A Funeral For God

Now, tonight I’m going to be speaking on a topic you have probably never heard a sermon about before. It is in entitled “A Funeral for God.” This is part of a series of messages on ”The Eclipse Of God” and all of the implications of the darkness that results. Right now what I would like to do is to refer to Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who at the end of the 1800s I should say, proclaimed the death of God. What he said is “God is dead,” and he wrote in vivid terms about the demise of God.

“Do we not hear the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine purification for even God’s petrify? God is dead. God remains dead and we have killed him. How shall we console ourselves the most murderers of all murderers? Who will wipe the blood from our hands?” Wow. Why did Nietzsche proclaim the death of God at the end of the 1800s? And who were these grave diggers that he refers to? Now he doesn’t exactly tell us, but I think we pretty well know who those grave diggers were. What I’m going to do tonight is tell you about three grave diggers and the implications. Then we’re going to turn to the scriptures and find out what God thinks of all of this. That’s the agenda. The first person I’d like to introduce you to is one you’ve heard a great deal about and possibly you may know a great deal about him and that is Karl Marx.

Marx grew up in the Rhineland of Germany. He was Jewish, his parents were Jewish. His father apparently converted to Lutheranism for various reasons of convenience. Marx, as you know, looked about and saw that the proletariat were being exploited by the bourgeoisie as you have the industrial revolution. He decided if private property were taken away from everyone and if the state owned everything, finally there could be the end of oppression and there would be equality throughout the country.

Now, in order to do that, he believed that God had to be destroyed. That is to say belief in God had to be destroyed. Why? Because after all, the family also had to be destroyed because men oppressed their wives, women oppressed their children, and parents oppressed their children and they took them to church and God was the ultimate oppressor. So, Marx taught that God did not create man, man created God, and it was a fantasy that had to be destroyed and the state had to take the place of God. In fact, in one quote he said, it is the state that is going to give us this day our daily bread.

So, what he did is he of course wrote the communist manifesto and other documents in which he showed or believed he would show that if we could get rid of oppression, human nature is good. Human nature doesn’t do anything evil. It only does evil because of oppressors. They are the ones who cause people to commit crimes, take away the oppression and all criminality will end. As a matter of fact, when the state owns everything according to Marx, at that point you won’t even need laws. There will be no need for the police. Forget defunding them. They don’t have to exist.

Marx had his particular philosophy that was believed, and of course the implications are absolutely huge. Marx attacked the rulership of God and all too briefly, I’ve simply introduced you to him, and now we’re going to go to another grave digger.

This grave digger actually attacks God as creator, and that of course is Darwin. Darwin also lived in the 1800s and he concluded that the life originated— He talked about a warm pond somewhere, some place life originated and then it developed. The most important thing we can learn about Darwin, I think, is when he proclaimed the baboon is our grandfather. He said, the reason we sometimes do evil is it is what is left over of the evolutionary cycle. That is the baboon, of course, still has a sinful nature or a nature of some sort that is bad at times and we still have inherited that. But the baboon is our grandfather as the monkey sit in the zoo. Am I my keeper’s brother? Am I going too fast for some of you?

Now, folks, if evolution is correct, you have a certain number of implications. One of those implications is eugenics. Eugenics, why? Because the whole idea is out of this came the survival of the fittest. Why not help nature along and help those who are the best and those who are going to survive and do away with those that are inferior? As a matter of fact, he talked about some tribes having a doubtful species.

Hitler picked that up. Now there are those who say, well, Hitler could not have been influenced by Darwin because the origin of species and other books were not translated into German. But listen, Hitler had his cronies who were reading English, and if you read the fourth chapter of Mein Kampf, you almost think as if you’re reading Darwin. Get rid of the inferior races, why not help the superior races to get on their good journey? So, you have eugenics, but you have something else. If Darwinism is correct, if the baboon is our grandfather, we have absolutely no argument against abortion. We have no argument against infanticide. There’s no argument against euthanasia.

I mean out on the farm— I was born on a farm out in Saskatchewan, Canada where it was so flat you could stand on a can of shoe polish and look halfway into next week. If a piglet was born deformed, we would kill the piglet mercifully. Why don’t we do that with kids? There are those who say we should. You see what the Bible teaches is something so radical. It says we are different from animals, not just in degree, but actually in kind because we are born with the image of God and that makes us distinct from the animals. But if your students are being told in university that we just came up through the animal world, why not all of the things that we hear about in the news?

