The Secret Battle of Ideas about God

Overcoming the Outbreak of Five Fatal Worldviews

Jeff Myers

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781434709653
• eBook ISBN: 9780781414128
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Do You Know What You Believe and How to Defend Your Faith? The world is full of ideas that don't reflect Jesus. In fact, according to a recent Barna study, only 3 percent of American evangelicals have an authentic biblical worldview. As president of Summit Ministries and an authority on Christian worldview and apologetics, Dr. Jeff Myers will teach you how to understand what you believe, why you believe it, and how to defend it against these five fatal worldviews:

• Secularism
• Marxism
• Islam
• New Spirituality
• Postmodernism

Chapter 1

Invisible Warfare

The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Lives

Deanna Williamson has said she never heard the explosion. She just saw paper floating through the air outside, like a ticker-tape parade.

A stockbroker from California, Deanna was in Manhattan attending a training conference for employees of the investment firm Morgan Stanley. As attendees gathered in the south tower of the World Trade Center, in a conference room on the sixty-first floor, Deanna slipped out to get a cup of coffee. That’s when green paper fluttering down outside a window caught her attention.

Soon Deanna and her coworkers saw desks falling from upper stories of the other high-rise and balls of fire erupting. Later they saw people plummeting to their deaths from the north tower.

This isn’t happening.

Several minutes passed as the Morgan Stanley employees stared in disbelief. At last, security guards rushed down the hallway and broke the spell, directing the group to the nearest exit. They descended flight after flight of stairs. Deanna’s anxiety grew when she started smelling smoke. Is our building on fire too? Will we all die of suffocation before we reach the street?

They were sixty floors from safety. With thousands of people being evacuated from the 110-story tower, progress was painfully slow. It was a New York pedestrian traffic jam on a relatively narrow stairwell. Shuffle. Wait. Repeat.

Deanna’s thoughts turned to her husband, who just then was halfway around the world in Australia. She found herself longing for the family they hoped to have. And now it might never happen.

Suddenly the building lurched hard. It felt as though they were being shaken by a major earthquake, which Deanna had experienced in California. That’s when she began talking to God.

God, I want to thank you …

The lights went out, emergency lights went on, and searing heat engulfed the stairwell.

… that this is happening to me and not to my family, my parents, my husband.

As she prayed, her attention was drawn to a woman sitting on the stairs, crying. “I’m a single mom. I’ll never see my baby again.”

“It’s okay,” Deanna said, taking the woman’s hand and pulling her up. “Let’s get out of here.”

As they descended seemingly endless flights of stairs, word came that their building had been hit by a jet. Unknowingly, the workers fleeing for their lives had become frontline troops in a secret battle. A catastrophic idea had been released in the world, and now it was spreading, virus-like, claiming victims without remorse.

This was the end, Deanna sensed. Then she realized she had left her purse—along with her ID card—in the conference room. When they find my body, she realized, the searchers won’t know who I am.

Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley’s head of security, had heard the first explosion that came from the north tower. He knew instinctively it was the opening salvo of a new kind of war. A decorated military hero, Rick had spent the past few years studying ideas that were multiplying while remaining largely hidden. In many regions of the world, there was growing resentment toward the United States, he sensed, but Americans for the most part were oblivious to the danger.

Having heard the blast from the adjacent tower, Rick knew he needed to act. He picked up the phone and called the Port Authority office in Midtown Manhattan. He was told to stay calm and keep people in their offices. It’s safer in the building, the official said. Slamming down the receiver, Rick pulled out his cell phone and dialed his best friend, Dan Hill, a war veteran like himself.

“You watching TV?”

“Yes,” Dan said, instantly connecting the dots. Rick was at the World Trade Center.

Exploding in colorful language, Rick rumbled, “They told me not to evacuate. They said it’s just Building One. I told them I’m getting my people out of here.” 1

Rick jabbed the “End” button and grabbed two pieces of equipment. A photo taken that day shows Rick as a heavyset man holding a bullhorn in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other, directing the evacuation of Morgan Stanley’s World Trade Center employees.

The ideas that had shaped Rick’s life came together that day. He became a hero, saving thousands of lives. The people he saved said he was singing the whole time. And in that seemingly random fact—that a hero acted quickly and with great foresight, while singing—we find a clue to how to win the battle that rages around us.

We’re in a Secret Battle

We live in a time of war. There are no soldiers in this battle. There are no landing craft, no bombers flying in formation, no artillery emplacements. Yet attacks occur every minute of every day.

The battle we’re in is a battle of ideas. Ideas are thoughts and suggestions about what we ought to do. Our ideas largely determine our understanding of life’s meaning and guide us in the way we live. Everyone forms ideas about questions such as the following:

• Am I loved? If I were to disappear, would anyone miss me?
• Why do I hurt? Bad things have happened to me. Can I overcome them and find joy?
• Does my life have meaning? Is it possible for me to find direction in life?
• Why can’t we just get along? What will it take for us to stop fighting and find harmony?
• Is there any hope for the world? So many things seem to be going wrong. Are we doomed?

The set of ideas that we form in answer to these questions is called a worldview. A worldview monitors the ideas we are exposed to and isolates the ones that appear to be destructive. But it’s possible to have a worldview that is porous, letting through some of the most damaging ideas. Or a worldview might be skewed in some way, welcoming ideas bent on doing us harm.

The battle of ideas never lets up, so how can we remain standing against such an onslaught? We need a healthy worldview that accurately identifies the ideas that come at us from every direction. We catch ideas from church, from culture, from family, and from friends. Billboards, speeches, songs, video clips, memes, pictures, Facebook posts, and lines from movie dialogue all present us with fragments of ideas that assemble themselves in our minds. If we are to live whole, satisfying lives, we need to do two things. First, we have to catch good ideas, and second, we have to avoid catching bad ones.

Unfortunately, bad ideas are easy to catch because they share a distinguishing characteristic with one of the deadliest things in the physical world.

Bad Ideas Are Like Viruses

The battles we face are more like germ warfare than like military warfare. That’s because bad ideas are like viruses. A virus is genetic material coated by protein. Genetic material is common and ordinarily not harmful. Proteins are necessary for the body to do its work. Separately they’re harmless. When combined, however, they can be deadly.

Bad ideas can multiply out of control, like the spread of a virus that becomes a pandemic. And even though idea viruses cause mass destruction, the battle we face is a secret battle because it’s hard to accurately identify bad ideas until after they have struck. 2

Idea viruses hover around us like secret agents waiting to infiltrate. Is there anything we can do to prevent them from sickening our souls and ruining our lives? I believe there is. That’s what The Secret Battle of Ideas about God is about. We’ll learn how to identify the bad ideas that target us. We’ll learn how to immunize ourselves with good ideas that assure us we are loved, enable us to be patient in suffering, help us find our callings, bring us into peaceful community with others, and replace despair with hope.

Yes, bad ideas are highly contagious. But they can be defeated if we keep one simple thing in mind.

How Bad Ideas Are Defeated

The key to achieving victor...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Invisible Warfare
• Chapter 2: Stopping Bad Ideas
• Chapter 3: Am I Loved?
• Chapter 4: Love Never Fails
• Chapter 5: Why Do I Hurt?
• Chapter 6: We Shall Overcome
• Chapter 7: Does My Life Have Meaning?
• Chapter 8: Hearing the Call
• Chapter 9: Why Can’t We Just Get Along?
• Chapter 10: Peace Wins
• Chapter 11: Is There Any Hope for the World?
• Chapter 12: Hope Endures
• Chapter 13: Is God Even Relevant?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes