I was driving through town this morning and noticed some new construction project going. I live on the outskirts of the Atlanta suburbs and it seems that the entire country is moving to this area, both legal citizens and illegal aliens undocumented migratory workers and “refugees”, so there is always something being built in order to separate people from their money serve all of the people who are moving here.
I had seen this construction site before but today was the first time that I had noticed the sign which informed the public as to what was being built. It’s a fire station. Right down the road from an older fire station… So there is already a fire station that serves the area. The new one doesn’t appear any bigger than the older one, but will certainly be more nice, and much more expensive, than the older one.
When completed, the new building will be a really nice place to park some fire trucks and some dudes until an emergency pops up… Now I’m not opposed to having new buildings and relatively comfortable quarters for emergency crews, but have you seen what governments are building these days with money that they force us to give to them in order to build temples to themselves and their accomplishments?
Ok so what does that have to do with worship? Though the fire station is a small thing, the idea of building lavish government buildings has everything to with worship.
Before moving in to this, I want to define how I see and understand worship. In my understanding, worship is recognizing something or someone as being of a higher status and worth than I. This puts me in proper relationship to that thing or person. Worship is a very individual thing, varying from person to person, but the object that is worshipped is what really matters to this discussion.
For the last 500 years or so, western culture has been running away from God and His ways of doing things. This started after the dark ages when people with really big brains and a lot of free time on their hands started trying to understand the world without God. This was the beginning of the materialistic world view that has dominated western thinking ever since.
Materialism is a way of trying to understand the world, its a world view. This idea has nothing to do with the piles of stuff that we work our whole lives to acquire. What materialism does is try to find truth and understanding in the world through rational thought and empirical methods. This is done in part by discarding everything metaphysical.
Metaphysical relates to something that is above or outside of the physical world. It can’t be measured, it can’t be seen, and can’t be fully understood through purely rational analysis and empirical measurement.
Materialism seeks to explain how the world works by specifically neglecting the idea of theism since God can’t be measured or understood in purely rational way. Since God is taken out of the picture that puts man as the top dog on the planet, as the best thing going and the ultimate being on the planet. This led to the ideas of secular humanism, which is the root of our problems today.
Once the idea that God was no longer relevant or real, people’s thinking started to change and from that thinking we started to get influential people such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, and Fredrick Nietzsche.
A metric buttload can be said about each one of these people and how their influence is still with us today, but that is the subject for a much bigger project that I am working on and hope to have out soon(ish). The goal of this post is simply to lay the foundation for the much bigger and complex series of posts that I am working on.
Essentially, the materialistic ways of thinking changed how people related to each other and how we understood the world. Because the divine was removed, we started to worship ourselves as well as those who have more of something that we want.
So how is it those aforementioned thinkers of the 1800’s gain such strong influence? How is it that the message of “man being on top” resonated so well with people? How is it that the materialistic world view is something that people will hold on too rather than the view that we are created beings, who are incapable of understanding the world completely, and who were made to have a relationship with a superior spiritual presence who loves us deeply?
One word… Pride.
Pride is one of the most powerful temptations that causes us to rebel against God. It was the cause of Lucifer’s fall from Heaven and has brought us the current level of tyranny, corruption, greed, arrogance, and suffering that we see in the world.
Pride is one of those words that is actually fairly complicated, kinda like the word faith. It can have different meanings but the context used here defines pride as placing of ones self above others, particularly God. Or in other words, it is believing that we know better than God.
Because of this, we believe that we can fully understand the world and humanity to the point that we know how to fix all of the worlds problems and therefore create a utopia here on earth. In reality, this unprecedented amount of pride is what has caused much of the problems with the world.
We all have varying degrees of talents. Some of us are incredibly intelligent, some are gifted with artistic ability, some have the gift of being incredibly warm and give really great hugs, some have the gift of being great teachers, etc. But the notions of materialism took all of those different gifts and nullified them, except for the gift of intelligence.
Over time, the ability for people to understand deep things and explain these deep ideas drew crowds away from the church where people were told to “have faith and believe what you are told” instead of the church engaging with the arguments of the humanists. These intelligent people, with their seemingly strong arguments, eventually won the day against the spiritual thinkers of the time because the spiritual thinkers stopped engaging the culture while the humanistic thinkers infiltrated the culture. They preached that we don’t need God anymore because they, the brilliant and learned individuals, understood how the world worked beyond a shadow of a doubt. And we listened and believed because they promised to give us what we wanted and could provide for our every want without God. This was counted against God, who doesn’t provide everything we want because He is wise enough to know what we will do if we get everything we want. Our trust (faith) in these people led us to thrive in a way that humanity has never known.
