This was and is the surest sign a civilization has gone pagan,
giving itself over to “the god of this world.”
Any nitwit marketer
knows the ages-old rule that “sex sells,” and as the Apostle Paul warns, “Beware
lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition
of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”
Jordan explains, “A rudiment is a fundamental operating
principle. It’s the basic operating elements of a thing.
“The rudiments of the world have to do with the basic
operating principles of the world system in which we live. There’s a way that
the world operates—in Galatians 1, Paul tells us it’s the will of the Father
that He would ‘deliver us from this present evil world.’
“Well, if it’s an evil world system, that’s a bad thing. Must
have a bad leader. As II Corinthian 4 says, ‘But if our gospel be hid, it is
hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds
of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who
is the image of God, should shine unto them.’
“Who is ‘the god of this world’? You hear people talk about,
‘Well, if God would let this happen and let that happen . . .’ Well, ‘the god of this world’ has no
problem with all the things happening in the world today! It’s his system,
designed to carry forward and express his program.
“Ephesians 2:2 says, ‘Wherein in time past ye walked according
to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air,
the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’
“Notice there’s a course that the world follows. When Paul
talks about the rudiments of the world, he’s talking about the fundamental
operating methodology of that ‘course of this world.’
*****
“When you start out thinking about this issue of the rudiments of the world, you really have to go back to Genesis 3 where all this stuff really begins to unfold.
“What you learn about life, and the way the world works, and
the way you function in it—it’s fascinating to me, all these years of dealing
with people and trying to take the Scripture and help people out, understanding
how it works in their lives and that kind of thing, the more and more I realize
that you don’t get very far from Genesis 3.
“Because there’s a pattern and a course that’s set up here in Genesis 3 that is really how ‘the course of this world’ goes.
“I think about it—God
creates man, puts him on the earth and says, ‘Go out and subdue the earth, have
dominion over it, replenish it,’ and Satan looks at this human and says, ‘Hmm,
that’s the guy whose supposed to take this stuff away from me?! This guy?! He’s
just made out of mud! He can’t fly; he can’t do all the wonderful things I can
do! Is God off His rocker?!’
“But he’d never seen a mud man before. So when you’ve never
seen something before, and you don’t know exactly what it can do, you need to
figure out how it operates.
“And so when Satan comes to Eve, he’s already developed a
scheme in his mind about how to handle this new thing God’s created—this human.
“When Satan begins to interact with them, you begin to see the rudimentary way sin and the world system are going to operate, and how sin’s going to attack, and how it’s going to defend itself, and how it’s going to seek to encompass others in it.
*****
“There’s something you have to understand about what godliness is. We have lists of taboos where we say, ‘Well, I don’t do this and I don’t do that.’ Therefore you’re godly. The problem with our list of taboos is that everybody has their own list.
“It’s like the old preacher Down South who was preaching
against liquor one Sunday morning. He was preaching away and this little old
lady back in the back yelled out, ‘Amen, preacher, you tell ’em! Preach it!’
“Then he got to preaching about smoking. She shouted, ‘That’s right, preacher! C’mon, tell it!’ He got to preaching about adultery and she just kept ‘Amen-ing’ him.
“Then he got to preaching about dipping snuff and she didn’t
say anything. She got real quiet and when she went to go out the door after the
service, he asked her, ‘Sister, you were coming along there with me for awhile,
then you quit. What happened?’ She said, ‘Well, you got to plowing in my tater
patch.’
“That’s the way we are. It’s human nature; it’s normal. We all have blind spots, but what religion does is it sets up these external standards of expectation and requirements. The dos and the don’ts, and it says if you do these and you don’t do that, and you conform to my legalistic standards—my standard of expectations for you—then you’ll have arrived at being like God.
“Because certainly, ‘God wouldn’t disagree with me about what
the standards ought to be,’ and so you have all kind of justifications. Some
of you are like me, you’ve come out from under that tyranny and that bondage,
and you say, ‘Hallelujah for liberty in Christ Jesus!’
*****
“I can remember when I was in college back in the late ’60s and we used to sit around in the snack shop (at the Southern Baptist-run Mobile College) and have these long, wonderfully nebulous, convoluted discussions about what is true spirituality.
“I always enjoyed the young preachers who would say, ‘Ga-awwd
would have me to do . . . ’ They had this little tone in their voice because
they thought that was spirituality. You know how it goes. And we used to talk
about, ‘Well, how do you do it and what is it?’
“Of course, the answer all along was in I Corinthian 14:37: ‘If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.’
“The question is, ‘Is this your attitude about yourself; that
you’re a prophet or a spiritual?’ This verse is going to read your meter here.
Here’s an objective standard in the Word of God to identify what true
spirituality is. You don’t have to worry about what Francis Schaeffer said
about it, or doctor so-and-so.
“My friend, true spirituality in the dispensation of grace is determined by what you do with Paul’s message. And when you look around you at the church today, and you see the Body of Christ at-large and you see the total disregard for Paul’s message—and an attitude of carelessness toward it—then you have an answer as to why the church lies in the lap of irrelevance.
“Even the evangelical fundamental church is totally irrelevant
to everybody except itself and it’s only relevant to itself as long as it can
keep itself perpetuating itself.
“The world about us looks at the church with total disregard. It has no impact on the world today except when it gets in the political realm and tries to stir up political fervor.
“Whether it’s the liberal or fundamental church, that’s the only
clout they have anymore. It’s who do they know politically. Why is that? Why
have the mighty fallen? Because the truth has fallen in the streets and the
test of what real spirituality is has failed.”
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