Funny, right?

The most hilarious commercial ever was the JCPenney doghouse ad. A man gives his wife a vacuum cleaner as an anniversary present and ends up in an underground cave folding laundry with other men from all walks of life who have given their wives thoughtless gifts. The clueless new arrival asks a recidivist named Donny if anyone has ever gotten out. Donny replies, “Only one man ever got out—Arnold.”

The old-timer brings the newbie to a remote place where he carefully dislodges a fake rock from the low curved ceiling to reveal behind it the photo of a man and his happy wife posing romantically. The two inmates study the picture in bafflement, the camera slowly fixing on a diamond gracing the woman’s neck. Donny finally says, “Nobody knows how he did it.”

Clueless, right? This is what it’s like to watch overeducated men on highly monetized podcasts discuss the great vexing issues of life. Every explanation under the sun is seriously considered—every explanation, that is, except the spiritual one that is staring them in the face.

Take, for example, the beating of your heart. The average person’s heart will beat 2.5 billion times, without interruption. That’s kind of amazing! I asked a biology professor from the University of Pennsylvania what keeps the heart pumping. She said the electrical system. OK, I thought, I’ll just back up my question one step: What keeps the heart’s electrical system going? She gave me a puzzled look, as if I were in remedial science 101: “Well, nothing. It’s spontaneous.” End of conversation.

The one possibility that will not be countenanced is that God keeps the heart beating. That “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). That “when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust” (Psalm 104:29; Job 34:14-15). And yet this accounting for the data is a darned sight better than, “Well nothing. It’s spontaneous.”

Or take the question of Israel. Why is a country the size of New Jersey and half the size of Estonia always in the news? Always a cultural wedge in continents nowhere near the Middle East? Intensely loved or intensely hated by the whole world? The country most legislated against in the United Nations? If American national elections were torn asunder over Estonia year after year, would no one be curious enough to get to the bottom of the mystery?

The one possibility that will not be countenanced is the spiritual one that Israel is unique among the nations because God chose it as His vehicle for His salvation plan. “At that time Jerusalem shall be called the throne of the Lord” (Jeremiah 3:17). No wonder Satan keeps kicking up dust about it. It would be puzzling to me if Israel were not the most controversial nation in the world.

Or, take the question of how it is that the conditions of planet Earth are uniquely suited to life. Our intellectual elites outdo themselves here, going as far as to posit the desperate (and unscientific) straw-grasping “multiverse” theory. If they really subscribed to Occam’s razor and believed that the least convoluted explanation is the best one, they would say that the same Intelligent Designer who made plants and animals sensibly made their Earthly home to conform to their life requirements. God calls it obvious (Romans 1:20).

Or, take the age-old question of where evil comes from. We are lectured about evil stemming from environmental causes, or poorly administered justice or resources. Or that evil is the natural consequence of competitiveness. Or is a psychological state resulting from a deprived childhood. Or represents the underdeveloped evolution of human consciousness. Or is merely the absence of good. Or is nothing but a social construct.

None of these fits the data better than the Bible’s Edenic origin story for evil: “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes” (Ecclesiastes 7:29). And that when tares appear in a beautiful field of wheat, “an Enemy has done this” (Matthew 13:28). Anyone who has ever done evil, or been the recipient of evil (which is all of us), knows in his bones that it is a thing too dark to be explained sociologically.

Today I was reading about how Canadian evangelist Charles Templeton parted ways with Billy Graham in their crusades. He ended up an atheist after he enrolled in a university to get a higher education and lost his faith there.

Be not greatly impressed with the pontifications of the celebrity pundits. “Where is the wisdom of the wise?” God laughs at it. Just like I always have a good laugh over the JCPenney doghouse commercial.