This sermon delves into the loss of absolutes in culture, leading to a search for wonder and the impact of materialism on society. It explores the existential questions arising from a worldview devoid of spiritual meaning, the pursuit of pleasure as a substitute for purpose, and the emptiness of hedonism. The narrative includes anecdotes and philosophical reflections on the consequences of rejecting God and the search for meaning in a world without absolutes.

I've been looking at the read and of the questions Jesus, the crowd concerning John the Baptist, did they go out expecting a read? I had given you two references of a smorgasbord philosophy. One of them was a loss of authority, second was a loss of creativity, and I'll leave you with the third one. A loss of a sense of wonder, a loss of a sense of wonder. I believe one of the reasons why they are deeply is because there are no absolutes left in the culture. And I think the number one addiction of the 1980s is fantasy. The reason why this is is because we have lost a sense of wonder. You see, with absolutes there are things that transcend anything that you've ever dreamed of. The definition of an absolute is you can't go beyond it. It is the ultimate. As a matter of fact, we could say there are three fundamental absolutes about God that define who He is. One would be that He's uncreated. Now, who in the fat knows what that means? He is triune, that's another mystery for you, and that He is a creator. Now we can maybe describe these, we can give verses on them, but what do they mean? What does it mean to have, as God, an uncreated triune creator? All of those, Francis Shepherd used to call these absolutes of wonder. They are things, he said, where you don't really explain, you just take your hat off and worship when you hit them. You can maybe give some illustrations of them. We have no way, for instance, of describing, we don't know what that is, we have no illustration of that. In nature, there's nothing else in the universe like God and what He is, this is His stuff. And then He's triune. We've got tons of illustrations of that, but we still don't know what it means. And then He's a creator. We can say man is a finite creator, but we still don't know what the act of a creator actually involves. Now those are absolutes. They are things that if you set your heart on studying God and you spend the huge chunk of your time meditating on what He is like, it creates incredible vistas of things. And not only that, the more you study, the more amazed you'll become. It brings out wonder. Now if you eliminate absolutes from a culture, biblical absolutes, you also eliminate the source of wonder. And what you're left with then is fantasy. You have to use your own imagination to come up with things that will give you back that lost sense of wonder. If we look at the movies that have been produced in the last decade or two decades, we took the top ten money-making movies in the Western world. Every single one of them is a movie of fantasy or science fiction or something like that. Matter of fact, technology is modern man's Holy Spirit. And science fiction is modern man's prophecy. And he's actually used science as his area of wonder. It's the last area of wonder that a materialist has. Now my favorite story on this, Malcolm Muggeridge, The Age of Credulity, I feel sure that if a name is required for this age, it would be The Age of Credulity, for never have human beings been more ready to believe anything. It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, that's the ultimate rejection of an absolute, they believe in nothing. But the situation is far more serious. The truth is that when they stop believing in God, they believe in anything and everything. Now what I call that is, if you believe in everything, you get thrilled about nothing. See, there's nothing that moves you, everything, you're into everything. I call it spiritual constipation. All absorption and no elimination. My favorite story on this is the man who had a friend, see when you're in the hip movement, it was a reaction against a culture that never was allowed to say wow. You see? You never could be surprised because you were into it. Do you know what I'm talking about? You ever ski? Oh yes, often. You play tennis? Yes. Jimmy and Mac and I work out, you know that kind of thing? Have you heard of, yes, yes I've studied that. Have you looked at, yes, I often, you know that thing? You can't go wow, I never saw that before. You can't do that because you're into everything, you're a part of everything, you know, you're a culturally sound smorgasbord. And you couldn't say wow, so the hippies dropped out, they were in there, wow, wow, you know, they were into everything, wow. And I have this story about a man who had a friend that was into everything, nothing ever surprised him, he was just, have you seen that? Yes, and so what the guy did is he got a friend and he said, can you help me? And he took a horse in the house, he said, what are you doing? The horse had never been in a house before, he said, help me get the horse up the stairs. So they took the horse up these stairs and he said, help me get the horse in the bathroom. And the guy finally got the horse and he said, now I need to get this horse in the bath, to stand