Christian Philosophy: Everyone Has a Philosophy. It's The Lens Through Which They View The World and Make Decisions. (11 page)

The great heroes of the Bible were people who followed God’s way of thinking, even when it meant putting their life on the line. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego come immediately to mind; they were three young men who had been taken to Babylon during the captivity. After Daniel correctly interpreted one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, he and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were elevated to positions of leadership within the king’s government. After some time, the king made an idol of gold and instructed everyone to bow down and worship it. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused, they were brought before the king to be punished. The king told them that if they bowed down and worshipped the image he would let them live, but if they refused, he would throw them into a burning furnace. Then he challenged them by saying, “Who is the God who will deliver you from my hands then?”

They replied, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Daniel 3:16-18).

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego knew God was capable of saving them, but they didn’t have a specific promise that He
would
. Still, they were not afraid of the king’s threats, so they told him that they were going to follow God, and they didn’t care what he said or did about it. It didn’t matter to them that the king was planning to roast them alive. They demonstrated that their commitment to God went beyond all other considerations, even the desire to live.

Most of us have not made such a strong commitment to God. Many will serve God and talk about the Gospel as long as they aren’t persecuted, but as soon as someone starts making fun of them, they shrink back. When friends start deserting them and family members call them fanatics, they back off preaching the Gospel. As long as your philosophy allows for you to back down from your commitment to God, then the devil is going to have an inroad into your life. The enemy will use your concern over other people’s opinions to manipulate you into conforming to his worldview. All he will have to do to stop you from following God’s will for your life is bring people along to make fun of you. That’s why the Bible says,

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.

Proverbs 29:25

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego maintained a philosophy that God is absolute Lord. He was the only one they would serve, and they would bow to no one else. Of course, their reply infuriated King Nebuchadnezzar. He was so angry that he ordered the furnace to be heated seven times hotter than usual. The king ordered the strongest men in his army to tie up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and throw them into the fire—and the fire was so hot that the king’s men were killed by the flames as they tossed the three Hebrews into the furnace.

The king gazed into the flames, watching to see the three Israelites consumed by the fire, but soon stood up in amazement and said, “Didn’t we cast three men into the fire?” His advisors said, “Certainly we did, sir.” And the king said,

Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.

Daniel 3:25

In astonishment, the king went near to the fiery furnace, calling the names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and ordering them to come out of the fire. They walked out from the middle of the flames and Scripture says, “…the princes, governors, and captains, and the king’s counselors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them” (Daniel 3:27). The flames that consumed the king’s strongest men had zero effect upon the three Hebrews who were totally committed to God.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to compromise, and God preserved them. Daniel was preserved in the same way when he was thrown into a den of lions after refusing to follow a law that forbade praying to God (Daniel 6). These biblical stories illustrate that commitment to God can’t be a negotiable issue. Whatever you have to compromise to keep or obtain, you will eventually lose. Compromise is the language of the devil. You need to make the decision that Jesus is Lord, and you are going to remain absolutely committed to Him no matter what anyone else says or does—it’s a necessary step in becoming grounded in a Christian worldview.

God should be our number one priority every day, but with many of us, He gets pushed to the end of our agenda. We should be seeking God about how to plan our days instead of planning our days and then seeing if we can squeeze in time for relationship with God. We should spend some time asking God, “What do
You
want me to do today?” We should present our calendar to God and say, “Here’s my schedule God, what would
You
like me to do?” This is how God intended for us to live when He created us. We should be allowing the Lord to direct our steps, not trying to figure out life with our limited understanding.

A common misconception in the church today is that only really devout Christians need to make a total commitment to God. You might think what I’m suggesting is just for the minority of “super-saints” whom God has given a special grace to excel in the Lord’s work, but that isn’t true. There are no super-saints. All believers have received an abundance of grace to reign in this life as kings and queens (Romans 5:17). Making Jesus Lord of your life and believing that the Word of God is the absolute authority are simply basic steps in establishing a godly perspective. These are simple ideas that are foundational components of a Christian philosophy, and adopting this philosophy will radically change your life.

This may come as a surprise, but God’s plans for your life are better than your plans for your life. You can trust Him. He desires good things for you (Jeremiah 29:11). The commands the Bible gives us about how to approach life are for our own good. It really simplifies life once you submit to Jesus as Lord and follow His commands regardless of what you think, feel, or see going on around you. Just make the decision that you are going to do what the Word says and follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit no matter what, and you will experience a drastic improvement in your quality of life.

Can I Really Know God?

W
hen Satan tempted Adam and Eve, he didn’t come right out and call God a liar; he started by questioning, “Did God really say….” It wasn’t until after he planted doubt in their minds that he accused God of lying to them. Satan told them that the real reason the Lord didn’t want them to eat the fruit was because they would become like God (Genesis 3:5). The devil acted like God was being selfish; as if God didn’t really love them, and didn’t have their best interests in mind. It was a total slander against the true nature and character of God.

