For Paul, the only way for sinful men and women to stand before the Holy God in the judgment yet to come is to possess the merits of Jesus through faith. So, it would figure that this would be the place where Satan would direct his attacks—rarely in frontal assaults, more often in subtle re-definition. For the gospel as taught by Paul is “all of Christ.” But Satan will find a way to make it “some of Christ and some of me.” Yet a gospel that is “some of Christ and some of me,” is a different gospel from that which Paul proclaimed, and tragically, is no gospel at all.

Paul’s warnings to the Galatians should ring in our ears today. To his amazement, a false gospel arose in the Galatian churches almost immediately after Paul left the area and was widely accepted in same churches in which Paul and Barnabas had preached in person. Grounded in wide-spread Jewish customs and practices, the false message was so compelling that even Peter and Barnabas were taken in for a time. Just as no counterfeiter would make purple seven dollar bills with Mickey Mouse’s likeness on them, neither does a false teacher show up and announce, “Hi, everyone, I’m a false teacher.” They always have a hook. Luther understood well how such deception works

The ministers of Satan insinuate themselves into people’s minds by promising them something better. They admit that those who preached the gospel to them made a good start but say that this is not enough . . . . They confirm true doctrine but then go on to point out where it needs to be improved. This was how the false apostles gained access to the Galatians.

We should not be surprised when theologians, pastors, and elders, fall from grace and begin teaching another gospel. Sad to say, we should expect this to happen. It is not a matter of if, but when. Paul exhortation to the Galatians reminds us to always be on our guard against those who teach that the death of Jesus Christ is not sufficient in and of itself to save us from God’s wrath in the judgment yet to come. The false gospel–Christ plus something we do–makes a great deal of sense to those who think that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is primarily about ethics (conduct), and that sound doctrine is secondary to proper behavior. This hook is often used by contemporary false teachers.
The reason why this happens is rather obvious. If someone believes that Christianity is essentially about making bad people into good people, or making good people into better people, then Paul’s stress upon Christ crucified for sinners, will sound odd, or even seem offensive. The biblical writers tell us that the cross is foolishness to the Greek and a stumbling block to the Jew (1 Corinthians 1:23). It is both to modern Americans. The generic American civil religion is the religion of Cain; “do what is right in your own eyes” (Genesis 4:3). This is grounded in the sentiment that people are intrinsically good and fully capable of coming up with something on their own which they think will be acceptable to God. “All God wants is our best,” is Cain’s motto. No, what God demands of us under the law–perfect obedience–he freely grants to us in the gospel, which Paul defines as the good news of the death, resurrection, and obedience of Jesus, for us and in our place.
There will always be those in our midst urging us to soften the offense of the cross, or perhaps, to remove the offense altogether. Given Paul’s view of sin (“there is no one who seeks God”–Romans 3:11), it is important to remind ourselves that it is God who seeks sinners as seen Paul’s emphasis upon calling as God’s initiative, made effectual by the Holy Spirit working in and through the preached gospel. It is through the proclamation of the gospel, but only through the proclamation of that gospel, that God calls men and women to faith in Jesus. We must never entertain the thought of changing or “softening” our gospel to make it more inclusive and less offensive, lest our gospel become no gospel at all and we fall under Paul’s anathema.
It is also clear from Paul’s opening words to the Galatians that the issue here is the content of what is preached, not the reputation or the abilities of the preacher. A preacher’s credentials should have little to do with how charismatic or compelling he may be, but with whether or not he preaches the gospel faithfully. Faithfulness to the gospel is the standard by which a minister of word and sacrament in Christ’s church will be judged by the Lord of the church. Granted, there is no excuse for boring preaching. Nor is there any excuse for preaching which is poorly organized, confusing, difficult to understand, or otherwise not compelling. In an entertainment-based social media driven culture such as ours, we have been thoroughly trained to evaluate things by how they make us feel, or by how they hold our diminished attention spans, or even worse, by whether or not we are entertained. This is not a good thing because these things are obstacles to the “hearing with faith.”
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It begins with the Church recognizing first how pagan it has become, then rooting out our rotten structures and rebuilding them in the eyes of the Word and His word. We can’t hope to overturn the advances of Satan with a gospel that doesn’t even move those who already believe it. Our preaching must be with power and assurance, and our discipleship needs be ordered to shape all the areas of life that a Believer needs prepared to face. And none of this can come about without prayer. We so underestimate what prayer can accomplish because we fail to comprehend the God we pray to.

