Sermon 2-18-24

Pastor Ray Lorthioir

Trinity Lutheran Church

W. Hempstead, NY

The First Sunday in Lent

Uncreated 

From roughly 2015 to 2020 we were being hammered with Marxist Critical Race Theory. It reached its peak with the George Floyd episode in Minneapolis. Those were the glory days of the thoroughly Marxist Black Lives Matter organization. Millions of dollars from “guilty” whites rolled in. And millions were spent by the leaders of that organization — surprise — on themselves. More than a hundred years of Marxism in the nations of the world has proven that that’s the way things always work out under Marxism. Those in power get the best, while everyone else gets the dregs. This is always the outcome of anything based on godlessness.

Here in 2024, it looks like Critical Race Theory has taken a back burner to another Marxist scam. We might call this Critical Gender Theory. It’s an outgrowth of the feminist movement of the 1960’s and 70’s. But in its current form, this thing seeks to undermine human society by not only completely erasing gender identity, but overwhelming the society with a radical feminism.

We have to remember that in Marxism everything is reduced to power and a power struggle of oppressed classes against oppressors. Therefore, in the current scenario “oppressed” women are being taught to take up arms against oppression from “toxic masculinity.” One result is that in some public school systems female teachers radicalized by such teaching put tremendous pressure on their male students to be less “toxic” and more feminine.

And ironically, this has caused a bizarre backfire. Biological males who have been coaxed into considering themselves female have been permitted into women’s sports. And in competition the biological men naturally win first place and perhaps second place as well. Male and female are not equal when it comes to strength and agility. This is why women’s sports leagues were created in the first place. So, like all godless philosophy, feminism winds up consuming itself in this utterly absurd way.

Is there such a thing as toxic masculinity? Yes. It’s godless, sinful masculinity. Is there also such a thing as toxic femininity? Absolutely. It’s godless, sinful femininity. And Holy Scripture — the Bible — gives us examples of both. On the other hand, Scripture also gives us ample definition of what godly masculinity is. It also gives us definition of what godly femininity is. The question is: what will we have?

All of this is just one present manifestation of a very ancient problem — so ancient that it goes back to the very beginning of human existence on earth. The problem simply is this: Who will be God? And sorry, atheists, this is a problem that even you have. Just because you say there is no God doesn’t mean there’s no problem. What you say is precisely the problem. For someone or something must be God.

So let’s begin by checking this out from a purely philosophical point of view. Everything exists. Doesn’t it? You exist. I exist. The world we live in exists. And our telescopes and space probes tell us we exist in an incredible vastness filled with stars and galaxies. Why does all this exist? How does it exist?

Here’s an important point. It was all here yesterday. Wasn’t it? It was here the day before that. Right? And the day before that and so on. All of us alive today are descendants of those who were alive on earth 100 years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, six thousand years ago and possibly longer. For all this to exist, something must be eternal. Something or someone has to have always been. Otherwise, nothing would exist in the present.

In addition to being eternal, this something or someone has to be uncreated. There are those that say aliens created all that we know. But if aliens did so, who created the aliens? And if the aliens were created by aliens, who created those aliens — and so on infinitely. Someone or something must be uncreated, otherwise nothing would exist.

And if someone or something is uncreated, it can’t depend on anything else for its existence. It has to be self-existing.

In all the history of human thought, there are only two possible candidates for an uncreated, eternal, self-existing, infinite source of existence. One is the universe itself. Indeed, all world religions except Christianity, Judaism and Islam believe in this candidate. This includes the religion of Philosophical Naturalism which is the religion masquerading as science that is taught in our schools at all levels.

Science cannot prove an uncreated, eternal, self-existing and infinite universe. It’s the job of philosophy and religion to posit such a universe. And a godlike uncreated universe can only be accepted by faith alone. Therefore, operating under the assumption that the universe is godlike and uncreated is not science. It’s religion.

In the history of the world, many cultures that have believed in an uncreated universe also have believed in powers, spirits and gods that inhabit and operate within the universe. Hinduism has millions of gods and goddesses. Buddhism can have many gods, or none at all — only the universe itself. The ancient pagan gods and goddesses of Europe, the Middle East and Egypt all operated in an uncreated universe. So did the gods of the earliest peoples of the Americas, Africa, Australia and all the Islands. In various religious systems, some of these gods even gave the universe order. But none of them created it out of nothing.

