One of the world’s most fascinating architectural wonders is a new Hindu temple being erected in the heart of America’s Protestant Deep South: Atlanta. No frame stucco this, that only looks imposing; this is the old fashioned kind of stone structure built to last a thousand years, its builders say. The wealth going into it seems unbelievable—19 million dollars.
Now the Bible faith of Jesus Christ won’t have to emigrate to India in order to chip away at the Gibraltar of heathenism; the Bible Belt’s mission field has moved into its own back yard. Hinduism claims to be the oldest religion on earth; it also claims to embody all the doctrines of all religions. It will have mass appeal to the modern public.
It will be useless to combat this new eruption with more expensively built churches intended to dazzle; and more artist’s imaginary pictures of Jesus won’t help (are they actually a form of Hindu expression? Hinduism has no end of pictures of “Jesus”). “The truth of the gospel” in its utter simplicity (cf. Gal. 2:5, 14) and its profundity, must confront heathenism. Preaching “Christ and Him crucified” is vastly more than the most ingenious PowerPoint program we can invent. Our clever creations can be deceptive if they leave us imagining that we have been successfully “rich and increased with goods” in our task of enlightening the earth.
Modern children and youth will be impressed by America’s Hinduism, especially its “spirituality” which is meant to constitute another “holy spirit,” and Krishna of course is another “christ.” Hinduism is not original; it rides piggy back on a distortion of the truly original faith of Jesus that dates from Eden through Genesis 3:15 where the Lord promised to “put enmity between [the serpent] and the “seed” of the woman.
Islam is also taking advantage of the American Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom, coming in “like a flood.” Now youth can’t rely on tradition to keep them grounded in a “post-Christian” kind of traditional faith; they must survey the field of religions that are in the world and make choices for themselves. That’s good, because the Lord Jesus is not honored by mindless, tradition-bound followers. But this influx of Islam and Hinduism is not all bad news: it creates the context for fulfillment of a glorious promise: when falsehood “comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against [it]” (Isa, 59:19).
That “standard” will be the message of Revelation 18:1-4 that does “lighten the earth with glory.”
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