You Are Not God: The Crisis of Our Age

The greatest problem of our time is not inflation, not politics, not even the open celebration of abominations that once stayed in the shadows. The greatest problem is this: every man does what is right in his own eyes, because no one respects the authority God has placed over us. We have made ourselves gods. We respect no one else unless they agree with every dot and iota of our own thoughts, we recognize no authority other than our own, and slowly destroy ourselves upon our own altars.

Judges 21:25 ends one of the darkest books in Scripture with that exact diagnosis. There was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. The result was chaos, idolatry, rape, civil war, and near extinction of a tribe. Look around Houghton County, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or the broader American landscape in 2026. Same story, different costumes. Autonomy is the air we breathe. “My truth.” “My body.” “My feelings.” “I decide.” Parents defer to children. Churches soft-pedal sin so no one leaves. Civil magistrates wink at lawlessness. Husbands refuse to lead, wives refuse to submit, elders refuse to discipline, and the flock starves while the shepherds chase relevance.

This is not progress. This is the ancient rebellion of Genesis 3 dressed up in modern clothes. The serpent’s whisper—“You will be like God”—has become the creed of a generation. We do not merely break God’s law; we dethrone Him and install ourselves. And a people who refuse to acknowledge any authority higher than their own appetites are already dead men walking.

Nietzsche and Empedocles are zombies living around us.

This is not new. It has a long, proud history. Consider two figures who bookend the modern impulse to dethrone God and enthrone man.

Empedocles of Acragas (c. 492–432 BC), the pre-Socratic philosopher-poet-physician, mixed science, mysticism, and self-exaltation. He taught that the cosmos is ruled by the opposing forces of Love and Strife, cycling endlessly. Ancient accounts claim he threw himself into Mount Etna’s crater, leaving behind only a bronze sandal, to prove he had become a god—or at least to vanish in a way that suggested divinity. Whether legend or fact, the story captures the spirit: man will leap into fire rather than remain a creature under the true God. He would rather invent his own cosmic drama than submit.

Empedocles of Acragas (c. 492–432 BC), the pre-Socratic philosopher-poet-physician, mixed science, mysticism, and self-exaltation. He taught that the cosmos is ruled by the opposing forces of Love and Strife, cycling endlessly. Ancient accounts claim he threw himself into Mount Etna’s crater, leaving behind only a bronze sandal, to prove he had become a god—or at least to vanish in a way that suggested divinity. Whether legend or fact, the story captures the spirit: man will leap into fire rather than remain a creature under the true God. He would rather invent his own cosmic drama than submit.

Fast-forward more than two millennia to Friedrich Nietzsche. In the late nineteenth century he announced what Empedocles had only gestured toward: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” With the Christian God declared obsolete, man must create his own values. The Übermensch (Overman) is the one who has the will to power, who forges meaning out of the abyss, who becomes a law unto himself. Nietzsche did not invent autonomy; he simply named the project that Empedocles embodied and that our generation now lives out daily—“my truth,” “my body,” “my feelings,” “I decide.”

Both men, in different centuries, illustrate the same ancient lie from Genesis 3: “You will be like God.” The serpent’s whisper has become the air we breathe. Parents defer to children. Husbands refuse headship. Elders soft-pedal discipline. Magistrates wink at lawlessness. Churches trade the fear of the Lord for therapeutic affirmation. The result is a dying generation: anxiety, broken homes, sexual confusion, addiction, despair. Autonomy promised freedom; it delivered slavery to lust and death.

Fruit of False Philosophies

The fruits are everywhere. Anxiety and despair. Broken homes and fatherless children. Sexual confusion sold as freedom. Addiction. A culture that cannot tell male from female yet claims the right to redefine reality itself. These are not random misfortunes. They are the natural harvest of a people who have decided the Creator’s design is optional and that every authority higher than their own appetites is suspect. A dying generation feels the weight of this even while it denies the cause.

