“Denial” is a word that comes up often in these times. Where I get the most aggravated with this word is when it is used to “deny” the possibility of God’s people finding peace and contentment in the hard and troubling issues of life.
One of the places that I have often found this is in the matter of ill health and impending death. It is so often found in the hospice movement. When some one seems to easily accept a prognosis of death they are pronounced as being in “denial”. The assumption is that they are not truly facing reality and walking through the grief process that modern psychology demands.
It needs to be acknowledged that most of the modern psychology world denies the reality of God and so they are utterly unaware of the peace and even joy that can accompany those in dire issues of life and death. When I worked in hospice as a volunteer chaplain there was often a friction between those of us who believed in God and His grace and the social department who did not. This friction was seldom if ever voiced it just existed as a mostly quiet, below the surface irritant.
My observation is this; who is really living in denial? I have been studying history lately. By that I mean not the events of history, but rather the history of history, i.e., how history is observed and recorded. It is being observed today that most, if not all, of recorded history is to be read with severe question. No history comes to us without bias. And not only has history been affected with bias, so also has science. A great illustration of that is global climate change. There is just no consensus on this matter of climate change. It is something that is being driven by agendas and not by what we in the past would have accepted as the concrete world of science.
I am so grateful that there is a world of concrete truth and that is found with the pages of a book that is like none other in the world and that book is the Bible.
Here are a few lines from a simple song that we teach to our children that is really profound:
The Bible stands like a rock undaunted, 'Mid the ranging storms of time, It’s truth by none ever was refuted, And destroy it they never can.
Through out history the Bible has been hated, denied to the common man, burned and abused by unfaithful translations, but yet it stands in its untainted and original truth. There is no other book like it. Some One must be preserving it.
Here then are the words of our Lord:
Matthew 24:35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
Are you dealing with reality or living in denial?
