S. GOD AND THE EDUCATED MAN

GOD AND THE EDUCATED MAN Dr. W. A. Criswell Acts 28:23 05-30-54 In Acts 28:1-31 in which chapter we have come preaching through the Word of God, in Acts 28:23, it says that Paul “expounded . . . the things of the kingdom of God, . . . out of the Law of Moses” [Acts 28:23]. And those two, Moses and Paul, the two chief men outside of Christ our Savior and Lord and God-Moses and Paul, the two chief men of the Bible: one in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament, bring to my mind the subject for this message tonight, GOD AND THE EDUCATED MAN. Religion has affinity with a trained mind, an educated mind.

One time I asked a professor at Baylor, when I went to school there, what he meant by the word "affinity." I had never used it before. I didn’t know what it meant and he used it talking to us, talking in a biology class. The word affinity. Well, we happened to be close to a window overlooking the campus, and there is a sidewalk that runs right through the middle of the campus-from one building to the other. And there was a boy and a girl who were holding hands with one another and looking at one another, and, you know, going down the sidewalk. So the professor said, "Well, look out there. You see that boy and that girl?" Well, he said, "They have an affinity for one another." I have never forgotten the meaning of the word since-affinity. God and a man with a trained mind have an affinity for one another. The two seem to fit. They seem to enmesh. Because a man is ignorant and unlearned and untrained is no reason at all why he should be more acceptable to heaven. Hierarchy does not consist in ignorance. Piety can find its highest expression, its noblest bearing, its sublimest achievement in the educated man. Moses was learned in all of the arts and sciences of the Egyptians. He was a man who had gone through all of the schools of his day. He was prepared and trained for the highest work God ever gave to man-up until the appearance of Jesus Christ. And it is no less so in the interpretation of the message of Jesus to the world. The Lord chose a man who was learned in the Greek language, who was brought up in the Greek university, who was taught in all of the theological casuistry of the rabbinical schools of Jerusalem. The two greatest exponents of revealed religion are first, Moses, and then, Paul. And both of them were men of the school. They were taught and trained and educated. They were prepared for the great work God committed to their care. You will find no exception to that. In all of the history of the development of God’s working in the realm of religion, you will find it done by the trained and the educated man. That does not mean you have not had wonderful preachers who flung out of the dust of the ground and the soil of the earth. That does not mean that we did not have capable men to proclaim a message in their own unusual style and fervor, who butcher the King’s English, who were never trained in the school. But, I think there is no exception that the great development of the Christian faith and of the revealed religion of God has inevitably wrought and furthered by the man of the school-the man trained; the learned man; the educated man.

You can see it right on through. From the days of Moses to Isaiah, to Daniel, through Saul, through Augustine, through John Wycliffe, through Savonarola, through Hus and Hübmaier, through John Wesley and George Whitefield-men from the university-through the most learned mind that America has ever produced, Jonathan Edwards, and clear up through this present day. I repeat that God has an affinity and religion has an [affinity] for a trained and an educated mind. When you look at the great universities of the world, up until this present time-in our generation, when state-supported schools have come to the fore-up until this present generation, all of the great schools of the world were religious schools. They were schools founded by the churches. And they were schools guided by the ecclesiastical leadership of the nation and of the people. That is true over there in Europe; in the ancient universities-Oxford, Cambridge and all of the rest. And it is invariably true of the great old universities of America-Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Chicago University. All of them were founded by the religious people. They are products of the schools. Religion has an affinity with the trained and the educated mind.

You came-your schools came out of the church. That is where it was born. In 1780, Robert Raikes, who was our journalist in Manchester, England, passing down the streets in the slum sections of Manchester on the Lord’s Day, on Sunday, saw those children dirty, unkempt, untrained, violent, cursing, playing out in the streets of the city. And Robert Raikes, a journalist, began the first Sunday school. Being a journalist, he captured the imagination and the ear of the English people, and finally, the throne itself. And he organized Sunday schools all over the land. What kind of a Sunday school was it? Not what you would think of when I use that word. It was a school that took those children who worked in child labor before there was any such thing as the Child Labor Law to prohibit it; he took those which were and he taught them reading, writing, arithmetic. And, of course, in that day and time, a large part of the reading matter was biblical, it was scriptural. But the Sunday school movement did not begin at all as a church movement teaching the Bible.

It started Robert Raikes in Manchester in 1780-to gather together those children on the Lord’s Day and to teach them how to read and how to write. And, of course, I say a large part of their subject matter was religious because in teaching them how to read. They taught them the Bible. They read the Bible. And the days passed, and as time went on and the movement grew all over the world, some of the people got together-now I repeat, the church had nothing to do with this to begin with. It met on Sunday because it was the day of freedom. As a development came, those people said, "On Sunday, we ought to teach the Bible, religion. And during the days of the week, we ought to teach reading, writing and arithmetic." So the great movement divided. And our Sunday school movement, the teaching of the Bible, and your public school movement, the teaching of the three R’s, came out of the same source and out of the same heart and out of the same movement. And they belong together. The teaching of the Bible and the teaching of God, and the teaching of the arts and the sciences, they all come out of the same heart and out of the same place and out of the same movement. And as time went on, they were fully separated. From Monday until Friday, we study science and literature and the arts. And then on the Lord’s Day, we gather especially to today the Word of God. But they ought never in heart and in soul be separated. The trained mind is a religious mind. And God I say, has an affinity for an educated man. We are not full-grown until we are taught both of them. We ought to be taught the Word of God. No man is educated who is ignorant of God. And we ought to be taught in our schools that we might be full-grown in our citizenship, in our homes and families and among our friends and among our people.

