Sermon Illustrations

Case in point: One of the biggest fools in US Government History was Thomas Jefferson: He and George Washington did not agree on much because of his twisted and distorted religious beliefs:

Thomas Jefferson had bought into the lie of the Enlightenment, French promoted Age of Reason and he eventually slipped into the Deism and the Unitarian belief system. Marshall notes, “Deism emphatically rejected the Triune God of Holy Scriptures. It renounced the divinity of Jesus Christ, His sacrifice on the Cross to atone for the sins of men, and His resurrection. Indeed, according to the Deists, there was nothing to atone for: to them, the concept of man’s nature as sinful and fallen was repugnant and absurd. They exalted reason and intellect, and anything that was not logical or rational they summarily rejected-including all the supernatural elements of the Christian faith. In sum, Deism offered a more appealing deity-a conforming abstract, the Prime Cause to which all effects could be traced, an ever gentle, loving and kind Supreme Being quite different from the righteous authoritarian of the extreme Calvinists (page 96). Jefferson bought into Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason” This book attacked Christianity: Marshall notes this:Like other Deist works, it was widely read and contained such profanities as: “The Christian mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church, have erected their fable which, for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by anything that is found in the mythology of the ancients.” And “Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditional or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.” He also referred to the New Testament Gospel as “The fable of Christ” (Page 99). Jefferson went so far while he was President to re-write the Bible and called it the “Jefferson Bible.” He removed every reference to the supernatural, the Virgin birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, and all other miracles (Marshall, page 111). He believed that we as a nation had evolved past the foolishness of believing in things like this – He tried pushing his distorted views and the country lashed out at him for it.

Solomon says the reality check comes when the fool dies and has to stand before God in heaven and give an account for his life and actions.