As the next to last entry for the fall series on things that go bump in the night we need to talk a little bit about a subject that can illustrate for us some of the dangers of the world in which we are currently living, especially in the West. When I say “the West” I mean Europe and North America. The cultural fishbowl in which all of us live in our day-to-day. Despite what your DEI representative (and I can’t be the only southerner who reads that as Dale Earnhardt, Inc.) told you at the last HR meeting it is okay for us to identify and express ourselves as Western. We are men and women who are the result of a bunch of dead white guys philosophizing about the world and we are also the result of the infiltration (in a good way) of the Bible into how we see and understand everything around us. It’s not white supremacy to notice our own culture, and even think that it is good and in fact better than what came before Europe became the Europe it became after Constantine’s dictate. We should celebrate the fact that we don’t sacrifice babies on the altar (well, more on that in a second) and force women to die with their husbands. Those things are bad. White men passing laws that stopped it were good. We shouldn’t be ashamed to say so. The art, philosophy, science, religion, etc… that produced the Christian states of Europe were and continue to be a blessing to all those downstream from them. Yet, there is a problem.
In our prayer and worship help today we are going to talk about the world in which we live today and how the same men tasked with building up have been working to destroy and tear down. We are now experiencing the results of this evil. In some sense the reappearance of the strong gods, the pagan culture we left a millennia or more ago is all a result of men abandoning their responsibilities in accordance with the Fifth Commandment. Everything comes back to the law of God, and whether society will bow their knee to Christ or seek to be their own god. Psalm 2 and other passages warn us as to the consequences of such. I get calls/texts regularly from folks both within and outside the congregation about why we see such rampant licentiousness and sin in the world today. On one hand the earth has been so since the days of Adam’s fall. However, there were times when it was better, even if sin was still present. The golden age is not yet with us. In our Thursday catechism lesson this week we are going to hear about Stews, and as will be opened there that means brothels, houses of ill-repute. Why did our Westminster Divines write about this? Because it was a problem. They were all over the place in Seventeenth-Century England. How many open, public, state-authorized spaces do we have for this practice in Clover? I am not naïve enough to not know that there is availability for such if you were desiring to look.
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Naturalism denies the obvious, reducing human beings to physical parts stuck together without reason or purpose—biological accidents, cosmic junk. No wonder they call it nihilism—nothing-ism. And when you start really believing nothing-ism about human beings, bad things begin to happen. Most of us know better, though. Deep inside, we know we’re not simply chunks of meat in motion. Reality informs us there is something wonderfully unique about humans—qualitatively, not just quantitatively. Humans are special, wonderful, valuable.

