"...whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." - John 4:14 KJV
An article published previously on this site, Defining Evil, discusses how humankind, relying on the wisdom gained upon eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, has redefined good and evil based on temporal standards of morality developed to replace God's eternal Truths.
In addition to the fatal pride involved in its origins in Eden, human wisdom is behind "enlightened" human-centered systems of morality that contain intrinsic fatal flaws. This article discusses the self-annihilating structure of godless humanistic morality called Modernism.
Modernism collapses into Postmodernism when the weaknesses of the foundations of modern morality become evident, and it is in the chaos of Postmodernism that evil, unidentifiable through the tattered vestiges of standards of recognition of true good and evil, can thrive masquerading as good to the world that has lost understanding of what good and evil actually are.
The fatal weakness of Modernism means that if one accepts the principles and reasoning behind temporal human-centered morality and proceeds with rational analysis of these premises to their natural conclusions, disaster is inevitable. That is, disaster necessarily follows from the principles underlying Modernism. Thus, Modernism by its very structure contains the seeds of its own destruction. In Modernism's death throes, Postmodernism makes a desperate but hollow last attempt at hope and peace as "standards" embracing the supernatural and the irrational reappear in a welcoming environment, barely distinguishable as evil in the mass of confusion where good and evil have been turned upside down. Only the Word of God can put an end to the confusion and bring lasting peace.
In Eden, the Serpent told Eve that by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, she would become wise, "you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). Thus beginning in Eden, humans were misled into trusting their own wisdom and into developing systems of human-centered morality to replace God-centered Truth. Believing themselves to be like God, Adam and Eve replaced trust in God's wisdom with trust in their own. Having become "wise", humans were led to believe that their knowledge of good and evil exceeded God's, and that they had no need for God since they themselves had become "like God". This is the Great Lie, fatal to its adherents, because the imperfect human form of wisdom is not equal to God's infinite, eternal, and unchanging wisdom.
As God's Word, the Absolute Truth, goes forth into the world and does not return empty (Isaiah 55:11), so its antithesis, the Great Lie, went forth into the world starting with our ancestors from Eden, and will not depart from this world until its destruction, global in scope, is visible to all. It is hardly believable that the modern Western systems of human-centered morality so revered and popularly embraced as "decent" and "civilized" (and from whose codes references to God are being increasingly and categorically expunged) are a direct manifestation of the Lie. Today's view of goodness or "godliness without God" is precisely what is needed to pave the way for consummate evil, disguised as good, to hold sway on the earth and for the Lie to come to the fullness of fruition that God has allowed in accordance with His plan for salvation and the coming of His kingdom.
The Great Lie has been around since Eden, waxing and waning upon the face of the earth throughout history, but never totally excised from the Creation. It held sway, for example, in the days of Noah (Genesis 6), again at Babel (Genesis 11), in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and in Rome when Rome flourished under the Caesars, but it seems to have picked up considerable steam during the last several decades.
During The Renaissance and The Enlightenment, the Great Lie reappeared in full force in the Western world after centuries of dormancy. In fact, it made what could be its final appearance, having become bloated to maximum distension, disguised as the "truth" that human wisdom is perfect, that all things are knowable, that the universe is entirely rational (in human terms), and that there is nothing humankind couldn't know given enough time and thought. This was the beginning of the so-called Modern Age or Modernism. The harm wreaked by the Great Lie is incalculable and barely visible. Its more spiritualized versions have also slithered their way into churches in the form of heresies such as Gnosticism's modern counterpart of Transcendentalism and its postmodern counterpart of New Age Spirituality. Men and women were urged to look into themselves in order to find God. This is the Great Apostasy that follows from the Lie.
Although it is true that we are God's creatures, created in His image, we are not the Creator. Although created in His image, we fell utterly in Eden, dispossessed of any spark of divinity whatsoever. But with humans deceived into believing that they are like God, the seeds of human-centered morality which challenges God-centered Truth were planted, took root, and have developed through the ages exactly as the Serpent intended, even becoming conventional wisdom of all humankind.
