Bulletin
"Common Sense Ain't Common!"
That was Will Rogers’ down-home take on an observation by Voltaire. Well, Voltaire died in 1778 and Will Rogers died in 1935 and it appears things haven’t improved much. If you’re like me, you often turn off the TV, shake your head and think, “Our society has lost its collective mind!”
God seemed to share our frustration when He pronounced judgment on the Edomites in Jeremiah 49. In verse 7 He asked, “Is there no longer any wisdom in Teman? Has good counsel been lost to the prudent? Has their wisdom decayed?” The people of Edom had made a lot of bad choices for generations and the patience of God had finally run out.
But are we really talking about common sense here? When we see someone behave in a way that appears illogical to us, we have to keep in mind that their decisions may seem perfectly logical to them because they are acting on a different set of rules than we are. That’s the problem with the concept of common sense – there is some unavoidable degree of subjectivity to it. That’s why René Descartes said, “Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.”
What standards are we using? - The reason many of us get the feeling daily that American culture has “gone off the deep end” is because secular progressives are, to a large extent, shaping the narrative. Whenever one segment of society is striving to allow God to define the rules and others are proudly ignoring His direction, the two camps will, unavoidably, drift worlds apart in a short amount of time.
Paul described what inevitably happens when folks choose not “to acknowledge God any longer” in Romans 1:18-32. Speaking of the pagans of his day, he said that, “Professing to be wise, they became fools.” Ignoring the irrefutable evidence of the Creator’s power, they chose to worship things other than Him. As a result, “God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe once said, “Common sense is seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be.” Now that’s a definition I can live with, but it is critical that we first see things as they truly are. If you can convince yourself that the standards of behavior are really up to us to determine absent any input from God, you may be able to justify asking high school girls to shower with men who happen to “identify as women”. If you can accept the unproven assumption that we are all merely animals who have evolved through an impossible series of accidental mutations, it will be easy for you to be absolutely incensed about Cecil the lion being shot by a hunter, but have no concern about the 50 million babies who have been killed through abortion over the past 40 years. You might even support the team of lawyers working to gain legal “personhood” for all primates!
If these examples strike me as total lapses in common sense, it is not because I am hanging onto some sort of 1950’s value system. It is because the God of heaven has defined right thinking in the inspired scriptures and therein lies moral stability. When people throw God out of the discussion, they “professing to be wise, become fools.” Literally anything goes and there is no end to the depths of depravity to which a group of people will sink based on their collective commitment to the rejection of objective standards.
Wisdom from Above - James 3 offers a contrast between worldly wisdom and a wisdom that has come to us from above. Paul talked about the humility necessary to accept the wisdom that God has to offer (1 Cor. 3:18-20). He said, “Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, ‘He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness’; and again, ‘The Lord knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are useless.’” It takes a humble person to sincerely acknow-ledge that “a man’s way is not in himself, nor is it in a man who walks to direct his steps” (Jer. 10:23).
I will continue to marvel at the prevalent lack of common sense as I turn off the nightly news, but I will find a little comfort in the fact that Will Rogers and Voltaire and the apostle Paul all felt the same frustration. Of course the task at hand is to continue to work to convince each that I encounter that what I or they or any other person thinks is of no consequence. All that matters is what God says. We must all be less concerned about common sense and search for Divine sense.
- Common_Sense.docx (14.93 kB)