We must understand that ideas have implications and whether we like it or not, philosophers have oftentimes directed the direction of entire continents, as in the case of Karl Marx. It also has influenced to some extent the environmental movement. There was an article in the New York Times some time ago about what to do about rats in New York City. They were saying, of course they have to be killed because they’re carrying disease, but at the same time, we have to do it very humanely, which I totally agree with. We should never intentionally inflict unnecessary pain on animals. But one of the things is that rats are very intelligent. I guess the idea is they are our cousins somewhere down the line. So the end of the article said, the real problem is not the rats. The real problem is the human beings. It’s us. That’s the problem. After all, they are, as I mentioned, our distant cousins, so let’s take care of them as well as we can.

So that’s where we are going. As a matter of fact, I’m so glad that my wife and I are going to be in Chicago this weekend because we’ve been invited to an animal rights barbecue. [laughter] You folks are easy to preach to.

You have Darwin who attacks God as creator. Marx, God as ruler. Darwin, God as creator. Darwin still believed in God, but he wrote against Christianity. But obviously he set in motion a whole field of study that resulted in evolution as it is taught today.

Then there’s a third man, and this third man is one that Nietzsche probably didn’t know much about because he wrote at the end of the century as Nietzsche was almost ready to die. Nietzsche died by the way, in the year 1900, and that is Freud. Freud believed in the pleasure principle and sexuality was the heart of human beings, and the worst thing that you could do with anyone is to restrict his sexual pleasure. He taught that, and that of course became something that has fed into our own society and has streamed all the way down to us in various ways that are very, very destructive. Freud also said that children can be sexual.

Aas a result of that, you have Kinsey who lived in the 1940s who did a tremendous amount of harm. I cannot even tell you publicly what Kinsey did to children, how he sexualized even babies. My dear friends, I want to tell you this, that as we begin to sink as a nation without any reference to God, the more evil will come. and there will be no stopping the evil. Because Dostoyevsky was right when he said, “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permissible.”

I’d like to show that maybe Wednesday, if we have time. If God doesn’t exist, everything is permissible. When it comes to the sexualization of children, drag queens, and everything that is happening. What we must do is really the end of a decent society as we know it. In the Old Testament, when they began to sacrifice their children to Molech and to other gods, that was really the final judgment. After that, they were carried off into captivity.

Yet today we find parents and others who were sacrificing their children on the altar of sexuality. You have transgenderism, which also is a part of the evolutionary process. After all, if God didn’t create me and I created myself, then why can’t I be a boy in the morning and a girl in the evening or tomorrow or whatever? All of this confusion results because we have forgotten God. I want to say this about Ezekiel 16. We’re not going to take time to turn to it, but in the Ezekiel 16, God says this to Israel, “You have taken the children which you have born to me, and you have offered them to Molech.” My dear brothers and sisters, even the children of pagans belong to God. God says, those are my children and you are harming my children.

That means even I believe deeply that the children of pagans, if they die, they go to heaven because they are God’s children. At some point of course, they become responsible for themselves, and we don’t know exactly when that point is. It doesn’t have so much to do with age as it does disposition because there are those who may be born with a mental disorder. Therefore, they might be treated as children by God until they die, and they die as children. But the point to be made is that when God does not exist, that’s what happens to a society.

Now, I want to review very briefly. Marx attacked God as ruler. Darwin attacked God as creator. Freud attacked God as law giver. To Freud the worst thing was that God was instituting laws through the scripture, which of course he didn’t believe that the scriptures came from God, but the point is that Christianity was stifling people’s joy and happiness. The real secret to happiness is to take away all these restraints and let people be who they really are.

That by the way, was the teaching of Russo. If you go to Switzerland and you’re in Geneva, there's a statue there to Russo. Russo believed people were good if only they could break away from all the restraints and they could just go back to nature. So, he had five children, and he allowed an orphanage to take care of them because he had to go back to nature and to find himself in nature. Man, without God.

Which leads me now to Nietzsche, he believed it was his responsibility to declare to the world that finally God was dead. Nietzsche, of course, was brought up Lutheran, as you may know, and he wrote in vivid terms about the death of God and the fact that God had to be buried, but he wanted to give God a respectful burial. The best way to understand Nietzsche is to think of a teenager waking up in the middle of the night being told his parents were dead.