This modern morality, absent of the God of the Bible, leads to disturbing conclusions when fully developed by the same human reasoning that gave it its origin. Although adoption of purely human standards of morality seems to have worked for centuries, it becomes apparent that such standards outside of God's eternal Truths are doomed to failure. By trusting in his own imperfect understanding, man made himself the final judge of good and evil. But history has made it abundantly clear what inevitably happens when man makes himself the final judge of good and evil, and it isn't good.
Without absolute standards, the difficult weighing of one person's morality against another's becomes a thoroughly academic and thoroughly problematic power struggle. It soon becomes apparent that because human standards conflict from one person to another, and from one people to the next: where there is no absolute right and wrong, no person or group is absolutely right or wrong.
What happens when the desires of two people, each a god in his own mind, conflict? If one person's "right" conflicts with another person's "right", then who is right indeed? The solution for a couple hundred years was the secular humanist solution, in which the aggregate good was absolute good, and this seemed to work in practice. But for those who vigorously sought deeper truths it became apparent that humanistic systems of morality were doomed to failure because even the "common good" theories, without God, cannot be shown to be more than matters of personal perspective or preference. Interestingly, this conclusion was reached by both godless thinkers endowed with great human wisdom as well as faithful believers who loved the Word of God. The pangs of conscience that the scrupulous person experiences after having committing a wrong, or a person's charitable inclinations, can only eventually be described by the secular humanist as "irrational" after all the convoluted explaining away that the human mind allows. Among the brightest of thinkers in the Modern Age, religious or not, Modernism has therefore segued into Postmodernism, embraced today by most of the Western world since real-time dissemination of this type of thinking to millions of people was enabled by technology of the 20th Century.
Distinguishing right from wrong has become a personal matter, and the validity of one's personal morality depends only on the strength of one's will to promulgate and enforce it. In effect, the "standard" becomes, "what's good for me is good", period. And "that which stands in the way of my will is evil." The worship of the Self is now extolled as virtue.
Because of the resounding disappointment of Secular Humanism to the many great minds who had put their trust, faith, and confidence in the goodness and ability of humankind, conventional (human) wisdom today has absorbed the failure and rationalizes it by telling us that truth itself changes with the times. Today, even human wisdom is for the first time generally accepted for what it is: changeable by its very nature, as with the times. And truth itself, as reasoned by human wisdom, is no longer believed to be absolute; it varies by person and by time. This is Postmodernism, and it flies in the face of Absolute Truth. After all, in the postmodern worldview, there is no absolute Truth.
The "atheist" philosopher and sage Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) predicted the inevitable culmination of human-centered morality. Nietzsche also knew that as long as the God of the Bible remained in the consciousness of the people, God would be an obstacle to this final result of human-centered morality, because people would have qualms about enforcing their will to get what they want in the face of Divine Goodness and God's unchanging Truth that expose their iniquity. The laws of men, on the other hand, change over time, and the postmodern trend has been to modify laws so as to mask iniquity rather than expose it.
Nietzsche made the famous statement that "God is dead", referring to the removal of the God of the Bible from public consciousness. But if God is dead according to Nietzsche, then who is god? We know from Genesis 3 what the answer is. What Nietzsche was actually saying is that we are gods by default. As gods, only the laws that we create limit our actions. If we are gods, then the only laws that are supreme are our own. As it turns out, Nietzsche and the Serpent in Eden give the same Lie. Today the Lie is being transmitted insidiously throughout the world.
It sounds pleasing to us that we are gods, as it certainly sounded pleasing to our ancestors in Eden and was central to the temptation. Although being our own god might sound like a good idea prima facie, where does it actually lead?
Where there are no absolute standards of good and evil, there exists only what Nietzsche calls the "will to power" to guide one's conduct and move boundaries to one's worldly domain. A person defines one's own personal version of good and evil spurred by one's will to power. What that means is that there is no real right or wrong, but only the right and wrong of the person concerned.
