The Triune God: The Necessary Foundation for Life

For most people reading this, there would a be a common experience in school of learning Euclidean geometry as part of our mathematical education. Part of that study would have been a group of axioms, i. e., principles which are unprovable, but are essential for building the rest of our geometrical system. Those axioms are then used to build and prove everything else.

All of life works the same way. Simply in order to live, we have to make certain unprovable assumptions, such as that we exist, that the things we sense in the world around us are really there, etc. Without those assumptions, everything degenerates into irrationality, incomprehensibility, and futility. We would not be able to function as thinking creatures.

The Bible assumes one principle as fundamental to all others, such that without it, again, we degenerate into irrationality, incomprehensibility, and futility: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7). It furthermore condemns as a fool anyone who rejects that fundamental axiom: "How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord" (Proverbs 1:22, 29). Any worldview built on any foundation other than the triune God of the Bible is built on a false basis, and must, therefore, collapse.

Notice that this is something that the writers of the Bible didn't consider to necessitate proof. It was something so self-evident that to deny it is considered to be foolish. Just as a mathematician who denies the axioms of geometry, the man who denies the most fundamental principle of the real world will necessarily end up in irrationality, incomprehensibility, and futility. Is this not what we see happening in our modern world? As Westerners have replaced our Christian heritage with humanism and mysticism, we have seen only growing social breakdown, such as violence and suicide. We have demonstrated the truth of Solomon's assertions in Proverbs. Jesus, too, well described this form of spiritual breakdown: "Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand" (Matthew 7:26). And the sand is being washed away.