And thrive we have… at the expense of what gives people value and worth and at the risk of ushering in new a level of tyranny and totalitarianism than what the world has ever known.
For the most part, we people are followers. Most folks don’t have the desire or the ability to lead and most just want to live their lives and be left alone. They will genuinely follow those who they believe will allow them to do just that and they will believe without question anything that boosts their self identity. It’s just part of human nature.
The start of all of this was with the idea that we could reason our way to understanding the world through purely rational methods if we would neglect senses and emotions. Turns out that we are emotional beings and that we need to trust our sense in order to navigate the world. Our reasoning ability, senses, and emotions are all interconnected and are all needed together so that we can function in the world. There is no such thing as being purely rational in our thinking. We are not capable of doing that for any length of time and when we try then we get to a point where life itself is not worth living.
Think for a moment about the purpose of all life and where all of your work will go when you die. Think about why you are here. If secular humanism is true then every single thing that you accomplish will no longer matter the instant that you check out of this world. Even if your name is spoken in a great way 1000 years from now, it will be spoken from the understanding of the people during that time and not as you truly were or of what you truly accomplished. People today speak highly of Karl Marx and his theories but Marx is quoted as saying that he “was no Marxist”. People today believe what he taught, but he didn’t believe what he taught…
In materialism, there is no point to any form of life since ultimately everything will die, including the planet that the environmental Marxists are trying to save by destroying energy production and trying to convince people to eat lab produced meat and crickets…
Sidetrack…
Think about that for a second… think about how much pride and arrogance it takes for someone to try and convince you that they know how to grow meat in a lab that is better than meat that grows naturally. They want to worship nature but at the same time think they can do a better job at something than what nature can do. Or that they understand how the human immune system is a flawed system and that they alone know how to fix it by altering the DNA sequence…
Ok… back on track…
Eventually, the sun will burn out and the earth itself will be consumed as the sun dies. The universe itself will ultimately die out. If secular humanism is true then nothing that humanity has done or ever will do matters.
This is nihilism and is the logical step after the philosophy of materialism has failed. If nothing matters, then we are free to do whatever we want because there are no true consequences since we will all die anyway. This is the world that we are moving into, a world where consequences don’t matter and if the consequences don’t matter then then we are free to do whatever we please. When the guard rails of society are removed, then mankind is capable of an unimaginable amount of evil. Don’t think that the evil is only relegated to men, women are just as capable of the most evil of acts. Christianity is the only system of belief that can establish the guard rails needed for society but is the system of belief that the secular humanist world view was created to dismantle.
So here’s the thing. We aren’t programmed to be alone. We are not molecular machines without emotion. We are built for community and we are built to worship. We understand that there are people who are more intelligent or more capable than we are. But there is no such thing as a completely free thinker. We are all influenced in the way we think about the world through our own unique mind, but also through the way that we were brought up in the world. People are not created equally when measured through the lens of materialism and secular humanism. Through this world view, some people will be given more worth and higher status than others. Because of that, we tend to worship those who we perceive as having higher worth or value in some way. You will worship someone or something and there is nothing you can do about that, what you worship is the choice that you will have to make. Even if what you worship is yourself.
Should you choose to worship something weak, then in time you will be forced to worship something strong. What you worship is what you submit too and even if you think you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, you will be forced to submit to the higher power power of government and society. You will comply because complying is what is needed for self preservation and you can’t worship yourself if there is no self to worship.
If you want an example of how this works then go look at the history of Communist regimes and see what a secular humanistic society looks like. Look at the amount of blood that has been spilled by these regimes and realize that the only way to survive is complete compliance. But then again, if you want an example a little closer to home, look at how the non-compliant “anti-vaxxers” and mask unwearers were treated by social media, the cult of compliance, medical industrial complex, and government officials during the coronapocalypse. That is the reality of humanity without God.
So what does any of this have to do with a fire station construction project?
Well let’s see if I can tie it all together together in a way that makes any sense (outside of my head) to everyone else.
