At the heart of the Christian life and world view is a concept of God by which essential to Christianity is the idea that God is triune, and how you understand God is the most crucial ingredient and element of how you understand man and how you understand the world. As Christians, we must interpret all of life, including personal suffering and national calamity, by the truth that God is sovereign over all. Welcome to this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Dave Terrio. This week we'll discover that God's rule is not overthrown by our suffering, by chaos, or even whatever calamity is happening in the world.
In fact, Dr. R.C. Sproul will remind us that in the midst of it all, God is working out His plan, and we can trust Him. If you are a regular supporter of this program, thank you. The generosity of friends like you enables Legionnaire Ministries to bring the daily Bible teaching of Renewing Your Mind to people in more than 180 countries around the world.
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Now, here's Dr. Sproul with the first message titled "A War of Ideas" from his series "When Worlds Collide." At this very moment, as I am speaking, the United States of America is at war.
Now, it's very possible that when you hear this series of lectures or view them on television, That by that time, the war will be over, and I certainly hope that that will be the case. But we have been told by the president of the United States in these days that we should anticipate a long and protracted effort. As we are engaged in an unusual kind of warfare, we've been told over and over that the United States is not involved in a conventional war against a particular nation, or against a particular ethnic group, nor against a particular religion and the adherents of such a religion. But rather, this has been defined as a war. On terrorism.
Now, the question I want to address in our first session today is: What is it that causes wars such as these? To begin, we look over past history, and the historians will say, World War One was caused by the assassination of an archduke in the Balkans. World War Two, at least the United States' involvement in it, was provoked by a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. We can go back even earlier in our own history to the artillery attack on Fort Sumter, which provoked the conflict that we call the Civil War. And even before that, we can go back to the shot heard round the world, fired by a patriot minuteman in the state of Massachusetts, provoking.
The Revolutionary War, but this war, of course, was provoked externally, at least, by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. But here, the historian is focusing attention on the historical provocations, the physical causes. For the war, but where wars really begin, ladies and gentlemen, is in the mind. Physical war is a direct consequence of conflict that begins in the mind—a conflict of ideas. Many wars have been fought because people differed radically on what form of government they should have, how that government should be structured, how that government should function.
So that political ideology produced actual physical conflict. There have been other occasions where war has been provoked. By how economic considerations take place, how commercial activity is to be handled, or how religious expressions are to be maintained, or in some cases suppressed. We are certainly aware that in the 20th century, that reached a point of two billion people who were imprisoned behind what Winston Churchill described as an iron curtain. There, ultimately, as the result of the philosophical reflections of Karl Marx, so that these conflicts begin.
With ideas in the mind.
Now, when we talk about the conflict of ideas, what we're talking about here is a collision between worldviews. And when we use that term worldview, we're describing how people understand their position, their significance, their meaning, their place on this planet.
Sometimes referred to it as a life and worldview. Where basically there are three ingredients that make up one's life view. There's the understanding of God. There's the understanding of man, and there's the understanding of the earth or the world. Which incorporates within it an understanding of the relationship between God and man, and between man and this world, and between this world and God.
These are the different ways that we understand our lives on this planet.
Now, since The attack on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington. There has been much public discussion about the role of God in our lives, and we have seen an unprecedented response of the American people to prayer and public worship. We'll talk more about the significance of that in the second address, when we look at our contemporary understanding of the providence of God and how God's sovereignty extends over the everyday matters of human life, but. While we've seen this tremendous expression of concern, renewed concern for God and people flocking together for worship services, we've also seen, on the downside, a manifestation of American syncretism. American syncretism is that principle by which it is assumed that though people have different religions and different religious backgrounds, that in the United States people are guaranteed through the First Amendment the free exercise of religion.
And we take pride in this freedom of religion in our country, that teaches and describes the principle that all religions have equal protection under the law. That the civil law of the United States of America grants religious freedom to Buddhists, to Hindus, to Muslims, to Jews, to Christians, to Protestants, Catholics, people of all different religious persuasions, and in the wake of that guarantee of religious freedom. Has come the idea that's deeply rooted in the American culture, that because all religions are equal in terms of their protection under the law, that therefore all religions, in the final analysis, are equally valid. We have seen several community. Worship services that have featured representatives from Catholicism, from Protestantism, from Islam, from Judaism, and a host of different religions.
