Devotional Guide
For the week of June 4, 2006
CHILDERENıS SUNDAY
About doubt
To read the Bible in one year, today Read: Ephesians 4-6
To Know:
³And when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with the Lord, he
heard the voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was upon the
ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim; and it spoke to him.²
(Nu. 7:89)
Matlock was a TV series that spun off a mystery named Diary of a Perfect
Murder. In that original film the Matlock character, who was a lawyer, is
walking with his daughter, also a lawyer, down the courthouse halls. One
after another, men pass the two and greet the daughter. Matlock is alarmed
when she tells him that the men in this passing parade are also lawyers. The
fatherıs warning is that lawyers cannot be trusted. They have, he said,
ethics but no morals.
Ethics were divorced from morals in the 19th century. That was the century
when God was no longer given ³the benefit of the doubt.² Doubt, wrote one
historian, was the Victorian disease. At the root of the ³death of God² was
the belief among intellectuals that the God of the Bible who speaks is not
really there. After World War II, the Bible-believing remnant in the
churches began fighting back. Billy Graham lifted the scriptures high and
preached everywhere, declaring, ³the Bible says.² In scholarly circles,
books like Francis Schaefferıs He is There and He is Not Silent began
recapturing students in American universities.
To Do:
Doubt is always close to the surface of our lives. Doubt felled many of the
influential men and women who lived between 1800 and 1900. They were unable
to withstand the seeming invincibility of science. They were demoralized by
the incessant onset of political and military revolutions. They were
eventually doomed by the enormous trust they were tempted to place in their
own enormous intellectual abilities. One of the best antidotes to doubt is
reading the Bible faithfully to protect ourselves against what others say it
says.
To Ask:
Father, speak to me as I read your word.
06086$-06086
.
|
