Tag: existentialism

Some inescapable basics

Our desire for authentic answers shows that we are rational thinkers, curious to understand our world and ourselves (and others). We are endowed with a mind which in some undecipherable way works in and through our brain. Our brain is the most complicated thing known to mankind; we all have one, and its performance capacity is amazing. Where did it come from? How is the mind involved in the atomic movements within the brain? These questions are beyond human understanding; they are the very mystery of human life.

Atheistic scientific materialism would have us believe that all our personal thinking is nothing other than the complex movements of the brain – that ultimately, we do not have personal freedom to think and understand truth because we are simply part of the cosmic machine. But we find that explanation unacceptable; it reduces us to robots with no freedom of choice, no real love, and ultimately no meaning either. The philosophy of scientific materialism does not provide any serious authentic answers to our very real hunger for finding truth about ourselves. Such “answers” undermine any hope for truth about our human reality. That is why societies dominated by that philosophy are struggling with mental health issues, because without some acceptable answers our human existence is bound to suffer both individually and in our social sphere. Bereft of wise moral absolutes, without meaning or purpose to their human existence, people don’t know where they are going and have no uplifting hope for their future. 

This is why people are more seriously reconsidering the Christian framework in which our many existential questions do find answers that are both reasonable and fulfilling. There is authentic hope for answers in studying the Bible: if it is the inspired communication of our Creator God, it should provide the answers our hearts long for. Does it? Well, yes, it does! This is what Christians realise, and though Christian believers do not necessarily understand all the answers, their source-book, the Bible, furnishes light enough to lead them out of the darkness of uncertainty and insecurity, into a life – when one believes in Jesus as Lord and Savour – that is the most fulfilling life possible. Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly”. He declared “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; and again, “whoever believes in me has eternal life” (John 10.10, 14.6, 3.36). He was so perfect in life that when he was killed, he came back to life. He, of all people who have ever lived, is totally worth following, and untold millions throughout the world have found that he does indeed bring into our lives a spiritual dynamic that makes sense and provides deep joy.

As the scientific materialist worldview has no absolute source of wisdom for moral questions, the typical outcome is to adopt a hedonistic outlook, living for personal pleasure. This is just selfishness by another name, and though it seems promising at first, its promises turn out to be illusions of a happiness that is never fulfilled, always wanting more, and never at peace. It takes the wisdom of the Bible to teach us that true happiness, blessedness, and fulfilment come not by giving free rein to our lusts, but by denying our evil tendencies and committing to follow that which is good. And who defines the true good? Well, only God: he alone is perfectly good, and wants to lead us into the true, deep, and meaningful happiness that comes from the real good life, a life that the Bible calls blessed.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Am I a good person?

What is a good person? How to define what goodness is for a human being? In his ground-breaking, thoroughly reasoned, brilliantly insightful book “After Virtue”, Alasdair MacIntyre clarifies the question with luminous simplicity. Taking as examples how we would assess whether a watch is a good watch or a farmer is a good farmer, he says “we define both ‘watch’ and ‘farmer’ in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are typically expected to serve.” A knife or a pen is similarly “good” if they fit the purpose for which they were conceived.

Reflecting on this, I realised that Jesus had taught this principle when he referred to salt. “Salt is good” is one of his words, (Luke 14.34). Its purpose is clearly to provide flavour to food. In the Sermon on the Mount, however, he adds, “but if salt has lost its taste… it is no longer good”; it can’t fulfil its purpose (Matthew 5.13).

Why is our generation so confused about goodness and morality? Why do ethical debates, instead of helpfully defining goodness, end rather in a good mess? Alasdair MacIntyre puts his finger on the deep reason: what’s missing is an understanding of man’s purpose (telos is the word he uses). If a thing is considered good because it fulfils its objective or purpose, the key question is what is the purpose of human beings? If there is no clear answer to that question, it is impossible to judge whether a person is good.

Now if everything in the universe, including our human species, resulted from a powerful explosion without any guiding intelligence and wisdom to provide the purpose of it all, there can be nothing but confusion both as to our meaning and purpose. And lacking understanding of our purpose, there is no means of assessing the goodness or badness of people.