And the news commentators tell us over and over again how wonderful it is that people from all these different religious groups come together to pray for God's mercy on our nation. And after all, we all believe in the same God. And though we are praying and carrying out our religious activities in slightly different forms and come from different traditions, at the bottom, at the root, we all basically are praying to the same God and believe the same thing.
Now that's one of the consequences of American public religion. But if one is a serious student at all of world religions, even a cursory glance at the content of world religions will display that there are radical differences among the various religions. I saw a talk show recently that featured a discussion between a Protestant Christian and a Jewish rabbi, and in that discussion, the moderator was saying that the two views at the bottom, at the end of the day, both believe in basically the same thing. And I thought, now that's a strange thing. It certainly keeps peace and preserves American unity.
But is there no difference between an affirmation of Jesus of Nazareth as the long promised and awaited Messiah of Israel? Is it possible that Jesus could be at the same time the true Messiah and Redeemer of His people? And not the Messiah, but a false teacher and pretender to that messianic vocation. Those positions cannot possibly both be true. They cannot possibly be reconciled one with another.
The only way we can say that Judaism and Christianity, at root, are the same is if we completely ignore. The central position of Jesus to the Christian faith, where the first affirmation of Christianity is the affirmation that Jesus is the Christ. But you see, that is a distinction that distinguishes two great religions, and it is a real difference. But what about the idea that we all believe in the same God? Again, if you study the Christian concept of God and put it next, for example, to the Buddhist concept of God, you will see a radical difference in their understanding of theology.
If you place the Christian concept of God vis-a-vis the doctrine of the Islamic notion of Allah, You will see that the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ has very little in common with the Islamic concept of Allah. But what about Judaism and Christianity, who both come from the Bible?
So certainly they worship the same God. No, they don't. This was indeed the dispute that Jesus had with the Jewish authorities of his own day. Ladies and gentlemen, again, at the heart of the Christian life and world view is a concept of God by which essential to Christianity is the idea that God is triune. And if there's anything, the classical Judaism categorically rejects it is any idea of Trinity.
So how could a thinking person say that we worship the same God when, in fact, our understanding of God is on a collision course? And how you understand God is the most crucial ingredient and element of how you understand man and how you understand the world.
So what I'm saying is the most significant element to the construction of a life and worldview is your understanding of the nature of God.
Now again, let me repeat this because what I'm saying swims against the strong tide of public opinion. What I'm saying here is radically politically incorrect. Because American civil religion teaches, as its central axiom, that all religions are the same and that everybody's worshiping the same God, and what Christianity is saying, no, we do not worship the same God. There is a radical difference among the various competing views of religion.
Now, step back for a moment to the pages of the Old Testament. Consider the experience of the people of Israel, who entered into a special covenant relationship to their God Yahweh, who embraced monotheism, and yet wherever they were engaged with their neighbors, they were constantly being involved in this problem of syncretism. That is, where they would borrow elements. From the pagan religions that surrounded them, and in so doing, they were violating the first commandment that God gave to Israel through Moses. Which first commandment said, "What?
Thou shalt have no other gods." Before me now, nothing is more un-American than to have an exclusive understanding of God. And yet, nothing is more fundamental than the biblical concept of monotheism than the exclusivity of the God of heaven and earth. Can you imagine the prophet Elijah? Engaging in a contest with the priests of Baal, and after that great contest at Mount Carmel, giving an interview to the media who were there watching this contest between the priests of Baal and Elijah representing the nation of Israel, and Elijah speaking into a microphone, saying, "Well, you know, at the end of the day." I and the prophets of Baal really are worshiping the same God. We really believe in the same, and we do it differently.
Our religious activity is not the same. There are elements in the religion of Baal that different from the elements of the religion. Of Israel, and certainly the God of Israel doesn't mind. In fact, He's honored when we celebrate our unity of religion. Can you imagine anything more foreign to the teaching of sacred scripture than that?
In fact, it has been said by biblical scholars. That the greatest weakness that led to the destruction of the Jewish nation in the Old Testament was not a military weakness, but a theological weakness. Again, what got the people of Israel in trouble with God over and over and over again was their blending and mixing the faith that God had delivered. With pagan religions, indeed, if we look at the book of Romans that Paul wrote in the very first chapter, we see that the primordial sin that defines all subsequent human sin is the human penchant for idolatry, for distorting the concept of God, and that is true not only in pagan religion. But Christians can be guilty of idolatry when they distort the biblical revelation of the character of God.
