God’s values are more about the soul than the body. The well of your soul is the vessel that holds the belief system that governs the choices you make when the circumstances you face are blurred. Standards are easier to discern — they’re defined by the black and white, the up or down vote of at least an intellectual accession if not an outward behavioral change.
But the majority of the gray area choices you make will be determined by the values you hold. You go in to cultural battle against our enemy Satan with the belief system forces you have in-place. Without God, you enter spiritual battle at a decided disadvantage. Let me give you a national example.
A friend of mine commanded a unit that was required to teach a course in ethics to future missile launch officers. He was chastised for using Biblical values in his courseware. Secularists arose and wanted his job. “Christian values,” they said, “in a formal Air Force course?” Now ask yourself the question, my fellow citizen. Would you sleep better at night if the people who have their fingers at the command of Armageddon were basing their choices of good and bad, right and wrong on an ethical foundation of—wait for it—nothing? Even secular philosophers can agree that all rationality becomes undependable in the absence of God’s moral values.
Here at the advent of a new administration in our country, we have never been in greater need of a citizenry instilled with a moral compass where the needle points to God’s truth. Without such a compass, who will provide the objective reference for us individually and collectively as a nation? We have complained about the pronouncements from the previous administration that “we are no longer a Christian nation.” Why would we turn to government now for the answer? Who will define the moral references of good and evil for us? If not God’s values, then what will we use?
Here are a couple of thoughts from a great teacher and Christian philosopher, Ravi Zacharias. “The greatest gift you can give your children is meaning. And you cannot give them meaning without the sacred.” Without God, there is no meaning. If not God’s values, then you have irrationality and insanity. Even philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, who proclaimed that “God is dead,” and opined that all existence would eventually arrive at insanity, was insane himself for the final decade of his life.
“Without God, there is no hope. Materialism and naturalism do not have the answer.” I come away from this writing with a profound sense that when all is in despair for you and you can’t quite put your finger on why that is, you should remember this from Ravi. “Ultimate loneliness is that of the soul, not the body.”
I cannot think of a lonelier soul than one without God. Then why does our national culture, our national soul, so celebrate the idea of your rejection of God’s values and, instead, your choosing ultimate loneliness? A nation without God is a national insanity.