So the secular West’s evacuating the Biblical wisdom of the divine Creator who had in mind a purpose for his creation, and specifically for human beings made “in his image”, is the real cause of our profound confusion. If we do not know what a person if “for”, we cannot say whether or not he is good in accomplishing that purpose. 

So both the meaning and purpose of our human existence, and the criteria of good and bad, depend on knowing why we exist – what is our telos. Back in the 17th century, some serious biblical scholars, reflecting on the essence of Christian truth, posed in the Westminster Shorter Catechism the question, “What is the chief end (telos) of man?” They furnished Christianity with the most brilliant summary answer, unsurpassed in four centuries: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever”. Vital wisdom in 14 words!

The same essential answer was expressed by Stephen Meyer, erudite scientist, biblical Christian, and author of “The Return of the God Hypothesis”. Interviewed by Piers Morgan and asked point blank: “What is the meaning of life?” he responded wonderfully: “To come into a relationship with the Creator”. If that is the purpose of our existence, and we are not in harmonious relationship with God, we are not truly “good”, for we are not fulfilling the purpose for which we were made. Today the Creator calls us out of that problematic situation: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened”, says Jesus, “and I will give you rest… learn from me” (Matthew 11.28). We will find that rest, through Jesus, as we commit to fulfilling His purpose for our lives.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Morality – the puzzle

People raise complaints against the “old morality” (where, for example, homosexual acts were considered a sexual perversion, abortion was a crime associated with murder, and kids born out of wedlock were “illegitimate children”).

They consider that what is wrong with this old morality is that it is “out of date”, as is indicated by their use of the expression “on the wrong side of history”, to depict those who still hold to them.

Does morality then change with the times? Does morality differ according to when and where you live? The moral relativist would say so – there is no objective morality that we can turn to with confidence. After all, who is to say what the right morality is? Will it be different tomorrow? It could well be. 

This reflection is not miles away from our daily lives, because we all make judgments about good and evil. These judgments differ from person to person, and from age to age: so there seems to be no objective standard to guide us as we face issues requiring some kind of moral judgment.

C.S. Lewis refers to this as “the poison of subjectivism”. “Until modern times,” he writes, no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgments, or that what they discovered was objective”. What Lewis saw coming is the slough in which we are plunged today: the old morality is condemned by those who seem to have invented a new morality, with new sins like “homophobia” and “intolerance”.

It is well worth listening to the deep wisdom of this Oxford don and ethics specialist. C.S. Lewis insists it is a “fatal superstition that men can create values.” There needs to be “some objective standard of good”, he asserts, for any moral judgments to have meaning. He shows how it is impossible to condemn the moral values of others as evil without using an objective overarching standard. Otherwise such condemnation merely expresses the subjective opinion of one or more people. “Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring” (Christian Reflections, p99-100).

The person who wants to relax the old-time morality and impose something “better”, does so only because he judges the old values by a standard: but the standard he uses is mere variable personal preference. Thus subjectivism poisons all such judgments and undermines the very heart of morality.

Consider this further deep wisdom from Professor Lewis: “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky. Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting some maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it into an unum necessarium” (the one supreme moral trump-card).

He recognises that our ideas of the good may change. However, “they cannot change either for the better or for the worse if there is no absolute and immutable good to which they can approximate or from which they can recede”. 

The necessary requirement for all and any morality is such an absolute and immutable good as that which resides only in the eternal God, who is “holy, holy, holy, the Lord God almighty”. He alone is, and always has been, (despite being neglected) the objective source of moral truth. And he has communicated to us, his moral creatures, in words we can understand, how he defines good, and what human acts he condemns as evil. “To sin is to transgress God’s law” (1 John 3.4). Wisdom and moral righteousness consist in obeying it.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Away with religion?

The New Atheists were dedicated to eradicate religion from any place of influence in society. In this they were following in the footsteps of Karl Marx. Marx’s position is bluntly summed up by Professor Carl Truman, in these terms: “if religion is one major means by which the current unjust set of economic relations is maintained, then at the heart of any drive to transform society must lie a pungent and effective criticism of religion”.

