The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
—Winston Churchill—
Key point: Reality isn’t mean, it just is. We can influence it to some degree, but some of its tenets are absolute and not subject to change. Reality, or truth, demands respect from us all, but if we refuse to acknowledge it and adjust our lives accordingly, it eventually will haunt us and demand payment for our lack of respect. The cost can be huge.
My first post of 2016 was titled “Reality: A Friend or an Adversary? The Decision Is Yours.” The following is adapted from that article.
Reality is our friend if and only if we cooperate with it and conform our perspectives and actions to it. We have many problems in our world today, but one of the most serious and consequential is that many and perhaps most people are building their lives on foundations that do not align with reality or with the truth. Yet there is hope. If an individual has started building in a bad place, he or she does not have to continue. Relocation is possible! Furthermore, anyone intending to build his or her life on bedrock truth can reassess current progress and make appropriate adjustments.
At the end of what we now know as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave a powerful illustration of the practical results of obeying Him versus the disastrous consequences of ignoring Him.
24 “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 The rain fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded that house, and it collapsed. It collapsed with a great crash.” (Matt. 7:24-27, CSB)
This translation is adequate. However, in verse 25, the word foundation is very interesting. While the translators of the Christian Standard Bible rendered this word as a noun, it actually is a verb in the original Greek. The translators of the King James Version and the New King James Version rendered it in English as a verb. Here is verse 25 in the NKJV:
and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.
We find this verb five additional times in the New Testament. Here are the verses in which it appears. In each instance we present it in the King James Version, and we have underlined the English word or words representing the Greek term.
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- He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock (Luke 6:48).
- That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love (Eph. 3:17).
- If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister (Col. 1:23).
- And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands (Heb. 1:10).
- But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you (1 Pet. 5:10).
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In considering Matthew 7:25, we do well to keep in mind that the original word is a verb. When we understand it to be a verb, we see it pointing to actions taken on the part of the one listening and heeding Jesus’ teachings. Foundations, you see, don’t just show up arbitrarily. They’re chosen, and the choice made brings forth either benefits or severe consequences, just as Jesus said.
America is paying a steep price for neglecting and discarding Jesus’ teachings, and more broadly, truth itself.
Neglecting The Truth Is Bringing Forth Severe Consequences in America
In 1968 his landmark book The God Who Is There, Christian thinker and philosopher Francis Schaeffer observed,
If you had lived in Europe prior to about 1890, or in the United States before about 1935, you would not have had to spend much time, in practice, thinking about your presuppositions [or the assumptions you made about life and relationships as you went about your daily activites].…
Before these dates everyone would have been working on much the same presupposition, which in practice seemed to accord with the Christian’s own presuppositions. This was true both in the area of epistemology and methodology. Now it may be argued that the non-Christian had no right to act on the presuppositions he acted on. That is true. They were being romantic in accepting optimistic answers without a sufficient base. Nevertheless they went on thinking and acting as if these presuppositions were true.
What were these presuppositions? The basic one was that there really are such things as absolutes. They accepted the possibility of an absolute in the area of Being (or knowledge), and in the area of morals. Therefore, because they accepted the possibility of absolutes, though men might disagree as to what they were, nevertheless they could reason together on the classical basis of antithesis. So if anything was true, the opposite was false. In morality, if one thing was right, its opposite was wrong. This little formula, ‘If you have A it is not non-A’, is the first move in classical logic. if you understand the extent to which this no longer holds sway, you will understand our present situation.
Absolutes imply antithesis. The non-Christian went on romantically operating on this basis without a sufficient base for doing so. Thus it was still possible to discuss what was right and wrong, what was true and false. One could tell a non-Christian to ‘be a good girl’, and, while she might not have followed your advice, at least she would have understood what you were talking about. To say the same thing to a truly modern girl today would be to make a ‘nonsense’ statement. The blank look you might receive would not mean that your standards had been rejected but that your message was meaningless (emphasis added).
Keep Dr. Schaeffer’s insights in mind as you continue to read.
The Truth Is Under Assault
Today, because of the bombardment of lies related to sex and sexuality, in addition to lies about the nature of truth in general, not only is a girl not likely to know what it means to be good; she may not even know she is a girl! Males, too, are buying into these same kinds of lies, even though the truth is obvious.
On March 30, an written by Devan Cole and published by CNN stated,
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- It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.
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The statement was revised a few hours later. The next day the article read,
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- It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and for some people, the sex listed on their original birth certificate is a misleading way of describing the body they have.
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The CNN piece was reporting on South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s executive orders regarding women’s sports in her state, orders she issued after vetoing a bill that would have prevented biological men who identify as women from competing against women in sporting events. The following is from the later edition of the article. Apparently, these paragraphs remained unchanged from the article as it originally appears.
The move [to enact executive orders] came after Noem angered conservatives by killing a bill that would have created a similar prohibition. In a news release explaining her veto at the time, Noem cited her concern that the bill would take the state’s colleges and universities out of compliance with national rules, that it left both schools and students vulnerable to lawsuits over performance-enhancing drugs and that it created an “unworkable administrative burden” on schools.
Noem’s conservative critics, including the editors of the National Review, accused her veto of being motivated by fear of “expensive lawsuits and potential boycotts.”
Though the two executive orders signed by Noem do not explicitly mention transgender athletes, they reference the supposed harms of the participation of “males” in women’s athletics — an echo of the transphobic claim, cited in other similar legislative initiatives, that transgender women are not women. The orders also reference “biological sex,” a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students’ original birth certificates.…
“The executive orders are just (Noem) trying to really cover her tracks,” Republican state Rep. Rhonda Milstead told CNN. “She said she’d sign the bill, she said she supports fairness in women’s sports.” Milstead said that without an enforcement mechanism, Noem’s orders do not adequately address the issue.
While the failure of the governor of South Dakota to sign the legislation is cause for serious concern, I’d like to focus on the outrageous claim the CNN article makes about biological sex. In an article informing readers about CNN’s assertion regarding biological sex and pointing out how foolish it is, Tristan Justice, writing at The Federalist, showcased this video, which was produced by CNN in 2017.
Writing at The Christian Post, Ryan Foley noted the editorial adjustment made to the CNN article, and he highlighted other assertions that were not changed. In both its original and updated forms, the CNN article
characterized the idea that “transgender women are not women” as “transphobic.” The article described the term “biological sex” as “a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students’ original birth certificates.”
Here is Ryan Foley’s concluding paragraph:
Cole’s [CNN] article comes almost two months after the American Civil Liberties Union declared that the idea that “sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics” is a myth.
Make no mistake. It isn’t just CNN promoting these false ideas. Increasingly, it’s one American institution after another.
Systemic Falsehoods
Moreover, the number of lies being propagated abound. In other words, sexuality and gender are not the only arenas in which falsehoods are gaining substantial ground. Next time, we’ll explore another.
Stay tuned!
Copyright © 2021 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture has been taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The passage marked CSB is taken from the Christian Standard Bible. Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible®, and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers, all rights reserved.
Great article!
Thank you, Oscar! Blessings to you!