The panacea some offer, prayer in the public schools, will not do the trick. Increased Sunday church attendance will not stanch the flood of secularism; after all, most Sunday worshippers accept the doctrines of biologic and economic determinism (i.e., evolution and socialism, respectively) just as avowed atheists do. Attempting to unite a people with its God through these measures is surely akin to building a wall with "untempered mortar" (see Ezekiel 13:9-23). In the coming storm, such a wall will fall. However, one will never find a Sabbath-keeper who is a secularist, for the Sabbath-keeper has maintained his link with the Creator God. Sabbath-keeping and secularism mix about as well as oil and water.
Charles Whitaker
Searching for Israel (Part Twelve): The Sign
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Isaiah 2:6-9
Portrayed here is an entire nation devoted to getting, much like our modern world. The American motto seems to be, "The chief end of man is to glorify prosperity and enjoy it forever." We worship—we serve—what we make. Another facet of this is that potential fruits of material success are self-confidence and pride, which to the successful mind subtly makes God unnecessary. But since all men must have a god, and a righteous God asks awkward questions as to how the success was attained, such people turn to a more amenable god. They worship their own success, secularism, the confidence of men in their own powers. The quest for material wealth thus produces a powerful need to assimilate to the world.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Tenth Commandment
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Amos 4:6-13
In the book of Amos, God shows that He uses "natural" disasters to teach people lessons, to bring them to repentance, to correct their ways. In this passage, He also admits that most people fail to make the connection between the disaster and their sins. Secular Americans snicker at insurance policies that refer to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and other natural disasters as "acts of God," when they, in their scientific arrogance, prefer to call them "acts of nature" or "weather events." Even those who are moderately religious, like the Deists of the Enlightenment, do not believe that God is active in earth's events, whether natural or human. To them, He may be watching, but He certainly is not involved in human affairs. This points out how utterly blind to God most people are, even Christians. For starters, because they are not looking for God's hand of intervention in their lives, they are certainly not going to see it. Having become so secular and scientific in their outlook, the miraculous is totally off their radar. They consider those who report of miracles to be medieval in their thinking and the miracles themselves to be mere coincidences of natural phenomena or overstatements of what actually occurred. To them, miracles are impossible because, by definition, they are unverifiable by scientific methods and therefore do not and never have happened. Today's thoroughly modern Christian does not derive this negative view of God's intervention from His Book. In the Bible, divine involvement in human affairs occurs from cover to cover—in fact, it is the central fact of human existence, which the Bible takes great pains to reveal. At every critical point in man's history, God has been involved. At Creation, before and after the Flood, at the dispersal of the nations from Babel, in the history of Israel, among the great empires of ancient history from Egypt to Rome—God was instrumental. God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, came to this earth and lived among us, bringing us the good news of His Kingdom and dying for our salvation. Then He sent His apostles to the four corners of the globe to spread the word among those He would call. That sounds as if God is active and involved in human affairs. As Creator, He certainly has power over the various elements of His creation. Manipulating the weather is like child's play to Him. He can send rain or drought anywhere, anytime. He flooded the entire earth to a depth greater than the height of the tallest mountain of the time, so flashfloods, coastal floods, and river floods are easy. Spinning tornadoes is like breathing to Him, and earthquakes rumble and tumble at His command. The Bible makes many claims about His power over the elements (Job 26:7-12; Psalm 147:15-18; Nahum 1:3-6; etc.). Jesus Himself calmed the storm with a word (Matthew 8:24-26). He also says that in His Millennial Kingdom, He will send drought on areas that refuse to keep His feasts (Zechariah 14:16-19). Are we to assume that, for some reason, He does not punish for sin now?
