By Dr. Greg Bahnsen in The Seventh Trumpet, Vol. V, No. 4 (Sep./Oct. 1990)
Don’t let anyone fool you. Ideas are not irrelevant. The most basic way that people think – the way they see themselves and the world around them – makes a walloping difference to their world and their behavior in it.
For instance, plenty of people think of this as a “chance” world. Things happen randomly, with no necessity or sufficient reason, and certainly with no transcendent direction by a sovereign God. Even the regularities of nature “just happen” to be the way they are and could be different – perhaps will change in the future. Even our alleged evolutionary past is thought to be fortuitous, not guided by any purpose or aim. There is no inner connection that links all things in the world, links all events, and accounts for a causal order in our experience.
Christians know that this outlook is mistaken. Their hearts have been changed by the power of God’s grace, and their eyes have been enlightened to the truth of God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures. So they have come to believe what the bible says about God’s sovereignty and His providential control of everything in the world and everything that transpires there…