4. The Motivation Behind Atheism
What is really behind atheism as its pulsating and motivating drive? Nothing complex really! First of all, man by nature wants to be his own lord and master. That was the driving force of sin from the very beginning. To be free in his choices, to obey nothing but his own appetites and desires. Second, and above all, to be accountable to no one! There you have it in an atheistic nutshell. To be able to eat, drink, be merry and party, without any reckoning to anyone staring them in the face down the line! Bingo!
One thing for sure, God isn’t going to change, nor will His standards of morality. Although the modern Christian church is redesigning God and rewriting His Word to make Him and It more compatible with our morally-decayed contemporary culture! But no matter how hard they try to alter God and His Word, God and His Word remain immoveable and rock solid. So we read in Malachi 3:6, “For I, the Lord, do not change….”
We also read about God’s Word in Mark 13:31 where God says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.”
Shucks! It is obvious then that you can’t buy God off or make a deal with Him, for He is a no-deal, no-change God. Now what?
So man puts his little wits together with other small-witted fools who are likewise indignant about always having to deal with this God thing. It is that carking and nagging God-talk in our society that makes sinning not as fully and freely enjoyable as they would like it to be. It takes so much of the fun out of sinning. So they muster all of the pseudo-scientific knowledge that they can gather, and invent all kinds of far-out and foolish theories. All of that not first of all to prove where man and the world really came from. No, but chiefly to prove that there is no God! Atheism is not primarily about science, but about reverse theology – in the beginning no God. To be able to sin like the devil and enjoy it without those perpetual checks of conscience! To not always and forever having to confront the reality that God Who will one day judge the world! So man conjured up the astonishingly stupid theory of atheistic evolution. Now he can have a blast without that Party-Pooper God always hanging around. You know now don’t you what is really going on?
God says it in Romans 1:18, “…who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
That’s the whole point! Science is not the issue. Righteousness and unrighteousness are the issue! It doesn’t say that the atheist suppresses the truth in unbelief, or disbelief, or anti-belief. No, the truth about God is pushed away and buried in unrighteousness. The psalmist David says the very same thing in Psalm 14:1,
“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.”
You’re on to it all by now, aren’t you? All of these Supreme Court Decisions about no prayer, no Ten Commandments, and no Bible in America’s public schools or on state property! It is not what they are making it out to be. They pass it all off as a constitutional struggle, i.e. as a requirement of the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. First of all, this is not what the U.S Constitution requires at all. That aside, what is really going on is the attempt on the part of the ACLU, along with their atheist judges and legislators, to get rid of God completely from our society, so that they don’t have morally to deal with this Divine killjoy anymore. They want to be able to sexually and sensually express themselves in every sinful and perverted way without moral restriction or accountability.
That is why Justice Roy Moore, Alabama’s Supreme Court chief justice was ordered by a federal judge to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the state’s judicial building. He defied the order. Alabama’s judicial ethics panel then removed Chief Justice Roy Moore from office. Both he and the Monument to the Ten Commandments were hauled away. In America, the land of the free and the home of the brave! Christians and the Bible are now the least tolerated group and book in this post-Christian nation and era. Who would have thought that would happen? But what we must understand is this, namely, that men are atheists not primarily because of the doctrine of God, but because of the obedience to God that His existence requires. Atheism is not rooted so much in anti-theology as it is in anti-morality. It isn’t Christian doctrine that bugs the atheist. It is Christian living!
To wrap this all up, think of it in this way. It will help clear things up. All men who are born into the world by nature are trying to “Hide Themselves From God”
That is all the result of sin in their lives. Adam and Eve started the universal custom. In their sinful guilt and shame, they played hide and go seek with the Lord. They were now deathly afraid of Him. We read in Genesis 3:8, “…and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” Everyone tries it in his or her own way. Sin always wears the badge of guilt, privacy and darkness. Man commis most of his sins in the dark forests of nighttime. That way, when the day dawns, all their sins seem to fade away with the vanishing darkness! Of course it doesn’t work, for the light of God’s omnipresence has already shined into even the darkest corners. But it is the constant attempt of natural man to try to hide himself from God. It is the spirit of sin and unbelief in the human race.
However, the evil spirit of atheism carries it all a step further in foolishness. Atheism is men trying not only to hide themselves from God, but trying to “Hide God From Themselves.”
That spirit of atheism is now rampant in America. The spirit of unbelief seeks to avoid and hide from God. The spirit of atheism seeks to counter and deny God. I mean to say, all of these futile attempts to try and stay clear of God become so wearying to the sinner! So why not cut the work short? Just get rid of God, for you will no longer have to agonize over trying to hide from God, when you can hide God from yourself! Just reject Divine existence. So as he drinks from the poison cup of atheism, the atheist denies the existence of the ocean.
Does it work? I really don’t think so, not in the deepest places of the atheist’s heart. On what do I base such an opinion? Romans 1:19, “because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.”
In other words, God has created within each man what John Calvin calls the Sensus Divinatus – the deep inner sense of God. It is not something that he is catechized or taught into. Rather, it is something powerful that he is born with. No matter what man does to disconnect the plug from that God-socket inside of himself, yet that God-light never totally burns out. God has not put the capability within man to fully extinguish that inner witness that God has left of Himself. If you will, man cannot ever totally erase what God has written deep in his spirit. The atheist may and does try very hard to shake loose from the gnawing sense of a God, but he never totally succeeds. He arms himself with all of his foolish theories and arguments against that inner voice of Divinity, but none of them can completely silence it.
In the late 1990s Newsweek magazine featured a front cover in gold, no less, with the headlines, “Talking to God: An Intimate Look as the Way We Pray.” The article featured a Gallup poll which attempted to get a pulse on the prayer life of America. The poll revealed some very fascinating results:
A. Seventy-eight per cent of all Americans pray at least once a week.
B. More than half, 57%, pray at least once a day.
C. About 20% of all atheists pray once a day.
This is exactly why throughout human history this sense of the Divine has shown up in every nation, language, tribe and culture. Because of man’s sinfulness, his sense of deity has been warped and distorted, so that the god or gods that he ends up worshipping are the false gods of perverted idolatry. But still the acknowledgment of a deity sticks to the human race throughout time because it is deeply embedded within its essence. The atheist is in fact the exception to the rule and an irregularity from the universal norm. A man born without the Sensus Divinatus would be the same as a man born without a head or a heart. And one day the atheists will join with all men as they confess their belief in God. We read of the end of all unbelief, atheism, agnosticism and idolatry in Romans 14:11, “For it is written, ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.”
