It was the brilliant father of science, Sir Isaac Newton, who once said,
"Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors."
If he was alive today, he may like to revise his last six words. We live in an age where there is a revival of the senselessness of atheism. But he certainly put his finger on its cause. Normally those guilty of the sin of idolatry pick and choose the attractive characteristics of the nature of God—"My God is a God of love and mercy. He would never create Hell."
And they are right. He would never create Hell because he couldn't. He doesn’t exist. He's a figment of their over active imagination—the place of imagery. The nature of the Creator of the Universe, as revealed in Holy Scripture, is not only love and mercy, but also justice and truth, holiness and righteousness.
The atheist's buffet, however, is a reverse idolatry. He picks and chooses a god from the characteristics he finds unattractive—"The God of the Bible is a judgmental, homophobic, unloving, wrath filled, merciless tyrant. If that's your 'God of love,' I want nothing to do with him!" But the god he doesn’t believe in doesn’t exist. He is also a figment of the human imagination.
Remember, Newton said, "Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice."
The atheist is in truth just the criminal offspring of Adam, still imitating his first forefather, by trying to hide from God. And the best hiding place he can find is in atheism.
In 2008, as Los Angeles County Sheriff's homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd routinely checked out some snapshots of tattooed gang members, he noticed a crime in which he was very familiar. One gang member named Anthony Garcia, had a tattooed scene of the killing of 23-year-old John Juarez.
The tattoo showed Christmas lights on the liquor store where Juarez was murdered, where the body was found, a bent street lamp, the name of the gang that was suspected of killing him, and a helicopter above the scene firing bullets. The police put an undercover police officer in Garcia's cell and got a confession from him. He then faced a sentence of 65 years to life.
Every crime we have ever commited against God is engraved with the point of a diamond upon our conscience, whether we believe in the existence of God or not. On the Day of Judgment God’s Law will seek it out and we will be punished with a life sentence, without parole.
What a fool this man was-—to boast on his flesh of the crime of murder. His trophy became his damnation. And what fools sinners are when they boast about their fleshly sins, because they believe that God doesn’t exist, or doesn’t see or doesn't care.
Fortunately, not all sinners are hardened atheists. Some have an open mind and are prepared to think and listen.
P.s. We leave for Israel this Sunday--to film Season Five of our television program, so Monday's post may be delayed a little.
