Monday, September 10, 2018

The Foul Dust of Autonomy

JUDGES 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
This is the last line of Judges and it is so sad!
Indeed we see in our culture the ruin and fragility associated with doing what you want to, when you want to… without any allegiance to authority.
America was founded on rugged individualism. Even the revolutionary spirit was born out of the desire to throw off the British monarch.
But freedom without boundaries is pure chaos- our founding fathers knew that. That is why they drafted a constitution with a balance of powers and the rule of law.
Imagine what kind of productivity and civility we would have if all the red lights went out at rush hour!
Freedom from God means you become God… and if everyone becomes God.. who is right?
Friedrich Nietzsche understood what it meant to throw off God and become God…. he penned it in a parable called ‘The Madman’.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”
[Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]
 Why do we do what we do? Do we ever not do something because we know God does not allow or approve? Do we ever feel the holy pressure to do right even if we don’t feel like it?
 Do you just do what you want to do and say, “Oh well, I am a sinner…God will forgive me.”?
 There are atheists for sure… men who have long forsaken any hope of God being there.
 But there are practical atheists as well… men who say God is there, but live life like there is no God.

Is there any real difference in the two?

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