in the bath. And the horse, one needs to be put in the bath, he was finally standing there with his reins around the shower stall and looking really weird and the guy came down the stairs with his friend and he said, what is this for? He said, well I got a friend coming over and everything I say to him, he already has done and he knows, see? Say to this, I know, he says, yeah, and I say this and he says, I know. So he says he's coming over for lunch in half an hour and he's going to want to wash his hands, he's going to go up the stairs, he's going to go into the bathroom, he's going to turn the water on in the tap, he's going to look in the mirror and he's going to come running down the stairs and he's going to say, there's a horse in the bath and I'm going to look at him and say, I know. So John the Baptist was not an eclectic. He knew the fact is equally true in the spiritual world and the world of art and music and everything else that God originally gave us, that those who become leaders are those who are willing to make a break from the crowd, to not be the same as their culture. I've heard it put this way, if you want to change the world, you cannot conform to it. You must be different from the culture around you. The first commandment in Israel, Exodus 20, 1 to 3, seemed a funny one. You'd think that God would say, I want you to believe in me. You'd think that it would be a commandment against atheism, that God would say, you must believe in God. That's the first commandment, but that's not what it was. It was that you must believe in the right God. I am the Lord your God. It wasn't a command to believe in God, it was a command to believe in the right one. And really that first commandment established priority for God's people, that there is only one God and he was the one that was to be worshipped. So God assumes that everybody will worship something. Might just be yourself, but it's going to be something. The second commandment seems a very strange one in the 20th century. It was, you shall not make unto you any graven image. And yet this commandment receives more attention than any other in the Bible. That's a strange one. It was a commandment to distinctiveness and it was to mark God's people as different. They were to be set utterly apart in their essential worship than every nation, tongue or tribe around them. That distinction is the survival of the church. To be different. She is to be different in the way she thought, the way she acted, the way she served, the way she worshipped. The last tribes of Israel didn't lose their way, they lost their identity. They failed to be that distinct thing. They absorbed the values and the concepts and the worship of their surrounding and they perished as a viable force to alter the face of history. So to me there is no greater tragedy than a man come or a woman come from the weary of the insanity of this present dying culture, come starving, hungering and sick to the voice of the church, to come expecting to hear the voice of another, to hear God's voice, to hear the beat of a different drum sort of thing and to hear only a cheap and shoddy echo of what they've been hearing in the world all along. That is a tragedy. In a culture rotting out by decayed absolutes where very little exists except what Schaeffer called moral memories, the memory of what it used to be good. And he used the illustration of a mother who used to say to her daughter when she went out on a date, be good. The girl might not listen but at least she understood what she was talking about. But to say be good to a modern girl would be, what in the world is your concept of good? You see it would just be an alien statement. And the previous generation had moral memories and they remembered what good was whether they practiced it or not. But this new generation doesn't even have that. The moral memories are gone, they've decayed. We have to have people then who believe and follow an absolutely wise, absolutely good, absolutely right leader and who have the courage to do what he says no matter what other people think or say. And that, when we present the gospel to the modern world, we have to be, they called it renaissance, reformation, men and women. These two movements in history started approximately the same time. But this one here was one, the renaissance man or woman is the Johnny Carson, David Frost type. You know, he speaks at length and in erudition and all kinds of things. He can speak to anybody and, you know, he's always got the right word and never says the wrong phrase. And he's right up with everything that's happening in the culture and, you know, he knows all the latest fads and what the latest news is and he's witty and presentable and that's the renaissance man. The renaissance man has no message, he's got nothing to say. He's very, very good at saying it, but he doesn't say anything. The reformation man, at the same time in the culture, he's the man with the fiery eye. He's the man with the laser beam look. He's the one who has one message and one thing to say. Sometimes he hasn't got any audience, but he's got a message. And the man or the woman who ministers today has got to be a renaissance reformation person, a person who's taken time to find out what their culture is like so you don't say