Gabe Fluhrer

Listen to what he says in his biography, his autobiography, pardon me.

Quote, "'Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure.

And even as a schoolboy, I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays.'"

I've also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable and music very great delight.

But now for many years, I cannot endure to read a line of poetry.

I've tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding out general laws out of large collections of facts, close quote.

My friends, a good indicator that a worldview has gone astray is when something is intrinsically beautiful, as the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven, for example, makes you reach for Pepto instead of rejoicing in the Lord.

That's a good indicator that something's wrong.

But notice that just like Jean-Paul Sartre in the middle of the 20th century.

So here we have with Darwin in the middle of the 19th century saying, it's all nauseating to me.

And so that nihilism pervades everything, and it pervades the churches.

That's where we see so many of the churches emptying today.

When the baby boomer generation started building churches, what did they have in their pulpits but the pleasant, glad-handing unbelief of educated ministers who were completely apostate when it came to understanding and believing the truth of the resurrection?

And that began to be believed consistently, and churches subsequently emptied.

Why?

Because everybody said, there's no way this can be true.

But you see, here's what the Scriptures offer us as an alternative to that moderate nihilism.

A worldview that makes our world understandable, that can answer the questions like, why is there so much evil and suffering?

Why do we hurt so badly?