It seems to me useful to discern here a principle that deserves to be exposed. Modern-day atheists, thinking that religion is the root of a lot of evil, attack it tooth and nail. “Religion”, of course, is an easy target to hit, for the word englobes all kinds of, quite honestly, ridiculous world-views with some kind of divinity attached (there are approximately 4,000 religions in the world). So under the heading of “religion”, one can find plenty to validly criticise.

I just want to make two points. The first is to consider where Karl Marx’s anti-religion stance ended up: huge persecution against millions of good-living people who, after suffering immense horrors, saw the collapse and failure of the whole atheistic Soviet enterprise. It is worth considering therefore, whether the modern atheistic attack on “religion” may also harm a large number of essentially decent folk, and also bring about a kind of godless society which, instead of raising the total sum of human happiness, actually brings society down to bizarre and awful horrors. Indeed, are we not already witnesses to the effective decline brought on by the insistence on godless “freedom” where selfishness replaces Jesus’ ennobling call to “deny yourself”, where immorality brings about so many broken homes and broken lives, where children suffer most of all, and antagonism and hatred of others replaces the basic principle essential for a harmonious and positive society – “love your neighbour as yourself”? The godless and religion-less influence we see undermining our erstwhile peaceful and relatively happy society should give us pause for thought.

The second point I want to make was well made by Blaise Pascal three centuries ago when he noted: “I see a number of religions in conflict, and therefore all false, except one” (§198/693). I find that “pensée” very clever. Whereas atheists would say, as they find all kind of religions in conflict, that they throw them all out, Pascal has the genius to see that that does not follow logically: one may – indeed could well be – the true one coming from the one true God. “Religions want to be believed on their own authority”, Pascal adds, and they make threats against those who refuse to believe: “I do not believe them on that account”, he wisely says. “But I see Christianity, and find its prophecies” (numerous fulfilments of biblical prophecies he catalogues in several pages of his Pensées); he concludes, “no other religion can do that!”

Society needs a Transcendent Authority to maintain peace, order, and stability; that authority may come from “religion”. But not just any religion will do. We need a “decent religion” such as even Richard Dawkins recognises Christianity to be. We need the one true religion, the religion that comes from our Creator God, a God who is objectively there and who speaks both wisdom, truth, and goodness into the world he created; not “the god of philosophers and scholars” – as Pascal put it in his Memorial; rather, “the God of Jesus Christ” who transformed the thinker’s life as he submitted to his lordship. That’s what we need, both individually and as a guide to society.

Clive Every-Clayton

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The real truth about human nature

The all-knowing Creator who made humankind “in his image” is the one – the only one – capable of telling us who we really are as human beings. Of course, there are billions of different versions of humans throughout the globe; yet there is a commonality to our humanity that our Creator knows well. His kind wisdom gives us the vital indications we need in order to understand ourselves truly.

These indications, revealed in the Bible, were well grasped by the great French thinker Blaise Pascal, and his “thoughts” are very illuminating on this theme.  He calls people to “know… what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God. Is it not clear that man’s condition is dual?” 

Pascal encourages humility, which means to consider ourselves according to truth. Pride is considering ourselves as better than we are. Discouragement comes from considering ourselves as worse than we are. Humility strikes the balance, seeking both to assess and to accept the true reality of who we are. And Pascal’s profound insight is to recognise that this our human reality is “dual”. There are two essential sides to our human nature.

 “There are two equally constant truths”, writes Pascal: “one is that man in the state of his creation, or in the state of grace, is exalted above the whole of nature, made like unto God and sharing in his divinity. The other is that in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that first state and has become like the beasts. These two propositions,” he concludes, “are equally firm and certain” (Pensée §131/434). It is wisdom for us to recognise both these aspects of our human nature.

Realising how our self-image impacts our mental health, Pascal comments further, “It is dangerous to explain to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him” (Pensée §121/418). So we really need to take on board both features of our reality – our nobleness and our vileness. We are great – the greatest of God’s creation, made in the likeness of God; yet we are perverted, twisted, fallen from our pristine glory. And that is true of you as it is true of me.

A final more amusing thought from Blaise Pascal: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast”! (Pensée 678/358) He would thus pinprick the bubble of our pride. We are both wonderful, yet wicked; both marvellous and malevolent; both glorious in humanity’s origin and yet tragically fallen from such grace.