When man decides there is no King above him, the first fruit is the collapse of meaning itself. Empedocles’ endless cycle of Love and Strife left no final purpose—only perpetual becoming and dissolving. Nietzsche’s death of God left a vacuum that the will to power was supposed to fill. What we actually get is a generation that cannot answer the simplest questions: Why am I here? What is a man? What is a woman? What is marriage? What is good? Without a Creator who speaks with authority, every answer becomes a personal preference, and every preference eventually collides with someone else’s. The result is not liberation but exhaustion. Young people scroll endlessly, chase experiences, switch identities, and still wake up empty. Rates of anxiety, depression, and despair climb year after year because the human soul was never designed to carry the weight of being its own god. The creature cannot bear the glory that belongs only to the Creator.

The second fruit is the disintegration of the home. When every individual is the final authority, the natural order of husband, wife, and children becomes optional—or oppressive. Fathers abdicate leadership because “equality” has redefined headship as tyranny. Mothers refuse the glory of helping and nurturing because independence has been sold as the highest good. Children are raised to follow their feelings rather than obey, and then we wonder why they grow into adults who cannot submit to any authority—employer, magistrate, or God. Fatherlessness multiplies. Divorce becomes routine. The home, which God designed as the first school of order and love, turns into a battleground of competing wills. The next generation inherits not stability but the same restless autonomy that destroyed the previous one.

The third fruit is the celebration of what Scripture calls unnatural. Empedocles’ cosmic flux and Nietzsche’s value-creation both dissolve fixed created realities. Male and female become fluid constructs. Sexual desire becomes identity. The body is no longer a gift to be stewarded but raw material to be reshaped according to the sovereign self. What follows is predictable: the normalization of sodomy and lesbianism, the chemical and surgical mutilation of confused children, the redefinition of marriage into a temporary contract of mutual satisfaction. These are not marks of progress. They are the logical end of a philosophy that has no room for a Creator who made them male and female and called it very good. A culture that cannot tell a man from a woman has already lost the ability to tell right from wrong.

The fourth fruit is the erosion of every lesser authority. If there is no God, then parents, elders, and magistrates have no higher warrant for their office. Discipline in the home is labeled abuse. Church discipline is called unloving. Civil law is treated as optional whenever it conflicts with personal desire. The result is not freedom but a soft anarchy in which the strong prey on the weak, the loud drown out the quiet, and the addicted are left to destroy themselves while society pretends that enabling is compassion. Addiction itself flourishes because the empty self needs something—anything—to fill the void left by the absent God. Substances, screens, pornography, and endless entertainment become the new sacraments of a people who refuse the true Bread of Life.

These are the fruits of Empedocles’ leap and Nietzsche’s proclamation. They are not distant theories. They are the air our children breathe, the water our communities drink, the soil in which Houghton County and the wider culture are rooted. A generation that has declared itself god is dying under the weight of its own crown.

The True and Living God

Yet God has never left the world without a remedy. From the first moment the serpent’s lie entered the garden, the Lord began to solve the problem of man’s self-exaltation. He did not leave Adam and Eve in their fig-leaf autonomy. He sought them out, exposed their rebellion, pronounced judgment, and then clothed them with the skins of a sacrifice while promising that the Seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. That same pattern runs through every generation.

To Abraham He offered a covenant of pure grace—an inheritance not earned by the strength of the self but received by faith. To Israel under the Law He showed the depth of their inability and pointed them forward to a better sacrifice. Through the prophets He called a stiff-necked people again and again to turn from their own ways and return to Him. In the fullness of time He sent His Son. Jesus Christ did not come as one more philosopher offering a better system of self-rule. He came as the true King who obeyed where every man had rebelled, who bore the full weight of our autonomy on the cross, and who rose to give new life to all who trust in Him.

What God offers is not a self-improvement program. He offers regeneration—the new birth that takes a dead heart and makes it alive. He offers justification by faith alone, so that the rebel is declared righteous not by climbing some moral ladder but by receiving the perfect obedience of Christ. He offers adoption, bringing former enemies into His household as sons and daughters. He offers the restoration of true order: husbands who lead in sacrificial love, wives who flourish under headship, children who learn obedience, churches that practice discipline and care, communities that submit to rightful authority because they first submit to Christ. He offers freedom—not the counterfeit freedom of doing whatever is right in our own eyes, but the liberty of those whose wills have been set free to love and obey the true God.

