What happened after God’s funeral?

What Happened After God’s Funeral?

–Ravi Zacharias

These are the notes I took while listening to this message, it comes in 4 parts and they can be found here:

http://www.rzim.org/resources/listen/justthinking.aspx?archive=1

“Young people, please hear me; this, to me, is the problem of 20th century man: he no longer knows what to laugh at and no longer knows what to weep at.”

“So you turn on your television screen and before you know it, you’re looking at a seduction yourself. And instead of weeping at it, you’re watching in intrigue as the story unfolds. You watch illegitimacies transpire before your eyes and mine, and because Hollywood has convinced us that it is entertainment we become entertained, rather than sitting there with a crushed and a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And I often wonder, if my Lord Jesus were able to stalk some of the seats of Broadway, or sit in some of the theatres where things are perpetrated and shown to you and me, where jokes are made of His virgin birth, where Christianity is demeaned and mocked, where illegitimacies are glorified and exalted; that which is vulgar is intended to make us laugh, that which is sacred is intended to make us weep, rather than sit there in awe and gratitude for the sacred, what has really happened between the educational system and whatever else is happening, we’ve lost the differentiation between laughter and tears. It is vitally important what you laugh at. It is vitally important what you weep at. What breaks your heart tells God who you are. What makes you laugh tells God who you are.”

If God is dead:

1. You have to mistake man for being God:
   1. If there is no infinite being, you are left with a finite being: man.
      1. i.      If man is made god, some men will become God.
2. If God is dead someone will have to take his place, it will be megalomania or erotomania. The drive for power or the drive for pleasure; the fist or the fallace; Hitler or Hugh Heffner.
3. You will have to take your body to be a soul
   1. If there is no God, there is no soulishness. If there is no soulishness all you have left is the material, and you have to take the body to be the ultimate and the eternal. Your body becomes your soul.
   2. The Abolition of Man, CH 1: Men without Chests, by C.S. Lewis.
      1. i.      “If I believe these men, they tell me mathematics is real therefore my brain is real. Food is real, therefore my stomach is real. But they tell me my emotions have nothing whatsoever to do with reality; they are going to produce a generation of men with brains, men with stomachs, men without chests and no heart.” –Lewis
4. “And if God is dead, you have to take the body to be the soul. And you will end up killing feelings of nobility, and shame.”
   1. i.      If your glands are what make you feel a certain way, then you can decide what you do without consequences: there is no nobility, there is no shame. We become men without chests; we’ve killed our heart.
5. Matthew 16:26, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”
6. When we see something noble, there is something of the spirit in it (not just flesh, blood, and bone). If God is dead the body has to be taken to be the soul. The only way one can live with this is to live with a constant sense of contradiction.
7. “The new rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty therefor he can never be a real revolutionist. The fact that he doubts everything gets in the way when he wants to denounce anything, for all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind, and the modern revolutionists doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. So he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, then he writes another book, a novel, in which he insults it himself. He curses the sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician he cries out that war is a waste of life, and as a philosopher that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. … In short, the modern revolutionist being an infinite skeptic is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling morality, in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes for revolt; by rebelling against everything he has lost his right to revolt against anything. “ G.K. Chesterton.
8. When soulishness is gone and body is all that is left, you live with a constant sense of contradiction, and nothing will make sense anymore.
9. You have to take time to be eternity.
   1. There is no tomorrow, there is no eternity; worms will eat your body and it will decompose. When a child dies it is no more significant than if a 95 year old were to die after a long life, because death is the end of everything.
   2. If you live by Nietzsche’s philosophy, that’s it. If you live by the teaching of God’s work, that is not it.
   3. John 14:19 “Because I live, you also will live.”
   4. Illustration:
      1. i.      A young med student tried to perform an abortion on his wife. They could not go to the abortionist because in his lectures he denounced abortion, and he accidentally killed his wife. We should not play God.
10. “No guilt in life, no fear in death; this is the power of Christ in me.”

 

 

You choice: Christ, or Nietzsche.

 

 

 

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