Sermon: Patterns That We Live With

Sermon: Patterns That We Live With

Playing Games With Divine Dichotomies
#1387A
Charles Whitaker (1944-2021)
Given 08-Jul-17; 35 minutes

listen:

description: (hide) God works in patterns and God has wired our minds to think in patterns. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that, given a set of dots that suggest a circle, our minds are prone to automatically fill in the pattern. Other ubiquitous patterns that God has created take the form of dichotomies, such as day-night, land-sea, male-female and Jew-Gentile. The members of true dichotomies must be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Hence, day and night are mutually exclusive, and there is no other alternative outside of the two genders God created, male and female—attempts of mankind aside. God’s dichotomies are firmly fixed in this under-the-sun order of things. While God can manipulate these dichotomies, mankind is unable to alter the parameters established by God’s dichotomies. Mankind, however, often attempts to change God’s dichotomies, as feminists in the matter of gender. Likewise, the world’s false religions have built a dichotomy of faith and works, while the Scriptures clearly show that no such dichotomy exists. We need to be thankful for all God’s patterns, and be careful that we don’t misuse them.