Since God is eternal without time, then what we know of time from creation to consummation is the smallest speck of dust on forever. And yet, the humanists of our culture have cancelled creation to rid our existence of sin and consummation to rid us of judgment. In their arrogance, they have declared themselves gods over a never-ending present time when we can all “do what feels good” without repercussions. Anyone who disagrees with them is cancelled or persecuted in other ways.
I. Matthew 19:3-9. When the Pharisees tested Jesus on the subject of divorce, He gave us a strategy of how to deal with the humanists in our culture today. Twice, He referred them back to how God intended for things to be “from the beginning.” For all of their insistence that their legalistic righteousness and standards they had established were the ones to follow (Romans 10:1-4), Jesus let them and the Jews who had believed Him know that slavery was found in sin and freedom in truth (how our culture has this backwards!). Though they insisted that God was their Father, Jesus told them that their works and their inability to bear His words revealed their true parentage (John 8:31-47).
II. Matthew 24:36-39. The One who is from eternity confirms in these few verses the attitude of the culture before Noah and how similar it is to the attitude of the culture before He comes again. He confirms the judgment on Noah’s world by a global flood by comparing the judgment to come on this present world. Thus, Jesus confirms the salvation and covenant God made with Noah and his family we read about in Genesis 6-9 by comparing it with the salvation and covenant He makes with us through the water of baptism into Christ (1 Peter 3:18-22). And yet through Peter, God also tells us that scoffers–mockers, humanists, evolutionists–will cancel us in the last days (2 Peter 3:3-7).
III. John 1:1-3. The eternal Christ is in the perfect position to tell us how things were “from the beginning.” After all, He is God while being with God, and it is through Him that all things were made. He was there “from the beginning” because He was “in the beginning.” Here’s where the Pharisees or certain Jews of Jesus’ time on earth in the flesh are so like the humanists of our culture today. Although they are finite in their limited existence, they nevertheless shake their fists at God when they declare themselves to be gods. In their arrogant attitudes, they make earthly standards and then insist that all others adhere to them–or else (Romans 10:1-4). It will not go well for them in the end.
Still, we need to know that the everlasting God (Psalm 90:2) is in control of our seemingly out of control world. And we need to let Him and His Word control our attitudes more than the culture does.