BP119
The Air We Breathe
How often do you think about the air around you? How often do you give serious thought to the oxygen you breathe? I suppose we think about oxygen once in a while, like when we are climbing a fourteener in Colorado where the air gets thinner with every step, when we are exercising hard, when we fear we are drowning, and when physical ailments like COPD impact our breathing. We definitely think about the air around us when the temperature is so cold that we shiver or when it is so hot that we perspire profusely.
Just to add some spice to this post, I researched quotes relating to the air around us and have included a few samples below.
Air goes in and out of my nose, throat, lungs, blood, heart, brain – and so I am ~ Matthew Quick
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal ~ John F. Kennedy.
Listen! the wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves! ~ Humbert Wolfe
Clearly, some poets and philosophers and nature lovers think and write about the air around us. But most of us rarely think about the air we move in and the oxygen we breathe into our lungs. We are oblivious to it. It is so unnoticed that we usually do not consider its impact on our life—or death.
The Spirit of the Times That We Breathe
I believe that many of us—all of us to a high degree? —are not aware of something else that we move in and breathe into our beings, namely, the Zeitgeist (“spirit of the times”). The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Zeitgeist as “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.”
We are all born into a Zeitgeist and breath it in every day through news outlets, movies, TV, songs, commercials, books, politics, social media. The spirit of the times does not remain static. It changes according to the evolving (or devolving) values and morals of a culture, a country, the world. And, for many, the shifting of the spirit of the times dictates the shifting of law and truth to conform to the Zeitgeist.
Take law for example–not the laws of a city concerning zoning practices or the laws of a state regarding minimum wage—but what often is called universal law. Some say that all law, even universal laws of morality, must change with the shifting cultural landscape or, the Zeitgeist. Bertrand Russell claimed that values are subjective while Epicurus declared that humans are guided by pleasure-seeking. There is no absolute source of law and truth that renders law unchangeable. Law must bow the knee to subjective values and pleasure.
The Zeitgeist of twenty-first century America does not advance absolute truth but relativism. As we have discussed before, relativism says that law, morality, and truth changes with the culture and that personal choice trumps universal truth. There is no absolute truth that is binding on everyone—except, possibly, that rape and child abuse are wrong (as long as you don’t call abortion child abuse. Apparently sexually or physically abusing a child is on a different plane than killing a baby in the womb).
Some believers in Jesus are aware of the current spirit of the times that proselytizes with a gospel of subjectivism. However, if you were born in the last thirty years, you will not have witnessed the before and after of this incremental (but massive) paradigm shift from universal, objective truth to personal, subjective “truth” in America.
Do you remember the old example of the frog that boils to death if placed in water that is initially cool and then heated to boiling? The same is true for many of you who were born into a culture that is the air you breathe from the day you are born. Tragically, as the cultural air around you changes degree by degree, you are oblivious to the truth that you will die in the toxic environment even though it feels “normal” to you.
Whether you sense it or not, you, like the frog, are bathing in a milieu that is beginning to boil.
Relativism or Absolute Truth
What drives this change in the spirit of the times? There are many factors, but the deadliest is the loss of the source of universal truth, the suppression of it by the ungodliness (lawlessness) of men and women. When the love of God and His truth is rejected, something will take its place, namely, human love that is divorced from the love of God and human truthiness built on Russel’s subjectivism and Epicurus’ pleasure-seeking.
As Designer Therapy for Life has pointed out in other posts, Proverbs 29:18 sums up this shift from God’s loving truth to unbridled human passion quite well: Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. When God is rejected in a family, a church, or a culture, people will throw off all restraining morality and run wild. They will do what is right in their own eyes (Deuteronomy 12:8), not God’s eyes. Objective truth will be replaced by subjective desire. People will make up the rules to fit their desires and convenience from identity to reproductive rights.
In order for absolute universal truth to exist, you need to have an unchanging compass, an eternal foundation on which it is built. The only such blueprint is the Bible, the word of the eternal God. Only a sovereign God who created everything can be a legitimate source of binding truth that transcends culture since God is above time and the world.
The writer of an article called The Universal and Unchanging Law (found in The Wanderer, a daily online blog), says about God’s truth: In sharp contrast with subjectivism is the objective system of morality based on the nature of man: natural law morality applicable to all human beings at all times, and knowable by the human intellect even without Divine Revelation.
