May 14. Ideas have consequences.

The aim of our charge is love.

1 Timothy 1 5.

Victor Frankel was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau

during the Second World War.

As a Jewish professor of neurology and psychiatry,

he became world-renowned for his book,

Man's Search for Meaning, which sold over 8 million copies.

In it, he unfolds the essence of his philosophy that came to being called logotherapy,

namely that the most fundamental human motive is to find meaning in life.

He observed in the horrors of the concentration camps that man can endure almost any how of life if he has a

why. But the quote that stirred me recently was this. I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers

of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidenik were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin,

but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

In other words, ideas have consequences, consequences that bless or destroy.

People's behavior, good and bad, does not come out of nowhere.

It comes from prevailing views of reality that take root in the mind and bring forth good or evil. One of the ways that the Bible makes plain,

the truth that ideas have practical consequences is by saying things like whatever was written

in former days was written that we might have hope.

The ideas presented in the scriptures produce the practical consequence of hope.

Again, Paul says,

the aim of our charge is love, 1. Timothy 1.5.

...