Chimps know better, Jane

I read this quote from 82-year-old Jane Goodall appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal and thought, “Whew, inquiring minds who don’t really want to know a single thing.”

Goodall testified, “I was totally curious as a child. I once took worms to bed, wondering how they walked without legs. I watched intently as they moved about. Chimpanzees are very curious too. If they come across a hole in a tree, they want to know what’s inside. Curiosity is supposed to be a measure of intelligence, but it’s difficult to say. Intelligence is the way you express curiosity and the lengths you’ll go to satisfy it. We’re always coming up with new questions. Science thinks it’s got the answer to the appearance of the universe with the big bang, but that leads me to ask, ‘What came before the big bang?’ I still have a lot of questions. What will happen to me as I get older? What will happen to me when I die? That’s my biggest curiosity and has been for a long time. But you can’t find an answer. It’s unknowable.”

Unsaved people love to claim curiosity as their own. Some will say of fundamentalist Christians that we have no real curiosity; we just take God at His Word and don’t ‘explore’ whether He’s really right or not. A favorite Robert Browning quote, for example, is, “Where the apple reddens never pry -- lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.”

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David writes in Psalm 14, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”

“That’s not a head problem; that’s a heart problem,” says Jordan. “Somebody says, ‘How do you know there’s a God?’ Go look in the mirror. You exist; you had to come from somewhere. Common sense tells you that. Cause and effect tells you that; the rule of first cause. You argue around it because you want to get rid of what you already know.

“There’s a current that runs through the world system that manifests itself in expressing the philosophy of the world. The channel through which the world works and is developed is the lie program that says, ‘Get rid of God!’

“There’s a culture in ‘this present evil world’ where the world wants to replace God’s truth with the vain imaginations--the empty rational reasoning of man’s attempt to make himself control things and come up with his own vain ideas; his own ideas about how it ought to work and what purpose and meaning of life is.

“Satan’s directing and promoting the philosophy, the course of this world so he can eliminate the Creator. How he exerts his influence and his rulership; he’s the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience. He has access, as it were, to their will. He works in their inner man.

“They have no Savior. They have no Holy Spirit within them. They have no light and truth within them. So he has free access to work.

“Listen, the genius of unsaved people is satanically inspired. He’s the creature that works, and he uses that to captivate them; to eliminate any ability on their part to see any glory in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“If you wonder why the world we live in is falling apart, the answer’s right here. II Corinthians 4:3: ‘But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost.’ If people don’t get saved it’s because they’re blind, and when it comes to the gospel, they don’t get it.

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“When it says he’s ‘the god of this world,’ he’s behind the ideologies, the opinions, the hopes, the aims, the goals, the viewpoints that are expressed in the world. He’s the one they worship.

“You see the world does worship a god; they just don’t worship the Creator God and the one that they’re following is the god of this world. That’s what he wanted to be--'like the most high God.' That was Satan's goal and ambition.

“Paul writes, ‘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.’

“You see, his tactic is to blind people; to hide the truth. In darkness things are hid. When things are in darkness you don’t SEE them and that’s why Satan is the ‘power of darkness,’ where the light isn’t there.

“That’s why in Ephesians 4 he talks about ‘through the blindness and darkness of their heart.’ He wants to keep people from seeing anything glorious in the gospel. You remember what Paul said in I Corinthians 1: 18? ‘For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.’

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“You go out and tell the world that a dead Jew hanging on a Cross is God saving them, you know what the world thinks: ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.’ Why do they think that? Because the god of this world hath blinded their minds.

“Colossians 2:8 says, ‘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.’

“Think of Sophia, a lover of wisdom, i.e., human viewpoint: ‘I think I know how to do it. I can figure it out on my own, thank you. I don’t need God.’ So let’s get rid of God in every way possible. Let’s don’t talk about Him. Let’s get Him out and forget about it.

“If it’s religion, philosophy, tradition--anything to keep you from focusing on what God is doing in the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Paul says in Galatians 6:14, ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.’

“But you see to glory in the Cross, you have to not glory in anything you do. You can’t glory in ME—my ideas, do it my way.

"Satan blinds lost people, but he also uses their own sinfulness to do it. That’s where the flesh comes in. You see how he says, ‘the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’

“They’re blinded by Satan but they’re also blinded by their own sin. Disobedience is a willful, deliberate refusal to comply with the demands of authority. The whole tactic is to hide and do away with the truth."