Now, that leads me to point out several things that are highly interesting to me because they affect us in our church and in our life and in our destiny and in our future as a nation and as a people. Education, secular education, profane education, the education of the three R’s, the education of the arts and the sciences, the education of the school, education has a tremendous responsibility to God and to the church. And to the family and to the home and to the nation and to the people. It has a tremendous responsibility. And the first thing it ought to be-the first thing it ought to be-education ought to be honest and sincere. When they teach our boys and girls the way of life, and when they explain to them the mysteries of this earth and this world in which we live. And that is where I think-that is where I think we fall into all kinds of trouble religiously. For example, I have young people coming to me all of the time-all of the time. It is not isolated incident. They come to me all of the time-every single day, "Pastor, I am so confused. I am so confused. I am just lost. When you get out there and you say in that pulpit God made man out of the dust of the ground. And He formed him out of the dust of the earth. And yet when I go to school here, my professors teach me that we all came from a green scum. We started way back yonder in the eons ago as a little aradigm,* a little paramecium or a little amoeba and then we grew up and we became a tadpole. Then we kept on growing and we became a frog. And then we kept on growing and we became a fish. Then we kept on growing and we had legs and we walked out on dry land. And we kept on growing and we became a monkey. And then finally, we turned into me. And that is what we are taught. There is no God in it,” they say, “and there is no place in it for the creative workmanship of God in a making of a man. Now, that is what I am taught, and you preach just something else. Now, what am I to believe? And where am I to turn?" Well, that is a great system. That is a great system. Brother, it is a knockout. It is a humdinger that system.

Walk all over a tadpole,
Beginning to the end.
Then it was a frog
With a tail set in.
And then a monkey
In a banana tree.
And now I am a doctor
With a Ph.D.

[author and source unknown].

Brother it is a cover. It is a cover. I tore a leaf out of the Reader’s Digest. It is an article by a great learned scientist on how we are going to look. So he starts way back, way back when we were unicellular little animals and came on up. And where we are now. And then he prophesies what we are going to evolve into. You are not going to have any more little toes. They are going to evolve off. You are not going to have any more teeth. They are going to evolve out. And you are not going to have any more hair; not even the women. You are going to be absolutely bald and hairless, every woman, every one of them. All of our beauty parlors are going out of business. I do not know what all else he says. I haven’t got time for it. One of the sentences here is very interesting-"Not long before the beginning of the Ice Age, our ancestors were quadrapedal apes. Swinging brashly through the tree tops, like a present-day monkey or gibbon or chimpanzee. But he was an ape. He was a monkey with possibilities." Some-now don’t forget, this is a learned scientist now, in the Reader’s Digest. But he was a monkey with possibilities. Some inner urge compelled him to get up on his two feet and free his hands for purposes other than locomotion.

Now, when I read things like that and brother, when you go to school, chances are you will be taught that up and down. When I read things like that, there was a time when I was one cell. That is right. There was a time when I was one cell, and there was a time when I walked on all fours, and I crawled around as a little baby. That is right. But oh, my soul, the first dedication I think that education has as they teach is this, they are to be honest and sincere. It is a theory. It is a man’s idea. It is his brainchild that all of us descended from monkeys. That is not a proven fact at all. And it is an insult to the monkey. You know that? “Three monkeys”-

Three monkeys sat in a coconut tree
Discussing things as they are said to be.
Said one to the other, now, listen you two,
There is a certain rumor that can’t be true. That man descended from our noble race.
The very idea is a dire disgrace.
No monkey ever deserted his wife,
Starved a baby, and ruined their life. And you’ve never known a mother monk
To leave a baby with others to bump
Or pass them on to one or another
Until they hardly know who is their mother.

Now another thing, you will never see
A monk’ build a fence around the coconut tree
And let the coconuts go to waste,
Forbidding all other monk’s to place.

Why if I put a fence around this tree,
Starvation would push and steal from me.
Here is another thing that-that a monk won’t do,
Go out at night and get on a stool. Or use a gun or club or knife
To take some other monkey’s life.
Yet man descended beyond,
But brother, he didn’t descend from us.

[author and source unknown].

