Influencers Weekly Devotional

Believe

by

Rocky Fleming

You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! James 2:19 (ESV)

Have you spent any time with a genuine atheist?  I have several times, and my experience with it has been like talking to a dying man who has given up any hope of surviving the disease that will claim his mortal body.  Worst, he feels there is no cure.  To cope for his lack of faith that there is in fact hope, he dogmatically believes there is no cure, and to tell him there is a cure shakes his belief system and challenges his ideology.  His plan is to simply get by in life the best he can and keep the party going, for he believes there is no other life than the one he now lives.  This belief-ism is his religion.  It is in fact, his church.  It is the religion of his life, and self is his god. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, there is anger in the atheist about the possibility that there is a Creator God, for like I said, it challenges his belief system and reveals the hopeless state he has bought into.  The atheist wants you to think he’s got things figured out … that he’s the smart one.  But they are not as secure as they think, and their insecurity makes them want others to believe like they do to validate their position.  They take up causes to “enlighten” the marginalized people they think that can be turned to their way of thinking, and for those Christians who are willing to proclaim their faith by the way they live their lives and the choices they make are eventually targeted for some sort of rejection by these atheists.  Maybe this is why we can spot atheists at the heart of most of the recent movements in the Western world including America, attempting to remove prayer from school children, and God from government. They seem to think so many things could be better without God and religion.  Some famous atheists who thought that way were Carl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.  This line of thinking in these leaders created the world’s worst system of government, and as a result released some of the greatest tyranny a government has ever waged against its own people.  Why is this?  Simple.  If a government is accountable to God and the things He values, this accountability becomes the foundation of its practice as government to and for the people.  This government is abiding by God’s value system, and it will be good for the people.  Why is this?  God’s value system values people, and following this path blesses the people.  On the other hand, as with the case of communism, if we remove God from our thinking and our government’s heart, then those things that were foundational for a government under God are also removed.  This is the eventual destiny of a government that systematically tries to remove God from its land.  The scary thing is our country is on a path headed in that direction, and if we stay on it, it will lead to what has happened before with governments and nations that followed the same path.  Destruction. There are others reasons to consider why that system of government is bad.  If the atheists would only use the great intelligence that they think they have, they would understand how history speaks on this subject.  They will not be able to get past the historical fact that atheism removes a consciousness of basic right and wrong from its leaders, and then its people.  This then destroys the trust the people have for their leaders and each other, which erodes the cornerstone of a government and its people.  Look how the Soviet Union turned out after following Marx and Lenin’s religion of atheism, as proof of what I am saying.  Those “smart fellows”, Marx and Lenin, philosophized a utopian government and a much better state of being, if God were removed.  But their brainchild failed, for people also lost hope.  I heard one former Soviet Union leader say that communism failed because they removed God from the people, and that was their biggest error.  It is said had they not waged war to remove God from the people, Communism might have succeeded.  Listen to these people who lived under the tyranny of communistic atheism.  They will tell you that their hope was destroyed under atheism, for atheism offers no hope.  They will also tell you that the people who pushed that agenda, as they are doing today, are out of touch with the core needs of mankind, which is to have God in their life.  If they don’t have Him in their life, they for sure don’t want Him in ours.  That is obviously seen by their actions today. Do the voices we hear and the words we read now days sound more and more like atheists are trying to reshape where this country is headed?  Can we not see those “smart people” have an agenda to undermine a government that was once under God, as our Pledge of Allegiance declares?  But, can they not let history be their guide and see the path they promote leads to ruin?  Don’t they get it?  Even if they believe there is no God, can they not see the dismal path they follow has never, ever produced a better government, or a better civilization?  Maybe the truth is they’ve recognized that what they promote doesn’t work, but their prideful, atheistic view doesn’t allow them to accept the evidence?  Maybe they don’t really care, after all they are people who live with no true hope in their perspective of life.  Maybe their dogma is so deeply rooted in their bitterness toward God that they see there mission in life is to be anti-God?  But there have been some occasions whereby an atheist finally wises up, such as the well-known former atheist C. S. Lewis.  Yes, you heard me right.  Our hero of the faith, C. S. Lewis, was once one of those dogmatic atheists who believed that there was no God.  Here’s his story: C.S. Lewis was a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University.  He once believed that all Christians were wrong to believe in God.  As an atheist, the last thing he ever intended to do was follow Christ.  However, in 1926, “the hardest-boiled of all the atheists,” per Lewis’ description, came for a visit. As they sat by the fire conversing, the “hard boiled” atheist remarked to Lewis that the evidence for the historicity of the gospel message was “really surprisingly good.” Ok.  Now understand, an atheist will shake another atheist up when they simply look at the historical facts about Christ, and have the courage to share what they see.  Needless to say, the statements of his colleague shattered Lewis’ solid beliefs against God.  Lewis wrote in his journal, “If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the tough, was not safe, where could I turn? Was there then no escape?”  So now, the atheist Lewis was finally open to some sincere research on the subject, which is what most atheists will not do.  Good for him, for now he’s being smart.  After examining the basis and evidence for Christianity, Lewis concluded that in other religions there was “no such historical claim as in Christianity.”  His knowledge of literature forced him to treat the gospel record as a trustworthy account. “I was by now,” he said, “too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myth.”  So, Lewis had no other choice based on the evidence he found.  Contrary to his strong stand against Christianity, Professor Lewis made an intelligent decision and this is what he wrote about it: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him Whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” Why was C. S. Lewis dejected and reluctant?  It was because all the atheistic conclusions he had come to understand and live by and drive his life by had been undermined.  His neat and convenient stand that there is no God had been taken from him.  The old man and his atheism had joyfully died.   A new man, perhaps one who would be greatly misunderstood by his colleagues would emerge, and it was this man we came to know and love … the new man in Christ. This story about the conversion and life of an atheist named C. S. Lewis prompts me to ask that we pray we will see more and more men and women like Lewis who will dig out of the embrace of atheism and into the embrace of Christ.  The atheists in our land are doing some mighty bad things now days.  But, some of them have the ability to do some great things for the Lord, if they come to know Him.  He loves them, even though they deny His existence.  Let’s pray they will come to know Him.  We have a great God Who still loves these atheists where they are in spite of their claims about Him, and He wants them as His own.  How could He do that?  Would you and I love an atheist like that?  But that’s just the way our Lord Jesus is, and why we want other people to know Him.  This is also why Christianity and Christians are such a threat to the atheist.  It is because it changes everything for them as it did C. S. Lewis, and look what happened to him.