I just finished a very good book entitled “Assumptions that affect our lives” by Christian Overman that did an excellent job of explaining the difference between Greek and Hebrew thought. What I found most interesting was in learning how much I have been affected, despite a pretty sound biblical grounding. The basic premise of the book is that Greek thought centers on the individual’s perspective of reality, where Hebrew thought centers on God as the epicenter of every aspect of life including areas that most of us regard as solely secular.
Work for example is cited as something that most folks regard as secular (unless of course you work in a church or in the mission field), but as the writer correctly points out… this is not what the Bible teaches. In fact it can be argued, and he did very effectively, that a person’s vocation is not at all affected by what he or she does to earn a paycheck. It is through the surrender of the notion that God is the God of everything that this false belief creeps into the minds of even the most learned of biblical scholars.
A painting, it was argued, is neither good nor bad in and of itself. God created the ability to be artistic in mankind in creating us in His image; therefore all that we create is a reflection of the glory of God. Yes, people can use that ability to paint things that are clearly offensive to God and man, but it is a mistake to forget where the ability came from in the first place. How a person uses that portion of us all that is divine (in that we are created in His image) is the determining factor of whether or not the final product is good or evil, but not a reflection of the profession itself in a general sense.
When I thought about this it became clear to me that things need to be put into proper perspective in order to see this clearly. Take for example a doctor who performs questionable surgical procedures. He or she is a practitioner of the medical arts in its broadest sense, but it is the choice of specialization that begins to take shape and form in determining whether or not that the individual has used his or her God given talent in a way that is good, or evil. The same doctor, who helps deliver a baby, can choose to offer his or her services in the form of counseling which might compel and expecting mother to receive an abortion. It is not the profession that is wholly good or evil, but the manner in which it is conducted.
Soldiers are likewise in this category despite the fact that the primary duty of a soldier is to kill other human beings. On its face killing appears to be wrong in a general sense, but there are times when evil in this world must be stopped with the use of physical force, and in order to do that we need soldiers who fight in Armies. I would imagine that a soldier in Hitler’s army in WWII would have a very difficult time reconciling faith and duty to country, but even in this, the most extreme of examples, if it weren’t for the presence of men who possessed a Christian moral compass restraining their evil deeds as a whole, it is likely that the evil done by Nazi could have been even worse; as difficult as this is to imagine.
Like I said, it was a very good book. It challenged you to think at a level that most folks don’t take the time to dwell in. All too often in life we take too many things for granted and fail to stop and think outside the box, asking difficult questions to oneself in an attempt to more clearly and correctly assess the world in which we live. The Christian worldview has suffered enormously in the wake of the hijacking of our educational system by secular humanists, and we should all dig as deep as is necessary to make sense of a world that has truly lost it’s mind.