The writer quotes the Roman philosopher and lawyer, Cicero, who said, (On The Republic, book 3), “True law is right reason in accordance with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting….It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves [my emphasis] for an expounder or interpreter of it.”
Cicero’s quote goes on to say, “And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law; its promulgator and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.”
The writer of the article in The Wanderer refers to Romans 2:15 where it says that even those who do not have God’s special revelation (the Bible) yet have the moral law written on their hearts.
The author goes on to say, This is true today and in every age, but that moral law is obscured in the hearts of those who reject God [or do not practice His presence]. Instead the theory of evolution is accepted as providing the fundamental explanation for the apparent intelligent order in the universe, including moral order.
Hence the prevalent outlook today. Blind evolution is assumed to be the basic explanation, with human life having no ultimate meaning. There is no objective moral law by which our actions should be guided, so the default position is to choose what is pleasant, as Epicurus taught.
The prevalence of this outlook makes it easier to understand the acceptance of absurdities, such as the claim that there are many sexes. Nor can abortion be seen as intrinsically evil, but may be the sensible solution to a problem that is threatening human happiness.
The Drift from God’s Truth to Cultural Truth
Every man and woman since the Garden of Eden have been in a spiritual conflict that pits the enduring, absolute truth of God against the fallen nature of humankind that rebels against God and desires unbridled pleasure with no limits. But beyond that baseline universal truth, there was a time here in America when the larger culture embraced God and His word as the riverbanks that directed us toward truth, health, love, and integrity. The God of the Bible was a mainstream personality to be obeyed and embraced as the plumb for truth.
However, over the last sixty years, the culture of America has increasingly flowed out of God’s merciful riverbanks and defied the divine blueprint for existence and identity. The virus of sin has escaped the lab, so to speak, and now has become not the disease we fight against but the illness that many now irrationally embrace as an invalid might embrace a wheelchair and the blind person might embrace lack of sight.
In truth, rebellion against God is absurd. It is unreasonable. It goes against our very nature—what is best for us. So, listen to scripture (special revelation), but also consider that nature itself (general revelation) testifies against the unhealthiness of sin and the craziness of subjective truth whose mantra basically is I am the boss of me. I want what I want, and I will get it. And God (and you) cannot tell me what to do or what not to do.
In our current culture, we are shouting demands and practicing a resistance to authority that normally proceed from the mouths of five-year-olds! How young we are as a people. How irrational. How disobedient to how we were originally wired by God.
Who was it that said that if we throw out the truth of the Bible, we will also be throwing out common sense?
Internalize the Spirit of Jesus Not the Zeitgeist of the World
The bottom line here is that the only way not to be impacted too much by the Zeitgeist, the cultural air that you breathe every day, is to breathe the truth of Jesus Christ as found in His word and through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us by the Son and the Father to lead us into all truth.
Where you spend your time, will determine your version of truth. What you seek and have affections for will define the lens through which you see the world, God, morality, and even the identity of yourself and others.
Born again Christians know the Author of truth and have the Holy Spirit within them. But if they do not practice meditating on God’s word and His eternal character, the riverbanks of their faith and integrity will erode and their passions will flood the land. Their compass will lose its true north and their blueprint will be smudged miserably by the spirit of the times.
Last week’s post focused on reasons why we don’t spend time in God’s presence. This post addresses the truth that if you do not practice God’s presence or rehearse His word of truth, you will soon be influenced more by the Zeitgeist than the Spirit of Christ. If you do not seek God with all your heart, you will primarily breathe the invisible but (often) toxic cultural air as opposed to the oxygen of God’s truth.
If you pursue the presence of the world and so by default breathe in the spirit of the times, you will soon call evil good and good evil. You will put darkness for light and light for darkness (Isaiah 5:20). Impulse will eclipse both the special revelation of God’s word as well as common sense.
The person who is disobedient to the natural moral law [from God] is denying his human nature and will suffer accordingly ~ from the article in The Wanderer cited above.
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever ~ I John 2:15-17
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God . . . made us alive together with Christ ~ Ephesians 2:1ff