In all the history of the world, only the ancient Jews brought a different concept down to the present, namely that there is an uncreated, eternal, infinite, self-existing being who is the Creator of the universe and everything in it. This is Yahweh. Judaism eventually birthed Christianity. And, it’s through Christianity that faith in Yahweh, the uncreated Creator God, has worked its way across all continents in the last 2,000 years.

After the first 600 years of Christianity, a perversion of Judaism and Christianity emerged in the Middle East. This is Islam. The character of its creator god is markedly different from the Creator proclaimed by Judaism and Christianity. However, it’s not our purpose to explore that difference this morning. Rather, we’re looking at the difference between Christianity and all forms of paganism, including Philosophical Naturalism.

Now, there’s a reason for paganism’s historic popularity and the popularity it seems to be regaining in formerly Christian America. If there is an uncreated Creator God, then everything — absolutely everything — was designed personally by Him and must conform to His rules and judgments. Therefore, we also must conform to our Creator’s personal rules and judgments. We chafe under these conditions.

On the other hand, if there is no Creator God, and instead the universe itself is the uncreated god, then the universe exerts only minimal control over our basic existence. In such a universe, we have no responsibility to anyone greater than ourselves. Thus, we are totally free to make of our existence anything we want. In other words, we become our own gods. We’re even free to create our own gods if we want. We naturally love such a situation. Thus, the popularity of paganism.

Now, when we examine the history of Israel given in the Old Testament, we see that while captive in Egypt, Israel was more or less captive to Egypt’s gods and goddesses. When Yahweh, Creator of the universe, chose to bring Israel out of Egypt by His own power, He demanded that Israel forsake the worship of all other gods and worship Him alone. Despite the incredible marvels performed by Yahweh during the Exodus, Israel, nevertheless, had great difficulty making Yahweh the sole occupant of their pantheon.

This difficulty continued throughout Israel’s first thousand years in the land promised to them by Yahweh. It took national disaster, removal from their land and a seventy year exile in the pagan city of Babylon to finally establish Yahweh in the hearts of Israelites as the one and only Creator God — their God. The reason for this thousand years of trouble was quite simple. Paganism offers something Judaism does not — the freedom to be your own god and create your own gods.

Ancient Israel often chose to follow the gods in the pantheons of their nearby pagan neighbors. These gods and goddesses were not entirely human creations. The apostles acknowledged that powerful demonic beings stand behind them. And from what we can see in our own culture, those same powerful beings still influence human affairs.

We now fast-forward to an important step in religion that took place in the 1700’s and especially the 1800’s. It’s called Philosophical Naturalism or just plain, Naturalism. Naturalism posits that the universe itself is uncreated, eternal, infinite and self existing. There is no Creator God. At the same time Naturalism denies the existence of anything beyond the visible natural world. So, in Naturalism there are no gods and goddesses. This universe has no supernatural unseen dimensions. There is no heaven, no hell. There are no angels or demons. There may be aliens that have visited earth that were mistaken for gods. But these are merely physical beings like ourselves. They’ve just evolved faster or differently.

According to Naturalism, everything is explainable by “science.” And what cannot be explained by “science”, simply doesn’t exist. It’s at this point that Naturalism engages in a sneaky slight of hand. Real science can only prove what exists. It can’t tell us where anything came from, or where it’s all going. However, that doesn’t stop Naturalism from claiming that “science” can tell us what are actually imaginative philosophical speculations and modern religious myths about the origin of all things and where everything is headed.

I’ll give you an example. The other day on YouTube I saw a PBS program entitled, “When Whales Walked.” This program was designed to blunt a significant problem that arises in Darwinian Evolution. According to the modern myth of evolution, life originated in earth’s seas. Eventually, creatures with fins and gills somehow developed lungs, legs and feet and came forth to live on land. Then, these land creatures somehow evolved into warm blooded air-breathing mammals. Therefore, the existence of whales, dolphins and other warm blooded, air-breathing creatures in earth’s oceans poses a difficult problem for the evolutionary myth. It means that warm blooded, air-breathing land based mammals had to redevelop into sea creatures. And this had to happen through a series of minute changes leading from one type of creature to the next.