What that professor ought to say is this: he ought to say, "I believe my ancestors were monkeys." He ought not to say all of our ancestors are monkeys. If he wants to think that, that’s all right. And if he wants to say that, that is all right. But you ought not to teach that as a fact, as a truth. He ought to say, "That is my idea, my great grand-dad was an anthropoid ape. That is my idea." But you and I may have a different idea about it. We believe we were created indeed the image of God. And until some body can come along and prove that difference, let’s stay by the Book, let’s stay by the Book. You see, young people, whatever is truth, do not be afraid of it. Do not be afraid of it. Just be careful to distinguish what is a fact, what is truth, and what that man says is a fact and says is the truth. For they may be two different things. He may say thus and so, but it may not be that way at all. He may think thus and so, but it may not be that way at all. You just ask for the facts, that is all and stay with it and don’t be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid of anything.

Why, I tell a man that is talking about the Lord Jesus, "Sir, if you can claim by another man, that is better than the Lord Jesus, I will forsake the Lord Jesus and I will follow the better man." If he has more of God, if he can reveal more of God, if he acted more like God, if he had more of God in him, which is inconceivable,-but if he brings me some body that was more of God than the Lord Jesus, why I would reject the Lord Jesus and follow the other man. Until he does, I am staying with the Lord Jesus. [It’s the] same way about all of the other things in life. "Whatever is true, oh, let us have it. Whatever is of Christ, let us push Him out." And when you finally you come to know it all, you will find that the Great Author of the world above is the Great Author of the world in that Book, the same man did both of them. You will find that. The older you get, the more you grow in grace and in knowledge and in the experiences in this life, the more you will see that the things that are out there, are the things that is written here. Sincerity, love another one-humility. Young people, there is so much you never can finally know. The other day one of these men took me out fishing. We went fishing. [We] got into a boat and we rowed to a certain place in that lake and it was as dirty and as filthy, it smelled bad, it stank. It was mucky. It was miry. It was everything that nobody was like. And I want you to know, out of that muck and out of that mire and out of that dirt and out of that filth and out of that stink, I want you to know that out of that, there was on the bosom of the water those beautiful, flat green leaves of the lily. And right in midst of those beautiful leaves, the most gorgeously-colored pink lilies that you ever saw. Where did they come from? They came out of the dirt and the muck and the mire. The beautiful beauty you have in front of you tonight, guess where it came from? Out of fertilizer that stinks, and out of dirt, and out of filth. That is where they came from. And they won’t grow without it. How in the world are those glorious flowers in a seed and in the dirt? I do not know. I just look at it and am humbled by it. Aren’t you? This boy down here that married that girl, he said they have a little baby. They, have a little baby girl. Where did they little baby girl come from? How did one cell ever make two and the two make four and through geometrical formation, they made billions. And by and by, that precious little baby girl was made in the bosom of that young mother. Oh, I just am humbled by it. Oh, the things that God does. You never know, you are never able to explain. You just look into the face of God and say, "May the Lord be praised and glorified." That is all-to be humbled.

Just briefly these other two things. Education, godly is to be inspirational. It is to lift us up. It is to set our feet on a rock. It is to put a song in our hearts. It is to send us out with a great enduring experience. And last of all, the summary of it all is to be godly. No man is ever smart because he is like Sinclair Lewis. In my day, Sinclair Lewis was the number one author of all America. And he spoke for America. And he wrote for America. He was lionized by America. Sinclair Lewis one time stood up in a church pulpit in Kansas City, Missouri, and he said, "God, God, there is not such a thing or person as God. If there be a God, I defy Him to strike me dead." And he took a dramatic stance there in the pulpit, defying God to strike Him dead. And I remember when that happened, oh, by the millions all over the country, people applauded-great doings, smart doings. Where does materialism and atheism find its allegiance? It will finally land in the country and in the culture where all the sacred values of God are taken out. And that’s what communism is. No God, no Christ, no Bible, no church, no heaven, no hope. You are an atheistic, materialistic communist-which is a violation of God’s world, of our own soul, of everything we hold dear. True education is always godly. It leads to the wonderful revelations we have in Christ Jesus. And he is not smart who stands up like Sinclair Lewis and says, "If there is a God, I defy Him to strike me dead." He is not smart. He is smart who bows down in reverence before the great God of the starry sky above uses and the microcosm, the nuclear world around us. And the heart and soul on the inside of us. And who says, "The Lord Who made me, Whose I am, and Whom I serve, O God, teach and save me in the right path, in the heavenly will until finally, my task is done and I go to spend that final eternity with Thee in glory." He is a smart man. The Lord bless you, young people, as you turn your page to the life that lies ahead full of perplexities and despair, but remember He lives. He holds the world in His hand and He will see us through.

Now, we’re going to sing our song. And while we sing the song, anywhere in the balcony around, this press of people on this lower floor, anywhere, some body you, give your heart to the Lord. Tonight, Pastor, I take Him as my Savior; or, to come into the fellowship of His church; as the Lord leads the way and says the word tonight, would you come and stand by me? A family of you; Pastor, all of us are coming tonight. Or one, some body you; as God shall say, shall lead, shall open the door, any where tonight; while we stand and sing this song, would you give your heart to the Lord? While we stand and while we sing.