Western culture once built elaborate churches as a way of worshipping God. Our best was given to God in the construction of these churches. The book of Exodus describes God giving talents to the craftsmen in order to build the first temple after the Jews left Egypt and it was to be built by the best craftsmen using the best materials that the early Jews had available to them. God wants our best as a form of worship.
“I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship, to make artistic designs for work in gold, in silver, and in bronze, and in the cutting of stone for settings, and in the carving of wood, that he may work in all kinds of craftsmanship.”
Exodus 31:3-5 (NASB)
We give our best and everything that we have to that which we worship. When we truly worship God, we give our best to Him. Not because He needs it but because He is worthy of our best. We owe our existence to Him and nothing short of everything in our life, including our life, should be more important to us than Him. Without Him, we are nothing.
So if worship means setting ourselves in the proper relation to that which we deem the most worthy and if we don’t believe in God then what is it that we worship? We worship ourselves or we worship those who have what we want, what we feel we are lacking, which in turn is another way to worship ourselves.
In my mind, the fire station construction project is the construction of lavish governmental complexes where those who worship themselves can have power over others, where those in governmental service can build temples to themselves to further the careers they worship and achieving a higher status, creating more self worship, while helping those who supported them in creating these temples to self.
Since these ways of thinking are infused in our culture, they also affect a good many of our churches and religious institutions where people who should be tending to the needs of the people in the congregation build a temple to the organization instead of to God.
We have given our best to that which we worship and our best has been given to the hollow secular centers of Marxist indoctrination educational institutions, garbage pop culture, self destructive instant gratification, hopeless careers, crappy country music, escapism, and self worship for over a century and look at the results.
Look at the current state of our culture and our society. We have given our best to these places and look what it has given us, an empty hollow generation of people who are unwilling to believe that there is hope because everything they have been taught to believe is hopeless and shallow. Who benefits from men thinking they are women? Who benefits from women aborting their babies? Who benefits from young men devoting their lives to the pursuit of money and fame? Where do those pursuits lead?
What happens when the bill for those pursuit comes due and those who have chased these hollow pursuits and worshipped themselves become aware of all that they have wasted and all the damage that they have done to themselves and others? Will they look inward and reflect on their courses of actions and seek truth? Probably not.
Western culture has far too many comforts and far too many opportunities to worship the self in some other way. It’s easier to worship ourselves than it is to look inward and see ourselves for who we really are without God… to see ourselves as broken, hopeless, weak, and selfish. To think that we can have a life of abundance through the worship of ourselves when the only way to have a true abundance comes from Jesus Christ, empty and foolish. It leads nowhere.
In conclusion…
To me, that fire station represents a disease in our society and culture, the disease of self worship and pride that has been encouraged through the materialistic world view that is interwoven in our society. I mentioned earlier that these things started several centuries ago but the truth is that this started at the beginning of time, in the Garden of Eden and history has shown what happens when God gets His fill and has had enough of our pride and of the building of temples to ourselves.
Every prideful nation has fallen in spectacular fashion and we are no different. There is a price to be paid for all that we have been doing; the celebrity worship, the career worship, the self worship, the neglecting the weak, the building of temples to our accomplishments, the nation worship, the listening to of Luke Bryant and Florida Georgia Line… all of this has a price and we will soon have to pay that price as troubles come to our communities and homes. The silver lining in all of this is that these trials and these tribulations are where we usually find God waiting for us.
Just kind of side note while writing all of this. I couldn’t help but to be reminded of Jesus being tempted in the desert after He was baptized. Matthew 4:1-11 records that after fasting for 40 days Jesus was tempted by Satan in three specific ways.
As I read it, I see it these temptations as pride, comfort, and envy. With these three temptations, Satan would’ve ruined the man that Jesus was had Jesus submitted to the temptations. It’s these same three temptations that western culture has allowed in to our societies and has led us to where we are today and they are so interwoven into our culture that there is no hope of society being repaired with God.
Well that’s it for this one. I really appreciate you following along. Feel free to share, subscribe, or comment. As always, I hope that you have a blessed day.
Fair Winds and Following Seas,
Nate
That's one thing people who become Christians later in life have a harder time letting go of. We've been in a "he who dies with the most toys wins" world for longer and many have practically killed themselves trying to keep up with the Joneses.
Not only is this worship true of government, but you see it anywhere an edifice is named after a living person.