The Foundation of God

Dr. Jay Worth Allen

“But he who heard and did nothing
is like a man who built a house on the earth without foundation,
against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell.”
(Luke 6:48).

In the 1950s, we were liberated by well-paying jobs, cars, lyrics and music that gave rise to the term, “the generation gap.” In the 1960s - a decade of protests - we lost our authority. Church, state and parents were called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing replaced it. In the 1970s, we lost our love. It was the decade of nihilism, dominated by hyphenated words beginning with “self” - self-image, self-esteem, self-assertion - which made a lonely world. We learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and few had the nerve to declare the difference. In the 1980s, we lost our hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love, large and growing numbers of us stopped believing in the future. In the 1990’s we lost our ability to reason. The power of critical thinking went from induction to deduction and very few were able to think clearly. We became a people who listen with our eyes and think with our feelings.

Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Performing Arts was America’s first postmodern building. The building’s architect designed it with no design in mind. When he was asked, “Why?” he said, “If life itself is capricious, why should our buildings have any design and any meaning?” So he has pillars which have no purpose. He has stairways which go nowhere. He has built a senseless building and someone else has paid for it. My hope is that he didn’t use the same capricious design technique with the building’s foundation. Any of us can fool around with an infrastructure, but we dare not tinker with the foundation because it will call our bluff every time.

Today, in the 2000’s we are told that there is no such thing as real truth; no such thing as real meaning; no such thing as real certainty. We have no sure foundation on which to stand – or so we’ve been told.

I am afraid we are loosing the most vital structure of what is necessary to bring the Church of the Lord Jesus into maturity: i.e., the Word of God. The Lord has provided us with His written Word to help us understand what He said, why He said it, and how we are to build His Church . . . but do we read it? Most of us only skim through it’s pages once a week in preparation for our group Bible study.

Sadly, when most of us good believers come together for the purpose of Bible study, we are not studying the Bible. Instead we study easy to understand books written in contemporary language which seek to render in the simplest, easy to comprehend terms what may or may not be Biblical truth - substituting, in some cases real theological truth into a poorer form of mythology - which will indoctrinate us into confusion, doubtfulness and division rather than truth. This intrusion is evident in many assemblies - worship may be the major element or Baptism or whatever, but the full truth of the Word is never experienced or expressed - forms of tradition or contemporary logic is exercised and therefore the believers never experience maturity. No matter how well written these books may be or how good they make us feel, we will never learn about the Lord, His Church, His foundation, without the scholarship He has established in His book the Bible.

But not all Bibles are Bibles. There are a few fallacious transliterations, such as The Message bible, which must be avoided at all cost! Simply because they are transcriptional, abhorrent hallucinations of intellectual fools - not the Word of God! They have been birthed from within popular professing Christianity, they invite the reader to learn more about Jesus from a pluralistic perspective - amalgamating Christ with the world. Their goal is to establish a Jesus (along with His Church) who is acceptable to all people of all faiths—or no faith. Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!

Within any work of God, there are those who gather themselves to what God is doing. The Gentiles did this in the outer court of the Temple. This is illustrated even fuller in the Old Testament economy with the mixed multitude coming out of Egypt with the children of God, Israel. This mixed multitude realized the children of Israel were inheriting a good thing, so they thought it a good idea to go along with them - to inherit whatever it was the children of Israel was going to inherit. Whatever the children of Israel was going to receive had to be better than what was left for the mixed multitude in Egypt - after God had finished with Egypt. So they tagged along with Israel. They wanted to share in the blessing. They gathered themselves among the children of Israel and left Egypt with the children of Israel although they were never part of the children of Israel; they never believed. So Jude 5 tells us that after He had brought them out, He destroyed those who did not believe.

“As a wise master builder," said Paul, "I have laid the foundation, and another builds on it. But let every man take heed how he builds upon it” (1 Corinthians 3:10). We build the church (of which every believer is a detailed part) of the Lord Jesus, of which He is the foundation, according to the pattern given the apostle Paul - according to God’s plan - and if we built it according to what God has said, then His glory will fill the Church.

The apostle Paul was concerned, as was Moses, so we, too, should be concerned with the structure, the framework, the foundation of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. God has given us His revelation concerning the manner in which we are to build His Church, and He intends that we should proceed with the construction of His building, according to the pattern which He has established. We have the foundation. And “the foundation of God stands sure.” “But let every man take heed how he builds upon it.”

(excerpt from Ch. 3, “What Shall The Righteous Do?”in A Brief History of Redemption by Dr. Jay Worth Allen)

The Foundation of God
Published: 6 January 2010 on Freed In Christ! blogsite.

Link goes to A Brief History of Redemption

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