Jesus final sacrifice and modern man, 1
It goes without saying that Europe and the US are secular cultures. What we mean by that is that they sense no need for God in their understanding of the world or in their coping with life. They find the laws of God to be old fashioned and repressive and Christians to be bigoted and arrogant. They have set out on their own way and have not yet been struck by lightening. So, they conclude, all this religion is a farce.
I don’t buy it. I think people of the West are very religious – that they cannot evade how God has made them – and that the image of God shows up everywhere. This thought was crucial for my study in Hebrews 10 this week.
Let me begin by establishing what Francis Schaeffer called the “mannishness of man” – the inescapable image of God that the most secular man or woman cannot escape.
I have loved and observed the truth of his thought repeatedly. People are bearers of the IMAGO. Deny that they have any purpose, insist that morality is the tool of oppressors, or describe the nature of humankind in the most reductionistic bio-chemical terms – they still fall in love, feel guilt, hate certain behavior in others, enjoy conversation, and are silenced before majesty or beauty.
You have to observe and know and ask questions – but it shows up everywhere.
A few years ago we made friends with some very secular folks. They were into spirituality, but disliked anything that was defined. They were also living with each other. Then they decided to marry – and included us on their joyful celebration. A month later we saw them and asked how it was going. They said they were puzzled. Ever since getting married things were different – they had more arguments, their relationship had changed. They could not understand since marriage, in their thinking, was only the acceptable way of society and only a piece of paper. They married to conform. But they were running into the reality that the two had been made one by God. They could not escape.
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