Food for Thought

Graeme and I are reading Standing on the Rock right now by James Montgomery Boice. I highly recommend it.

An excerpt:

"If there are no absolutes-no final truth as to where we are coming from, who has made us, what we are doing here, or what lies ahead-then ultimately our existence here has no meaning. If there are no absolutes, there are no absolutes for us. We are here, and that is fine. We will die, and that is also fine. Nobody will be the poorer for our loss.
We see this truth expressed in the realm of words. If there are no absolutes then words or what they stand for are not absolutes either, so ultimately words are meaningless.
Some years ago there was a seminary class in which one of the professors was expounding a relativistic view of truth. He was insisting that language has no absolute meaning. "It means what it means to you, but what it means to you is not necessarily what it means to me." He said that we can never communicate in any absolute sense.
The students were arguing with the professor because, to their 'untutored' minds, this did not seem to make sense. One said, "That is not right! It is true that sometimes language is ambiguous. That is why we write dictionaries and word books to explain what we mean. That is why we teach and argue points. We go back and forth to try to understand where the other person is coming from. But it is not true that language is always ambiguous, and the less ambiguous it is, the better."
Another continued, "For example, if you look out the window and see an airplane in the sky and say, 'Look , an airplane!' everybody looks up. Why do they do that? It is because the word 'airplane' carries some objective content. It is not an empty term."
The professor did not agree. He kept pressing his point. So, finally, one of the students said, "You know, if language is meaningless, then the language we are speaking here is meaningless. And if the language we are speaking here is meaningless, our being here is meaningless."
Then another student asked, "Well, if this is meaningless what are we going to do with the rest of the hour?"
A third student said, "Let's play squash." So the class got up, went out the door and left the professor alone in the classroom with his theory.

That same illustration can be applied to the churches. If we do not have a sure word from God with objective content, then what we are doing in our churches is as meaningless as what that professor was doing in his classroom. If that is true, the most rational thing a congregation can do is get up and walk out. This is just what congregations are doing in many liberal churches. They are showing with their feet that modern theology has no meaning.
You need a place to stand as a Christian, and you have it in the Bible. The Bible speaks in absolute terms: “Thus says the Lord.” In these terms the Bible teaches about God, who brought everything into existence; about ourselves as his creatures-who we are, what we have become, and what we can be; about Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation; about a hell to be avoided and a heaven to be won.

We do not have a strong church in America today, though numerically we may appear relatively strong. Strength does not come from numbers. Strength comes from quality of character, and what is most lacking in our churches is character formed by the knowledge of God. If God is not known as the sovereign, holy, omniscient, and unchangeable God the Bible declares him to be, then he cannot care for us, guide us or protect us. We cannot be strong in adverse circumstances."