Spiritual Instincts

The majority of people who become Christians have their interest aroused not by intellectual arguments but by other influences. Thus there has been a remarkable growth in the number of Christians in Islamic Iran. The majority of these conversions were triggered by a deep abhorrence of the activities of the Muslim hierarchy. Ramin Parsa was a devout Muslim student in Iran but his unfair arrest and beating by the religious police began a search for something better than the rules of Islam. It was the instincts within him that led him to be critical of what he was offered. He then was attracted to the person and claims of Jesus and became a Christian. Just as animals have instinctive behavior built into their makeup, so it seems that all humans have moral and spiritual values built into us. Could this be part of what the Bible means when it says that,

“God created us in his own image, in the image of God he created him.” Genesis 1:27

These spiritual instincts reveal themselves in various areas.

The Sense of Good and Evil

One of the greatest difficulties many modern people have is finding a unity between their instincts on right and wrong and modern ways of thinking. This is the consequence of our conditioning. Modern philosophies have killed off God and consequently have removed the concept of sin. However it cannot remove the subjective reality of sin. This is engrained into our instincts.

In Washington, the Managing Editor of what is probably the city’s most prestigious political weekly was such a post-modernist thinker. Martha (not her real name) regarded all constructions of good and evil as social structures without any absolute force. So she thought that although the Jewish holocaust looked pretty ghastly from a Jewish perspective, for those committed to an Arian theory it looked like the way to go. She considered that morality depended on your point of view, whether you are talking about the tribal conflicts in Rwanda or other more recent conflicts such as those in Ukraine or the Middle East. She felt you could construct concepts of evil and good out of the social matrix of where you live.

At this time Martha got to know Mark and Connie Dever. Mark is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. They invited her to come to a Bible Study in their home. She noted that they handled the text well and because she was interested in words and texts she went along. However she did not agree with what was said, considering it mostly to be a load of ‘poppycock’. She did not know much about the Bible so she went along and learned all the ‘stuff about Jesus’from the gospel of Mark, even though she did not believe it. It was just an interesting handling of the texts as far as she was concerned.

Martha was then sent on an assignment to PNG (Papua New Guinea) for political reasons. Just as she was about to leave she came across the story of a priest who had been arrested for paedophilia. He was about to return home for retirement after spending thirty five years in PNG. It transpired that he had sodomised no fewer than two hundred children over those thirty five years. She could not stop thinking about this man and the possible consequences of his actions. She thought about all the relationships his behaviour would touch. What would happen to those children when they grew up? How many of them would become abusers themselves? Would they ever be able to have happy marriages? These issues grabbed her.

When she returned to Washington she discussed it all with Mark Dever. Mark’s response was to ask,

“Martha, was it wicked?”

Martha replied,

“Come on Mark, we all know that the vast majority of child abusers were themselves abused as children. This sort of thing gets passed on, doesn’t it? They are as much victims as victimisers.”

Mark smiled,

“True enough. That’s what the Bible says too. Sin is social as well as personal. ‘Sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.’ There are few private sins. That is not the issue. The issue is, ‘Was it wicked?’”

Martha could not get away from this question. When she bumped into Mark on the street he would say,

“Hi Martha, ‘Was it wicked?’”

When she went to the Bible study she would be greeted with,

“Hi Martha. Welcome. ‘Was it wicked?’

Every time Mark saw her he asked,

“Was it wicked?”

Martha could not sleep. Her instincts and her philosophy were in conflict. She would wake up in the middle of the night and would hear Mark’s voice saying,

“Was it wicked?”

Then one night she woke up in the middle of the night. She couldn’t sleep. She was sweating by the side of her bed as she wrestled with the same question. Then she concluded,

“This was wicked. This was wicked. This was very wicked.”

Then it dawned on her,

“Maybe I’m wicked too.”

Martha’s gut instincts had overcome her way of thinking. Within three weeks she had become a Christian. It now all made sense, her instincts and rational thinking were united. Now she is one of the most able communicators of the gospel in Washington. It all makes sense.

