Let’s get something straight. God gave us minds and expects us to use them. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37)
Some famous atheists have said that God is anti-intelligence because He forbade Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge. But even Sunday School kids know it was “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2:9)
That tree was there to affirm God’s right to be the Moral Arbiter of the Universe. He tells us what’s right and wrong. Without an absolute standard, our choices can elicit nothing more than the schoolyard taunt, “Says who?”
So yes, God wants us to love Him with all our minds, but not to use them as weapons against Him, undermining the life-changing truths He reveals.
The cosmic conflict of the ages isn’t for territory. It’s a battle for minds, and will be won or lost between our ears.
To combat the danger of mind insurrection, we must “tear down speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.” (2 Corinthians 10:5, LSB)
To what sort of speculations was the apostle Paul referring? How about these words, sung by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood in the National Cathedral at the recent memorial service for past President Jimmy Carter?
“Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us, only sky.”
Singing this well-known atheist anthem by John Lennon and Yoko Ono wasn’t some oversight. Carter had requested the song. It had also been sung by the same duo at his wife Rosalynn’s funeral in 2023.
Now the Carters professed to be serious Christians. What were they thinking? Just skip the first few lines and focus on world peace and brotherhood?
But what if there IS no heaven? Did the Carters want to rob the world of hope? Hope for the heart-broken young couple that they’ll never see their baby again? Hope that we’ll ever find answers to our oft-repeated prayers, our unexplained tragedies, our unfulfilled desires?
And no hell? So justice doesn’t matter? Did Hitler and his Holocaust victims merely cease to exist, their bodies returning to common dust? Is there no final tribunal for the almost 50% of unsolved murders in the U.S?
Will the God who judged Sodom’s sins let America’s crimes go unpunished?
There’s some irony here. Lennon penned the words, “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man.” But when he died by an assassin’s bullet in 1980, his net worth was estimated at $200 million ($620 million today). And there was still plenty of hunger.
By all means, help with homes for the needy, as the Carters faithfully did. Be concerned about peace and brotherhood and world hunger—and act on it, beginning in your own community. But instead of imagining there’s no heaven, how about this?
Repent! That means recalibrating your mind to be in sync with God’s Word—agreeing that you need a Savior, that Jesus is the only one, and that today is the day of salvation.
And that there IS a new world coming, with peace and harmony and every need met.
Don’t just imagine everything’s fine. “Prepare to meet your God.” (Amos 4:12)
Article by Jabe Nicholson first published in the Commercial Dispatch, Saturday, February 8, 2025.