By Dave Breese

The ever present question for every person on earth is “On what can life be successfully built?” “In the midst of the swirling scenes of time, what is solid?” “What can I stand on?”

Most people come up with the wrong answer to these pressing questions. The results are not simply inconvenient or troublesome, they are catastrophic. To attempt to stand or—perish the thought—to build on the wrong foundation is to have one’s efforts and then one’s life swept away into misery, death and eternal loss. To attempt to live life and build the future on a foundation of one’s own invention is the activity of a total fool. Alas, such fools populate our world in great numbers. They certainly constitute a muddled majority in our time.

In fact, virtually all the problems, the difficulties of our world continue to overwhelm us for want of attention to one simple truth. The world fruitlessly labors and hopelessly diesbecause it has not read and does not believe the clear statement, “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (I Cor. 3:11).

What does this mean? It means that a life is built on Christ or nothing. The Bible does not suggest that there are simply lesser foundations than Christ. No indeed! It says that other foundations do not, in fact, exist. All other supposed solidities are mythical, they are cruel hoaxes. Christ alone created the universe. Christ alone gives it substance. Christ alone upholds “all things (that’s ALL things) by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:3). That truth alone could save our culture—which is even now dying of frustration because it cannot discover the nature of reality.

It is worth noting a few of those supposed solidities which exist only in the minds of self-deceived people—but which have become the assumptions on which we are futilely attempting to build our culture. The first one of these comes in answer to the question, “What is man and from whence did we come?” The world’s answer is evolution. It is the fantasy that we are here because of a process of natural selection, that this process has brought man from a lowly amoeba to the sophisticated entity which he is today. By believing this collection of nonsense called evolution, man has deliberately thrown away the very nature of his being and divorced himself from his greatest claim to significance. That significance comes from the fact that man was made in the image of God. Divesting himself of that image, man walks in bewilderment without a past, without a future, and without an identity he can claim as his own.

The great blasphemy of evolution, however, is that it imputes to something called “nature” a certain god-like quality. In evolution, nature is given a will, an ability to determine its future, and the power to self-create its oncoming generations. In believing this package of absurdities, our culture, in its supposed wisdom, has believed a set of incredible stupidities. By believing in nature as God and natural processes as destiny itself, our pseudo scientific generation has invented a foundation which is nonexistent. Our culture even now crumbles because it is in fact merely valiant dust that builds on dust and erases from its mind the knowledge of God.

There is a second supposed solidity which comes out of the nonsense of evolution and that is humanism. Humanism is not merely, as some claim, a “respect for humanity.” Humanism is rather to redefine humanity as something that it is not. In humanism, man becomes autonomous, self-sufficient, creative and therefore man is seen as God. In that humanism claims that man is the be-all and end-all of all things, it gives man a vaporous excuse for indulging in life’s greatest sin, which is pride. Now the philosophers have suggested that mankind can look at itself and announce, “I am God, the creator of worlds.” In humanism, man becomes superman. This is a position which man is perfectly willing to claim for himself when, having forgotten God, his foolish heart becomes filled with the great poison of the cosmos—pride. It is not for nothing that the Bible says, “Pride goes before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18). Indeed the Scripture says, “When pride comes, then comes shame: but with the lowly is wisdom” (Prov. 11:2). Who can doubt that the incredible, shameful activities of our culture come because the poison of humanism has taken from the minds of the young and the old the idea that one day they shall answer to an eternal God? Every cemetery, every hospital, every psychiatric clinic in our time should remind man that he is neither infallible nor humanly eternal. Humanism is denied by every fact of life but still is believed by the abysmally ignorant of our time.

Humanism is soon followed by another supposed certainty called secularism. Man, leaving God out of the picture, invents a set of rules, an organization, a government, a supreme court, and a book full of laws by which it hopes to retain certainty and sanity within a society. So it is that the culture of our time looks to such things as government with greater interest and higher dependence than ever. We are led to believe that the nation now lives or dies because of pronouncements from Washington, the United Nations, the world court, the unctuous legalities from the drones of our secular society. Secularism is the ultimate denial of the existence of God and the final vesting of godlike qualities in man’s corporate, quasi-legal intellect.

Even in our time, it is popular to say, “We are a government of laws and not of men.” This and other foolish pronouncements banter their way around our society. By so speaking people forget that “any fool can make a rule.” We live in a time in which the laws of yesterday are wiped out with one stroke of a pen in favor of new, foolish notions called “laws” in these days. The laws of our hapless land now permit the murder of an unborn child by almost anyone. These and a thousand other egregious pronouncements, admonitions of the secular mind, are evidence of the foolish attempt of bewildered man to create a supposed solidity out of nothing.

Close to these is another notion which is an attempt by man to produce a pseudo sense of destiny in his fevered mind. That point of view is utopianism. Because the mind of man must have a purpose, must work toward a goal, the philosophers have now promised that man by his efforts will create a perfect society. Biological Darwinism becomes cultural Darwinism and everyone begins to sing about the glories of the future. Indeed, the city of man is rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of past failures. We can anticipate a more determined effort than ever by the pygmies which are producing a world government to produce the city on a hill. Like a parched Bedouin staggering across the burning sands, today’s humanity looks at a future which is nothing but a mirage. “We will produce a splendid future!” says the modern politician. His problem is that he has not read the Scripture which says, “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come” (II Tim. 3:1). “Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (II Tim. 3:13). By announcing perfection for the future, modern man has neither good sense nor the teaching of Scripture on his side. The evidence that comes to us from the daily newspapers certainly tells of a deteriorating society. A utopia is not before us, but utopianism persists as the ultimate lie concerning the future.

This is why we may rejoice in that “we have also a more sure word of prophecy” (II Pet. 1:19). That word tells us of the splendor which God has before us, but it denies that man by his efforts will bring it to pass.

So it is that we watch the laughable but horrible specter now being created in our time whereby prideful humanity attempts to live with sanity today and hope for tomorrow. Both of these are impossible in a culture that aspires to do it all without the presence and the power of the eternal God. Today’s insane society is thrashing in the pangs of hopelessness because it forgets that other foundations beside Jesus Christ have no claim to existence whatsoever. They are myths, they are charades, they are lies built upon lies.

The Christian, of course, will make no such mistakes. He will build his life upon the firm, unshakable foundation of Jesus Christ. He believes in the finished work of the cross as the sole and only basis of his salvation. He believes in the strength of the Lord as the one capability which is truly his today. Trusting in the Lord, he receives the promise that his paths will be directed by the Holy Spirit. He therefore, even in times like these, may plan on moving from strength to strength, producing those results which are to the glory of Christ and to the credit of a mind which trusts in the eternal God.