This is the same offer extended to every generation. The gospel has never changed. Whether in the days of the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the Reformers, or our own hour in the Keweenaw, the call remains identical: repent and believe. Stop doing what is right in your own eyes. Turn from the empty throne of the self and bow to the risen Lord. The God who solved the problem for Adam, for Abraham, for David, for Paul, and for countless saints across the centuries is the same God who still solves it today. He does not wait for us to clean ourselves up. He invades the dead with life, the proud with humility, the autonomous with glad submission.

At Christ the King Church we do not soft-pedal the diagnosis, nor do we water down the cure. We open the Word without apology so that the Law stops every mouth and the Gospel raises the dead. Expository preaching holds up the mirror of Scripture until men and women see their autonomy for what it is—rebellion against the living God. Then the same Word announces the finished work of Christ. Sovereign grace regenerates. Christ alone atones. Faith alone receives. The heart that once exalted itself finds rest in the true King. Joy replaces despair. Holy fear replaces arrogance. Love for God and neighbor replaces self-worship.

The Path to Reconcilation

If the weight of these truths has begun to settle on you—if you recognize the emptiness of living as your own god, the damage done in your home, your relationships, or your own soul—then hear this clearly: the way back is open. God does not leave you guessing. Scripture marks out the path of reconciliation with precision and with mercy.

First, you must repent. That means more than feeling sorry. It means a decisive turning. Stop defending the right to do what is right in your own eyes. Confess that your autonomy has been rebellion against the living God. Name the specific ways you have rejected His design—whether in the home, in sexuality, in the refusal of authority, or in the quiet pride that says you know better than your Creator. Repentance is not a vague spiritual mood. It is the Spirit-wrought change of mind that hates the sin that once felt like freedom and turns toward the God you have offended.

Second, you must believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. Trust that He lived the perfect life of obedience you never could, that He died under the judgment your self-worship deserved, and that He rose again so that all who come to Him might have life. You do not clean yourself up first. You come as you are—dead, proud, empty—and receive the righteousness of Another by faith alone. This is the only door. There is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.

Third, you must submit to the authorities God has placed in your life and take your place in the household of God. If you are a husband, begin to lead your wife and children with the sacrificial love of Christ. If you are a wife, begin to respect and follow your husband’s headship. If you are a child still under your parents’ roof, obey them in the Lord. And for every one of us, join yourself to a faithful church. Do not remain an isolated individual inventing your own spirituality. Come under the care of elders who will preach the Word, administer the sacraments, practice loving discipline, and shepherd your soul. Reconciliation with God is never a private transaction that leaves you free to continue as your own master. It brings you into the ordered life of Christ’s body.

This is where we at Christ the King stand ready to walk with you. We will not flatter you or leave you in vague spirituality. We will open the Scriptures with you, week by week, so that the truth continues to expose and heal. We will pray with you and for you. We will visit your home. We will help you take the first concrete steps of obedience—whether that means reconciling with a spouse, establishing order with your children, fleeing sexual sin, or simply learning to sit under the Word with a teachable heart. We will call you to baptism if you have never publicly identified with Christ, and to the Lord’s Table as a regular means of grace. We will practice the kind of church discipline that restores the repentant and protects the flock. In short, we will labor to lead you out of the isolation of autonomy and into the glad submission of sons and daughters who know their Father and their King.

The path is not complicated, but it is costly. It requires the death of the self that has been playing god. Yet it leads to life. The same God who sought Adam in the garden, who called Abraham out of idolatry, who restored David after catastrophic failure, and who transformed Saul of Tarsus is still seeking, still calling, still restoring today. He has not changed. His gospel has not changed. The invitation remains the same for this generation as for every generation before it.

Come. Do not delay. The throne of self is a heavy crown, and it is crushing you. Lay it down. Acknowledge that you are not God. Trust the One who is. Then walk with us as we learn together what it means to live under His good and gracious rule.

We meet every Lord’s Day at 11:00 a.m. Reach out. Come talk. Let us help you take the next step. The door is open, and the King is kind.

Soli Deo Gloria.