Sermon Central
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If There Is No God, Who Decides?
Contributed by Martin Spoelstra on Mar 6, 2026 (message contributor)
In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a short parable that still echoes through Western culture.
He imagines a man running into a crowded marketplace in broad daylight, holding a lantern. He cries out, “Where is God? I will tell you—we have killed Him. You and I. We are His murderers.”
The crowd laughs at him. They don’t feel the weight of what he is saying. But the madman continues. If God is gone, he says, then we have wiped away the horizon. We have unchained the earth from the sun. There is no longer a fixed reference point—no transcendent source of truth, no divine author of history, no ultimate moral law above us.
And then he says the most sobering line of all: If God is dead, we must now become gods ourselves.
• We must create meaning.
• We must decide good and evil.
• We must guide history toward a goal of our own making.
Nietzsche was not celebrating atheism. He was diagnosing Western culture. He believed that the Enlightenment had already removed God from public life and replaced Him with a new faith—faith in human autonomy and reason.
The question he raised still stands: If there is no God above us, who decides what is real? What is good? What is human? What is life worth? Because here is the truth: when we remove God, we do not become neutral. We become value-makers.
And that is exactly what Scripture warns us about.The madman ran through the marketplace asking where God had gone. But the deeper question is not whether God is gone. The deeper question is this: Who sits on the throne of our hearts?
Because culture is never neutral. It always carries values, stories, and loyalties that compete for us. The world offers cravings and pride and self-exaltation. But John reminds us: “This world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.”
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