At that time, declares the LORD, the bones of the kings and officials of Judah, the bones of the priests and prophets, and the bones of the people of Jerusalem will be removed from their graves. They will be exposed to the sun and the moon and all the stars of the heavens, which they have loved and served and which they have followed and consulted and worshiped. ... all the survivors of this evil nation will prefer death to life, declares the LORD Almighty.

No one repents of his wickedness, saying, "What have I done?" Each pursues his own course like a horse charging into battle.

From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit.

Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when they are punished, says the LORD.

I will take away their harvest, declares the LORD. There will be no grapes on the vine. There will be no figs on the tree, and their leaves will wither. What I have given them will be taken from them.

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved ... I mourn and horror grips me.

The “natural man” assumes that he can and must interpret himself and the facts of the universe without any reference to the God who is actually there. The “natural man” assumes that the facts of the space-time world are not what Christ, speaking for the triune God, says they are. For the natural man the facts are just there. They are contingent, i.e. not pre-interpreted by God.

The “natural man” assumes that there is a “principle of rationality,” including the laws of logic, i.e. the law of identity, the law of excluded middle and the law of contradiction which is, like the “facts,” just there. The facts he speaks of he assumes to be non-created facts. There is no “curse” that rests upon nature because of man’s sin. The “natural man” assumes that he himself, being “just there,” can relate the space-time facts which are “just there” by means of a “principle of rationality” that is “just there” to one another or that if he cannot do this, no one can. It does not occur to him to think of God as the one whose thoughts are higher than his thoughts.

All the schools of modern science and philosophy agree that to say God is there, in the sense of the traditional Confessions of the Church, is to speak nonsense. Many of the typical modern scientists and philosophers may believe in a god. They even defend their belief in their god against naturalists, mechanists, and sceptics and materialists. They may believe in a personal god. They may want to give a spiritual, teleological interpretation to the course of history. For all that their gods are nothing more than projections of would-be autonomous moral consciousness of man. They agree with Kant that man himself is autonomous in the final point of reference in predication. In the eyes of all the major schools of modern thought, the god who is there is dead. “When it comes to metaphysics,” says Neuath, a member of the Vienna Circle, “one must indeed be silent, but not about anything.” Or, as the Cambridge philosopher, F. P. Ramsey, an enthusiastic follower of Wittgenstein, puts it: “What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.”

When they heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. "Look," he said, "I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. And Saul was there, giving approval to his death.

On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison.

When we turn to modern theology we soon discover that its major schools agree with the starting point, the method and the conclusions of modern science and philosophy.

With one accord, modern theologians contend that even though, as over against naturalism, we must speak of God -- we must not speak of a God who is self-sufficient and whose revelation of himself is directly and clearly given in history, more particularly in Jesus.

Suppose that Jesus did think he was the Son of God. Suppose that in his own words we could hear him say that he is one with the eternal Father.

Our principle of inwardness [rebels] at this. [Because we posit that] Man is not truly a personal being if he must listen to extraneous voices.

Robert Collingwood expresses the view of modern theology on the question of revelation well when he says that the modern historian must take such claims as Jesus makes -- when he says he has absolute authority -- as [just] so much evidence into his own philosophy of history.

Only clergymen were allowed to teach religious classes, and those clergymen were forced to teach according to the anti-Christian instructions of the Nazi Ministry of Education. When in Wurrtemberg, clergymen refused to follow Nazi teachings on religion, seven hundred were banned from the classroom. The Nazis did not stop there: Christian prayers were banned from the public classroom and crucifixes were physically removed as well.

By 1935, the virulently anti-Christian leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Shirach issued a regulation that prohibited any child from belonging simultaneously to a church youth group and the Hitler Youth, and gradually membership in the Hitler Youth became almost obligatory – parents were told that their children would not get jobs in the civil service unless they belonged to the Hitler Youth and employers were told not to hire children who did not belong to the Hitler Youth. Christian schoolchildren who did not belong to the Hitler Youth or its female counterpart were routinely beaten up by young Nazi thugs.

Boys inducted into the Hitler Youth were required to explicitly reject Christianity by oaths like this: “German blood and Christian baptismal water are completely incompatible.” At Hitler Youth center at Halle, was the following prominent statement: “The Faith fanatics, who still to-day slide down on their knees with faces uplifted to heaven, waste their time in churchgoing and prayers, and have not yet understood that they are living on the earth and that therefore their task is of a thoroughly earthly kind. All we Hitler people can still only look with the greatest contempt on those young people who still run to their silly Evangelical or Catholic Churches in order to vent their quite superstitious religious feelings.”

Or consider these quotations out of Hitler Youth training manuals: “Christianity is a religion of slaves and fools.” “How did Christ die? Whining at the Cross!” “The Ten Commandments represent the lowest instincts of man.” and “Christianity is merely a cloak for Judaism.”

As William Harman Black, one of the most outspoken American opponents of Nazi anti-Semitism wrote in 1938: “The initial battle is for control of the youth of the country. The Christian Church, on the one hand, desires to maintain its parochial schools, where the young people may grow up with an education based on the morals and the manners of the Christian religion; on the other hand, the German State wants to divorce all religion from the education of its youth. As Hitler himself announced ‘The State must control all attitude, shaping influences finally, completely and irrevocably.’

Parents who resisted Nazi anti-Christian indoctrination too strongly simply had their children taken away from them. The Nazis even forbade parents to give their children Christian names and ordered babies instead to be given names like Dietrich, Otto or Siegfried. The home teaching of Christianity by parents in the home was forbidden. Not content with simply driving Christianity out of public schools, Himmler banned all Confessing Church seminaries and instruction in 1937 and he closed all private religious schools two years later.

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered? Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution.
It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.

I will keep on doing what I am doing in order to cut the ground from under those who want an opportunity to be considered equal with us in the things they boast about. Such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.

"My prayer is not for [my disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. ... May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."