No-one asks for pardon till they know they are guilty. No-one asks for life until they are under the sentence of death. You don’t ask for forgiveness until you know you are wicked. Nothing will satisfy the void in peoples’ lives until they realise they are devoid of God.1

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre thought that life had no meaning and any values must be your own. But when the violent struggle for independence in Algeria took place he became outspoken against the immorality of many barbarous acts of the rebels. His instincts of morality and justice conflicted with his intellectual theories. He did not write any substantial books after this event.

Moral Values

The appreciation of good and evil is but one example of the fact that moral values are a fundamental aspect of every human life. All people have an inbuilt moral compass regardless of their background. Honesty, integrity and love are appreciated by all, whilst lying, stealing and killing are hated when I am the victim. We all consider these things to be wrong.

The big question is where these instincts come from. Clearly they are stronger or weaker depending on a persons background and environment, but they are always there in some form. Some have claimed that these are just products of our upbringing, what our mother taught us so that the family can exist harmoniously. Such people have to say that conscience is just a matter of upbringing.

The Bible however, whilst acknowledging the importance of family training, insists that there is a God-given basis for these values, that these values are discovered and not invented. The Bible teaches that God will use the values that we judge others by, as the standard by which he will judge us.

“You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you arte condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” Romans 2:1

Non-religious people may not have written rules to govern all aspects of behavior but they still distinguish right from wrong using God-given consciences.

“Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law . . . they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness.” Romans 2:14-15

These values are a reminder that we will all face God’s judgment and this judgment will be fair. Our great problem is that we already know the natural verdict. Religious or not, none of us meet he righteous standards of God.

Longing for Loving Relationships

It’s a well known fact that children who are deprived of normal caring families, affectionate touch and affirmative words are usually not equipped to face life in a healthy way. They are stunted in their emotional development and crave attention all the time in quite destructive ways. When they reach adulthood, they are constantly on the look out for affirmation, affection and meaning. We all thrive in secure, loving relationships where there is also accountability. Surely this reflects that we were made for relationship, very few people enjoy prolonged loneliness or isolation. God himself, Father, Son and Spirit are three persons in one Being, each perfectly in tune with the other and bringing glory to the whole Person. God was in a close loving relationship before the world was created and he made us for relationships too. He designed us to be born into families, where love and nurture could easily flourish whatever the external pressures. He made men and women equal partners in marriage, with their different roles so we could reflect the perfect relationship that already exists in the Godhead.

Is it surprising then that some people are attracted to Christ because they have an instinctive longing to be loved.

The sense of truth

This is a fascinating instinct. If we have developed by random chemical processes out of ‘primordial soup’ it is very hard to derive an absolute view of truth. Some existential philosophers now talk of ‘your own truth’, as if truth is purely subjective. I asked a group of hospital consultants how they would define truth. They had a problem answering but then one suggested,

“Truth must be defined as consensus.”

This is clearly inadequate as that would mean that powerful people, such as the Hitlers of this world, could manipulate public opinion and so alter truth. Instinctively most people recognize that the must be an absolute perspective of truth. Medicine is dependent on finding the pathological cause of a problem in order to affect the optimal treatment. In law, the judge’s first task is to determine the truth of propositions.

Plato (428-328 BC) recognized that truth must be related to an abstract ‘ideal’. The natural world we perceive through our senses of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling reveals only a reflection of this Ideal Truth. Today truth can be defined as a concept compatible with what God knows. Consequently in any research we are seeking to discover something about the truth. This usually involves using a dialectical process. In this a theory is proposed, the thesis, which is then tested against an alternative idea, the antithesis and out of this conflict a new thesis comes forwards. It is by this process that we come towards discovering the ‘true truth’ that our instincts tell us is out there.

The search for truth has resulted in many people finding Christ. It is no coincidence that the word ‘truth’ comes fifty times in John’s gospel alone.