the wrong words, you don't speak with an accent into your chosen field of ministry, God's called you to, but that you say what God says, you're a reformation man. And I think God has some ideas nobody's ever thought of that he wants to give to people, that he can trust, and that's in the whole field of art, music, and everything else. A friend, Bob Maddox, in the United States, who used to be a hippie in the 60s, he was saved very, very supernaturally. Another friend of mine was a young evangelist, called him out in a meeting, stood him up, told him his name, where he was going to, he got saved and delivered, and baptized in the Holy Spirit and called a ministry on his feet. All in one shot, boy. The guy had hair down to his ankles, he looked like an explosion in a mattress factory, he was a total mess. And God just, boom, called this guy, and he lost most of his hair now, including that in the middle. But Bob is a fabulous guy, during his time in the hip movement, he invented the light organ. You know, you've seen the disco lights that pulse with three different colors depending on the frequencies. Well, he invented an organ where every note had a corresponding spectrum color, so when you play something, there's a visual equivalent of whatever you're playing. Well, I give you that because Bob had an outreach ministry in a college, in Chico State University in Northern California, and he used to run these meetings on campus. And one particular night, they had invited in a Christian singing group, and this singing group was really bad. I mean, they weren't bad singers, they just weren't really cool. I mean, put it this way, their chief accompaniment was a piano accordion. This is not exactly a college-type ministry. Would it help you to know that their record albums used the same picture with different colors ink on each version? So that'll give you an idea of how uncool they were. They were just definitely not your basic, cool, college, contemporary music group. Anyway, the plot thickens. You know what, they're really into worship. They love singing, and they're into all of it. So they're in the front, and there's quite a bunch of them, there's about six of them. So all the front seats, the place was pretty full. The front seats were the only empty ones where they'd all got up. And they were singing and worshiping away, and Bob was sitting over in the corner. And into that hall walked four or five of the best secular West Coast studio musicians there were. I mean, the best. These are the guys whose names are all on the hot albums, you know. And they're all secular musicians, and Bob knew them from the secular world, and hardly anybody else would have known them in there. And they couldn't, there was no seat, so they were actually right up in the front to sit right there in front of these, I don't know why they got, they all sat digging each other in the ribs, and you know, they were probably going to groove out on this wild, far out old stuff here. Anyway, they're sitting there, and Bob is nearly dying. He thinks, oh, shoot, you know, why couldn't we have had some of the real cream of the Christian singing ministry? Why did we get these guys tonight? He's just dying there, you know, and he just doesn't even want to look. He's so embarrassed. And these other guys are swinging away and, you know, playing the piano accordion, and oh, shoot, he's dying. And anyway, he doesn't even want to look. Puts his head down, he's so embarrassed. But the presence of God began to increase in demonstration of the play. People really started getting into worship, and it hit a very high level, you know. People forgot everything surrounding, they didn't even know who these guys were, they didn't care. They were just into it, and Bob was the only one who was embarrassed. So finally, he forgot too. He just thought, ah, we'll just get into it, and they just abandoned themselves to the worship of God. And then, he said, in the middle of all of this going on, he suddenly felt, I wonder what these people think of this, because it's hitting really heavy levels. And he opened his eyes, and he said, every single one of them was sitting on the edge of their chair, their eyes were bugging out, they were looking like Kermit the Frog, their mouth was open, they were like this. And Bob said, as he looked at them, he realized something was happening there. And he said, he turned around, and for a second, he saw what they saw. And these guys in the front, these terrible, uncultural, uncool, absolutely not the best people to use in this thing, they had their eyes closed, most of the people in the place had their eyes closed, except the five in the front and Bob. And he said, the air around them was sparkling. Have you ever seen Star Trek, where the transporter goes brrrrrrr and the spark of the air, it's like each little molecule was a light, sparkling all around them. And the cement walls of this university were pulsing gold. It's like gold light coming out of the cement. And they were looking at that, and God said to Bob, you like light shows? God has ideas. He has ideas, he has thoughts, he has things. He probably never would have said that to Christians, but I wonder what those secular guys did as they walked out of there that night. A convinced church is a heroic