The fool says in his heart,
“There is no God."

Here the psalmist shows what is the root of all ungodliness. It is the "foolishness" of thinking that God does not exist. The agnostic is undecided. He has doubts about the question of God. What is called practical atheism is not an opinion but a way of life. This attitude may coexist with a weak belief in the being of God, but the person lives as if there were no God. The statement made here goes further. Here we find the complete rejection of Christian theism. Now when atheists argue that they are absolutely certain that there is no god, they implicitly claim to know all things. This is nonsense. For the atheist to claim that there is no God, and that there are no traces of God's existence anywhere, the atheist must have explored all the infinite regions scattered throughout the universe. This requires omnipresence, or in other words, it would imply that the atheist is God himself. Atheism is irrational. It’s not a system that satisfies the intellect. You can never be sure that there is no God. It assumes a kind of knowledge that the human mind simply does not have. David is right! Only a fool would be satisfied with the claim that there is no God.

In Ephesians 4:30 Paul writes:

"And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption".

This is one the most remarkable instances of anthropomorphism (attributing human qualities) in the New Testament. God the Spirit is described as experiencing sorrow. There is a sense in which God is never disturbed by anything. God is the ever-blessed God (1 Timothy 1:11). Yet God has chosen this particular word "grieve" to teach us something very important about the way God interacts with his people. Paul is telling us that it is possible for Spirit-filled believers to bring sorrow to the heart of God. Paul means what he says. We can't minimise the importance of the command “do not grieve the Holy Spirit”.  So what is Paul saying then? He's saying that God takes our relationship with Him so seriously that He allows himself to feel emotions under the reactions of his people. This is the wonder of the covenant of God with his people in Jesus. In the covenant of grace, God opens his heart to us and in doing so God opens himself to unpleasant attitudes coming from the covenant-community. But God is always the blessed God. He is never subject to unhappy emotions. How can this be? First, we need to remember that God’s emotional life is vastly different from ours. This means that we should never project our emotions on God. Take wrath for example. In the Being of God wrath is perfectly compatible with his blessedness. When God displays the fury of his wrath, He is displaying a righteous feeling against evil and wicked things. It follows then, that when God is angry he also feels within Himself the internal satisfaction of showing justice and righteousness. When Paul says that God the Spirit may be grieved, it does not mean that God is sad or overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. Paul simply means that God through the Spirit reacts to the inconsistencies spoken of in this context. In other words, God will withdraw the operations of the good Spirit in us.

Ideologies and the Church

The purpose of this article is to show very superficially the nature of ideologies and their power to modify social behaviour. Although I have tried to avoid as much as possible the use of philosophical language, I believe the article is clear enough to be understood by the informed readership of our website.

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We all agree that among the many differences that separate animals and human beings is that animals are concerned with survival and reproduction, while human beings have motivational drives that go beyond survival and self-preservation. Out of all human desires, the love for power is one of those desires that is limited only by what the imagination allows as possible. Although many would find it difficult to admit it, the reality is that everyone would like to be God. This desire to be limitless , to take the place of God, is the impulse that makes social cooperation difficult and creates economic competition, political self-interest, greed, and periodic violence. That is why the world needs the Gospel and Christian morality in order to restrain anarchic self-assertion. We make the world a colosseum of gladiators when we allow untamed power to control the circumstances where living takes place. The Gospel is the power of God to restrain human power and to create the conditions required to give human life the splendour, freedom and joy which can only be achieved in glad submission to the Lordship of Christ.