That’s rubbish!

There was a time when I used to say that it didn’t matter what one believed in life. If someone believed this, that, or something to be true or the truth, well then that’s the way it is for them – truth. When it came to all the various religions and their practitioners in the world, plus the different philosophies, my thoughts were pretty much the same.  In other words – believe whatever you want to believe – who am I, you or anyone else to tell us what is true and what is false or what is right and what is wrong?  No thought did I give to the reality that what we believe, is what we are or become.    

Then one day I started to think and question.  I had never done that before.  For most of my life up until that point I was a follower of any opinion that sat right with me, which I then embraced and added as my own.  One of my first thinking questions was, “what about Adolf Hitler?  He had a belief system.”  In fact he even believed in God. Adolf Hitler deeply and sincerely believed that he was appointed by God for the German people.  So powerful was his belief system that it was not long before he had those people eating out of his hand.  Then I began to dwell on the outcomes of his beliefs – nothing but devastation!

Dwelling on this for some time left me questioning my own beliefs.  And it was not long before I came to the conclusion that most of the adversities that had occurred in my life to that point, were created by myself as a result of a entertaining a faulty belief system.  Thanks to God and His great mercy upon me, Jesus Christ changed all that when I chose to believe His revelation, that He is the truth.  Confusion became a thing of the past for me when I learned that truth is not some abstract thing, but rather, Truth is a Person.

Most people despise truth.  They hate it.  They want nothing to do with it.  How do I know that?  I know it by the people’s reactions to the mere mention of the name Jesus Christ.  They have no problem with the baby in a manger at Christmas time.  A baby Jesus can’t threaten anyone.  Neither can a grown-up, “good man” Jesus who went about doing “good” when he lived on the earth.  But a biblical Jesus, He’s a different story.  He can threaten people and He does.  One who believes, whatever-it-is-he-wants-to-believe, may be happy to believe the Jesus who came to bring peace on earth, but he will reject the Jesus who said He came to bring division Matthew 10:34-36.

Even lots of Christian people despise truth.  They’ll be a lot more refined in their reactions however.  Perhaps they won’t yell and curse you (some will) like unbelievers, but, with overt smugness or covert annoyance, they will say something like, “That’s just your interpretation.”  I found that, or something similar, to be a favourite mantra among church people.  It was used by them to try and shut me down.  What they completely ignored though, was the apostle Peter’s word to us that no prophecy recorded in Scripture was ever thought up by the prophet (messenger) himself.  They were given as true messages from the Holy Spirit and He is not schizophrenic.

A very agitated old lady told me she used to be a Sunday school child and later she became a teacher of the same.  But she’d “stopped going to church years ago.”  When I asked her why, she told me that she’d come to the conclusion that it was all madness. She blamed God for the “madness,” whatever that was. Then her husband came to the door.  He was fuming at me as he blamed God and Christians for all the wars and starvation in the world.  That was another common mantra from people as well – “what about all the………?”  So I asked him the same question – “what about it?  What have you done to help fix it?”

I then suggested to him that when it gets right down to it, none of us can use these questions as an excuse and a smokescreen to hide behind, so as we don’t have to face up to what Jesus Christ confronts each one of us with.  Both these people chose to change the truth of God into a lie.  So deep were they now living the lie, that it was part of their belief system and it was destroying them.  They became what they believed – angry, bitter, self-righteous people, just like those who create wars and starvation.  I told these two people that Jesus said war and selfishness come from within the heart of every individual, but they rejected it.

Twenty-six year old single mother Diane was in turmoil because her young child had not been baptized.  It was her strong belief that if the little one died it would be excluded from heaven.  Such a belief gave her restless days as well as nights.  When it was mentioned that God has nothing to say to us about infant baptism in the Bible, she struggled to accept that as truth.  It was foreign to what she had grown up believing.  Diane then shared that as a teenager she argued and fought a lot with her mother.  One day she lay down on her bed after such an event and felt an incredible fight going on within her, “between the devil and God.”

Diane then fell asleep.  When she awoke she said she felt an almighty peace within and all over her. Then she went out and gave her mother a big hug as she apologized. She didn’t tell her mother of her experience, but she did tell some of her school mates. They all laughed at her and told her she was mad. That’s what they believed. They had no basis for such a belief, having had no experience for themselves, but nevertheless, so strong and convincing were her mates that Diane believed them and not God. Since then, she’d been operating on a faulty belief system that was blocking off any further peace and truth that God desired to impart to her.

Eighteen year old Jodie stood at the door asking lots of questions about God and the Bible, saying she was trying to figure out the meaning of life.  She’d been out of school for a year and couldn’t find a job.  All her friends had one which left her disturbed and questioning, “why me?”  I had no answer for her, but I told her that Jesus Christ did.  As a student at school she said there had been many discussions on God, but none on Jesus Christ.  She had never heard the gospel message that God has revealed Himself in Christ and that if we know Christ, we know God.  But her mother had and she rejected it.

When I mentioned to Jodie that Jesus Christ would reveal Himself to her if she sincerely asked Him to, I heard footsteps coming down the hallway and another voice saying, “That’s rubbish!”  Jodie asked another question.  Her mother was standing with her by this time as I answered, and again she said, “That’s rubbish.”  This went on for some minutes.  I challenged her mother to test her beliefs with those of Christ.  She wanted to know how that could be done, so I responded by repeating the Lord’s challenge which is, “do what God tells you to do and then you’ll find out for yourself if it’s true or not.”

That challenge softened Jodie’s mother a little and now it was her who asked some questions.  My answers were from the Bible alone.  I explained that we cannot know the true meaning of life by holding onto humanistic, philosophic or religious beliefs that don’t line up with biblical revelation.  If we do so, we are calling God a liar.  Not only that, but we will become increasingly deceived. God tells us that if we continue to embrace falsehood over truth, then at some point He will make sure we remain embracers of falsehood (lies) with all our hearts. In other words, we will forever believe the lies to be truth.  But in time, our beliefs will come back to bite us as they did for Hitler and the German people.

God Almighty Himself paid a high price for truth. In some way, really only known to Himself, it was He who became a Man. It is as a Man that God shows you and me who He is and what He is like. We can know God’s nature and character by looking at Christ’s nature and character. Not only that, but we can become partakers of that nature and character, if we will but choose to humble ourselves and permit Him to cast away ours (which are sinful and offensive to Him), including our faulty belief systems along with them. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.” Jeremiah 17:9-10.