So what can we do with this vital double assessment? Realise, first of all, that God does not love you because he finds you perfect, but he loves you in his grace despite your sinfulness. Secondly, when we invite our Saviour, Christ, to come and dwell in our hearts by faith, the Holy Spirit progressively develops within us the desire to overcome our sins and to grow in Christ-likeness. The biblical Christian is encouraged to “put off the old self which… is corrupt through deceitful desires, and put on the new self, remade in the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4.22-24).

Clive Every-Clayton

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Who am I really?

A great thinker of the 20th century, Francis A. Schaeffer, summed up man’s situation thus: “The dilemma of modern man is simple: he simply doesn’t know why man has any meaning. He is lost. Man remains a zero. It is the damnation of our generation. If a man cannot find any meaning for himself, that is his problem”. 

The difficulty was compounded by Jean-Paul Sartre’s insistence that we have to create our own meaning, which contributed to confusion in the search for self-understanding and later to the supposed possibility of inventing one’s identity. The problem with that is we are simply not able to invent ourselves; rather, from the very moment of our birth, we exist as “given”; the wisdom of the serenity prayer counsels that while we should change what ought to be changed, we must accept what cannot be changed. 

We first have to reckon that we come from somewhere; we have a back story. We cannot abolish the past – our past. We are caught in existence at this moment in history.

If we want to re-invent ourselves, we find we drag our past with us and we can never be dissociated from it. Rather, as we seek to understand ourselves properly, we need light to guide us, truth to correct us where we’ve gone wrong. “Know thyself” is not a banal piece of advice: it is of the essence of our happiness and our survival. But that means we have to assess ourselves as we are, as objectively as we can (which is not easy when we are the subject). We have to assess judiciously how other people consider us: we all know how their opinions can do much harm in damaging our self-esteem, and how sometimes their praise does us much good, boosting our morale. In fact, unknown to our own hearts, what we really need is for someone who knows us truly and who loves us dearly, who can tell us who we are, why we are here and what the meaning is to our existence. That person exists! We must listen to him! 

(continued in next blog)

Clive Every-Clayton

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The “endarkenment”

In the Middle Ages, proud intellectual philosophers dared to think that they could find the answers to questions about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything while rejecting the prevailing biblical consensus of the time. That period was called the “Enlightenment”.

After several centuries of intellectual effort the result is one of confusion, humiliation, and the recognition of failure. Having abandoned the wisdom of Jesus who declared that he was “the Light of the world”, philosophers who hoped for enlightenment by their own rational powers ended up plunging the world into hopeless darkness; I call this the “endarkenment”.

The truth is that only the Creator of the whole universe who placed on earth human beings made in his image – only he can enlighten our darkness. “God says: It is I who have made you and I alone can teach you what you are” (Pascal). 

The true enlightenment came when God sent into the world his Son, who proclaimed: “I am the light of the world; whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life” (John 8.12). What a claim! The Gospels tell us that he was “the true light which enlightens everyone” (John 1.9). Jesus’ light “shines in the darkness” (John 1.5); but Jesus lamented that “people loved the darkness rather than the light”. Why? Jesus tells us: “because their deeds were evil; for everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3.19-20). In other words, Jesus’ light includes moral absolutes; these condemn our sins, and we don’t like that, so we “switch off” the light. That’s why Jesus was rejected and crucified by evil men.

Today, Jesus’ light remains the only ultimate answer to our human predicament, and our refusal to listen to him damns us to remain in our existential darkness.

A powerful passage in the New Testament unveils the deep darkness of our human condition; sadly, we are too proud to envisage its truth. It speaks of all people as “walking in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity” (Ephesians 4.17-19). It takes serious humility to accept such an accurate assessment of our human condition!

Another penetrating and devastating analysis of our human darkness is to be found in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. It describes how people “became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… They exchanged the truth about God for a lie… and… did not see fit to acknowledge God”. Such behaviour brings down God’s holy wrath against us sinners, and the passage shows that an element in that righteous judgment is that God abandons sinful people to their “dishonourable passions”; specifically “women exchanging natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise giving up natural relations with women and being consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (v26-27).