From now on, man has to live life on his own without any transcendent meaning. Whatever meaning he has, he has to glean from himself. So, we are staring into the abyss and when we stare into the abyss, the abyss looks back at us. Now, Nietzsche was especially influenced by Darwin because you see nature meant a great deal to Nietzsche. There’s a philosopher that I was reading who really helps us to understand Nietzsche this way. Just imagine the importance of nature. Let’s take for example some sheep and some wolves. What is best to sheep? Well, sheep, they enjoy being in the pasture and being next to people, next to animals like they are and just lazily enjoying life. The sunshine, the grass, and the water. That’s what’s best to sheep, what’s best to wolves? What’s best to a wolf is to grab that sheep, rip it apart, and gobble it down. Now, how would you like to have— You say, well, what we need is we need to bring peace to the animal world. So, let’s have a conference and let’s invite the sheep and let’s invite the wolves, and maybe we can agree on some common ground. Good luck with that.

Nietzsche blistered Christianity. He cursed Christianity because what he said is what Christianity is doing is it’s trying to get wolves to act like sheep. The meek shall inherit the earth. That’s insulting. When have the meek ever inherited the earth? Forgive one another in weakness. Oh, humility is so important. Where’s that going to get you? In a world in which there are wolves. Isn’t it interesting that Hitler kept a copy of Nietzsche next to his bed and then gave a copy to Mussolini. Hitler said, on one occasion, “Why cannot we be as cruel as nature?” In the forest, let us be the wolves. We certainly don’t want to be the sheep, and there is no wolf whose conscience ever bothered him because he ripped a little lamb apart and ate it.

Nietzsche took his SS troops through a regimen, I should say Hitler and his cronies in such a way that their consciences would be deadened. He did that in various ways so that they could be as cruel as nature. You say, “Pastor Lutzer, where was the church in all this?” Thank you so much for asking that question. The church had already been hollowed out from the standpoint of doctrine and in other ways because of another German, Friedrich Schleiermacher.

German is the only language in which you can say, “I love you” and it sounds like a threat. Ich liebe dich, really? Do you want to settle that out in the hall? Schleiermacher lived in the 1700s, he died I think in 1834. He was the father of modern liberalism. He basically said is we can’t believe all the miracles, all the miraculous stories of scripture. What we have to do is to find the real kernel that is most important, and the most important statement that comes to us from Schleiermacher is that “Religion is a feeling of dependence.” What you have to do is you have to feel dependent.

In which case one wag said, my dog is very religious. Isn’t it true that dogs have a sense of dependence? You know cats, I shouldn’t throw this in because we used to have cats and they are socialists. I mean, they have such a sense of entitlement. I mean, socialism ends up being a paradise for parasites and cats absolutely fit that paradigm. I’m sorry, don’t come up to me later and say that you love cats. We love them too. My wife loves them. Our kids love them. I’m just an observer of nature.

You know when the church of Jesus Christ exists in the midst of a society it can be attacked from without. Of course that’s what happened when you think of Marx and Darwin and others. But the most serious attacks come from within. Schleiermacher was brought up in a pietistic home. He was known as a scholar of Christianity, and from within, he and others destroyed all faith in the scriptures as a revelation from God. It had value of course, and all that it taught us really was a feeling of dependence. Think about how this goes all throughout history. Now today you have those who say, “I’m spiritual, but I don’t believe any doctrines. I believe in spirituality.” Which really means your own consciousness becomes God. So that’s where society is.

But Nietzsche finally decided reluctantly it was time for him to give God a decent burial. So, in his book, The Mad Man, he describes the Mad Man as entering into various churches throughout Europe and singing the Requiem for God. Thus he calls out, “What are these churches now, if not the tombs and the sepulchers of God?” Go throughout Europe today and the cathedrals are libraries and restaurants. I told you this morning their nightclubs such as in Bedford, England.

Europe today does not have a culture war. In America, we have a culture war. But in Europe the culture war is over, secularism has taken over. So Europeans are by and large, totally in the secular kind of belief. Now, there are individual pastors who if they preach the Word, they of course sometimes are persecuted, or they may even go to prison. Especially if they speak about matters of sexuality from a biblical point of view, but Europe has been overcome by secularism.

How did the death of God work out? Nietzsche dies in the year 1900. You have Marxism taking over Russia. You have Marxism taking over China with a death of millions of people. Rebecca and I were in Albania in April and God willing, we’re going to be going back to Albania next year if He wills it. We saw there what Albania was like under communism. Tt was awful. They have this museum to the communist regime. Did you know even in the seventies and eighties they had tape recorders in prisons to hear what the prisoners were saying. If you rejoiced when one of their leaders died, your sentence would be extended. The control was incredible. Leftism has always taken away the freedom of people and it’s happening here in America today. Pretty soon we’re going to find ourselves in a digital prison because of all of the technology there is.

