“Turn around, don’t drown,” came the mechanical voice over the National Weather Service flash flood warning. The Texas Hill Country is very prone to flash flooding, and despite signs and weather announcements, people still attempt to drive through rising water over flooded roads. The lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals of nature will have deadly consequences.

Whoever coined the phrase “ignorance is bliss” was obviously delusional. Ignorance can be costly. It has been costly to the Church of the living God. Biblical illiteracy has reached epidemic proportions. Noted evangelical theologian and President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary R. Albert Mohler addressed this in an article titled “The Scandal of Biblical Illiteracy: It’s Our Problem.” He cited a Barna Research Group study that was discouraging, to say the least. Eighty-two percent of Americans wrongly believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is a Bible verse. Eighty-one percent of born-again Christians also held that view, a statistical tie. Other views were equally troubling. Fifty percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife and that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Mohler summarized by saying, “An individual who believes that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ will find salvation by grace and justification by faith to be alien concepts.”

Why is this important? The Apostle Paul tells us, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17 ESV). Jesus, the living Word of God, has through the Holy Spirit, given us “all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3 KJV). This is what King Jesus was referring to when he summarized the Sermon on the Mount. It is by the keeping of His Word that we build our life on the Solid Rock.

Conversely, Jesus described what would happen to those who ignored His Word. “And 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. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:26-27 ESV). Biblically illiterate Christianity is a house upon the sand, and the flash flood of today’s culture is rocking the foundations of the evangelical Church.

I believe the prophet Amos saw this day. “‘Behold, the days are coming,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘when I will send a famine on the land — not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord’” (Amos 8:11 ESV). Mohler’s advice to the Church? “This generation must get deadly serious about the problem of biblical illiteracy, or a frighteningly large number of Americans — Christians included — will go on thinking that Sodom and Gomorrah lived happily ever after.” To quote the National Weather Service, “turn around, don’t drown!”

What say ye, Man of Valor?

Semper Fidelis!