In other words, bad thinking leads to bad living. God’s light not only answers our existential questions: it provides moral truth we need, to deliver us from the hellish slippery path of relativistic moral thinking. 

Jesus, however, offers truth and the promise of eternal life.

Clive Every-Clayton

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A better story

I have been busy these last weeks preparing and giving lectures here in the Highlands of Scotland on a better way to conceive of our human reality.

Whether we like it or not, we in the West live in an atmosphere fashioned by a secular mind-set, and through this grid we seek to understand the way people think and behave. Some months ago, certain leading intellectual thinkers, politicians and academics meeting in London insisted that we have not been well served by the modern secular “story” – the worldview beclouding our western society with its morose and unhelpful ideas about our human meaning and value.

These thinkers are proposing a different approach, and although not all would adhere to a religion, there is a basic realisation that without a Transcendent framework, society tends to descend into a kind of hopeless moral relativism that brings on the anguish we see increasingly in the West.

As a Christian, I wholly concur that we need a “better story”, and my lectures have been addressing that need in various areas of our self-understanding. My basic thesis has been that the atheistic materialism underlying the secular story is unhelpful and psychologically damaging. It is a factor contributing to people’s confusion about their human reality, the rise of mental ill health, and the prevailing sense of hopelessness and despair. It is the hidden cause of a lot of the deterioration of our modern society that we have been sadly witnessing these last fifty years or more. 

Why is the materialist-atheist scenario so harmful? Because it proclaims that we all have come ultimately from an impersonal beginning – an immense explosion of energy and matter which, over billions of years, instead of obeying the second law of thermodynamics and deteriorating progressively into total disorder, has somehow managed – by some unaided process – to actually bring about the world we see around us with all its life, variety, beauty, and splendour. The essential blind spot of this “story” is its absence of any original personal Creator as the valorising ground of our human personality.

Dr Francis Schaeffer discerned this years ago, when, commenting on the thesis that “man is the product of the impersonal, plus time plus chance”, he wrote: “no-one has succeeded in finding personality on that basis, though many have tried. It cannot be done”.

This means that if you begin by adopting the atheistic materialist explanation of the origin of all things in an impersonal explosion of matter and energy, there is no way you are going to be able to establish the reality of human personality. That first assumption leads inexorably to an understanding of the human condition which cannot account for – and indeed undermines – all the marvellous enjoyable realities of our personal existence: our intelligence and rationality, our emotional nature, the reality of love, freedom to choose and to exercise our own will, our ability to communicate, and our moral sensitivity. All these much appreciated aspects of our personal lives have no real basis following the story told by secular materialism; it contradicts our well-known reality and would undermine our true personhood. This makes evident the falseness of that story: we know that our personal faculties are real and precious, so any explanation that cannot account for them must be wrong. 

Instead of assumptions that do not explain in positive terms who and what we are – but rather confuse us – what a relief to turn to the “better story” that an infinite and personal Creator made humankind in his image; that both valorises us and truly explains who we really are.

Clive Every-Clayton

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The implications of atheism

Atheism is a futile and failing faith, and the sooner society realises that, the better it will be for us all. Yes, atheism is a faith-system, a negative faith perhaps, but a belief which carries serious implications with it. It is failing, because it cannot bear the weight of expectation placed upon it to provide a meaningful and hopeful worldview. So it is futile to trust in such a baseless ideology.

In another blog post I brought out the implications of God being our Creator; now I want to think through some of the implications of atheism.

Atheism denies the Creator; what is left in his place? Chance and necessity. All that exists is the outcome of chance – from the Big Explosion onwards. Guided by no divine mind or wisdom, everything that exists is the result of the hazardous movement of matter and energy.

What then are we? Humans are merely the accumulation of accidental collocations of atoms, thrown up by pure chance. No intelligence guided the process of our evolution; no value can be put on our personal reality – rather we are either sophisticated beasts or impersonal machinery. Our human value is zero, despite our seemingly great capacities.

What is our purpose? Chance can create no purposes. Purposes are the fruit of an intelligent creative mind, such as God’s; but without such a Creator of humankind, there can be no purpose in our existence, no meaning to our lives. This is the deep cause of the rising existential crisis in societies where atheism’s bleak philosophy exerts a predominant influence. Here is the reason for the increasing mental health difficulties experienced by those without any wiser guidelines to show the way. They are psychologically lost.