To celebrate Stand to Reason’s 30th anniversary, we’re republishing classic issues of Solid Ground that represent some of the foundational ideas characterizing our work over the decades—ideas that continue to be vital to apologetics and evangelism today.
Lately, I’ve been enjoying my nine-year-old Annabeth’s theological common sense. “Papa, why don’t atheists believe in God?” she asked.
“Well, for a number of reasons,” I said. “Partly because they can’t see him, so they don’t believe in him.”
“Can they see atoms?” she offered.
“Good point. But I think they’d say that doesn’t count since they can still detect atoms with scientific instruments, something they can’t do with God. They won’t believe in anything they can’t measure scientifically.”
“That is the weirdest thing that I’ve ever heard,” she concluded.
My fourth grader was on to something that more educated types seemed to have missed: Lots of things are real that cannot be detected by science. How did she know that? She didn’t go to grad school. Innocence often sees the obvious.
Annabeth’s insight was about the inadequacies of naturalism, modernism’s worldview conviction that reality consists completely of material particles in a physical universe governed by natural laws.[1]
Naturalism is best summed up in Carl Sagan’s famous faith statement, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”[2] No God, no souls, no Heaven, no Hell, no miracles, no morality, no sin, no forgiveness, no transcendent purpose—just molecules in motion. It’s the worldview of virtually all atheists and the methodological philosophy governing all science.
Entire cultures have been subtly indoctrinated with this physicalistic view. Even many religious people have a naturalistic impulse in their day-to-day dealings with reality, relegating whatever spiritual “beliefs” they have to the shadowlands of “faith.”
Dealing with naturalism can be daunting, until we realize we have a powerful ally working in our favor: Reality is actually on our side.
Reality, Our Ally
This is an insight I learned from Francis Schaeffer. If Christianity is true, he noted, then the worldview it presents is accurate—it describes reality the way it actually is even for naturalists who deny it. “Regardless of a man’s system,” Schaeffer pointed out, “he has to live in God’s world.”[3] This situation creates a problem for skeptics but an opportunity for us.[4]
Someone once said that reality is what you “bump” into (and sometimes get injured by) when you don’t take it seriously. Consequently, anyone who denies some significant feature of the world is headed for a collision. Skeptics are not just at odds with “religion,” then. They are at odds with reality. Their claims about the world dictated by their competing worldview are going to conflict in important ways with the actual world they experience every day.
Schaeffer called this the “point of tension,” a kind of dissonance between what naturalists say about the world and the way the world really is. Sooner or later, they’re going to affirm—sometimes without even realizing it—features of reality that make no sense given naturalism.
On the one hand, the naturalist speaks from his own worldview. On the other hand, the way he lives affirms things that have no place in his view of reality but make complete sense in ours. He is sending two conflicting messages at the same time but doesn’t realize it. He’s bumping into reality.
Atheist Richard Dawkins is a prime example. On the one hand, his naturalism dictates that morality is just a relativistic trick of evolution to get our selfish genes into the next generation. On the other hand, he rails against the God of the Old Testament as a vindictive, bloodthirsty, homophobic, racist, genocidal, sadomasochistic, malevolent bully.[5] Do you see the problem?
Clearly, Dawkins is not coming to this conclusion based on his naturalism. Instead, that’s his commonsense moral realism talking. His protest makes no sense in his worldview but is perfectly consistent with ours.[6] Dawkins is living in a contradiction on this issue. That’s the point of tension. He’s trading on our worldview, not his. Dawkins is bumping into reality.
There’s something else I want you to see, though—not just the contradiction naturalists live in, but also the explanatory power of Christian theism over naturalism. Here’s what I mean.
Important details of the Christian worldview fit nicely with the way we actually discover the world to be. They resonate with our deepest intuitions about reality. This “fit” is the classical definition of truth.[7] Consequently, Christianity has the ability to make sense of salient details of the world and of human experience that naturalism cannot.
I want to suggest some practical ways to take advantage of both the naturalists’ “bump” into reality and the superior explanatory power of Christian theism. My goal is to be shrewd and creative—to catch him by surprise, if I can—maneuvering with questions wherever possible. This is the heart of the “tactical” approach.
First, a qualifier. There is no “silver bullet”—no perfect answer, no magic apologetic trick guaranteed to change someone’s mind in a single session. Rather, my aim with people who are deeply committed to a false worldview is to try to plant a seed of doubt or uncertainty in their mind, or to get them thinking in a productive way about Christianity. I call it “putting a stone in their shoe.”
There are lots of different ways to do this with naturalism, but I want to focus here on three bumps with reality that create serious worldview problems for the naturalist yet serve to validate the Christian view. I’m going to call them “the bump of stuff,” “the bump of bad,” and “the bump of me.”
The Bump of Stuff
My starting point for this maneuver is simple: Stuff exists. Not too controversial. The naturalist cannot easily deny the existence of the material world. It’s her stock-in-trade, the only thing she’s certain about.
Here’s the fundamental question: Why is there stuff? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did everything come from? What caused the universe to come into existence?[8]
Let me show you how this line of questioning plays out tactically in conversation. I was once asked during an audience Q&A to give evidence for the existence of God.
“Can I ask you a few questions to get us rolling?” I said to the challenger. He nodded. “First, do you think stuff exists? Is the material universe real?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered.
“Good. Second question: Has the stuff of the universe always existed? Is the universe eternal?”
“No,” he said. “The universe came into being at the Big Bang.”
“Okay, I’m with you. Now the final question: What caused the universe to come into being?”
At this point, he balked. “How do I know?” he said. “I’m no scientist.”
“Neither am I,” I admitted, “but there’s really only two choices: something or nothing. What do you think? Do you think something outside the natural universe caused it to come into being, or do you think it just simply popped into existence with no cause, for no reason?”
At this point, the skeptic who prides himself in his use of reason finds himself in a rational box. Both the law of excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction (it can’t be neither option, and it can’t be both) oblige him to choose one of only two logically possible options available.
To admit something outside of the natural, physical, time-bound universe is its cause would be to contradict naturalism. Yet, who is in his rational rights to opt for the alternative? Even if he thinks it possible the universe popped into existence, uncaused, out of nothing, it’s an understatement in the extreme to say it’s not the odds-on favorite.

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