church. It is a certain church, an uncertain, unsure, uncommitted bunch. You start off with that, you've got a church any rotten atmosphere can affect, and any charlatan can rip off, and any devil can push around. You want people of conviction, and you've got to have them in your heart and in your life if you're going to minister in this smorgasbord world. And it'll draw people, it really does. People of conviction will draw people. We've looked at what happens in a society as it's pushed towards that totalitarianism at the top. Any person who speaks with authority and seems to have answers draws a smorgasbord culture. And I think it's only right that Christians who have an authority given them of God that's not a hard or legalistic authority, should come to the forefront in a culture like this and say, this is the way, walk in it. That kind of thing. Now can we go to part two? Part two is just as much fun as part one. What is the second statement, the second question that Jesus asked about this man, John the Baptist? What did you go out to see? You go out to see a reed, or, second, man dressed in fine clothes. He said, did you come out, was it John the Baptist's dress that attracted you? Did you say, hey, you've got to see this guy. I mean, this guy, you talk about fashion, he is wearing camel skin. And I mean, with the humps and the whole trip, man, you've got to see this. See, why did you come out? Did you come out because you think this guy is just the latest and the greatest? Neiman Marcus or whatever, you know, who did you come out to see? We come then to a second major mindset in the Western world, and we'll simply call them the materialists. These are people who believe the only real important thing in life is things. Clothes, car, food, furniture, right house, right pool, right spa, right, you know, this. They're the kind of people that evaluate you by the clothes you wear. Oh, yes. You know that kind of person? I've never forgotten this, I've forgotten it was in one of the television, I think it was Magnum P.I. or something, and a guy comes into this exclusive club, and they order him out because he's got jeans, and he says, that guy's got jeans, and the maitre d' goes, but sir, they are designer jeans. Now, isn't there a huge chunk of people to whom this is all of life, that that's it? That's the whole thing. It's what you wear, they sum you up by the way you look, and their whole life is built on getting exactly, getting Gucci this, and, you know, Calvin Klein this, and the right underwear, or you're just out of it. And a large number of 20th century people to read an equally large number of materials. People with nothing but we could call a temporal value system. Life is only a question of economics, of supply and demand. You got the right clothes, best food, big house, a car or two, sure and stable cash flow, what else is there? Now the reason why we have a lot of people like this is a bit more complex, and it comes basically because a spiritual world view has been replaced in the West by a materialistic world view. And the materialistic world view, again Schaefer pointed out, goes like this. Young people, especially in the last 25 years or more, have grown up thinking there is nothing in the universe but these three things, time, plus chance, plus matter. And that equals man and the entire universe. We will look later at some challenges to this widely accepted philosophy, but most people you speak to who are materialists have brought this fundamental assumption, that the reason behind everything here is simply these three things, time, chance, and matter. You can see why they're materialists, there's no supernatural in this at all. All the universe we know, people, the vast complexity, the art, the design of the whole universe has just simply come out of these three things. Time is impersonal, it is not a person unless you believe in father time. Chance is impersonal, chance, chaos, randomness is not impersonal, no order there, no design. And matter is impersonal, unless you believe in personal hydrogen atoms. And I actually had a guy from LA send me a six-page study on the personality of hydrogen atoms. At least he was consistent within his premises. He, you know, his basic thing was to show that the reason why there's personality is because the atoms have personality, that, you know, that's where personality comes from. And Schaefer's pointed out that it has been hard in a hundred years since this thought form has been studied, and of course Charles Darwin is a key figure in this, though Darwin himself had a religious background, remember he was training to be a minister, he was a bachelor and minister when he went on the voyage of the Beagle. And there is also some fairly well substantiated rumors that near the end of his life he turned back to Christ. And I have an account of that, it was here in England, and Lady Huntingdon was the, was had made an account of this in Darwin's last days when he was bedridden and the maid in his house, Lady Huntingdon was having a service not far away from Darwin's house and he asked that the windows be opened that he could hear the singing and asked that the book be bought and she said, which book? He said there's only one book and asked for the scriptures to be bought and