The United Kingdom is among the most secular nations in the world, according to a survey carried out for a BBC programme. Only 67% of those interviewed in this country claimed they “believed in God or a higher power”. This leaves one in three Britons claiming to be atheists. It is a dire picture, particularly when the corresponding figures for countries like Nigeria and Indonesia are in excess of 90%, though many of these are followers of false religions. Of course, it does not need a survey to tell us how far religion has fallen in Britain today, but these figures, however inexact they may be, do put the position in sharp focus.
The words of Psalm 14 will no doubt spring to the minds of many readers: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”. Perhaps in no previous generation have so many, particularly in Western countries, taken so blatantly atheistic a position. Other generations have indulged in practical atheism: they have said in their hearts that there is no God; they have not sought Him; they have been careless about His worship; and they did not strive to keep His laws. But this generation has tried to deny the existence of God with their mouths and with their pens, openly and unashamedly. Which reveals a unique degree of hardness of heart – no doubt the result of the fact that what people in Britain today are turning their back on with perverse determination is not a false religion but a rich Christian heritage.
What foolishness! It is to ignore the evidence that God exists. The beauty and complexity of the universe – in particular, of plants and animals – could not have come about by any random process, however forcefully that may be asserted by those who claim to be today’s leading thinkers. Only the supernatural power of the eternal God could have brought it about.
Besides, atheism ignores the revelation God has given in the Scriptures. There we are plainly taught, again and again, that God has created everything that exists. Atheism therefore rejects the authority of God, though, strangely, 30% of professed atheists in the survey sometimes pray – or perhaps not so strangely, for, as Paul makes clear, “the invisible things of Him . . . are plainly seen, even His eternal power and Godhead”, and even those who profess to
be atheists cannot always deny what is plainly seen of the eternal power and Godhead of the Most High. And, in rejecting God, His revelation and His authority, atheists are putting away from them the hope of salvation.
As an illustration of the extent to which men, even men with brilliant intellects, may go in sweeping away every vestige of reasonable hope from under them, we may note the chilling words of the prominent twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell as he laid out part of his unbelieving creed: “That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving. That his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves, his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. That no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave. That all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system . . . All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation, henceforth, be safely built.”1
All this may be eloquent, but it is most certainly full of unyielding despair. And, without the slightest doubt, unyielding despair is manifestly a firm foundation for nothing. How foolish man becomes when he is left to his own wisdom – even the wisdom of a brilliant intellect! The one firm foundation for understanding the origin of man and his eternal existence beyond the grave is God’s revelation in the Bible. There God has also made known that the soul’s habitation may be safely built on Christ Jesus, the God-man, who came into the world to work out salvation by the sacrifice of Himself. It was because Paul had trusted in Christ that he could express himself hopefully as he looked into the future, beyond the grave: “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”.
In the same poll only 7% of respondents in the United Kingdom said that they regularly attended religious services and only 31% claimed that their God is the only true God, in contrast with countries like Nigeria and Indonesia, where over 90% made this claim. This of course reflects the disappearance, in large measure, in the West of the concept of truth in religion. Hence, the accepted view, at least in some influential quarters, is that all religions are equally valid (or invalid) – a statement which tends to achieve the status of absolute truth, even where the idea of absolute truth is rejected! But this is to dismiss the testimony of Him who cannot lie, when He said, “I am God,
1 Quoted in Ravi Zacharias, A Shattered Visage, The Real Face of Atheism, pp 94,95.
and there is none else”. So to dismiss divine testimony is typical of man, who since the Fall has had an inward bias against God and His truth.
Our situation today cries out for the proclamation of scriptural truth everywhere. But in historically Christian nations, it is a situation where scriptural ideas have for many years been marginalised. They are normally presented in the media as extreme – as what no self-respecting person could possibly choose to believe. The bulk of people in Britain today – just as in countries which are manifestly non-Christian – assume that scriptural teaching may be automatically rejected. Only a few generations ago, most of the population showed some degree of respect for the teachings of the Bible even when they were unwilling to submit to them. The position today is very different, and one might be inclined to despair of this generation ever giving a hearing to the gospel.
But such an attitude is not justified. It ignores the power of the truth when it is applied by the Holy Spirit. And it ignores the record of the success of the gospel when it was proclaimed by the apostles in a heathen environment. Even in Athens, where people were open to all sorts of unbiblical philosophies, some individuals cleaved to Paul and believed. And in Antioch, the Gentiles responded to Paul’s preaching with gladness “and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed”. It is clear that nothing is too hard for the Lord; there will be fruit, no matter how unpromising the soil in which it is planted, when He is pleased to bless the sowing of the seed of the gospel. No matter how foolish sinners may be in their rejection of the fact of God’s existence, He is able to make them willing to recognise that fact and to cast themselves, as helpless and ignorant sinners, upon the sure foundation which has been laid in Christ Jesus for the salvation of the guilty.
In 1848, the atheist Karl Marx was bringing his Communist Manifesto to a conclusion with the words: “Workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite!” Eventually, the workers in many countries including Russia and China became entangled in the chains of Communist oppression which, in varying degrees, involved opposition to true religion. But in most of these countries except China, communism is already a thing of the past. Generally speaking, it brought them no real gain, even for this world. But, supposing it had, “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul”? For lasting profit, he must seek to gain the world to come. What need there is of ambassadors to go out to the whole world to proclaim the gospel – revealed in the Scriptures in terms which are totally dependable! And what need that the Lord would be pleased to send His Holy Spirit to bless the gospel everywhere!