Dr Hugh Ross, the eminent astronomer and scientist, was born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, Canada. His parents were morally upright but non-religious. Their neighbours could also be described as non-religious. He did not know any Christians or serious followers of any other religion whilst growing up.

By the age of seven he was reading physics books as fast as he could. By eight he had decided to make astronomy his career. In the next few years his study of the evidence for a ‘big bang’ convinced him that the universe had a beginning, and thus a Beginner. But, like the astronomers whose books he had read, he imagined that the Beginner must be distant and non-communicative.\

His high school history studies disturbed him, for it was obvious that the peoples of the world tended to take their religions very seriously. Knowing that the European philosophers of the Enlightenment largely discounted religion, His initial response was to study their works. What he discovered, however, were inconsistencies, contradictions, evasions, and circular reasoning.

The obvious next step was to turn to the "holy" books themselves. If God the Creator had spoken through any of these books (and at first he thought He probably had not) his authorship would be obvious: the communication would be perfectly true. He reasoned that if men invent a religion, their teachings will reflect human error. But, if the Creator communicates, His message will be error free and just as consistent as the facts of nature. So, he used the facts of history and science to test each of the "holy" books.

Initially the task was easy. After only a few hours (in some cases less) of reading, he found one or more statements clearly at odds with the facts of history and of science. He also noted a writing style best described as esoteric and mysterious. This seemed inconsistent with the straightforward character of the Creator as implied by the facts of nature. His debunking task was easy until he dusted off a Bible that the Gideons had given him several years earlier as part of their distribution program in the public schools.

He found the Bible noticeably different. It was simple, direct, and specific. He was amazed at the quantity of historical and scientific (i.e., testable) material it included and at the detail of this material. The first page of the Bible caught his attention. Not only did its author correctly describe the major events in the creation of life on earth, but he placed those events in the scientifically correct order and properly identified the earth's initial conditions.

For the next year and a half he spent about an hour a day searching the Bible for scientific and historical inaccuracies. Finally he had to admit that it was error free and that this perfect accuracy could only come from the Creator Himself. He also recognized that the Bible stood alone in describing God and His dealings with man from a perspective that demanded more than just the physical dimensions of length, width, height, and time. Further, he had proven to himself, on the basis of predicted history and science, that the Bible was more reliable than many of the laws of physics. The only rational option was to trust the Bible's authority to the same degree as he trusted the laws of physics.

By this time he clearly understood that Jesus Christ was the Creator of the universe, that He had paid the price that only a sinless person could pay for all of our offenses against God, and that eternal life would be his if he would receive His pardon and give Him His rightful place of authority over a person’s life. He had understood enough Scripture to know, however, that this commitment cannot be a secret one. It has to be public, and that means letting our peers and professors and family know about it, but he feared the contempt and ridicule that surely would come. So, for several months he hesitated.

During those months he experienced a strange sense of confusion. For the first time in his life, his grades dropped and he had difficulty solving problems. He was discovering the meaning of Romans 1:21, which says that when a man rejects what he knows and understands to be true about God, his thinking becomes futile and his mind darkened. The eventual consequences spelled out in the succeeding verses chilled him.

Instinctively he knew what he had to do, but his pride prevented him doing what he knew to be right. However one evening he prayed and asked God to take away his resistance and make him a Christian. He prayed this way for six hours with no apparent answer. Finally, he realized that Jesus Christ will not force Himself upon anyone, even if asked. It was up to us to humble ourselves and invite Him in. And this is what he did at 1:06 am in the morning. He then signed his name to the "decision statement" at the back of his Gideon Bible, acknowledging Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

Right away he sensed an assurance that God would never let him go, that he was His forever. His fears of ridicule from unbelievers subsided gradually, and day by day he began to learn how to share his discoveries about spiritual truth with fellow students and his faculty. However, without the benefits of fellowship with other Christians, he found that his growth in Christlikeness was stunted.