When one person's (or people's) view of right and wrong conflicts with another's, then the "true" view belongs to those who are powerful enough to enforce it. The "goodness" and "morality" of the very powerful therefore become the law of the land. Slavery is "good" by whoever keeps slaves; Hitler (a huge fan of Nietzsche's) was considered "good" by the many Nazis who proudly proclaimed his "truths" and followed him; Stalin was called good by millions of adoring Soviets and communists worldwide, as was Mao Tse Tung by adoring Chinese, and Pol Pot by his supporters. These popular megalomaniacal men, convinced of their godlike status, are all realizations of the Lie. Many of us saw on television the numerous statues of Saddam Hussein standing (for a while at least) in every public square in Iraq, intended as images to be venerated as the likeness of the embodiment of goodness, as the images of the savior of the Iraqi people, as images of the god of the land.
These illustrious men, Hitler et al, although deemed evil by us, were totally good in the minds of millions of their devoted followers (remember that in Eden it was the Serpent who told people that they would know good and evil). Now who is right? We or they? Why is it that we think we are right? In postmodern thought, the answer is not obvious. Without any absolutes laws and absolute standards, any one person is as "right" as another.
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts. (Proverbs 21:2 KJV)The LORD that pondereth the hearts is the Absolute Standard of right and wrong.
Here's another example: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. If there is no absolute standard of good and evil, then who is wrong in terrorist attacks? Who is right? My guess is that most of us think that terrorism is wrong, but of course there are plenty of martyrs in training that strongly disagree. And they do not call themselves terrorists; they call themselves freedom fighters. What we call acts of terrorism are, to many people, acts of heroism of the highest order of good for which the freedom fighter is rewarded eternity in Heaven.
Friends, this confusing state of affairs existing in the world is where so-called postmodern thinking brings us by eradicating consciousness of absolutes, and promoting moral relativism to lengths that result in conspicuous absurdity. We have only seen a hint of things to come. When meanings of words such as good, evil, God, and sin are removed from our vocabularies and from our consciousness, or are absorbed into a confusing and chaotic mess, there will be a return to standards, but it won't be the true God's standards. It will be other standards, maybe the Quran, or maybe the moral rules of the men or women powerful enough to enforce them.
In a sardonic twist of events, many professed believers have reverted to less obvious manifestations of the Great Lie in order to escape the increasingly evident, however subtle, evils of Postmodernism. The disguised version of the Lie in the Apostate Church has now become the truth in the eyes of the deceived, and the false Church has stepped up its theft of confessing believers. With the chaos of Postmodernism, people find it comforting to cling to the older standards, albeit human-made standards, of Modernism. Like sheep they have run back to the comfort, shelter, and familiarity of the feel-good modern Apostate Church, having no idea that they will not be sheltered from the impending storm. On the contrary, the trusted environs where they feel safe will collapse round about them. Against the backdrop of Postmodernism, man's modern truth has now become God's truth in the eyes of many confessing believers. The tactic of the Serpent could not have been more brilliant. In the backlash against postmodern chaos and immorality, those who hope desperately to hold on to some semblance of truth and order have adopted man's truth as "Absolute Truth", and the Great Lie is finishing the damage of which it is capable. But thankfully its damage will not be completed. The Absolute Truth will be revealed before the grasp of the Lie is total.
Modernists, like most pagans, agree with the 2nd of Jesus' Great Commandments. But they too, like all pagans, do not agree with the First and Greatest commandment: you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second commandment "love your neighbor as yourself" is easily understood. But the Great Apostasy teaches us that all other things being equal, do what's most enriching to yourself and love yourself first, not God. It is an intuitive, ungodly doctrine that is derived by imperfect human wisdom.