What use is our intelligence? Can we think or reason our way forward? Impersonal matter – which must be what we are if there is no personal and infinite Creator – has no intellectual capacity at all. The brain merely reacts to impulses; it doesn’t think any more than computers do. But since we do think, the atheistic basis proves unsatisfactory. We can think our way out of atheism, to seek how the Creator has made himself known.

What about moral values? If there is no absolute divine holy and good Creator, there is no objective source for discerning right from wrong. We are simply left with the relativism where each decides for himself; and to prevent the moral chaos that would ensue, authoritarian governments impose what they think is good – the politically correct. And this is often far from the wisest guidance, leading to profound discontent and bitter argument.  

What about truth? The good old definition of truth was, “reality as seen by God”. Now if there’s no God, it becomes just what you or your opponent may “see” as true. So we enter the “post truth” era – the minefield of “your truth” and “my truth”; because there is no absolute truth if God cannot be the grounds for it. And “your truth” or “my truth” may well be merely falsehood or error in disguise.

What about freedom? In the atheist’s materialistic universe there can be no freedom, which is why some thinkers turn to determinism, saying that while we may think we are free, our actions are merely the result of hazardous impacts made on our impersonal brain cells. 

What about suicide? An atheist’s life, thus considered, seems not worth living. This means not that life really is meaningless, but that atheism is hopeless and unliveable. 

Our Creator God, conversely, gives meaning, value, truth, freedom, and purpose to our existence.

Clive Every-Clayton

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A blessing out of hopelessness?

Post-modernity enshrouds us in a depressing cloud of despair: despair of finding any ultimate meaning, despair of knowing any absolute truth, despair of ever truly understanding who we are and what is the meaning and value of our human existence.

All this is profoundly disturbing, but in the midst of our confusion, hopelessness and despair, there is at least one glimmer of light, one saving grace that can enlighten our darkness.

The unexpected blessing is this: we may learn, first, that the quest for valid answers to our existential questions has totally and abysmally failed because our proud expectation was incorrect that we could find them by our own reasoning powers.  This is a humbling but salutary lesson – that man’s reason is unable to ground truth on anything ultimately valid. The efforts made down the centuries by thinkers starting out merely from their own unaided intellectual powers have now been shown to offer only relative answers, human opinions, futile and partial, not really absolute truths. The wise among us can see that Descartes set us off on the wrong track with his “I think, therefore I am”. This started us off thinking only out from ourselves – and it has led to the present end of hope for getting final truth. 

This solemn discovery can prove to be a blessing for the seeking soul.

How? Well, in the light of this discovery, we may learn, secondly, that we need light from a Source that is wiser than mere mortal man. If the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe, wouldn’t the Maker of such a brain be endowed with mind-boggling wisdom? He knows very well the limits of our human thinking to come up with absolute truth, so he has provided a better way by which we may get the answers we crave.

So as we despair of our own intellectual efforts, consider the potential blessing: trust in our reason has led us to realise the limits of our reason, so the next logical step that will renew our hope for authentic answers is to trust the infinitely wise Creator who shares his knowledge with us. He knew all along that we needed his input; right from the creation of the first couple he told them in words some vital things they needed to know.

We should be thankful to God for teaching us this humbling lesson: recognising that we are unable to find many key truths unaided, we are led to acknowledge our need of God’s revelation of truth. And the first element of his truth is that he exists: it is another human folly to imagine we can do without listening to him or by dismissing him completely. It is “the fool” who “says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14.1). The “beginning of wisdom”, according to God’s word, is to “fear the Lord” (Psalm 111.10) – which means taking on board the fact that he is there, that he is wise, and good and loving, well capable of teaching us the way of true human fulfilment as we yield to him his rightful place as the Lord of our lives.

Turn then from vain human thinking and study the words of God! That is the ultimate blessing from which we humans can benefit, once we abandon our proud attitude of expecting to find the answers by ourselves without his revelation.

Intellectual pride will actually blind you to God’s truth: be humble, be teachable as you turn to study the Bible!

Clive Every-Clayton

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