So, in the deserts of Africa, a paleontologist found an extinct creature with legs and feet that has one thing in common with whales. It has a bone structure in the skull similar to the one present day sea mammals use to detect sound. For this reason, the discoverer pronounced this extinct creature to be an ancestor of the whale. Of course, he only found this one type of creature. There are no intermediary types going from that creature to the whale. Nevertheless, on account of this one discovery, he established the true religious doctrine that whales once walked.

I can think of a much better myth that explains the existence of this extinct creature far more easily. The Creator God who created whales also created a land based mammal with the same ability whales have to distinguish sound while in water. While whales are meant to live full time in the oceans, this extinct mammal apparently was equally at home in water and on land. Simple. Right? And no absurdities masquerading as sophisticated knowledge are required.

Naturalism reached its heyday in the middle of the 20th century. But something happened in the late 1960’s. Resistance to the Vietnam War coupled itself with Marxist ideology, feminism and a New Age Neo-mysticism. All things considered, it was a combination of strange bedfellows. However, the result was that Naturalism found itself under attack because its insistence on the mere physical and scientific undergirded the scientific-military-industrial complex that was being protested. Ever since, it has been gradually falling out of favor.

However, Naturalism played its part in destroying the Judeo-Christian worldview that had dominated Western thinking for over 1,500 years. It severely questioned the existence of an uncreated Creator God. In the process it successfully demolished the ethical and moral standards upon which society was built. Suddenly social taboos were no longer valid, and debauchery of all kinds was in. It took about thirty years, but the debauchery of the baby boomers reached all the way into the Oval Office under Bill Clinton.

But as I noted at the beginning, we’re now at the point where the very fabric of society is coming unhinged. Is there such a thing as male and female? In recent years we’ve even seen the absurdity of female candidates for high federal office unable and unwilling to define what a woman is under questioning in the U.S. Senate. The God question is what’s hidden behind this absurd silence and preposterous dissembling. For, when the universe itself is posited as the uncreated, eternal, infinite, self-existing source of everything, this is naturally what happens. We are free to be our own gods. We can radically redefine reality in any way we want to. We can even redefine males as females.

And this shows us that things have become far more dangerous than merely overflowing debauchery. Power is the focal point now. There is an elite who believe they have the right to reimagine civilization itself in any way they want. And, they show themselves quite determined to exert that power.

However, in the midst of all of this calamity, Yahweh, the uncreated, Creator God is neither silent nor inactive. As it says in Galatians 6:7, “. . . God cannot be mocked. . . .” For, He has designed us human beings so that alarm bells will go off in some heads when something isn’t right. It may only be a vague feeling of unease. But when it comes, we stop and consider things. For, belief systems have consequences. Behavior according to belief systems has consequences. That’s the way Yahweh has designed things. We would do well to pay attention.

Yahweh has also designed us so that when something is truly right and good some of us will be sufficiently attracted to find out what it’s all about. This has always been God’s way for us. And from what I can see on social media both things are going on. 

For instance, there seems to be an increasing number of women about 30 years of age who are complaining that feminism has lied to them. There seems to be an increasing number of young men who have separated themselves from involvement with women because of female behavior. Looming large in the midst of this turmoil seems to be narcissism, lying and unfaithfulness. This is the real toxicity, not the imagined stuff. As Jesus said in John 8:34, “. . . ‘I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.’” This is people complaining about their slavery to what is not of God.

On the other hand, social media reveals young people who are searching for the historic ways. Is it OK for a woman to desire to be a wife, homemaker and mother? Is it OK for a man to desire the traditional role of provider, protector and family leader? These things are being explored by young people who have no training in them because the society no longer provides it. They’re having to learn it from scratch. And, most interestingly, there seems to be a significant number of young people turning to the Bible and the living Creator God that it reveals. They are becoming His students.

In Matthew 28:18, Jesus commanded His Church to make disciples of all nations. I don’t know how many people in this area are searching for historic Christian ways. But let’s offer ourselves. Indeed, to do so, we, ourselves, are going to have to learn and practice what those ways are. But the good news is that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It’s all there in Moses, the Prophets, our Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles. So, for the next four Sundays of this Lenten season, let’s explore the foundations that we have to offer people who know there’s something wrong and are looking for a way out of the present mess.

In conclusion, let’s hear again these verses from our second lesson. James 1:16-18, “16 Don't be deceived, my dear brothers. 17 Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. 18 He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” Yes. His truth doesn’t change. He’s willing to give us new birth through His Word of truth. All this is good news. Amen.

All Bible quotes are from the NIV.