Why didn’t Adam and Eve recognize that Satan was lying to them? I believe that although they communed with God in ways that most of us would long for, Adam and Eve didn’t truly know God. I know that sounds like a radical statement—I struggled with it at first too. After all, Adam and Eve were perfect before sin entered the world. They walked with God in the cool of the evening and talked with Him. They weren’t exposed to the ungodliness that has hardened our hearts toward God since sin entered the world. Everything was perfect, and nothing was blocking their relationship with God—but Adam and Eve didn’t know the true nature and character of God as well as we can today. They didn’t know God loved them so much that He would become a man Himself, suffer humiliation, and lay down His life to save them. They knew God as Lord, but they didn’t know Him as Savior.

The Word reveals to us the depths of God’s love. It shows how God has pursued mankind throughout history; how He has loved us, and proven through His actions a love that Adam and Eve could not have imagined. True Christianity is the only religion on the face of the earth with the concept of God becoming a man and taking the punishment we deserved in order to redeem us and bring us back to a right relationship with Him.

Other religions may acknowledge a god-like entity, but they put the burden of salvation on the individual; on living a holy life, and meeting certain standards of righteousness. The standards vary, but one consistent theme among all manmade religions is that there are specific instructions you must follow to appease an angry god. True Christianity is all about
what God has already done
for us
; it’s not about what we do, or how we live. It’s all about what God has done to give us
His
righteousness. The Gospel of John sums it up by saying,

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John 3:16

God demonstrated His love for us when He sent Jesus to suffer and die for our sins, and then resurrected Him to give us His righteousness. It’s a love that was impossible for Adam and Eve to understand. The sheer humility of God’s plan of redemption is beyond human comprehension. No man could have conceived such a thing. Adam and Eve didn’t know God’s love to the extent that we can know and experience His love today. They had no idea that God would sacrifice His own Son so that they and their descendants could live forever. If they had known God that intimately, Satan would not have been able to deceive them into believing God was holding out on them, or trying to keep them from reaching their full potential.

A major part of having a Christian worldview is knowing God intimately, not from a distance. We can’t just adapt other people’s opinions about the nature and character of God. We need to have our own personal relationship with Him. The more we know the goodness of God, the less susceptible we will be to the lies of the devil. I fully believe that we succeed and experience victory in life to the degree that we have relationship with God. The good news is that we can know God better than Adam and Eve knew Him because we have a much greater revelation of the extent to which God will go for us. Therefore, we don’t have to fall prey to the lies of the devil. Once you know God intimately, Satan won’t be able to discredit Him or convince you that God can’t move in your life. So a close, intimate, personal relationship with God is an essential component of a Christian philosophy.

The heroes of the Old Testament didn’t understand God’s love the way we can today. Prior to the resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit, not even Jesus’ disciples had the revelation of God that is given to us in Scripture. At the crucifixion, the disciples were expecting Jesus to come down from the cross and establish His kingdom on earth. They didn’t understand what was happening. When Jesus was arrested, the disciples ran away in fear and hid (Matthew 26:56; Mark 14:50). They knew Jesus was the Messiah, but they were expecting Him to establish a physical kingdom on earth—right then. As they stood and looked at Jesus hanging on the cross, they saw defeat. To them, it looked like all of the hope they had placed in Jesus to save mankind was wasted. It shocked them when Jesus rose from the dead because they didn’t know or understand God’s plan of salvation (Mark 16:11; Luke 24:11; John 20:9, 25).

In hindsight, through the record of Scripture, I now have a greater understanding of why Jesus sacrificed Himself on the cross than His disciples had prior to the coming of the Holy Spirit. Even after the establishment of the Church, Peter—one of the Lord’s closest disciples—still didn’t fully understand grace or the dynamics of what had happened on the cross. He was trying to merge the Christian faith back into Jewish law and the apostle Paul had to openly rebuke him for it (Galatians 2:11-14). Years later, Peter wrote in his second letter:

…our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.

2 Peter 3:15-16

Peter says right here that Paul’s revelation of Jesus was superior to his own. Peter lived with Jesus for three and a half years, and Paul spent no time with Jesus while He was walking on earth, yet Paul had a greater revelation of who Jesus was and what He came to accomplish. The point is that Paul didn’t get his revelation from other people, he received it through his spirit—the same way we receive revelation today. Paul has recorded for us the revelation God gave him in the letters he composed, which make up half of the New Testament. Through the Holy Spirit and the study of Scripture, we can know God’s love for us to a degree that the disciples of Jesus did not understand while they were ministering with Him on earth. That’s an amazing statement!

I have a greater revelation of the true nature of God than Abraham or Moses had—not because I’m better than they were, but because God’s plan of redemption is complete, and I have a fuller picture of God than they did. If I could travel back in time and sit down with Moses to explain God’s plan of redemption, he wouldn’t understand it. He wouldn’t understand that the system of animal sacrifice they practiced was only foreshadowing how God would send His Son to live in the flesh and become the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. Moses did not anticipate that God would do away with the sacrificial system and tear down the veil that separated us from the holy of holies. He had no idea those things would happen.