With the onset of the twenty-first century, it seems that the world, to use a common expression, has changed gears. While technology continues to develop, the problems and difficulties in this world are becoming greater, not smaller. As a result, man is trying, as it were, to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and to invent solutions to problems that in many cases are beyond him. The advice that was considered good enough for the last century is now considered to be obsolete, and new concepts and new approaches to problems are being advanced. The Internet, for example, has radically changed not only our way of doing business, but ultimately our whole way of living. However, these approaches sometimes stray into the moral and spiritual realm, and, as always, man’s thoughts are the opposite of God’s thoughts.
In particular, prominent American author Michael Shermer has recently made comments in his latest book, The Mind of the Market, to the effect that we need to recognize that almost everything important in nature and society “happens from the bottom up, not the top down.” A firm believer in the theory of evolution, he calmly states that “life is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules.” Shermer is the founder of the Skeptic magazine, head of the Skeptics Society, and a contributor to Scientific American. Among other things, he has also written a book on the so-called evolutionary origins of morality and “how to be good without God.” With a strong emphasis on logic, he demeans anything that cannot be ascertained by reason.
Things Beyond Reason
When talking about the natural man and his way of operating in this world, there may be a grain of truth to Shermer’s theory that things generally happen “from the bottom up, not the top down.” For example, it is generally true that those who work hardest obtain the most in this world. However, to reason this way in moral and spiritual things is to leave God out and ultimately make man and his mind the limit of everything we believe. As another has said, “There is nothing in the Bible contrary to reason, but there are many things that are beyond reason.” To deny the existence of what is beyond reason turns man in on himself and ultimately turns him away from God.
With the believer, everything starts with God and ends with God (Rev. 1:88I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. (Revelation 1:8)). Thus it is not “from the bottom up,” but rather “from the top down.” The Bible begins with the words, “In the beginning God,” and if man reasons (and it is God who gave man his reasoning powers), he must of necessity begin with God and reason from God down to man. Starting with man will always dishonor God and will eventually deprive man of the blessing that God wants to give him. If man thinks that he can “be good without God,” he will find that he has no basis for the morality he covets. With a sinful heart and with his mind blinded by Satan, he will always be dragged down, never lifted up. But if man starts with God, his reasoning will be on the right footing, and his deductions will more likely be correct.
The Purposes of God
This is true in the highest sense when we consider what God is doing today, in connection with the mystery of Christ and the church. The natural man who starts with himself will never know the purposes of God in Christ, or the blessing God has for him. Indeed, it is the effort of “the god of this world [Satan]” to blind “the thoughts of the unbelieving, so that the radiancy of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ, who is the image of God, should not shine forth for them” (2 Cor. 4:4 JND). Notice that the blindness primarily concerns the glory of Christ, not man’s need as a sinner (although true). The revelation of the glory of Christ and of all God’s purposes in Him can never come from “bottom up”; it must come from God, from “top down.” Then, in understanding this revelation, we find that God, in His goodness and grace, has also purposed that we should be brought into blessing with Christ and take part in all that He will inherit. It is God who has determined that He will “gather together in one all things in Christ” and who has also determined that we shall also obtain an inheritance in Him (Eph. 1:10-1110That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: 11In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: (Ephesians 1:10‑11)).
It is for this reason that Paul, in preaching the gospel, starts with God’s purposes in Christ, not with man’s need — top down! Man’s need is met, it is true, but when God’s purposes take precedence, God is far more glorified and man is far more blessed than when man starts with himself. This is true of the unbeliever, but it is also true even of the believer who is not seeking to rebel against God.
Our Everyday Lives
If this principle is true as to our present position before God, as associated with Christ as His body and bride, it is true in our everyday lives too. Living in this world, we are apt to be governed by man’s thoughts and may be tempted to think first of ourselves and our needs rather than starting with God. Seeing the many needs in this world, we may, perhaps even with right motives, seek to meet those needs in our own wisdom, rather than starting with God, who not only is wiser than man, but who loves His creature more than we do. Surely the wisdom of God, which purposed the glory of Christ in a past eternity, is also the wisdom that “God ordained before the world unto our glory” (1 Cor. 2:7). It is a blessed privilege for us, in this time of God’s grace and when all of His counsels are displayed, to have “the eyes of your understanding enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints” (Eph. 1:1818The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, (Ephesians 1:18)). All of this must come from “top down,” not “bottom up”!
“What raised the wondrous thought,
Or who did it suggest?
That we, the church, to glory brought,
Should with the Son be blest.
O God! The thought was Thine
(Thine only it could be);
Fruit of the wisdom, love divine,
Peculiar unto Thee.
W. J. Prost