The Frosty Creep of a Hardening Heart
Guard especially against heart-hardening. Hard hearts are unbelieving ones; therefore beware of ossification of the heart. The hardest hearts were soft once, and the softest may get hard. The chalk which now holds the fossil shells was once moist ooze. The horny hand of toil was once full of soft dimples. The murderer once shuddered when, as a boy, he crushed a worm. Judas must have been once a tender and impressionable lad.
At first the process can be detected by none but a practiced eye. Then there is a thin film of ice, so slender that a pin or needle would fall through. At length it will sustain a pebble, and, if winter still hold its unbroken sway, a child, a man, a crowd, a cart will follow. We get hard through the steps of an unperceived process. -- F.B. Meyer
Meyer concludes,
The constant hearing the truth without obeying it. The knowing a better and doing the worse. The cherishing of unholy things that seem fair as angels. The refusal to confess the wrong and to profess the right. All these things harden. Beware of the deceitfulness of sin! Take heed to yourselves! Exhort one another daily.
"As it is said, 'Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion'” (Hebrews 3:15, ESV).
Expensive Cardboard
When Super Bowl LV kicked off between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs, Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida looked full with the help of some fake fans.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, the NFL had approximately 25,000 in the stadium for the 55th Super Bowl, far fewer than the 70,000 fans that attended the big game the last time it was held in Tampa.
To make up the difference, the NFL produced 30,000 cardboard cutouts of fans to fill most of the remaining seats.
Unlike other sporting events where the cardboard cutouts are all bunch together in some areas of the stadium, the fake Super Bowl fans were spread out to keep the real fans socially distant.
The NFL charged each fan $100 to have their face placed on one of the cardboard cutouts. That's a cool $3 million in revenue to make up for some of the lost ticket and concession sales.
When I look at the faces on those cutouts all I can think of are the many who fill the pews every Sunday, pretending to be something they’re not. They appear to be there but they’re really somewhere else. They’re there to fulfill an obligation but not to worship. They seem to have it all together but it’s all an illusion. They want to be seen but not known. They have all of the zeal and passion of a cardboard cutout. They pretend to be alive but they're dead. They’ve made it a practice to be religious but what they really need is to be born again.
Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God" (John 3:3, NLT).
•Application by I.E.
Suspended Disbelief
The term “suspension of disbelief” was first coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. Coleridge asked readers to allow a “willing suspension of disbelief,” so they might better engage with his fantastical poems.
Of course, we have all done this when reading a good book or watching a movie. Often, the difference between a positive or negative review is whether the critic was persuaded to suspend their disbelief. But even as we are persuaded to do this, no one really thinks that Superman can fly, or that Dr. Frankenstein was able to bring a corpse back to life. Rather, for the sake of being taken on the journey, we make a conscious decision to suspend critical thinking.
What we are less conscious of is the fact that we are often called upon to suspend our disbelief when it comes to how we view the real world. For example, who has ever actually witnessed the spontaneous generation of life from non-living matter? The fact that this has never been observed begs the question, what’s the difference between this “story” and the tale of Frankenstein’s life-imparting lightning strike? As far as we have been able to determine, the one is just as improbable as the other. At least Frankenstein’s effort had an intelligent agent behind it while the story we have been told is totally dependent on a chance occurrence. Yet, we consider one a fantasy while the other is touted as a fact.
The greatest minds in the world, combined with all of today’s advances in science and technology, don’t begin to know how to breathe life into non-living material. It’s not just that it’s difficult to do, it’s that we have discovered it to be beyond the realm of possibility. By any definition, such an event, however it happened, would be a miracle. And yet, without blinking an eye, we have suspended our disbelief and have accepted that it was blind, unguided chance that produced life. Modern science has asked us to allow a “willing suspension of disbelief,” so that we might better engage in their fantastical theories about reality, and we have complied.
We don’t typically suspend our critical thinking to no benefit, so why have we been willing to do this? What is the pay-off? We have turned our critical facilities off and accepted an inadequate explanation for the inexplicable so that we might avoid the implications of the inexplicable. We have suspended our critical thinking in order to embrace a narrative that leaves God out of the picture. In the face of the miraculous, instead of awe, we have chosen suspended disbelief.
"For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God" (Romans 1:20, NLT).