Love Worth Finding

Adrian Rogers: There are ghosts from history that still haunt us. You're going to find out that there are five men who have basically shaped and molded what is going on in America today. You need to know this, and your children need to know it. And if your children are grown, your grandchildren need to know it.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Love Worth Finding, featuring the powerful and biblical messages of pastor, teacher, and author Adrian Rogers. Sometimes when you go through hard times, you want to make sense of the confusion. So we can often turn to man-made philosophy for comfort. That's what Job's friends urged him to do. When Job's life fell apart, his friends urged him to look for answers in the philosophers of yesterday.

And you know what? Our world today has been shaped, molded, and skewed by a few philosophers. And there's a deeper evil to their theories than what meets the eye. If you're not careful, you just might believe them. If you have your Bible, turn now to Job chapter eight as Adrian Rogers exposes the five ghosts that haunt us even to this day. Here's Pastor Rogers.

Adrian Rogers: Did you know, folks, that we are in a crisis? No longer in America do we believe in absolute truth. And if you'll go back to a period that began in 1962 through 1982, you will find out that the courts in 20 years reversed the principle of one nation under God that had been the principle of American history.

In 1962, in a court case, Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black ruled that voluntary prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. That's 1962. Right hard upon that in 1963, the Schempp decision and Justice Thomas Clark set in motion the dismantling of classroom Bible reading. Then came 1980 and the posting of the Ten Commandments was declared unconstitutional.

Then came 1982 and the courts prohibited the teaching of creationism—that men, boys, and girls were created by almighty God. 20 years it took them to expel God from the public schools and tell him not to come back. Now, what has been the result of that? Well, presently children need parental permission to have any medication given to them, even an aspirin in many schools.

But aided by high school counselors, they may have an abortion without parental notification. A high school student can be aided by high school teachers to have an abortion and to kill a baby. We're in serious problems in America and serious times. There has been a systematic move to exclude those things that you and I hold dear and that we believe are the foundation of this nation.

As a result, we see values clarification being put in schools. We see value-neutral sex education put into schools. We see the dispensing of birth control devices and condoms in public schools. We see abortion counseling without parental notification or approval. We see homosexuality being introduced in textbooks as an acceptable lifestyle.

How did all of this happen? What has happened to America? How have we lost the Christian worldview that we once had? Well, there's a man named Roger Friend. Roger Friend is quite a scholar, and he has given us an overview. I'm going to try to encapsulate it and squeeze it down a little bit. Remember what Job was told by Bildad? He says, "I pray thee, inquire of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers."

It was to get Job to appeal to the philosophers of yesterday. Who are some of the philosophers of yesterday that have so skewed the American thinking today? It's an amazing thing if you'll find out what happened in the 1800s in the 19th century. You're going to find out that there are five men who have basically shaped and molded what is going on in America today.

Don't check me out, even though these names sound strange. You need to know this, and your children need to know it. And if your children are grown, your grandchildren need to know it. The first was a man named Georg Friedrich Hegel. He lived in the 1820s and he was a philosopher. Now, for 1,500 years, people had accepted without question the fact of moral absolutes—that right was right and wrong was wrong universally.

Everywhere, murder was thought to be wrong. Everywhere, adultery was thought to be wrong. And if it were not thought to be wrong, it was only an aberration. The consensus was there is a fixed standard of right and wrong. But Hegel came along and he rejected moral absolutes. He had what he called a dialectic theory. Dialectic is just simply an argument. He had a reasoned argument, a dialectic theory.

And what was his dialectic theory? I suppose if you have studied philosophy, you've heard it, and I'm going to give it to you in shorthand. But he said all history is made up of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Thesis is an idea, a proposition that people believe to be true, and they hold that idea until somebody comes along with an opposing idea—an antithesis.

And so these get into a battle—a thesis and an antithesis. And they begin to battle back and forth until both of them give a little, and they meet somewhere in the middle or one or the other wins, and you come to a synthesis, which is a thesis and antithesis coming together. And that synthesis becomes the new thesis. That becomes the new accepted model for truth.

Hegel said, therefore, there are no moral absolutes. Now, he's not talking about biological evolution. He's talking about philosophical and social evolution—that society is always in a flux. It's always moving, and there is no fixed standard of right and wrong. Now folks, if you were to ask in our high schools today, how many of you students believe that there is a fixed standard of right and wrong, you would be shocked.

If you were to ask in our colleges how many believe that, you would be shocked. Do you know what people say in America today? Well, what is right for you may not be right for me. You will hear that over and over again. And so what Hegel said was ideas come under the heading of the survival of the strongest. The strongest idea wins and therefore history is evolutionary and there can be no absolutes.

