A Funeral For God – 1 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We're in a spiritual battle. Behind the destruction we see around us are invisible forces bringing darkness, a darkness bent on destroying any light that threatens to expose it. Those are the words of Erwin Lutzer. Today we begin a crucial new series on the eclipse of God. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, why have you titled your first message, A Funeral for God? Well Dave, what I've tried to do is to show why darkness has come upon the land. And of course, when I speak of the funeral for God, I'm actually talking about Nietzsche.

He died in the year 1900. He proclaimed a funeral for God. He had someone go through the cathedrals of Europe saying that the cathedrals of Europe are now the tombs of God. So it's my intention to help people to understand the darkness. Because the darkness of Europe, those shadows have come to the United States. And we today, in our country, are experiencing an eclipse of God. And I talk about the implications and what we should do about it. For a gift of any amount, we're making this new resource available for you. Here's what you do.

Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. The eclipse of God. Now tonight, I'm going to be speaking on a topic that you have probably never heard a sermon about before.

It is entitled, A Funeral for God. This is part of a series of messages on the eclipse of God and all of the implications of the darkness that results. And right now, what I would like to do is to refer to Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, who at the end of the 1800s proclaimed the death of God. What he said is, God is dead. And he wrote in vivid terms about the demise of God, do we not hear the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrification? For even gods putrify. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we console ourselves, the most murderers of all murderers? Who will wipe the blood from our hands?

Wow. Why did Nietzsche proclaim the death of God at the end of the 1800s? And who are these gravediggers that he refers to? Now he doesn't exactly tell us, but I think we pretty well know who those gravediggers were. And what I'm going to do tonight is to tell you about three gravediggers and the implications. Then we're going to turn to the scriptures and find out what God thinks of all of this.

That's the agenda. The first person I'd like to introduce you to is one that you've heard a great deal about and possibly you may know a great deal about him. And that is Karl Marx. Marx grew up in the Rhineland of Germany. He was Jewish. His parents were Jewish.

His father apparently converted to Lutheranism for various reasons of convenience. And Marx, as you know, looked about and saw that the proletariat were being exploited by the bourgeoisie as you have the industrial revolution. And he decided that if private property were taken away from everyone and if the state owned everything, finally there could be the end of oppression and there would be equality throughout the country. Now in order to do that, he believed that God had to be destroyed. That is to say belief in God had to be destroyed.

Why? Because after all, the family also had to be destroyed because men oppressed their wives, women oppressed their children and parents oppressed their children and they took them to church and God was the ultimate oppressor. So Marx taught that God did not create man. Man created God and it was a fantasy that had to be destroyed and the state had to take the place of God.

In fact, in one quote, he said, it is the state that is going to give us this day our daily bread. So what he did is he of course wrote the communist manifesto and other documents in which he showed or believed that he would show that if we could get rid of oppression, human nature is good. Human nature doesn't do anything evil. It only does evil because of oppressors.

They are the ones who cause people to commit crimes. Take away the oppression and all criminality will end. As a matter of fact, when the state owns everything according to Marx, at that point you won't even need laws.

There will be no need for the police. Forget defunding them. They don't have to exist and so Marx had his particular philosophy that was believed and of course the implications are absolutely huge. Marx attacked the rulership of God and all too briefly I've simply introduced you to him and now we're going to go to another gravedigger and this gravedigger actually attacks God as creator and that of course is Darwin. Darwin also lived in the 1800s and he concluded that life originated.

He talked about a warm pond somewhere someplace. Life originated and then it developed. The most important thing that we can learn about Darwin I think is when he proclaimed that the baboon is our grandfather and he said the reason that we sometimes do evil is it is what is left over of the evolutionary cycle and that is that the baboon of course still has a sinful nature or a nature of some sort that is bad at times and we still have inherited that. But the baboon is our grandfather as the monkeys sit in the zoo. Am I my keeper's brother?

Am I going too fast for some of you? Now folks if evolution is correct you have a certain number of implications. One of those implications is eugenics. Eugenics, why? Because the whole idea is out of this came the survival of the fittest and why not help nature along and help those who are the best and those who are going to survive and do away with those that are inferior. As a matter of fact he talked about some tribes having a doubtful species. Hitler picked that up.

Now there are those who say well Hitler could not have been influenced by Darwin because the origin of species and other books were not translated into German but listen Hitler had his cronies who were reading English and if you read the fourth chapter of Mein Kampf you almost think as if you're reading Darwin. Get rid of the inferior races, why not help the superior races to get on their good journey? So you have eugenics.