talked about in the early days how he was young and his theories caught on like fire and it shocked him how heavily they'd been picked up. If you look at the origin of the species and then the later study, you see a real decay in Darwin's thought, it begins first with a more biblical thing and then gradually it seems to go downhill in his later writings. But if this is true, then Darwin had some very serious second thoughts near the end of his life. As I said, the closer you get to death, the more the philosophical questions really start getting asked. And Darwin's theory ultimately became this, that there is nothing in the universe but these three things. And this has formed the basis of many, many major philosophies today. Things as diverse as existentialism and Marxism have all come, and Nazism have all come out of this same fundamental assumption about the nature of reality. And what Schaeffer points out is this, if time is impersonal and chance is impersonal and matter is impersonal, how can three impersonals add up to a person? And the answer is, not very easily. And so in the early biology books, if you go back a century and you look at biology books, they had a line there. Above the line was, they call this living or organic, see? And then they had man at the top, and then they had the apes, and then they came down until you had the amoebas and viruses and germs and stuff down here. And then there was a line drawn, then they had inorganic, and then they had the table of the elements and stuff like this. Well, what has happened over the years is gradually that line has moved down until it's gone now. There is no division anymore now between the organic and the inorganic. It's just one continuum. In other words, there is no difference ultimately, except in complexity of organization between man and dirt, no difference at all. So we could say here, when you take out the personal God, what you wind up with is that man is not a person, he is only a highly complex machine. Now the first generation to really, when I say generation, I say 30 years, 25-30 years, the first generation to really get the full impact of this was this one. The one that has arisen, parents and the children of the last 25 years are the ones who've grown up with this as a reality, fully established reality, no real alternative to this given. And you first started seeing it in the 60s. In the 1960s, university students around the world, earlier in Europe, a little later in the US and in other places, began to march feeling an impersonality about their lives, feeling like, I don't fit in anywhere. And many, many people came to offer solutions in that. For instance, there were a lot of marches in the early days where kids carried cards, I am an IBM card, do not staple, fold, mutilate or bend. The idea was I just feel like a number, I'm being programmed and I don't feel like a person. It was a loss of personality. And many, many writers in this case for Christianity, there are a number of, I want to read you a couple of these here. Here's Tom Stoppard, but why? Was it for all of this? Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths? To be told so little to such an end and still finally to be denied any explanation, to realize you're going to move on, that the bomb might come tomorrow and blow you away and there's still no reason why you should even be there. That's a scary thing. What are we sure of, said Tennessee Williams? Not even of our own existence, dear comforting friend. And whom can we ask the questions that torment us? What is this place? Where are we? A fat old man who gives sly hints that only bewilder us more, a fake of a gypsy squinting at cards and tea leaves. What else are we offered? The never broken procession of little events that assure us that we and strangers about us are still going on. Where? Why? No destiny, no purpose, no sense of going anyplace. And the perch that we hold is unstable. The world you live in could be blown away tomorrow. We're threatened with eviction, for this is a port of entry and departure. There are no permanent guests. And where else have we to go when we leave here? See? There's no heaven. There's no hell. There's no eternal future. The supernatural worldview that's true of a great chunk of third world nations is ripped away in the West, replaced with this structure. We are lonely. We are frightened. And then this one here. Here's Woody Allen, which most of you know. He's really a philosopher as well as a film director and a comedian. And many of his films are philosophical statements done in a funny way. He frequently deals with death in his films. It's almost an obsession with him. And in Death, which is the title of one of his plays, this is what he says. It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens. And here's a couple of others, the whole sense of the future. P.T. Forsythe, English theologian, and this is 1848 to 1921 he lived. There are happily still people who ask what all the long and tragic train of history means. What great things does it intend? What destiny is it moving to? Where its clothes shall be? Do all its large lines converge on anything? Do they all curve in some vast trend and draw together to a due close? Do they all work together for good and love? What does man mean? Or