Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Lie
Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Lie
by John MacDonald
by John MacDonald
No, the title is not missing a letter. Rick Warren is lying to you. Does Rick Warren know whether there is a God or not? I don’t know, but he’s convinced over thirty million people that not only does he know there is a God, he can delineate the essence of His message into a neat little book – simultaneously giving you the meaning of life. A massively boring read, Warren’s central thesis is easily deconstructed by pointing out that there are contradictory tendencies in the bible toward asserting mutually exclusive accounts of God’s faculty of understanding in relation to human existence.
But how could there be no purpose? After all, Jeremiah 1:5 says "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." Doesn’t this mean that God knows your life before you were born, and has a purpose for it? No, it means nothing of the sort. God set the character in the book of Jeremiah aside for this knowledge, not you. We see, for instance, a counter-example in the book of Job, where God had no prior knowledge of Job’s life, to the extent that Satan moved God to give Job a life that God had never even considered before Satan had caused him to do it: Job 2:3 “And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.”
What does this mean? Assuming there is a God, and it is a Judeau-Christian type of God and not, say, a God of war that rewards people for gaining power, you could even be as good a man as Job, and God probably didn’t look into your future before you were born and foresee the events in which you fulfilled your purpose. Believing anything else is pure arrogance, or even psychosis, because it is not in the text (unless you want to hold one part of the bible is inconsistent with another based on disparate account of whether God is all-knowing or not). It’s like a Muslim man believing his wife should be veiled, when the only thing the Koran teaches is that that the wives of the Prophet should be veiled – because you are believing God set you apart like the character in Jeremiah.
But how could there be no purpose? After all, Jeremiah 1:5 says "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." Doesn’t this mean that God knows your life before you were born, and has a purpose for it? No, it means nothing of the sort. God set the character in the book of Jeremiah aside for this knowledge, not you. We see, for instance, a counter-example in the book of Job, where God had no prior knowledge of Job’s life, to the extent that Satan moved God to give Job a life that God had never even considered before Satan had caused him to do it: Job 2:3 “And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.”
What does this mean? Assuming there is a God, and it is a Judeau-Christian type of God and not, say, a God of war that rewards people for gaining power, you could even be as good a man as Job, and God probably didn’t look into your future before you were born and foresee the events in which you fulfilled your purpose. Believing anything else is pure arrogance, or even psychosis, because it is not in the text (unless you want to hold one part of the bible is inconsistent with another based on disparate account of whether God is all-knowing or not). It’s like a Muslim man believing his wife should be veiled, when the only thing the Koran teaches is that that the wives of the Prophet should be veiled – because you are believing God set you apart like the character in Jeremiah.