One professor was teaching this. He said there's nothing that you can say is absolute. A student lifted his hand and said, "Professor, are you sure about that?" He said, "Absolutely." Now, after Hegel in the 1820s, there came along another man in the 1830s. This man's name was Ludwig Feuerbach. He was another German philosopher.

And you see one of these things begins to build upon another. Feuerbach said if there are no absolutes, if Hegel is right—and he accepted that Hegel was right—then there can be no God. Because if there is a God, then that God would have absolute truth. And so he said there can be no God. He said man creates the idea of God—that man is not made in the image of God, but God is in the imagination of man.

That all of this moral flux, this no absolutes causes a deep insecurity in the heart and mind of man. So Feuerbach said that God is created in the imagination of man, that man just simply invents God. I want to quote from him, and I want you to hear what he pompously stated. He said, "Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from reason but from the life of mankind. It is nothing more than a fixed idea."

Now, are we haunted by that ghost today? Absolutely. It's called humanism. Now, humanism sounds so much like humanitarianism, but there is a vast difference between humanism and humanitarianism. Humanitarianism means we love one another, we care for one another, and we love the human species that God has made: man. But humanism makes man the center and the circumference, the sum total of everything. It has no room for God.

It is a fine-sounding name, but it is atheism just simply wearing another coat. But you have first of all, you have Hegel and his Hegelian hogwash. And then right after that, you have Feuerbach, who builds on that. And you're going to see how these philosophers—one will build upon another. And so the third person that we're being haunted today by is Karl Marx.

Karl Marx built on the work of Hegel, and he built on the work of Feuerbach. And he said now, if this is true, if there are no absolutes and therefore there is no God, then what is the future and the purpose of mankind? Where are we going? As a result of that, Karl Marx wrote *The Communist Manifesto* in 1848, and he took Hegel's dialectic argument and he called it dialectical materialism, another word for communism.

And so what he believed was that capitalism—the right to own property and the right to be productive for yourself—was wrong. That he said is the thesis. The antithesis is the desire for equity and fairness in the hearts and minds of the working people. And he said if you take that thesis and that antithesis, you will come to a synthesis which will be socialism or communism.

That's Marxism. That's Hegelian philosophy and the ideas of Feuerbach put together because communism is godless. It's not just another form of economy. It is unspeakably immoral because it does not recognize the worth, the dignity of the individual. The individual is nothing. And so Marx said that the way to set all of this about is a revolution. And he said it doesn't matter if there's suffering.

He believed that there must be violent change. He said that we must be like a foreign body within the existing system that will accelerate its death. And so millions and millions and millions were put to death under godless communism—40 to 50 million were executed. Why? Because there's no God. If there's no God, there's no fixed standard of right and wrong, and therefore we as human beings all we have is materialism.

And what we've got to do is to somehow bring in a humanist, godless utopia. And revolution was necessary, and here is what Marx said: "The suffering and sacrifice of violent change constitutes the price that mankind has to pay to have any essential progress at all." So he said we want change and we want it violently. And don't think communism is dead. It's not dead in Cuba. It's dying there, but it's not dead there. It's not dead in Red China.

But you know where it has the most life? Come up close and I'll tell you: in the universities of America today. And if the Russians want to get rid of their old textbooks, we have plenty of universities over here I believe that would buy them. That is Marxism-Leninism that is infecting and affecting American life today. Now, here's the fourth of these men that has skewed the worldview.

His name is Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin, who wrote *The Origin of Species* in 1859 and *The Descent of Man* in 1871. He came to the conclusion that man is the product of evolution. If there is no God, there can be no fixed standard of right and wrong. And if there is no God, then how do we get here? How do we explain our existence? Well, evolution is not a science. It is a philosophy.

It is the next best guess of the mind that cannot accept divine creation. And so what he did though, he went on to write that we ourselves are the product of mere chance, that we as human beings cannot escape the evolutionary web. And so another philosopher a little later on described what Darwin taught us: "With this single argument, the mystery of the universe is explained, the deity is annulled, and a new era of infinite knowledge is ushered in."

From that time on, man has been endeavoring to make a monkey of himself, thanks to Charles Darwin and those who believe him. Now, the fifth of these five men that haunt us today is a man named Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud lived from 1856 to this century, 1939. He was the one who put the final bow on the whole thing, put the final touches to the evolutionary model.

Now, Feuerbach said that we created the idea of God because of the insecurities that Hegel brought about by saying there are no absolutes. But Freud said, where do we get the idea of God? What kind of a God do we conjure up? He said our idea of God comes to us from our childhood father. And we conceive of God like we would conceive of our childhood father when we were children.

And so he was the father of psychoanalysis. He taught that mankind is motivated chiefly by pleasure, specifically by sexual pleasure—eroticism. To Freud, almost everything begins and ends with sex. And so he felt that if mankind is repressed by society in his or her erotic urges or their erotic urges, if people fail to be allowed to fulfill their sexual and erotic desires, they may get a neurosis.

