According to Pew Research, in 2018 –– the latest figures I could find— only 36% of Americans attended church every week and at least 29% never attended at all, this in a country founded by people with a deep and abiding faith in God. But we are not alone in turning our backs on God. The percentage of those attending church weekly in European countries is even lower with England at 8%, France at 12%, Spain at 15%, Greece at 16%, Germany at 10%, Sweden at 6%, and Norway at 7%. When asked how important religion is in their lives, those who felt it was important were found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the United States, with 68% of Americans claiming that religion was important in their lives, even if they didn’t make it to church weekly.
What has caused this turning away from God? Perhaps it is the same hubris that caused men to construct the Tower of Babel to reach up to Heaven. With the intelligence that God placed in his human creation, men and women have themselves becomes creators — of televisions, of computers, of cell phones, of technology that allowed a man to walk on the surface of the moon and others to live in a space station, revolving around the earth far above its surface. We have learned to attach human limbs that have been detached, replace all sorts of internal organs from hearts to the corneas of eyes, built jet planes that cannot be detected by radar and drones that can be piloted from the ground many miles away and yet drop bombs on our enemy. We can build cars that drive themselves, robots to do our work, and bombs that are powerful enough to destroy it all. We are invincible, we believe, forgetting that it is the knowledge and skill with which God has gifted that has enabled us to do these things.
So, with all the things that we can do for ourselves, many of us feel we no longer need God, and we put Him away with the fairy tales and the scary Halloween stories. But we do so at our peril. For the fact that we deny the existence of God, or remember Him only on Christmas and at Easter by dressing in our finest and trotting off to a rare church service, does not in fact make God disappear. The Israelites tried this frequently throughout their history. When Moses went up onto the mountain where God gave him the ten commandments, the people grew weary while awaiting his return and forced Aaron to help them melt their gold to create the image of a calf to worship. They wanted to worship something they could see, not an invisible God out there somewhere.
It apparently did not occur to them that something which they created with their hands would not have the power to do anything more than they created it to do: in this case, stand on a pedestal. It could not feed them or protect them from their enemies. It could not heal their illnesses. It could do nothing. It was much like the old saying about computers: “garbage in garbage out.” When a human creates something, it is only as good or as powerful as that human. It can be no more.
But we have learned to do so much, especially in the last few decades, that we imagine that we can do anything. Yet we cannot. Nothing that we do is without the possibility of catastrophe. Planes crash. People die on the operating table. Some medications will help one part of our body while damaging another. The unsinkable Titanic sank. We are not the gods that we imagine ourselves to be. We are, after all, only human.
Thus, to help us through these crises, we need Someone who is infinitely more than we are. Someone who is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresent (always there wherever we are), and omnipotent (all-powerful). It is difficult to grasp the existence of a Being like this because He is infinite and everything in our realm of understanding is finite. But if God were understandable, He wouldn’t be God.
Often people say that science and Christianity aren’t compatible, but in fact the contrary is true. The Big Bang Theory, considered perhaps the best theory of how the universe and the earth began, says that an infinitely dense and infinitely hot bit of matter called a singularity suddenly began expanding until over the next 13 plus billion years it had expanded into our universe with the planets, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the earth. But where did that first dense bit of matter come from? Scientists cannot say. It was just there, they explain. A professor once told my Earth and Sky Science class that if you trace back every scientific law or theory you will find that each depends upon another and that upon another. If one is not true, then none are true. But even when science can offer proof of each one, they eventually arrive at a spot where they can no longer prove what they believe to be true. That point must be taken on faith. That is where God steps in. The Bible tells Christians that God created the universe and all that is in it, as well as the earth and mankind. And the Bible tells Christians as well that God has always been, that He has no beginning and no end. If this is hard to believe, it is no harder to believe than that a little clump of dense, hot matter suddenly appeared from nowhere in something that was not even space, yet, and gradually expanded into the universe. Christians would posit that that clump of matter came from God. Christianity has an answer when science has none.