So we cannot assume at the outset of the construction of a life and world view that everybody believes in the same God, because they don't. In fact, there are few, according to the scriptures, that have a sound and biblical understanding. Of the character of God, and my question for me is not does everybody else in the world follow the true God, but do I? Am I consistent in my thinking and in my living with the God who is?
Well, again, as I said, how we understand God has a profound impact on how we understand ourselves. If it's true, as Judeo Christianity asserts, that we are created in the image of God, if we have an incorrect understanding of the archetype, we will consequently misunderstand and distort the type that is based upon it. And so, if we don't know who God is, how can we know what it means to be in His image? And one of the things that I'm grateful for is a consequence of the tragedy that has befallen the United States in the radical attack against our culture is what I'm seeing on television. As I stated the very first day of this tragedy on September 11th, the year 2001, when I watched.
Those buildings implode. I said, right there, marks in American history the end of moral relativism. This is a death blow to relativism because the response of Americans and the response of people all over the world, after looking at this heinous attack on human life, the response is this: This is evil, and everybody knows it. Just recently, I saw that same affirmation made by a national news service, where they put a headline bulletin on the screen during the newscast, saying, "The end of moral relativism." So I hope people will remember that, because you can't have such a shocking encounter of pure evil and walk away saying, "Well, it's a relative thing." Here you see the absolute wickedness of this kind of assault on human life. But in addition to that assault, we also saw, with the implosion of those buildings, the practical end of macroevolution as a defining theory for the human species.
Who really believes that man is a grown-up germ? Who really believes anymore that we are nothing but cosmic accidents emerging fortuitously from the slime and destined to annihilation? If you really believe that. When you see pictures of thousands of people destroyed by an act of violence and terrorism, it should make you yawn, because the destruction of grown-up germs, who have no eternal significance, in the final analysis, is no more important than going out into your yard and using a cherry bomb to blow up. An ant hill filled with fire ants, but every human being in America knows that he's not a fire ant.
Every person on this planet knows that he is not a germ. We all know that human life is sacred and that human life is meaningful, which it could not be. If there were no purpose for human existence, and beloved, we all know what Dostoevsky understood—that if God does not exist, then there is no purpose to human existence. That we would be, as Jean Paul Sartre said, nothing more than a useless passion, if God does not exist. But if you understand the existence of God and you relate the existence of human beings to that existence of God in your life and worldview, then you know that every human life is sacred, and you know that it matters, and it matters ultimately.
If you are running around blowing up people, like were murdered in the World Trade Center. In New York, finally. The third principle of the worldview is how God relates to this planet. That is, how is God related to nature? In our age, we have a tendency to view nature as functioning independent from any.
Government of God. If anything has disappeared from our vocabulary until such tragedies as these occur, it is the concept of divine providence, because Christianity affirms that in God we live, we move, we have our being. Nothing can move, nothing can live, nothing can be apart from the power of God. If you remove that understanding of God from the equation, then you see a universe that operates according to its own internal fixed laws, and the scientist replaces the priest as the mediator of human existence and of human meaning. And so, your understanding of God.
Your understanding of humanity inevitably results in your understanding of nature itself. To imagine science as the mediator of human meaning is a depressing thought, and yet there are many people who live under the dark cloud of that worldview every day, aren't there? Thankfully, we serve a living God who loves us and guides our steps. Christians live coram Deo before the face of God because God is sovereign over all. Before we wrap up today's program, I want to invite you to join us at Reformation Bible College this January for the 2027 Winter Conference, as we explore the cross of Christ.
Hear speakers like Kevin DeYoung, Derek Thomas, and others as they reflect on the person and work of Christ. The early bird rate for this conference ends soon, so be sure to register today and save at reformationbiblecollege.org/winter. When tragedy befalls a nation, people sometimes begin to ask, "Where was God?" Tuesday, join Dr. R.C. Sproul as he helps us understand God's control over all things and the comfort that brings to His people, even in life's darkest moments.
Here, on Renewing Your Mind.