are you so happy with the children or so engrossed in your enterprises that you can spare no attention to ask about the movement, the meaning, the fate of the race? And that's why a lot of people just bury themselves in things. If you stop long enough and you really think seriously about this, it is scary. So most people don't want to think. They want to stay up nights wondering about what's going to happen when they die. Your philosophy then in the 60s was eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall fry. And here's Michael Harrington writing in The Accidental Century. Once destiny was an honest game of cards which followed certain conventions with a limited number of cards and values. Now the player realizes in amazement that the hand of his future contains cards never seen before and that the rules of the game are modified by each player. See the absolutes have gone too. The whole world has become a dialectical nightmare. There are no more certainties. Now if you had to think long enough and hard about this, you might just kill yourself. And some did. But most people don't want to take that alternative. Instead they bury themselves in pleasure or in a cause that has this as its base. You can see that if this is true, and kids have gone up from primary school believing this. They see pictures of, you know, palm trees falling making coal and then beetle-browed humans slugging each other and eventually mutating whether a rock arrives, a monolith to teach them how to use a club and finally go out and 2010 can be born. Whether they're directed or anything, the general idea is that man is the product of all of this. Now very serious questions can be asked about this and we will ask them. One of the main ones is, is this sufficient to give a world of order and man like there is? And the consensus seems to be no, it is not really sufficient. And so there is a new form of evolution around today. Darwinism today is not the Darwinism of a hundred years ago. It is a neo-Darwinism. As a matter of fact, in many places there is an attempt to impose into this some form of order. In other words, there's not enough time to put together a man or a world of this design and complexity in the time that we know or we guess and we believe that the universe has been around. There's just not enough time to do it. So what has happened now, and it's a very sneaky thing, is into this equation has been thrown an extra little thought. Maybe somebody has helped man, but we can't say God because that's naughty. You're not allowed to use God, it's a bad word today, especially in the West. We're not allowed to say that. So we could say there are some who believe that life did not start here but in another galaxy. So you get all of the idea that maybe we are the product of genetic engineering from another civilization. The reason why there's not been enough time is that people have designed it. I mean, space beings, we may have run into them before and called them angels of God, but they're really not God. Now that's cheating a bit. It's saying that there's design, but we can't call that design really God because we're not allowed to use the word God. We'll call them space men instead. And you've got E.T., a little gardener that's been around for millions of years, who knows how long he's been there, supposing him to be a gardener. We will look to some other intelligence higher than man that maybe has designed us and put us here. And men like Carl Sagan, not only astronomers but good writers and write science fiction stories contact the first contact and have made serious research to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to contact these others up there who put us here. To show you the alternative, the best way I can explain this is to tell you about a Swedish rock opera in the 60s. This Swedish rock opera, there was a group of young people, they were all hip kids in those days, that stole the first faster than light spaceship like Jefferson Airplane said they would do. And they became Jefferson Starship that was hoping to graduate more quickly. Jefferson Airplane said that we are going to hijack the first faster than light ship. We're going to populate it with our kind of people, you know, lovely people who sing and dance and don't make war no more. And we will go to another star system, Alpha Centauri, the closest one, four light years, you can make it. If you travel the speed of light, it will only take you four years to get there, sub-light, you know, maybe your children will get there. But that was the idea, we'll go to this other world, we'll start again and everything will be beautiful in its own time, we'll start our own wonderful heaven in another world. Well this Swedish rock opera opens with a group of young people who have done just that, they've got this faster than light ship, they're docked in Earth's orbit, they're getting ready to make the hyperspace jump or whatever, it's quite a complex procedure, the captain's figuring it all out. They're singing, it's all in Swedish, it's a rock opera, they're singing, swinging. And from the inside of the ship there are speakers along the wall and out of those speakers are coming music from Earth, and the music from Earth is The Pits. It sounds like John Cage, I read about John