True Christianity, founded on the substitutionary shed blood for the atonement of sin by the Christ who is risen bodily from death and the grave, cannot be perfectly understood using only human wisdom; the Word of God enlightens, not the thoughts of men. Neither is Christiainity intuitive, as matters such as the Trinitarian Godhead do not lend themselves to easily comprehended "common sense" explanation. Other matters, such as the virgin birth, the parting of the Red Sea, etc., defy "rational" explanation. The reason is that all of these are supernatural events! God gave us His Word so that we can know the Truth without trying to figure things out on our own. If human wisdom is like God's (which it isn't) then we can rely on our own intellect and have no reason to bother reading the Bible.
With the apparent doom of the rational Modernism engendered by the Age of Reason, and with the advent of Postmodernism, there has been a sudden rush in Western thinking to embrace the irrational. But unfortunately, with the revival of acceptance of the irrational, doors to pagan churches have been flung wide open, as have the doors to the less chaotic but nonetheless pagan-based Apostate Church. Tying in closely with the whole self-esteem preoccupation these days, even in the world of professed Christians, it is an insidious, cleverly disguised form of the Great Lie, the substitution of oneself for God, permeating the face of the earth like a translucent cloud of volcanic ash. The Apostate Church subscribes to the second of Jesus' commandments, but substitutes the Self for God in the first of His commandments. Today, many people are praised because they want the best for themselves, and are called heroic for achieving the deepest desires of their own hearts. Selfishness has become a virtue, "greed is good", and achievers now boast of their success through selfishness and through their own effort - through their own "will to power".
Nietzsche showed that removing God, removing laws, and removing all externally "imposed" morality led to the definition of goodness based on one's own "will to power". A person is good if the person is good in his own mind. It follows that the person or people who is the stronger is in the right, since there is no real right or wrong to contradict his conceit. Also, there are no boundaries, no rules, and no laws to protect the weak.
There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness. There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes! and their eyelids are lifted up. There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men. (Proverbs 30:12-14 KJV)In Nietzsche's world, "might makes right" indeed. Many people have bought into this type of thinking, and why not? It's all around us. We are told that we can do what want, when we want, and anything that infringes upon our "will to power" is an evil that must be defeated. We are told to do things simply because we can. We are led to believe that the poor and the oppressed, furthermore, can be used cheaply for our own benefit, glory, and adulation.
But Jesus knew about these things, and they did not please Him. He said:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.Luke records that Jesus said:
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. (Matthew 5:3-11 KJV)
Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.Jesus did not say, blessed are the rich, the sated, the happy, the proud, the merciless, the greedy, the persecutory, the adored. Jesus knew that those people, because they are only human, have bought into the Great Lie that they are like God, wise, knowing good and evil. All of us as humans have bought into the Great Lie at some time. But it is the meek, the humble, the mournful, the merciful, the persecuted, who can know the Truth and be saved, because they are not blinded by pride.
Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.
Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.
Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.
Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven (Luke 6:20-23 KJV).
Man's reliance on his own knowledge of good and evil, along with the assurances of the Serpent of man's godly nature, have led to the formation of systems of morality throughout the world which make Man as the standard of goodness and perfection. We have seen what happens when Man makes himself the standard of goodness. His own wisdom becomes his undoing, because if we accept the premise of the perfection of human wisdom, postmodern "morality" is the necessary conclusion. We see this today.
The consequences are that you end up with people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Saddam who believe they're around for the good of the world, for goodness' sake. Although there are few people in history whose evil compares with theirs, you see my point about what can happen when you take away the Absolute God-given Standard of good and evil and make Man the standard. In fact, things can get worse: these notorious men, Hitler et al, wanted to rule the entire world, but thankfully didn't - but what if they did? The fact is that with sufficient will to power and absence of absolute standards, there is nothing, except for God's Hand, to limit a person from becoming far more destructive than they were, utterly eclipsing their atrocities. The frightening thing is, such an evil person will be viewed as "good" or "godlike" by millions of adoring followers, just as Hitler and Stalin were.
