Sunday 28th April 2024
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them,
male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26-27 (NIV)
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Self-evident?
This week I came across a quotation from G.K. Chesterton which is so good I simply had to share it. But first I should explain the context…
Dr Hilary Cass has recently published her independent review into the workings of gender identity services for children and young people. It has become increasingly clear that these services have been driven more by gender ideology than by a genuine concern for the children and young people they claimed to serve. It was too quickly assumed that a person could be ‘born in the wrong body’ and that drugs and even surgery could usefully be employed to give that person ‘the right body.’ Author J.K. Rowling has been a leading voice in calling out the madness of such an approach (and has suffered abuse for doing so).
Here, then, is what G.K. Chesterton wrote. Bear in mind that he was writing in 1926, but with what now seems like prophetic wisdom:
“The Declaration of Independence, once the charter of democracy, begins by saying that certain things are self-evident. If we were to trace the history of the American mind…we should find that fewer and fewer things were self-evident, until at last hardly anything is self-evident. So far from it being self-evident to the modern that men are created equal, it is not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men… We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.”
We have indeed reached a place where “it is not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men.” In fact, less and less is “self-evident.” That is inevitable once we abandon revelation; all we are left with is what I as an individual think and want, and who can say that I am wrong (or right, for that matter)? If necessary, reality must be bent to fit who or what I believe myself to be.
Father, thank you that you have shown us what is right and true, not least about yourself and about ourselves; give us the humility to trust what you have said and the courage to live by it. Amen.
Yours warmly, in Christ,
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)