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Seven College Fables |
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Seven College Fables |
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Fable #l: In order to believe the Bible one must commit intellectual suicide. |
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It is a myth of modem education that a truly
intelligent person will not believe the Bible. Actually, a truly
intelligent person cannot help but believe the Bible. Most of
the early colleges in America were founded on this principle.
William and Mary, Yale, and Princeton, to name a few, had the Bible at the
center of their curriculum. As the first Some of the greatest intellects of history have
found the Christian world-view to be completely reasonable-Augustine, John
Wycliffe, Rembrandt, John Milton, Blaise Pascal, Johann Sebastian Bach,
Robert Boyle, Jonathan Edwards, Michael Faraday, James Clark Maxwell, Lord
Kelvin, C. S. Lewis, and a multitude of others, saw no contradiction
between thinking and believing. That God has revealed truth to men,
especially in His Son Jesus Christ, is the only thing that can make sense
out of life. The Bible is ridiculed by many so-called “intellectuals” today because their pride and arrogance has blinded them to the truth. “Professing themselves to be wise, they have become fools” (Romans 1:22). Don’t fall for the pseudo-intellectualism on campus. Ultimately it will matter little if you are counted wise or foolish by the college crowd. What will matter is whether you know God. |
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Fable #2: Christianity is basically the same as the other religions of the world. |
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Though there are some superficial similarities
between Christianity and other religions, Christianity’s essential message
stands in sharp contrast. Christ claimed a relationship with God
that excluded the possibility of salvation by any other way: “I am the
way, the truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father, except through
Me” (John 14:6). Christianity is Christ. His life, death, and physical resurrection for sinners is Christianity’s foundation. All other religions are essentially humanistic: sinful men attempt to reach God through their own efforts. In Christianity, God reaches down to sinful men and provides for them a perfect righteousness through the death of His Son on the cross. To view Christianity as basically the same as other religions is to miss its focus: “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3: 16). |
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Fable #3: Money, power, pleasure, and prestige are worth striving to attain. |
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Academic honor, the high-paying job, and the “good
life” are all dangled before students as enticements for pursuing a
college education. Are they really worth the effort? One of
the wisest men who ever lived had all these in abundance, but found they
didn’t satisfy. King Solomon had far more than you can ever hope to
attain, yet came to realize that they gave no true meaning to life and
that death would soon sweep them away. You brought nothing into the
world; you can carry nothing out. A pursuit of the fleeting
pleasures and treasures of this world is “chasing after the
wind.” Jesus added an even more sobering aspect to this quest. He said that not only will you lose all these things at death, but you will also lose your soul. Hell awaits the person who lives for the things of time. As Jesus said, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). Why waste your life on things that will, in the end, cost you your soul? |
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Fable #4: Jesus never claimed to be God. |
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A few quotes from the New Testament are sufficient
to dispel this myth. In John 10:30, Christ expressly claimed
equality with God by stating, “I and the Father are one. ” Later in
the same book, He made the same claim in a different way, “He that has
seen Me has seen the Father.” Christ constantly attributed to Himself divine
characteristics He claimed the power to forgive sins and the right to
receive worship from men. When Thomas called Him “my Lord and my
God,” He did not rebuke him. On the contrary, He promised men divine
gifts such as peace and eternal life. He taught His own moral
perfection. He put forward His teachings as absolutely
authoritative, saying that heaven and earth would pass away but His words
would never pass away. He claimed to be the Saviour of the world,
and that He would come at the end of the age to judge all men. His Jewish contemporaries certainly understood Him
to be claiming Godhood, charging Him with blasphemy. On one occasion
when they were going to stone Him to death, Jesus asked them for which of
His good works He was being stoned. The Jews answered, “For a
good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; because You, being a
man, make Yourself God” (John 10:31-33). These are only a few of the New Testament references concerning Christ’s divinity, but they should be sufficient to lay to rest thus often-repeated misrepresentation of Christ. He can’t be dismissed as a good moral teacher like Buddha or Confucius. He does not allow this option. |
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Fable #5: The accounts of Christ are not reliable since they were written long after His death. |
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This is one way men have tried to avoid the
supernatural character and staggering claims of Christ. These
things, they say, were invented by His followers many years later.