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Divine Intervention
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Romans 3:20
Together, Romans 3:20 and Romans 4:15 produce a general principle that covers, not just biblical morality, but also secular. Laws reveal to us our religious and/or civic duties. In reference to God, law awakens us to a consciousness of sin. Through God's laws we become aware of the contrast between what we do and what we ought to do. By enacting laws, our legislators tell us what is moral, right, and good in secular areas of life, but instead of calling a transgression of the state's laws "sin," we call it "crime." In many cases, crimes are also sins. The difference between secular law and God's law is that the latter contains clear moral values and reveals our duties toward the Creator God. Where do people get their ideas regarding what is moral? We must conclude that religion, law, the state, and morality are each parts of the same family. Thus, every system of law is a system of ethics and morality. Since law establishes standards of conduct, those standards are the establishment of religion, a way of life we are to be devoted to following. Therefore, in truth, there can be no absolute separation of church and state. This point escapes most Americans, but not every American. For instance, some journalists have clearly identified communism as a religion. In such a system, the government is the god. At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans made no bones about this principle, declaring and demanding under the penalty of death that Caesar be worshipped as a god. This is part of the "divine right of kings" principle. Beware, because this idea is about to be reborn: Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence, and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. (Revelation 13:11-12) When the Beast arises, he will be accorded this honor that belongs only to God. In the Western world, a new religion is rising. It is not really new, but it has a fairly new name: secularism. It is a type of idolatry, one that has been increasingly challenging this world's Christianity over the past century, and it is gaining ever more strength in numbers and devotion here in America. The war between it and this world's Christianity is virtually over—with Christianity rapidly becoming irrelevant. Persecution in the courts is already an established fact, and outright persecution on the streets cannot be very many years away.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The First Commandment
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1 John 4:8
The word "tolerance" makes not even one appearance in the King James or the American Standard versions of the Bible. Why? Because, before 1960, translators could find no place that it fit. It was not until the New International Version and the New American Standard Version made their appearances that "tolerance" also made its first appearance, and even then, in less than five places. Why? Because the older versions used terms better suited to those narrow contexts: "forbearance," "endurance," "patience," and "long-suffering." Tolerance has several common usages in our time: "the capacity to endure hardship or pain"; "the endurance of the presence or actions of objectionable persons, or the expression of offensive opinions"; and "the capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others." By themselves, none of these are objectionable to a Christian. The problems lie in the modern twist given to it by those who frequently use it in advocacy. Revelation 18:4 challenges us to come out of the world, a most difficult task because we live our lives physically immersed in the world. No matter which way we turn in the activities of life—whether in employment, entertainment, schooling, government, and religion—we are confronted by the world's conduct, attitudes, beliefs, and programs for actively maintaining its cultures. In every level of society in this multicultural world, a Christian meets tremendous diversity head-on. Indeed, in every culture and every aspect of society, the Christian's loyalty in exercising his faith in the laws and principles of God's way of life is being challenged, for God's way touches on every facet of life. Simultaneously, most of this world's beliefs and practices are anti-Christ. The world's religions are clearly anti-Christ, but concepts and practices drawn from false religions permeate this world's governments, education, entertainment, and employment. Virtually every day we see clear examples in the news of an energetic movement to remove every concept of the Christian God and His commandments from government, schooling, and entertainment. Yet, what is replacing Him? He is being replaced by the god of secularism—by man himself. Secularism is a religion people practice, accept, and adhere to, even though it has no formal congregations or places of worship. The same is true of evolution, which is in reality nothing more than random and blind chance, yet this false god dominates academia, especially the sciences. Much of the modern environmental movement is a New-Age-driven worship of Gaia, the so-called earth goddess. Here, the modern twist in the usage of tolerance has a strong influence. In the minds of many, tolerance is acceptance on an equal level, not merely forbearance or putting up with something. If one does not accept this worldly standard, he is then accused of lacking love. Can a Christian honestly tolerate, that is, accept outright, paganism as being equal with the God of creation and His moral and spiritual absolutes? Can a Christian wholeheartedly accept the writings of Buddha, Mohammed, or anybody else under the influence of a demon as being on an equal level with the Holy Bible? God's own Word will clarify this. I John 4:8 reads, "He who does not love does not know God, for God is love." No single word describes the character of the God of creation any better than "love." In Deuteronomy 7:2-6, as the Israelites were about to enter their inheritance, He commands them: And when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the LORD will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly. But thus you shall deal with them: you shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire. For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The same Person who became Jesus of Nazareth and out of love died for the sins of the world gave these commands. The Bible says, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). In His command, He does not tolerate evil in the least. Instead, in telling them to destroy evil, He expresses His overwhelming love for His people. Do not be tricked into accepting this modern tolerance of sugar-coated, sinful paganism. We must not tolerate such concepts in our lives.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Tolerance and Love
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