Daily Thoughts
Select a thought to read by choosing a collection, the month, and then the day:
Thought for the Morning
5-24
In A World Without God, Part 4
“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”
David, in Psalm 14:1
Paul made a list of good and evil things in Galatians 5, but look at them from the point of view of atheistic men, from the viewpoint of a world without God. First, we considered the evil “works of the flesh”; now, we consider the “fruit of the Spirit” in a world without God:
The Fruit of the Spirit in a World Without God
(Gal. 5:22-23)
- love- In a world without God, love never heals because it is never pure. Love of self is the only worthwhile love. I have seen an elderly woman fall, and risk her own frail health to protect the infant she was carrying in her arms. And I have seen a mother cat go to extraordinary lengths, endangering herself, to protect her kittens from predators. And I have seen young men take the time to speak gently and lovingly to helpless infants. No such selflessness and sharing of one’s short life makes sense in a world without God.
- joy - In a world without God, joy only exists in a perverse form, when some lust is satisfied or when the ego is flattered.
- peace - In a world without God, peace doesn’t exist at all (Isa. 57:21). There may be brief times when wars are not raging as fiercely, but the fears remain.
- patience - In a world without God, the faults of others become opportunities for self-promotion. And if one is harmed in a world without God, patience becomes dangerous, lest one appear to be too weak to protect one’s self or goods. In a world without God, the more brutally a wrong is retaliated against, the better a man appears to be (as in the case of Lamech, in Genesis 4:23-24).
- gentleness and kindness - In a world without God, gentleness and kindness, if feigned, can be very useful tools to soften up a target by causing him to relax his defenses against you. If sincere, such things are fatal flaws.
- faith - In a world without God, along with faithfulness, faith itself is abject foolishness, a mirage. It is, as Karl Marx said, merely “an opiate of the [stupid] people”. Faith causes people to become weak targets in a world without God.
- meekness - In a world without God, meekness is madness, unless it is fake. Then, as with gentleness and kindness, it can be a useful tool to deceive a target.
- self-control - In a world without God, controlling self is a noxious idea, unless self-control is temporarily employed to impress others and so, bring admiration and opportunity to self.
We do not want to live in a world without God. The two atheists I described earlier would not want the world they would have if they had it without God. The world they mock would not even exist if God were not here influencing the hearts of men to strive for goodness. And the world that atheists imagine, where people are good to each other without God, has never existed and never will.