So that's the reason that you see what we see: the perversion, the filth, the debauchery that we see in society today. That roots back to the extreme permissiveness that came out of Freudian psychology. And you see it in raising children. We're told today not to repress children. I mean, after all, you don't want to warp the little thing. My dad warped me. You don't want to warp him.

And if Throckmorton wants to cut the leg off the dining room table, you keep the saw sharp so it won't frustrate the little dear. And that is the idea that we have today in Freudian psychology. Now, what happened when these five men brought these philosophies in the 19th century? It took less than a hundred years for them to come in fruition in this century. In 1924, a man who was a student of Hegel, Feuerbach, a man who was a student of Karl Marx had a name: Adolf Hitler.

He thought that he had a better idea, however, than Marx. His idea was Nazism. And so he wrote *Mein Kampf*. Let me quote what Adolf Hitler had to say: "No more than nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals"—there you see the survival of the fittest; we're talking about Darwin there—"No more than nature desires the mating of the weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher and a lower race."

Hitler was the original racist. You need to know that. "Since if she did, her whole work of higher breeding over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years might be ruined with one blow. All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally created race died from blood poisoning"—that is intermarrying. "The man who creates the culture must be preserved. Preservation is bound up with the rigid law of necessity in the right to victory of the best and the strongest in this world."

That's just another way of saying the survival of the fittest. Then Hitler said, "Those who want to live, let them fight. And those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live. Even if this is hard, this is how it is." And that led to the gas ovens. Now, you say, well, the gas ovens were terrible. What about the abortion business in America today?

What about the grizzly business today of taking little babies who are the weakest of all creatures? And because they're weak, because they cannot defend themselves, they can be liquidated. Do you know what Hitler's argument for the extermination of Jews was? He reclassified them as non-persons. Do you know what we're doing to the little babies today? We are reclassifying them as non-persons.

Can you imagine a Nazi saying—well, or somebody saying about the Nazis—well, I personally am against the cremation of human beings, but what one does in his own personal gas chamber is his business. I'm for choice. Now, this is the idea of the survival of the strongest. But it's only a little step now to the doctors, I believe, a new generation of doctors, who will put little babies to death in the womb and be paid for it, will with a needle and a syringe help some of us to get out of the way in this crowded world because it's just what we call the survival of the fittest.

These ideas, folks, have been around for a long time. Now, actually, they were born in the pit of hell. But there was a resurgence of these kind of ideas in the last century, and now we've sown the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind. Now, folks, am I discouraged? No. And I'll tell you why. The Bible says the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.

God has given us kingdom authority. Jesus said, "Behold, I give you authority over all the power of the enemy." Do you know the one thing that they do not have is truth? Let me tell you the other thing they don't have: they don't have the Holy Spirit. And so what we need to do is to take the word of truth and the spirit of truth and hold up the Christ of truth. And we need to get out of the boat with both feet.

The days are short. We need to know who we are, what we believe, and why we believe it. And I tell you, friend, that we don't have to be ashamed of what we believe. There are good answers to these things, and the Bible says we're to be ready always to give an answer to those who ask us of these things. And I am convinced there's not a lot wrong in America that could not be changed radically and quickly if we had a generation of preachers across this land who would stand in the pulpits of God, anointed with the Holy Spirit in a heart full of love from a pure life, who would preach and teach thus saith the Lord.

Let it start in my heart. Let it start in your heart. Let it start in church. And let's stand up and speak up while God gives us a voice. Amen? Let's pray. Father, I pray now that you will help us, Lord, not to be discouraged, not to be alarmed, but on the other hand, dear Lord, to be sensitized and awakened and Lord, energized.

Help us, Lord, not to go just off half-cocked. But help us to know what we believe and why we believe it and then to teach it in the anointing and the power of the Holy Ghost. Our eyes are upon you to make a way for us and for our little ones. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Guest (Male): Amen and amen. Well, as you listen today, maybe your heart is heavy for one of your children or a grandchild. Maybe you have a prayer request that you'd like to share with us at Love Worth Finding. It really is one of our greatest honors to come alongside you and pray with that need that you have right now.

If you can, go to our website, LWF.org, and scroll down to find the prayer wall. You'll find the option to submit a prayer request or to pray for others. This resource is one of our favorite ways to keep the ministry and the community praying continually for one another's needs. We can't wait to hear from you. Again, go to LWF.org and scroll down to find our prayer wall today.

Hi, this is Cary Vaughn, and this program has been brought to you by Love Worth Finding, a non-profit ministry showcasing the powerful preaching and teaching of Pastor Adrian Rogers. We operate solely through the generous gifts of individual supporters just like you. To give a gift today, call 1-877-LOVEGOD. That's 1-877-LOVEGOD.

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