The Unknown God

Truth leads to knowing God. Lies lead to the unknown God.

It’s positively astounding! It has remained undiscovered by science. Higher education has never taught it. And organized religion has withheld it. How? By suppressing the real gospel message Christ brought from heaven that reveals the awesome purpose of human life.
 
~ Herbert W Armstrong

Our society has for the most part rejected clear, objective truth. HWA used to talk and write a lot about how science, education and even religion worked together to suppress the truth. In these modern days, he may as well even had added how media and government are leading the way to destruction in lecturing everyone about “alternative facts”, “relative truth” and how certain obvious solid facts are actually “fluid”.

I wrote last time about how the news media more and more relies upon the Internet for its “facts” and stories, highlighting the more salacious and emotional components over reality. Add to that a president who plays the media by throwing out the shiny in front of them as a cover to do what he wants, and the media pundits commenting and regurgitating the commentary rather than focusing on things that really matter, and you have a distracted electorate who are ripe for disaster.
We live in a strange world, even stranger than the one HWA lived in. Government corruption has always been with it, but when was it ever so blatant? News may have been biased in the past, but when was it ever so blatant? Society worships their idols who have abandoned all morality, whereas the conscience of the world is best expressed by a hacktivist group with questionable actions. People want what they want, and they are not ashamed to publicly seek it out.
It was not that long ago that people would have been locked up in a treatment facility for expressing their fanciful hallucinations as though they were reality. Today you can be a woman, and tomorrow you can be a man, and it all depends upon how you feel, not upon any objective truth. You are entitled to all of the rights of citizenship even if you aren’t one and broke the law to be here. If something sounds bad, then just redefine it and rewrite the dictionary. Child murder is no longer murder but “abortion”. It is not a child, but it is “tissue”. After all, if it truly were a child and it truly were murder, would people be loudly demanding the right to commit child murder?
It isn’t really that the Republican party is so righteous, either. I suspected Trump would reveal the hypocrisy of the GOP after being sworn in. However, it seems that neoliberals are bound and determined to be even bigger hypocrites, even if it makes them look like complete wack jobs. If the right does something outrageous, the answer from the left is to be not just opposite but even more outrageous in the opposite direction. Of course, if it is “our guy” or “our gal”, then it is OK, but not the “other party”. Trump was trounced for speculating about accepting the results of the election, but when it turned against the neoliberals, then they took to the streets, made up stories about Russians, the current day bogeyman, “influencing the election” (as though we don’t others, as though corporations don’t, as though lobbyists don’t?), and literally call for impeachment without a shred of evidence that an actual crime was committed. Is it any wonder that Anonymous calls liberalism, and really it is neoliberalism, a mental disorder?
This is not leadership. This is a recipe for disaster.
Meanwhile, does it really matter? I mean, a lot of liberals talk about religion while supporting teachers who teach evolution and decrying any vestige of religion, especially of a Judeo-Christian variety, in public. They will even castigate someone who takes their religion seriously, as you can see in the first 2:57 or so of this YouTube clip (the rest has little to nothing to do with the title):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIjT67NzT3o
It is amusing that atheists will condescendingly say that if it takes religion to keep you from being a berserk maniac, then by all means stay religious. The truth of the matter is that many young will riot, burn cars, etc., all because they do not get their way, since in the end, it does not matter. They will live, perhaps grow old and die. That’s if they are lucky. Perhaps they will catch some serious disease and live in pain and torment and die slowly. There is no purpose to living, let alone suffering.
Following this line of thinking, it is obvious that there is nothing inherently better about the greatest poets, singers, athletes, etc., than what is the worst of Hitler. In fact, there is no objective “good” or “bad”, and relative morality isn’t. Relative morality does not exist, and deep down the nihilist knows this and acts accordingly. If we have a nuclear war and kill off all life on the planet, then it still does not matter because no one will be left to care. In fact, it could be seen as a good thing since even the earth itself will end one day. Relative morality is nothing more than a series of preferences that don’t matter because we will all die and the earth will be eaten up when the sun eventually explodes. No matter how hard they try, the atheist cannot come up with a satisfactory answer to it all.
Science has let us down as well. It is used as a club to beat political opponents into submission who dare to question the ecclesiastical order of scientists who are given to ideological concepts like we are masters of our future, playing with nature and nothing less than the most intelligent beings around, creating frankenfruit and manipulating things we do not understand. We think that GMO cannot and will not ever have negative consequences, but hypocritically we acknowledge that in the past we have polluted the planet, killed off various entire species, turned on one another in endless wars and supposedly even have the power to change the weather patterns of the entire planet. Isn’t it weird that we have all this power to cause climate change but are so smart and wise that genetic manipulation could never do us harm?
The Book of Revelation talks about a world tribulation so bad that men will cry out to die. They will cry that the mountains would crush them (Rev 6:15-16). They will even cry out for death and not find it (Rev 9:3-6). Is this the result of biological and chemical weapons, or could it be that future soldiers will be somehow biologically enhanced to be more resilient to events on a battlefield? Maybe they will be genetically altered. Maybe they will be “bionic” soldiers. Maybe both.
In the end, we don’t know what we are doing. Hiding from the truth and wallowing in our prideful ignorance will destroy us.

Two Things Are Clear

The Bible makes at least two things abundantly clear: We don’t know the truth, and we don’t know God. In fact, these two things are intimately entwined. You cannot know the true God unless you know the truth. You cannot know truth if you reject God.
Pilate asked, “What is truth?” How have the moderns fared? Have the postmoderns done better?
Is it any wonder that overall the world does not know God?
Paul stood up and preached to a pagan audience about “The Unknown God”, and the feature image shows an artist’s rendition of that event. Paul preached to them about The Unknown God because they were ignorant of the real God because they did not know the truth. How can they be saved from tragedy and the second death if they do not know the truth?

³ For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;
⁴ Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.
 
~ 1Ti 2:3-4

You cannot be saved if you do not know the truth.

¹⁰ And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
¹¹ And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
¹² That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
 
~ 2Th 2:10-12

What is really perverse about it all is that the truth is put down as “burdensome”, when in reality it is the truth that sets us free (Jn 8:31-32)!
So, here are some relevant questions:

1. Do you really believe that the truth will set you free?
2. Do you actively love and seek the truth, or do you believe you have simply heard it all before and don’t need anything else (Rev 3:17)?
3. Do you read the Bible and seek out God’s will, or do you simply follow the traditions of your particular church organization (Mk 7:7-8)?
4. Have you traded the clear commandments in Scripture for convoluted and complicated justifications for disregarding them in spirit and in letter?
5. Are you exercising your resources to grow and better yourself and be an example, or are you simply sitting on your talent making excuses for not growing spiritually (Mt 25:14-30)?
6. Have you and do you continually “prove all things” (1Th 5:21), or have you stopped? You realize that verse was written to converted Christians, right?