But you have something else. If Darwinism is correct, if the baboon is our grandfather we have absolutely no argument against abortion. We have no argument against infanticide. There's no argument against euthanasia.

I mean out on the farm I was born on a farm out in Saskatchewan Canada where it was so flat you could stand on a can of shoe polish and look halfway into next week. And you know if a piglet was born deformed we would kill the piglet mercifully. Why don't we do that with kids? And there are those who say we should. You see what the Bible teaches is something so radical. It says that we are different from animals not just in degree but actually in kind because we are born with the image of God and that makes us distinct from the animals. But if your students are being told in university that we just came up through the animal world why not all of the things that we hear about in the news? We must understand that ideas have implications and whether we like it or not philosophers have oftentimes directed the direction of entire continents.

And it also has influenced to some extent the environmental movement. You know there was an article in the New York Times some time ago about what to do about rats in New York City. And they were saying of course they have to be killed because they're carrying disease but at the same time we have to do it very humanely which I totally agree with.

We should never intentionally inflict unnecessary pain on animals. But one of the things is that rats are very intelligent. I guess the idea is that they are our cousins somewhere down the line. And so the end of the article said the real problem is not the rats the real problem is the human beings. It's us that's the problem. After all they are as I mentioned our distant cousins so let's take care of them as well as we can. So that's where we are going. As a matter of fact I'm so glad that my wife and I are going to be in Chicago this weekend because we've been invited to an animal rights barbecue.

You folks are easy to preach to. So you have Darwin who attacks God as creator. Marx, God as ruler. Darwin, God as creator.

Now Darwin still believed in God but he wrote against Christianity but obviously he set in motion a whole field of study that resulted in evolution as it is taught today. And then there's a third man and this third man is one that Nietzsche probably didn't know much about because he wrote at the end of the century as Nietzsche was almost ready to die. Nietzsche died by the way in the year 1900 and that is Freud. Freud believed in the pleasure principle and sexuality was the heart of human beings and the worst thing that you could do with anyone is to restrict his sexual pleasure. He taught that and that of course became something that has fed into our own society and has streamed all the way down to us in various ways that are very very destructive. Freud also said that children can be sexual and so as a result of that you have Kinsey who lived in the 1940s who did a tremendous amount of harm.

I cannot even tell you publicly what Kinsey did to children, how he sexualized even babies. And my dear friends I want to tell you this that as we begin to sink as a nation without any reference to God the more evil will come and there will be no stopping the evil because Dostoevsky was right when he said if God doesn't exist everything is permissible. If God doesn't exist everything is permissible. When it comes to the sexualization of children, drag queens and everything that is happening what we must do is that that is really the end of a decent society as we know it. In the Old Testament when they began to sacrifice their children to Moloch and to other gods that was really the final judgment and after that they were carried off into captivity. And yet today we find parents and others who are sacrificing their children on the altar of sexuality. You have transgenderism which also is a part of the evolutionary process.

After all if God didn't create me and I created myself, then why can't I be a boy in the morning and a girl in the evening or tomorrow or whatever? All of this confusion results because we have forgotten God. And I want to say this about Ezekiel chapter 16.

We're not going to take time to turn to it. But in the 16th chapter of Ezekiel God says this to Israel, you have taken the children which you have born to me and you have offered them to Moloch. My dear brothers and sisters, even the children of pagans belong to God. God says those are my children and you are harming my children. And that means that even I believe deeply that the children of pagans if they die they go to heaven because they are God's children. At some point of course they become responsible for themselves and we don't know exactly when that point is.

It doesn't have so much to do with age as it does disposition because there are those who may be born with a mental disorder and therefore they might be treated as children by God until they die and they die as children. But the point to be made is that when God does not exist that's what happens to a society. Now I want to review very briefly Marx attacked God as ruler. Darwin attacked God as creator. Freud attacked God as lawgiver.

To Freud the worst thing was that God was instituting laws through the scripture which of course he didn't believe that the scriptures came from God but the point is that Christianity was stifling people's joy and happiness and the real secret to happiness is to take away all these restraints and let people be who they really are. That by the way was the teaching of Rousseau. If you go to Switzerland and you're in Geneva there's a statue there to Rousseau. Rousseau believed that people were good if only they could break away from all the restraints and they could just go back to nature.

So he had five children and he allowed an orphanage to take care of them because he had to go back to nature and to find himself in nature. Man without God. Which leads me now to Nietzsche.