Every once in awhile he would visit a church, only to discover they were a cult or a group who called themselves Christians but did not take the Bible seriously. On arriving at Caltech for post-doctoral studies, he met a serious Christian at last, Dave Rogstad. Dave invited Hugh to join him at a seminar about applying Biblical principles to daily living. There he sat with 16,000 committed Christians all in one building. He was overwhelmed to find that so many Christians existed, and was helped as well as humbled by the things being taught.

Within weeks of that seminar he found himself not only attending home Bible studies but helping to lead them. Dave challenged him to begin sharing his faith with non-Christian non-scientists. He was surprised to observe that unlike scientists, who tend to struggle more with their will than with their mind in coming to Christ, the non-scientists he met tended to struggle more with their mind. If only they could see the convincing evidence that God exists, that Jesus is God, and that the Bible is true, then surely they would readily give their lives to Christ.

He began spending more and more time sharing this evidence with others. Within a year he was serving full-time as the minister of evangelism for Sierra Madre Congregational Church. Ten years later, when breakthrough discoveries in the sciences virtually sealed the scientific case for the God of the Bible, a group of friends urged him to form an organization, Reasons To Believe, to communicate this new evidence as widely as possible. Since then he has found that for each year since knowing Jesus as his lord and Saviour, that his joy in Him and his joy in sharing His truth with others has grown greater. He says,

“There is nothing in this world for which I would trade my relationship with Him”.

For Hugh Ross, it was his instincts about truth that led him to find the God of truth or to be found by the God of truth.

When John describes his friend, Jesus, he says about him,

“The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14

In John’s gospel alone the word ‘truth’ comes fifty times. Jesus is passionate about truth. When describing himself as the way to God he says,

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

God demands that we are all searchers after truth. David recognized this after his sordid affair with Bathsheba,

“Surely you desire truth in the inner parts.” Psalm 51:6

Jesus repeatedly talks of the evidence there is for his claims to be divine. Passages such as John 5:31-47, John 8:12-20 and John 10:24-33 where Jesus presents outlines of the evidence for his being the Messiah, make this very clear. The Bible makes it clear that we will be judged by God if we deliberately reject the truth about his son, the Lord Jesus. This is why Jesus can fairly say,

“There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day.” John 12:48

The sense and need of purpose

There is much research that demonstrates that those who have a sense of purpose in life tend to live longer. One researcher, Patrick Hill of Carleton University in Canada has said,

“Our findings point to the fact that finding a direction for life, and setting overarching goals for what you want to achieve, can help you actually live longer, regardless of when you find your purpose. So the earlier someone comes to a direction for life, the earlier these protective effects may be able to occur.”

The instinct that our lives have purpose is ingrained into us. It was this instinct that led me to Christ. I had started as an undergraduate in Cambridge University as was really enjoying myself. I was loving the opportunity to play a lot of tennis, squash and hockey. I was making good friends. But I started to question “What is the point of it all?” This started a search for answers to the meaning of life. I was a slow starter as I did not want to be conned by religious people or ideas. However, I instinctively felt that there were answers out there and I became convinced by the evidence that Jesus was indeed the God-sent solution who could give me a purpose in life that could stand all the tests for validity.

David Hamilton was a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force in Northern Ireland who, in 1978, was eventually jailed for 11 years for a series of bombings and bank robberies. He was held in the Maze Prison, where fellow inmates included IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Mr Hamilton admitted he initially had little interest in practising religion - preferring to smoke the pages of the Bible, rather than read them. He said,

'For me being a Protestant was being part of Ulster and nothing to do with religion, I had no interest in Christianity, I thought it must be the most boring life ever. You're not allowed to smoke or drink or chase women or do robberies, it seemed like no life at all. But every cell in prison has a Bible. I liked the Bible because when you've no cigarette papers you can smoke the pages of it. I often tell people I smoked Matthew, Mark, Luke and John before I got converted.'

However, when he was later moved to Belfast Prison, David began attending church services and started to believe.

'I began to look at my life and realised that God had spared my life on numerous occasions. Three times I'd been shot and twice I'd been blown up - one was my own bomb explosion. Another time, the IRA tried to shoot me when I was having a meal with my wife in a Chinese restaurant. Two IRA men came in with guns and I managed to escape through the kitchen and they fired two shots, but none hit me.’