Cage in Schaeffer's books, so I thought I'd go and listen to John Cage, so I got a record from the library, it was a $17 record, you know, and I listened to it, here's what it sounded like. That was it, 17 bucks worth. Who was John Cage? Well he was a musician who tried to write music like this. Time and chance and matter gave us all this order and beauty and complexity, then maybe random stuff, so he got I Ching sticks and threw them down and wherever they fell he put notes and, you know, shook dice for a while but there weren't enough notes there and he just ran them, you know, he tried to write whole symphonies by random means. And he even got two robot unprogrammed conductors isolated acoustically from each other and two bands, orchestras, he would have used robot orchestras too if he could afford it, but these orchestras would have watched, looking with his random score, and an unprogrammed robot up there with a baton, and they'd have to watch the baton and play these random notes whenever the thing would do it, sometimes it'd just stay there for 10 minutes, it wasn't programmed, they'd just stay there waiting and the audience had to listen to this, I mean this is 20 bucks a ticket, and someone went, ah, and walked out and he would say, no, no, this is all part of the symphony, well here's a guy who's seriously taking this and trying to play it, another man was Jackson Pollock, American painter, Jackson Pollock got buckets of paint and just stood up on ladders and threw it down and kept looking to see if he had any order and beauty, well it just looked like a mess of paint in the end and his best works were awful and he couldn't make it work so he shot himself, got a gun in his head and blew himself away. See that's a serious attempt to try and live out that philosophy in the arts and all it did in Shafer's words is give a devilish din, it was just a, well that's the kind of music coming out in this spaceship, it's all, that's why they're leaving, that's why they're going to another star system, well they're all singing and it's kind of an age of Aquarius, they're all singing there and then suddenly in the middle of this thing there's a brilliant blue white flash outside the porthole and seconds later the whole ship is rocked and shaken, looks like it's actually going to blow apart and they're grabbing each other and clutching each other in the hull and then rapidly outside the porthole it fades from blue white down to white yellow, orange red and then fades away and sort of scant seconds after that flash the sound comes over the speaker and then nothing, now what has happened? Some idiot has pushed the button, boom, no earth anymore, see, everybody stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb and it's gone, now, this is in modern play, there's no God, there's no heaven, there's no hell, there's no life after death, all you are is time and chance and matter, all that is left of mankind is what is in that ship, there's nothing else left, there's nothing outside the universe, there's no other human beings, just that, now imagine you were in the ship, you have a look around because this is the last there is of the human race, we got to make it, nothing else out there, like Princess Leia when her home planet was blown up, there goes my mother, my father, my stereo system, everything, badoom, it's gone, nothing left at all, so they, you know, that's a great shock, you have a look around, think if this was all it was, we got to find another star system and start again because that's the last hope, we are the last hope of the human race. Now, how would you feel? Well, that's the consciousness that kids felt in the early 60s, they felt it right down here and all the songs of it came out, well, they keep singing, not quite so bravely and then the captain comes back from the front of the ship and he is not singing and he is not smiling and this is what he says, the blast has destroyed our guidance system, we are out of control and we are heading into the sun, this is the end of the human race and then the curtain comes down and you go home, that's the end of the play, now how do you feel? Well, that's how kids felt in the 60s, you can understand then the pain of the music that came out of it, when Barry McGuire sang, don't you understand what I'm trying to say, can't you feel the fears I'm feeling today, if the button is pushed, there is no running away, there will be no one to save with the world in the grave, take a look around you boy, I'm bound to scare you boy, if you tell me over and over again my friend, you don't believe on the eve of destruction and that complete breakdown, you don't know how to talk to anybody anymore, hello darkness, my old friend, I come to talk with you again, see that thing? Another Simon Garfunkel song, I thought it was so summed up, the gut feeling of that time was when there are two kids on a bus and his girlfriend finally falls asleep and he's just going along those endless freeways in the US, you know, just late at night and the phrase goes, Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping, I'm emptying and aching and counting the cars in the New Jersey turnpike, they've all come to look for America. See that loss? You pull, you replace in the bottom of your heart, these are the