He believed that it was his responsibility to declare to the world that finally God was dead. Nietzsche of course was brought up Lutheran as you may know and he wrote in vivid terms about the death of God and the fact that God had to be buried but he wanted to give God a respectful burial. The best way to understand Nietzsche is to think of a teenager waking up in the middle of the night being told that his parents were dead. From now on man has to live life on his own without any transcendent meaning. Whatever meaning he has he has to glean from himself and so we are staring into the abyss and when we stare into the abyss the abyss looks back at us. Now Nietzsche was especially influenced by Darwin because you see nature meant a great deal to Nietzsche.

There is a philosopher that I was reading who really helps us to understand Nietzsche this way. Just imagine the importance of nature. Let's take for example some sheep and some wolves. What is best to sheep? Well sheep they enjoy being in the pasture and being next to animals like they are and just lazily enjoying life, the sunshine, the grass and the water. That's what's best to sheep. What's best to wolves? What's best to a wolf is to grab that sheep, rip it apart and gobble it down. Now how would you like to have you know you say well what we need is we need to bring peace to the animal world so let's have a conference and let's invite the sheep and let's invite the wolves and maybe we can agree on some common ground.

Good luck with that. Nietzsche blistered Christianity. He cursed Christianity because what he said is what Christianity is doing is it's trying to get wolves to act like sheep. The meek shall inherit the earth.

It's insulting. When have the meek ever inherited the earth? Forgive one another in weakness.

Oh humility is so important. Where is that going to get you in a world in which there are wolves? Isn't it interesting that Hitler kept a copy of Nietzsche next to his bed and then gave a copy to Mussolini and Hitler said on one occasion why cannot we be as cruel as nature? In the forest let us be the wolves. We certainly don't want to be the sheep and there is no wolf whose conscience ever bothered him because he ripped a little lamb apart and ate it. And so Hitler and his cronies took his SS troops through a regimen in such a way that their consciences would be deadened and he did that in various ways so that they could be as cruel as nature. You say well Pastor Luther where was the church in all this?

Thank you so much for asking that question. The church had already been hollowed out from the standpoint of doctrine and in other ways because of another German Friedrich Schleiermacher. You know German is the only language in which you can say I love you and that sounds like a threat. Ich liebe dich really.

Do you want to settle that out in the hall? Schleiermacher lived in the 1700s. He died I think in 1834 and he was the father of modern liberalism and he basically said is you know we can't believe all the miracles, all the miraculous stories of scripture. What we have to do is to find the real kernel that is most important and the most important statement that comes to us from Schleiermacher is that religion is a feeling of dependence. What you have to do is you have to feel dependent in which case one wag said my dog is very religious. You know cats I shouldn't throw this in because we have we used to have cats and they are socialists. I mean they have such a sense of entitlement.

I mean socialism ends up being a paradise for parasites and cats absolutely fit that paradigm. I'm sorry don't come up to me later and say that you love cats. We love them too. My wife loves them.

Our kids love them. I'm just an observer of nature. You know that when the church of Jesus Christ exists in the midst of a society it can be attacked from without and of course that's what happened when you think of Marx and Darwin and others but the most serious attacks come from within and Schleiermacher was brought up in a pietistic home. He was known as a scholar of Christianity and from within he and others destroyed all faith in the scriptures as a revelation from God.

It had value of course and all that it taught us really was a feeling of dependence and just think about how this goes all throughout history now. Today you have those who say well I'm spiritual but I don't believe any doctrines. I believe in spirituality which really means your own consciousness becomes God and so that's where society is. I hope my friend that as you listen to this message you understand how deeply I feel that we as a nation need to turn back to the God of the Bible. We're living at a time when people don't mind saying that they believe in God just as long as they are God. I've written a new book entitled The Eclipse of God and one of the things that I emphasize is the need to get back to the God of the Bible and not the kind of God that we would like him to be. For example one of the chapters is titled Nearer My God to Me. My dear friends we are redefining God that's why the subtitle of this book is America's Disastrous Search for a More Inclusive Deity. For a gift of any amount we're making this resource available for you.

Here's what you do and I'm going to give you this contact info. Hope that you have time to write it down go to rtwoffer.com that's rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. You remember it was Tozer who said that what you believe about God is the most important thing about you. I want to ask you a question do you believe in a God of your imagination or do you believe in the God of scripture? This book emphasizes our need to get back to the God of the Bible. For a gift of any amount as I mentioned just a moment ago this resource can be yours.

Go to rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. What we'll discover when we go to the scriptures is this that we should not try to conform God to what we want him to be but we must bow before the God who actually exists. You can write to us at running to win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. Running to win is all about helping you find God's road map for your race of life. Thanks for joining us as our series on the eclipse of God is beginning. Next time more on how the God is dead philosophy has led to a culture is dead reality. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer this is Dave McAllister. Running to win is sponsored by the Moody Church.