Human wisdom will never compare with God's infinite knowledge and wisdom. Keeping in mind that Man's wisdom and God's wisdom are not the same, consider what God said through the prophet Isaiah:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9 KJV)Still, the desire to be like God continues to this day, and the most arrogant of people insist that their understanding of good and evil is better than God's. They hold God at fault for things of which they have no understanding , and no real wisdom about at all.
Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. (Matthew 11:25-26 KJV)Humankind has fallen from total unquestioning reliance on God's Absolute Truth, and uninterrupted glorious communion with Him, into an abject autonomous existence relying on flawed human wisdom, inferior to God's wisdom but today believed to be superior to His. At the same time, the Absolute Truth of God's Word is called "superstition", "darkness", and even "evil". By the proudest of people, God is looked at as if He were the enemy. The Word seen by Isaiah:
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! (Isaiah 5:20-21 KJV)Flying in the face of God, there are people today who, in a grotesque and disgusting perversion of the Truth, say: "blessed are the rich, blessed are the sated, blessed are the proud, blessed are the merciless, blessed are the greedy, blessed are the persecutory, blessed are the adored, blessed are the vain." They have cursed the qualities that are virtues before God, and have made virtues out of the contemptible vices of man. The practical working out of that is to love yourself first, which necessarily follows if you are your own god in twisted obeisance to Jesus' first Great Commandment, substituting yourself for God, fulfilling the Serpent's words "you will be like God". Those of the Apostasy say to love yourself first, and then, love your neighbor as yourself.
We must never forget the true meaning of the first and Greatest Commandment to love the Lord God. The true God of the Bible transcends the human ideas of goodness embodied in human systems of morality and is the only absolute measure of goodness, and likewise of evil. We must love and respect our neighbors, but we must be guided by God's Word first and foremost, and by His love, in the way we treat our neighbors.
There is the wisdom that came to humans in Eden when the Serpent deceived them. And there is real Wisdom, God's Word, through which the world was created and through which God spoke the universe into existence (Psalm 33:6, 9). God's Wisdom is the Truth, is what is real, is what is: His Name is I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14), and the universe issued forth from His spoken Wisdom, His breath, His Word:
O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. (Psalms 104:24 KJV)The spoken Wisdom of God, His Word, is the Son by which all things were made (John 1:3).To him that by wisdom made the heavens: for his mercy endureth for ever. (Psalms 136:5 KJV)
Human wisdom is a problem because it blinds people to God's Truth by keeping them in darkness. Ironically, humans call their own wisdom "light". But human wisdom is darkness that causes people to stumble. It stands in the way of knowing the Truth, the real Light.
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. (John 3:19-21 KJV)It is man's wisdom that says, "I'm too smart for that Jesus nonsense, I'm educated and the Bible is backward, ignorant, darkness". Man's wisdom destroys the world as the Absolute Truth of God's Wisdom, spoken to us through His Word, is being taken from us - taken out of our schools, our language, our consciousness, our mouths, our minds, our lives.
Ever since Adam and Eve's encounter with the serpent in Eden, man has been wise in his own eyes, and how does God feel about that?
Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil. (Proverbs 3:7 KJV)There's not much we humans can know about on our own. Even secular humanists observe, astutely so, that the more we know, the more questions we have. But God has revealed His Absolute Truth, His Wisdom, His Word, to us. With God's everlasting Word things are not confusing, changeable, or temporary. As it turns out, the God of the Bible is the Rock that doesn't move, doesn't change, ever. He is, has always been, and will always will be the Great "I AM".Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him. (Proverbs 26:12 RSV)
God's Wisdom, His eternal and unchanging Word that proceeds from His mouth, will obliterate the ungodly wisdom that entered into the world when humans ate of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, tempted because of the Great Lie told to them by the Serpent. Victory over ungodly evil is assured because the Word will subdue the Enemy of God, and that is the Truth.
Ron Blevins
Last revised: June 19, 2003.
Go to Word to the Wise Part 2