You have communism, you of course have nazim. That’s what happens when God does not exist, and Nietzsche gave him a decent burial. At least he said, these tombs are monuments to the time when God used to exist. Now, what does God think of all this? Well, I want you to take your Bibles and we’re going to turn to Psalm 2.

First of all, obviously God attends his own funeral. You can’t keep God away. God is there. God sees what is happening and God remains in control. Psalm 2 is very easy to expound from one standpoint, it has four different sections. First of all, you have the voice of the nations. We’ll read the first three verses, “Why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, (Notice that they are working together) against the Lord and against his Anointed saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast their cords from us.’” (Psalm 2:1–3)

Let’s get together and do away with God. Let’s get organized. Let’s do it together. The voice of the nations is a voice of rebellion, but let’s look at the next three verses. Now you have the voice of God. The Lord says, “He who sits in the heavens (this is verse four.) laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, ‘As for me, I’ve set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’” (Psalm 2:4–6)

God says, “I’m laughing.” Elsewhere in the Psalms it says God scoffs at the wicked. So, you are taking me on, and you have a funeral for me and you don’t recognize that I continue to be God. Let’s remember, and I’m speaking actually on the eclipse of God, when there is an eclipse, it doesn’t affect the sun. It affects the earth because the moon comes between the sun. and the earth. The moon of secularism seems to obscure the sun, but the sun is shining just as brightly as ever and God is God just as much as ever.

There’s nothing anyone can do and why is it that the moon looks approximately the same size as the sun when we know that the sun is millions of times bigger? It’s because the moon is 400 times closer to the earth than the sun is, and it’s diameter is 400 times shorter than that of the sun, so it appears to be big. In America, the moon of secularism seems to be so strong. We’re in trouble politically, we’re in trouble morally, our educational system seems to be coming apart. You know all those things, but God is still God.

I think it was Spurgeon who says, “Hell cannot erase a single line of God’s promises. Skeptics cannot cut a single twig from God’s purposes, and atheists cannot cut a single flower from the garden of God’s decree.” I thought maybe I’d hear an amen, but it might be illegal here in Michigan. I don’t know. The point is that God says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it under control.” In the midst of all of the craziness that is going on in the world, and there’s plenty of craziness, what we always need is a fresh vision of God. When we have a fresh vision of God, we begin to worship God.

Now we have in the next part of the Psalm— First of all, you have the voice of the nation’s rebellion, the voice of God, He laughs. The voice of the Son, that is the son of God, and His is a voice of justice. “I will tell of the decree: The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I shall make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’” (Psalm 2:7–9) Wow.

What God is saying here is “I have a plan too. You guys have a plan to do away with me, but I have a plan. I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.” I believe this refers to the Lordship of Jesus Christ still to come. He is Lord of course, but his rulership over the earth. You remember the song that goes, “Jesus shall reign where air, the sun, it’s successive journey, run his kingdom from shore to shore?” God is saying there is a future coming in which all of the injustices and all that is done against me is going to be taken care of. That will be under the lordship of my Savior, my Lord Jesus Christ, rather who is the Savior and the one who is God in the flesh.

All of us know that a day is coming, when Jesus is going to return. Many of us believe He’s going to be setting up a kingdom even here on earth though everything is going to be changed. God says, “I have it under control and justice is coming.” We’re going to talk about justice issues tomorrow.

Now we must remember that there are then also, as I mentioned, there are four different aspects in this Psalm. The voice of the Son is one of justice. Now we come to the voice of the Holy Spirit, the voice of the Holy Spirit in verse 10. “Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath as quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.” (Psalm 2:10–12)

How do we summarize all this and leave with some transforming lessons? First of all, things are not what they appear to be. It may appear as if secularism— It may even appear if the devil is winning, but he isn’t. It may appear that way, but that is a superficial way to view reality because God is the one who is allowing this and in the end, God wins. You and I must recognize that to be the case.