Certainly, the Bible talks of God creating the heavens, the earth, Adam and Eve in six days and resting upon the seventh and many Christians have accepted those as being actual 24-hour periods. Yet, the Bible also warns us that “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” (2 Peter 3:8) meaning that God does not measure time as we measure it. But the Bible, especially the Old Testament books, were written for a largely uneducated society of small farmers and sheep herders. Things had to be explained in terms that they would understand. Thus, it might be more accurate to say that creation occurred in six distinct indeterminate time periods, rather than in six 24-hour days. Thus, science and Christianity are not at odds here at all.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in no way coincides with Biblical teachings, but neither has it ever been proven. It remains a theory with glaring problems, the most obvious of which is, as Darwin himself admitted, that there is no example between an ape and a man to prove that we are descended from these animals. One might also wonder at what point fish began to spawn more fish rather than animals with legs that climbed out of the oceans to then produce more non-ocean living beings. When did oak trees start producing more oak trees instead of rose bushes or grass? What caused them to do these strange things? And why did all of this change come to an end? What turned off this supposed evolution of species? It is illogical in the extreme to believe this, yet this is taught as true science in our schools.
It is no wonder with the swirl of technology and science permeating our lives that we should forget the actual Creator of it all, little wonder that so many of us, puffed up in the pride of our own abilities, should doubt that God ever existed except in the myths of the past. Even in many of our churches, the religion which is preached is a “feel good, God is love, everyone will go to Heaven if you live a good life” kind of religion. And the Bible has come to be considered somewhat old-fashioned. Preachers pull out the scriptures that make their congregations feel good. Transgenderism, same-sex marriages, and homosexual ministers are considered as normal as a family made up of a married man and woman with their children. The several scriptures, even in the New Testament, that preach against the sin of practicing homosexuality and other sexual perversions are never spoken of and treated as if they no longer apply to our “woke” society.
Sadly, God is not only a God of love, but a God of judgment. We are reminded over and over that the Word of God is enduring and unchanging. What was sin in Biblical times is still sin. And sin, without remission, ends in spiritual death and Hell.
In Isaiah 40:8 we read “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” Peter repeats this in 1 Peter 1:25 when he says again, “The word of the Lord remains forever.” And in 2 Timothy 3:16 “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. . . .”
And while most Americans still say they believe in God, their beliefs do not correspond very well to God’s Word. Nearly 60% believe that Heaven is a place where all people will be reunited with their loved ones. Ignoring the words of Jesus, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh to the Father except through me,” (John 14:6), 64% of Americans believe that God excepts the worship of all religions.
Being a Christian is more than being good and doing good works. We are warned “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). And we are reminded by Paul that once you have given your life over to God, you must work each day to overcome the sins that you will daily be tempted to commit. In his letter to the Hebrews he encourages, “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,” (Hebrews 11:1). In 1 Corinthians 9:27 he tells us “But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified [for Heaven]. And in Philippians 2:12, “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;”
In Paris, France in order to travel on the metro (the subway), you buy a ticket. If you change your mind and choose not to travel that day, it makes no difference. The ticket remains good until it is punched. You could stick it on your dresser, knock it on the floor, and not find it until you spring cleaned months later. It wouldn’t matter. You had bought the ticket. You could still take it, go to a metro station, and ride. But salvation is not like that. When you repent of your sins, believe in your heart that Jesus died for your sins, and confess it verbally to someone, then you are saved. But you must nurture that salvation like you nurture a young seedling. You must be baptized. You must feed your faith with Bible reading, prayer, and attending a church in which Bible-based sermons (and not social platitudes) are preached. And daily you must ask again that God forgive any sins you may have committed that day as you attempt to live your life according to His example, doing good works as a result of your salvation, not the source of it. James writes “But someone will say, ‘You have faith, and I have works.’ Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works,” (James 2:18). Then and only then will Heaven be yours.
Sadly, this is a truth that most supposed Christians in American and Europe have forgotten.