'I realised God must be interested in me or he wouldn't have kept me alive.' 2

The need for relevance and a sense that his life had a purpose eventually led him to Christ. The final trigger occurred when he tore a page from the Bible to have a smoke but when he glanced at the page he read a verse that he had heard when he was younger,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

This verse struck a chord in his conscience and he knew that he had to make a personal commitment to Christ. Straight after becoming a Christian David went out from his cell and told the first person he met, another convict,

“I’ve just become a Christian,” he said.

Immediately a skeptical response was thrown his way by a friend,

“Oh yes, and who did Cain marry then?”

David had no problem with this,

“Mrs. Cain stupid!”

A desire for eternal significance

This longing to be significant shows itself in many ways. It drives people to become important and famous but it also is related to our natural fear of death. It is not just that we leave family and friends behind, there is a natural fear about what happens next. The following quote from the Old Testament is true for all peoples. It describes an eternal perspective that God has put into the instincts of all people,

“He has set eternity in the hearts of men.” Ecclesiastes 3:11

I was on a teaching ward round with my surgical ‘firm’ when we came to a very pleasant lady in her 50’s who had been admitted for terminal care. She had liver secondaries and was feeling very weak. She asked if she could have a private talk with me later. When I returned she said,

“I am finding this business of dying very difficult. Could you speed it up for me? She clearly wanted ‘euthanasia’. I replied, “We don’t do that,” but we went on to have a discussion about what she was finding difficult and the things we could do to help her. I wondered if there was some spiritual problem underlying all this so I continued,

“I wonder if there is a reason that God is keeping you going like this. Do you think you have got everything ready?”

“I think so,” she replied, “I have cleared all my cupboards at home.”

“Yes, but on a deeper level, are you sure you are ready to meet God or aren’t you sure about these things?”

“Oh! I think I’m ready, I’ve never done anyone any harm.”

Here was this lady about to meet her maker and she wasn’t ready. Fortunately our hospital has Gideon Bibles in the bedside lockers so I asked if I could show her a few things.

“I would like that,” she replied.

The first thing she needed to be clear about was that when we die we will face judgement. I wondered about using the passage in 2 Thessalonians 1:8-10 but decided that the wording was too aggressive for this lady so we looked up Hebrews 9:27,

“. . . man is destined to die once and after that to face judgement.”

The great attraction of using this verse is that the adjoining verses both talk about Jesus died to “take away the sins of many people.”

I illustrated this by placing a book on my open hand, and explained that this represented my sin, which acts as a barrier between God and myself. My religion, which was illustrated by my fingers actively moving under the book cannot help get rid of the barrier. She seemed to understand this so we went on to talk about sin and to show that no-one is naturally good enough for God. Her claim about ‘not doing anybody any harm’ was both untrue and certainly inadequate. So we looked up Romans 3:11.

“There is no-one righteous, not even one; there is no-one who understands, no-one who seeks God.”

She then agreed that being right with God was never something she had bothered about at all. We also looked up Isaiah 59:2,

“But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden your face from you, so that he will not hear.”

As we talked she began to understand her problem. The Bible teaching resonated with her innate instincts,

“How can I get right with God?” she asked.

Sitting on her bed we talked about the Lord Jesus. We talked about his death on that cross and how he died to take away the consequences of our sin and to enable us to be right with God. We then turned to 1 Peter 2:24.

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”

As we talked it all seemed so clear to her, the Holy Spirit was convicting her of sin and righteousness and judgement in a non-aggressive way. She then said,

“I need to be forgiven by Jesus. Will you pray for me now?”

At this point the nurses sitting at the adjacent nurses station jumped up and pulled the screens round even though they give hardly any privacy. They must have been listening. I prayed thanking God for what he had done for us on the cross, and asking that, just as he had promised, he would put her name in the ‘Book of Life’, forgive her sin and give her his Spirit. She was very grateful. I left her with a list of the verses we had looked up as well as two more on assurance,

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” John 1:12

“I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has passed over from death to life.” John 5:24

The Lord gave her great joy that continued. Her husband phoned me up the next morning.