Even in the case— I remember being in Turkey, Rebecca and I visited the seven churches of Revelation. There are no churches, there are only mosques. A very devout Muslim guide said to me, “Islam’s ability to crush the church is proof of its superiority as a religion.” All throughout the Middle East, at one time, the Middle East was largely Christian. Even Syria and some of those countries at least nominally Christian and Islam crushed all that. So, he said Islam's ability to crush the church, he didn’t use the word “crush,” he was more sensitive than that, but his ability to transform the church or to obliterate the church is proof of its superiority. This troubled me deeply because it made Jesus look weak. We were on a cruise. This was about 12 years ago. I went back to the ship, and I said, “Lord, give me wisdom as to what these non-existent churches in these cities have to say to the American church.”

That actually became the basis of a book I wrote in title about Islam and namely, The Cross In The Shadow Of The Crescent. What lessons are there to be learned? Well, those of us who take the book of Revelation a little more literally than some of you might, and I’m not here to negotiate those things, but isn’t it interesting? In chapter 13 of the book of Revelation, you find antichrist is ruling and the Bible says, “All who dwell upon the face of the earth worship him, except those whose names were written in the lambs book of life from before the foundation of the world.” They don’t, but everybody else does. Those who don’t, they’re killed with a sword.

Now, if you take the point of view that the person with the most power and the most authority is going to win, my goodness, throw in your lot with antichrist because he’s the one the entire world worships him. You have the political, you have the religious, and you have the economic part of the world all coming together in one person. That’s chapter 13. But then when you get to chapter 15, you see this reversal of fortune. “I saw as at where a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them who had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, [and over his mark,] and over his number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God. And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints.” (Revelation 15:2–3)

Chapter 13, antichrist is winning. Chapter 15, those whom he kills arrive in heaven victorious. A couple of chapters later, antichrist, the false prophet thrown into the lake of fire. So don't go by what you see but recognize that things are not what they appear to be. Then I want to leave you tonight with the words of the Psalm that we have just read. “Kiss the Son.” That means do homage to the Son.

The best thing you can do if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior. If you’ve never received His grace and His mercy and you’ve never worshiped him, what you must do is to worship the Son.

I’m going to throw this in because I have a few extra minutes, but sometimes there are people who come to your door and they knock on the door and they want to talk with you, and they have literature that says “The Watchtower Society.” You often wonder, how do I deal with this? Because I don’t have a whole Saturday morning, but I want to leave a witness. I’ve done this a number of times. What you do is you ask these dear people, and they are dear people. You ask them and you say, “Do you worship Jesus?” They say, “No, we don’t worship Jesus, but we do honor him, but we don’t worship him.” Then I say, “Did you know that in heaven they worship Jesus?” “No, we honor him, but where does it say that you worship Jesus?” I’ve actually had them hand me their Bible in which I take great delight.

Then I turn to Revelation 5, where it says “There’s one sitting on the throne and the Lamb, and they sing together the praises of God. Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty, just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints, and they are giving glory to Jesus.” Then I kneel, and I say, “Now I’m kneeling to worship Jesus. Why don’t you worship Jesus with me? You kneel with me and let’s get ready for heaven by worshiping Jesus together.” At that point, they decide this might not be the best house to stop in. Then I just pray for them and pour out my heart that God might show them the light of the glory of the fact that Jesus is God of very God. It’s a witness, it’s a loving witness, but it helps people to see in heaven, not only is the Son magnified, but all people, every tongue and people and nation worship the Lamb.

In the movie, The Last Emperor, the king wants to illustrate what it’s like to be a king. He says, “I can do something wrong and my servant gets blamed for it.” So, he takes a vase off the shelf, and he throws it to the ground and it breaks into a thousand pieces and a servant gets whipped. I want you to think of how different Christianity is. Christianity says that we are the servants who take vase, and we throw them down. That’s why you have 2 million people in prisons. We are the ones who mess up our lives. We are the ones who commit crimes, and we do evil. And lo and behold, it is our King who gets whipped for us because when Jesus died on the cross, His death was a sacrifice for us. He took our guilt; He took our punishment. If we trust Him and savingly believe we belong to God forever. This Jesus is someday going to come as our judge, but for now, He is a savior and He’s biding His time. God is in control. God is on the throne, and He has a plan, and no human being can thwart it. [crowd says “Amen”] Finally, I got an amen. Praise God.

Let’s pray. Our Father, we ask you shall take these thoughts and help us to see even though there are those who want to speak against you, to cast off all restraints, that ultimately, you’re God. Help us to believe you. To trust you. In the world that has lost its way to remember that we belong to you forever. And in the end, we rejoice that you are the one who wins. For that, we thank you in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen. Thank you.