glasses you put on and you interpret your world from it, it suddenly becomes a very, very scary, lonely, destiny-less world, it's not going anyplace, it's not going anywhere and something has to fill that gap. So one whole division of thinking, the materialists actually here, with that equation then, they broke up into different fields. Now some of them, we could just call it this, that is what a huge chunk of people like, night ago I went out to get some Kentucky Fried, I was accosted by a couple of bisexual guys that asked if I'd like to have sex with them, drunk as skunks, totally immoral people, see, their whole life is just eating, drinking, pleasure, nothing else. I said to them, I don't think you're an animal, I don't think, guys swore 40 different ways, I said there's a lot more to life than eating and drinking and sex. He swore at me up and down 20 different, that's his life, that's the whole thing. Since that was all he had to life, I bought him a box of chicken. Do you see, huge chunks of the world that we live in, that's it, that's the whole of life, there's nothing more to it. I talked to a man last year in New Zealand, we were out on the beach, um, met this guy, he had a little boy, probably 8 or 9, playing in the surf, and he'd just come out, the guy's a very successful interior decorator, you know, he's made hundreds of thousands of dollars with his stuff, and I was just talking to the guy and the subject came round to life after death, and he had a Christian guy who'd been witnessing to him at work, and he said, well, you know, guy's been talking to me about God and stuff, but he said, I don't believe that, he said, I believe that when you die, you put you in a hole in the ground, and that's it, it's all over, it's all finished, and, uh, you know, there's nothing more, that's it, you eat, drink and be merry now, because that's all you got. And I looked at his son out there, and I said, uh, and your son, what about him? He said, oh, well, that's, that's eternal life, see, in other words, my life's gonna go on in his. And I said, are you willing to gamble, not only your life, but the life of your son, that what you think is right, and the one who split history in half is wrong? Jesus said there was a life after death, and you're gonna have to stand before him and be judged for the way you live now. Are you ready to gamble, not only your life, but the life of your child, to point it on a man who wants to die, and after death, the judgment? What shall profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Now, we have a world where that has become the dominant philosophy. And, uh, the other one, which we'll look at later, not this shot, is, uh, the various forms of Marxism and Maoism, which takes this materialist and attempts to change the world with it, give purpose and vision. This one here, my favorite story is Barry McGuire with the cat and the bird. We were in this, uh, place in northern California. It was sort of, uh, doors that opened to the outside here, and the cat was up here asleep, and down here was the cat's food bowl. It had cat food in it, and the doors were open, and in through these open doors came a bird, and it was checking around for cats. See, birds aren't designed to look up, and, uh, couldn't see anything. So it came and it started eating this cat food out of, well, this cat woke up, and, you know, saw this bird ripping off its, its food, and then, and the last thing that bird saw was its worst nightmare, coming through a flying cat. Birds, cat jumped on the bird, biting feathers all over the place, and that was the end of the bird. And Barry came in, and he looked at the bird, and the cat, and the food, and he said, it's true, it's true. I said, what's true? He said, you become what you eat. He said, the bird was eating cat food, and became cat food. I said, oh, Barry, that's stupid. Anyway, what is the problem with hedonism, this whole idea of, uh, call it the Hefner philosophy? Well, how high must the high fly be to bring satisfaction? There's no end to this thing. Can it? Really satisfying. You buy the latest, and when you got the latest, it's not the latest anymore. The thing that just came out is the latest. So it just keeps escalating. It gets worse and worse. We haven't got time. We've got to quit now, but, um, we'll pick up the second lot of materialist mindsets. Just, I'll just say this, that I have met in travels over the last 20 odd years of ministering, people from the very top and the very bottom who are both materialists. Guys who have absolutely nothing, whose whole focus is food, sex, drink, and people right at the top, and I've come to a conclusion that the only people who really believe this thing satisfies is people going up or people going down. The people on the top and the bottom know it is not true. Some of the people right at the top are the most miserable people in the whole world. A classic example would be, um, Howard Hughes. Could buy half the world, and the guy lived a life worse than most drug addicts I've ever seen. His fingers grew out like eagle claws. He was paranoid. He had to drink bottled water from Poland because he thought people would try and poison him, and just crazy, crazy life. I, if you win the rat race, you only become chief rat. Anyway, let's quit.