This attempt to escape the Christ of Scripture cannot stand the light of
historical investigation. The evidence that the biographies of Christ were
written within the lifetime of His contemporaries is now so strong that
William F. Albright (the foremost Middle East archaeologist until his
death in 1971) stated that “every book of the New Testament was written by
a baptized Jew between the forties and the eighties of the first century
AD.” The portrait of Christ in the New Testament is
entirely beyond the scope of human invention. He stands too high
above anyone who could have produced Him. It would have taken
someone equal to the Christ presented in Scripture to have invented such a
perfectly human and divine character. Certainly the apostles would
not have given their lives (which most of them did) for something they
knew they had conjured up in their own imaginations. The only explanation that makes sense is the obvious
one: the Bible contains just what it claims-eyewitness accounts of the
most amazing person that ever walked this earth-God incarnate. As
the apostle Peter put it, “We did not follow cleverly devised
tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty” (2 Peter 1:
16). If you really want to use your mind, why not read the New Testament itself, being as honest as you can with what you read? In the Gospel of John, a good place to start, the Lord said, “lf anyone is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself” (John 7: 17). |
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Fable #6: Evolution is a reasonable explanation of the origin and present makeup of the universe. |
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t is important to define what we mean by evolution. We are not just talking about change. Obviously there has been a great deal of change in the world around us. By evolution we mean the hypothesis that molecules have become man through a purely naturalistic process, sometimes called macroevolution. Men like Julian Huxley, C.C. Simpson, Jacques Monad, and Carl Sagan are some of its chief proponents. This brief statement by Sagan is a good summation: “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” The idea that by pure chance life could somehow come
from non-life and that the ultimate source of all we see, including man,
is impersonal matter or energy, is absurd. The spontaneous generation of
life was disproved long ago by Redi, Pasteur, and others. The concept has
been smuggled back into modem science by evolutionists who need it to give
a naturalistic origin for life, Despite popular misconception, the various
biopoiesis experiments like the Miller-Urey spark discharge apparatus have
not even come close to producing anything that could be called life.
Even more destructive is the idea that impersonal,
mindless matter aimlessly interacting with itself has somehow produced man
with his personality, rationality, and concepts of morality and
purpose. Can amoral matter produce man with his moral concepts! Can
impersonal matter produce man with his personality and rationality?
In fact, the theory is self-destructive. |
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Fable #7: Man is basically good. |
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It is amazing in the light of human history that men
still see themselves as basically good. Think of just our century: two
world wars, the Nazi concentration camps, Viet Nam, the sixty-six million
Russians exterminated since the Bolshevik revolution, and the millions
murdered under Mao. These are just a few recent examples of the fact
that most of the history of mankind has been written in blood and
tears. Still man tries to deceive himself with flattering thoughts
of his own goodness. But here is the Bible’s realistic assessment:
“The hearts of the sons of men are full of evil” (Ecclesiastes
9:3). It is true that man as God originally made him was
good, but since he has rebelled against his Creator, man is in his very
nature corrupt. One reason men still view themselves as basically
good is that they compare themselves with one another instead of measuring
their lives by God’s righteous and holy standard. Of course, we
don’t seem too bad if we lower the standard to fit our behavior.
We look on the outward appearance. Sometimes
we can do a pretty decent job of cleaning ourselves up on the outside, but
what about the thoughts and motives of the heart? Jesus said that
this is really what God’s commands are all about. For instance, the
command against murder goes much deeper than just physically taking
someone’s life. Every time you lose your temper, or harbor
resentment, you are committing murder in your heart. “Everyone who
hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3: 15). You may be able to
hide your sin from others. You may even be able to convince yourself
that you are not so bad. But be assured, one day you will stand
before God to give an account of every thought, motive, and action.
The most amazing fact: There is a way for you, a
rebel sinner, to be reconciled to this holy God. The good news of the
Bible, majestic in its simplicity, is this: Though you have broken God’s
righteous standard a multitude of times, and deserve to be condemned for
it, He has shown His love to our fallen race. “For the wages of
sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our
Lord” (Romans 6:23). “Christ died for our sins ” (I Corinthians 15:3). “Believe on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31).
Personal salvation has two requirements. There is repentance toward
God-agree-ing with God about your sin - your guilt and inability to
fundamentally solve the problem of it within. And there is faith
toward our Lord Jesus Christ - agreeing with God about His Son, the only
and ultimate answer to the problem of your sin (Acts 20:21).Will
you accept Him as your Saviour? Adapted from Ten
Lies College Students Hear By Richard Ochs.
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