Should we be skeptical of the wisdom of this world?

There is a trope out there that Bible-believing Christians stand side by side with tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists. Supposedly Q-Anon has become the oracle of choice for deplorables like us. We are scoffed at, mocked, assumed to be card-carrying members of the Flat Earth society. That trope exists because the world, that system of ideology and institutions that is hostile to Jesus Himself, is dreadfully wrong on the nature of humanity and the wisdom of God’s design of the world.

Because we Christians still carry with us the dying embers of the enlightenment we too, contra God’s Word, see unbelievers as neutral pursuers of the truth. We’re willing, if we tend toward the fundamentalist side of the evangelical spectrum, to concede that the world is often wrong. They err in their thinking when they affirm that the unborn are just blobs of cells. They made a wrong turn in the moral reasoning that leads them to embrace socialist ideologies. They simply misinterpreted the muddy evidence on the whole creation/evolution issue. The trouble is, we are not only wrong on how often and how badly they are wrong but we are wrong on why they are wrong.

The reigning folly of the world is what it is not because they are more stupid than we are but because they are just as wicked as we once were. You don’t end up not only affirming but enforcing “Men can get pregnant” by forgetting to carry the one in a math problem. You get there by embracing high handed rebellion against the Maker of men and women, the One whose image we all bear. You don’t end up elevated to the highest court in the land when you, with the whole world watching, affirm that you don’t know what a woman is unless the whole world is in on the lie.

Romans 1 teaches us that those still in their sins reach the conclusions they reach because God has judged their rebellion by giving them over to depraved minds. To put it another way, we’re skeptical not because we are especially susceptible to conspiracy theories but because the God who made all things, who knows all things, who not only can only speak the truth but speaks truth into existence, tells us not to listen to them. We’re skeptical because we’re supposed to be. The believer is the one called to state the obvious, that the emperor’s ensemble is nothing more than his birthday suit.

Sadly, our skepticism too often falls short. The more we reject the folly of the world, the more the world rejects us, calling us fools. We want to treat their thinking errors as just that, mere miscalculations. The truth is their lies lead to babies being murdered, and children being butchered because of sexual confusion. They are not just wrong, but evil. They are not just lovers of pleasure but lovers of death (Proverbs 8:36). Make no mistake. We are called to love our enemies. We are called, however, to love them enough to let them see us as their enemies, simply for telling them the truth.