“Are you the doctor who spoke to my wife yesterday?”

“Yes,” I replied rather hesitantly as I didn’t know what was coming.

“We are not a religious family in any way, but I would like to thank you for spending the time with her. She has such peace. Would you mind explaining to me what you said to her?”

He phoned me at home a few days later at the weekend and came for tea. I was interested to see that somehow he had obtained a large unused Gideon Bible, Authorised Version, which had the words, ‘Headmistress’ printed in bold type on the outside. We went over the gospel in a very similar way. He wasn’t ready to commit himself but I gave him a copy of ‘Cure for Life’ and said he could phone at any time.

His wife moved to the local hospice where I visited her on one occasion. She was holding firmly onto her Saviour even though she was sleepier from the drugs. We looked at Romans 8:1 which is another great verse on assurance.

“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because . . . ”

To make this simpler to understand, I wrote her name on a piece of paper and placed it inside the Bible.

“Let this Bible represent the Lord Jesus and this piece of paper represent you. Because you are now ‘in Christ’ when you meet God he will not see your sins at all, he will see that you are in Christ and have ‘his righteousness’. Furthermore Jesus is now in heaven and because you are in Christ he will take you to be with him there.”

The nurses told me that she later asked them to read her the whole chapter of Romans 8. About two weeks later I had a phone call from her husband to say that she had just died. Apparently one of the last things she said to her husband was to ask him to become a Christian and made him promise to “go to the doctor’s church”. He did faithfully come and he later attended a Basics course when he also committed himself to Christ.

Our instincts about eternity can help lead us to Christ

Our sense of the divine

Augustine of Hippo said in one of his prayers,

“The thought of him stirs him (man) so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”

The philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, argued that the human experience of emptiness and the yearning for something more is an indication that our essential need is to be fulfilled in something greater - a relationship with the God who made us.

Dr Kenneth Samples, a Professor of Comparative Religion, has written,

“Scripture also reveals that as God’s special creation, individuals surely know, in the core of their being that there is a God to whom they are morally accountable. This inherent and intuitive sense of the divine explains humankind’s deep seated religious and moral impulse.”3

There is evidence that animal sacrifice has been a part of nearly all cultures in history, from the Hebrews, Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans to the Aztecs and the Yoruba. The practice remains in the holy books of the worldÆs major traditional religions. The term sacrifice derives from the Latin sacrificium, which is a combination of the words sacer, meaning ‘something set apart from the secular or profane for the use of supernatural powers’, and facere, meaning “to make.”

Scholars tell us that the Hebrew of the first phrase, "In the course of time," suggests that this offering of sacrifices was a recurring event. It is actually implied in Genesis 3:21 where it says, "The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them." The clothing of skins with which God covered Adam and Eve had to have come from animals that were killed.

Why did the Lord look with favour on Abel's sacrifice and did not look with favor on Cain's offering? It was because the sacrifice of "the firstborn of his flock" carried a symbolism certainly known and understood by both Cain and Abel. It was an acted out prophecy of a coming Saviour who would give His life to save the human race.

Offerings of clean animals were offered by Noah after the flood when the ark came to rest on the top of Mt. Ararat (Genesis 8:20). Later Abraham built altars and offered sacrifices in the land of Canaan (Genesis 12:7,8; Genesis 13:4,18).

Instinctively we all know that we have not reached God’s standard and long for someone else to take responsibility for my wrongs, we do need a saviour.

BVP

1 This account was taken from a talk by Don Carson to the Christian Medical Fellowship annual student conference in February 2003

2 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1293033/Former-Ulster-fighter-David-Hamilton-abandons-life-violence-finding-God.html#ixzz4a6dHBaOh

3 Kenneth R Samples, ‘God among Sages’, BakerBooks, Grand Rapids, 2017 p.214