I used to play this trick where I took a handful of change from my pocket and asked someone to count it for me before I used it as an illustration. They would come back with a number and I would look puzzled and ask, ’Are you sure?’ I would then count the change for myself, taking out all the foreign coins that looked like British currency. ‘That,’ I would say, ‘is how easy it is to fool someone. With blinding familiarity and an unsuspecting mark.’
So it is that along comes a Jehovah’s Witness, pointing out the Bible clearly says, ‘You are my witnesses,’ declares Jehovah.’ Isaiah 43:10, and our mark, thinking this an insight, and feeling how clever of him to see it, says, ‘Oh, yes! Tell me more.’
So, too, a Mormon comes along and says, ‘The true church is built on a foundation of apostles and prophets.’ Ephesians 2:20; 1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11-14, and our mark, thinking he knows something now, and how clever he is to know it, says, ‘Oh, yes! Tell me more.’
You see, even someone who has never cracked open a Bible will, like someone with a handful of coins, believe they are in familiar territory. The currency of faith, in a society founded on Judeo/Christian ideologies, is taken for granted as familiar, just as the currency of money is so familiar that we take it for granted we know what we are looking at.
The Currency of Disdain
When I was a boy my mother, seeing ladies passing our house to go to church Sunday mornings, would sometimes remark, ‘They’re just old ladies going to church to show off their hats.’ Fifty years of church experience has taught me that this is a spiteful thing to say, and untrue for the great majority. However, when you’re a little boy you believe what your mother says. You also learn to adopt the same tone of disdain.
Pretty soon you hear others speaking in the same tone, offering pearls of wisdom, such as:
‘The church is full of hypocrites!’
‘You can make the Bible say anything.’
Science has disproved God.’
‘Religion has been responsible for more wars than anything else!’
‘Christianity is not for rational, thinking people in this day and age.’
These things are said with such apparent authority you find yourself impressed. It isn’t long before you realise you can sound as wise and erudite as those people in your community who say such things. With that same air of authority you can trot out any number of reasons to distrust the church, and feel very satisfied with yourself for doing so. Of course, it’s all nonsense, but you haven’t taken the trouble to find out otherwise.
The church is full of sinners. The world is full of hypocrites.
Only someone with no integrity, a hypocrite, would attempt to ‘make the Bible say anything.’
Science hasn’t disproved God, far from it. The more we understand through science the more we see the hand of a creator – if we’re not hypocrites and are prepared to look.
Wars are fought largely for political and territorial reasons, religion being used as a justification. The bloodiest century in history is the 20th century, whose wars were justified by secular ideologies, the kind of ideologies men embrace when they reject God.
Christianity, true biblical Christianity, will always disappoint the superstitious because it is a reasoned faith meant for thinking people.
However, people find the simplistic one-line, cynical ‘explanations’ pleasing and so repeat them.
Misery Likes Company
Well, misery likes company, so when a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon, or someone else comes along to confirm all your worst fears you are pleased to find yourself in the company of a fellow-traveller.
‘You’re right, ‘Christendom’ is hopelessly corrupt, you’ve every reason to distrust an apostate church. Let’s be disdainful together. Anyway, it’s alright, because we have a way of cutting through this jungle of compromise and hypocrisy. Bring your insights and join them to ours. Can we call back and do a book study?’
So, people find themselves treading the primrose path, strewn with the sweet smelling flowers of cynicism, heresy, false teaching, and smug self-satisfaction. So much of this is avoidable if you stop being hypocritical, pretending you know what you’re looking at, if you look closer at that change I handed you, if you simply look at what the Bible actually says.
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