Viewpoint of Mark Cadwallader, Creation Moments Board Chairman
As I write to you this month, the unique “madness” of the year 2020 continues unabated. Do you remember the classic movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”? Made in 1963, it starred an all-star cast of comedians and was really quite funny.
In the movie, half a dozen motorists hear the dying words of a released convict who wrecked his car on a desert highway. He said that he had hidden $350,000 at a location downstate, and the motorists agree to work together to find and share the buried treasure. But they simply cannot do so because of the depravity and insanity of human nature. So they end up giving in to all kinds of childish behavior as they race to be the first to find the money. In laughing at the endless comedic scenes, we are laughing at the truth about ourselves and the world we live in. People are insane!
Would that actual human depravity were always so funny – but, alas, “childish” greed, jealousy, anger, fear and strife are evils that don’t go away in childhood. In reality, this selfish greed causes much pain and suffering. Thank the Lord that He has designed us to have a sense of humor! Did you know that human beings are the only species that can truly laugh? And laughing does indeed help in our “pursuit of happiness”!
In fact, in a slap against evolution, racism and multiculturalism, scientists know from repeat testing worldwide that there are six universally recognized emotions by facial expression – no matter the culture, the language or the people group. As the Bible teaches, we are all one human race, created in God’s image, with a universal set of needs and feelings. And that includes a universal need to know and be reconciled to our Maker.
Psychologists have applied a color wheel to the range of emotions, so the above six emotions can be displayed as at the right. Using the light spectrum allows a range of intermediate hues to develop for a spectrum of emotions in-between, just like there is a range of color as we move within the spectrum of light – from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to violet. And so we see, for example, that “surprised” borders both “afraid” and “happy” because we can be happily surprised or fearfully surprised.
God designed us with lots of emotional capabilities, and they are connected to spiritual reality. Anger, for example, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins the early church worked out from the Scriptures for basic sin categories. And the Bible says that fear is a spirit that is not from God (2 Timothy 1:7). Even though God is rightly feared, that is because of sin. So when Adam and Eve were innocent, they did not fear to walk with Him in the Garden of Eden. Nor should we fear to commune with Him in our redeemed condition as His beloved children through the Lord Jesus.
The Bible says that our Creator, the Source of all things, “is a Spirit” (John 4:24). Science also tells us that everything material – including the chemical molecules for the hormones that drive our emotions – are vibrational frequencies. We see this when we drill down as far as we can go into the sub-atomic level. Materialism, thus, reduces to an unseen immaterial world of wave energy of the electromagnetic spectrum – an unseen realm which to me exposes the clear plausibility of spirit and soul, of heart and mind, as the Bible teaches. These Scriptural realms of consciousness, spiritual reality – both internal and external to us – transcend and yet interact with the physical organs and biological life and chemistry within our bodies.
So when we laugh, for example, we release hormones called endorphins (feel good chemicals) and decrease production of stress hormones. Laughing also increases the number of immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies. Laughter is good for us in the short term and in the long term. And God designed us this way so that we might enjoy His creation even in the midst of the mad, mad, mad, mad world all around us.
As Christians, we have an added aspect of His design – the recreation of our spirit so that we are His perfected work of art – His unique living “poem” (Ephesians 2:10). Hard as it is to believe, we can even enjoy His wonderful presence in the midst of a horrible Nazi concentration camp – as Corrie ten Boom documents in her book The Hiding Place. Again, our great Creator and re-Creator made us with this capacity. He is the Master Designer.
Great artists, musicians, architects, sculptors and other creative geniuses reflect their individual personalities in their work. And they have their particular reasons for staying with a certain style and format, and for using the same “nuts and bolts” and features in different aspects of their creations. Likewise, similarities in the designs and constructions of nature testify to style and choice in the handiwork of One Super-Creative Personal God. The “common ancestry” of the evolutionists falls apart when considering the much better explanation of “common design”.
The intimidation which Christians have felt from evolutionary science is a tool of the devil. And it needs to be resisted through spiritual warfare as well as through Bible doctrine and creation science. We all need “to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11), fending off negative emotions and developing God-given positive emotions like joy and peace and contentment and gratefulness as they all border on the spiritual reality of our loving Creator!
Thank you for partnering with us as we reach out to people all over this mad, mad, mad, mad world of ours! We teach that there is only one way to escape the madness, and that is through the shed blood of Christ, poured out for our salvation!
© 2020 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.
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Notes: Photo – The 7 universal facial expressions of emotions by PhD.Paul Ekman_Icerko Lydia_CCA 3.0 (commons.wikimedia.org) (Lables were added to identify each emotion.) Image: Plutchik Emotion Color Wheelik_Dyads.svg by chaoticbrain CCA By SA 4.0 (common.wikimedia.org)
