Be Not Children in Understanding – Sunday, August 16, 1942
In times of stress and disturbance, there are always those who rightly know that the ills of the world are the direct result of man’s having broken the laws of God—having broken the rules of life. But there are also those who, in such times, cry out that God doesn’t exist, because if He did, He would not have permitted men to bring about such unthinkable conditions—those who, in their resentment against the evils of the day, would eliminate God from the universe.
A highly accredited philosopher once made the statement “that man could neither prove nor disprove the existence of God.” But even a philosopher can be wrong. There are those throughout the ages, even down to our time, whose testimonies concerning the personal reality of God are recorded and documented and witnessed as convincingly as any of the facts of history. But at least the last part of that statement is true—it is true that man cannot disprove the existence of God.
The universe is too big and there are too many unseen things in our own world, to say nothing of beyond our world, for the puny presumption of man to say that out there in all that great beyond, which is largely a closed book to us, there is no God. We have a hard enough time finding out what there is in a drop of water, what there is in a particle of dust, what it is that makes a kernel of wheat, without presuming to encompass the entire universe and eliminate therefrom the power and direction and personality of God—and they who would do so somehow remind us of the child who does not believe what he has not seen—the child who says that there is no broad ocean, because he has never seen beyond the land, the child who says that no such thing exists, because there is no such thing in his own backyard.
It was such children, although they were men in years, who once were sure that the world was flat, and who ridiculed and stoned and burned those who believed otherwise. It was such children who once believed all manner of strange things, which now, in the light of greater truth, seem sometimes amusing, but more often tragic. It was perhaps such as these to whom in the days of Paul he wrote: Brethren, be not children in understanding . . .but in understanding be men.” (I Corinthians 14:20). And so, again, in this, our troubled day, to those who would eliminate God from the earth and from the heavens and from their lives, because things have gone wrong, because the inhabitants of earth have made a sick world, it should be said again: “Brethren, be not children in understanding … in understanding be men.”
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Aug. 16, 1942, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright-1942.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
August 16, 1942
Broadcast Number 0,678