The Folly of Felix and his Character

It is sometimes said that people don’t believe in God because they don’t want his righteousness interfering with their sins and pleasures. I don’t think that’s always true. In fact, I’m not even certain that it’s mostly true – at least not whenever we are talking about genuine non-belief. In my experience, when people really don’t believe in God it is because they just don’t believe in him.  They’re married to a perverted over-reliance on empirical evidence. They’re uncomfortable with discerning the nature of things using only pure logic, and they have a rather illogical bias against considering supernatural explanations even when those seem to be the best explanations. Ironically, (and sadly) they do have a strong faith – it's just placed in nothing higher than men and manmade processes. For all of their purported love of logic, they seem only to rely on it when it is in conjunction with direct sensual evidence – unless, of course, they’re mathematicians. However, when people reject God, well, that’s a different thing altogether.  Sometimes it is because they have a painful bitterness born from the cruelties of a fallen world. That world deceptively reinforces their false sense of his absence. Those cases are harrowing, tragic, and challenging.  But most of the time, I’ve found that people really do believe in God at some level, but reject him (perhaps with feigned disbelief) because they don’t want his righteousness interfering in their pleasures or with their mistaken impression that they have a kind of comprehensive control over their own ultimate destiny. 

Acts 24 seems to illustrate this rejection process. In the latter portion of Acts, Paul was falsely accused of religious and cultural heresy by Asian Jews in Jerusalem.  This led to riots in which he had to be rescued by Roman military authorities.  When those authorities could not resolve the issue they took him to the Roman governor, Felix at Caesarea. Paul defended himself against those unjust accusations before the governor. Even though Felix had an “accurate knowledge” of the Christianity of his day, he chose not to make a decision regarding Paul’s situation and shelved it for later (Acts 24:22). In fact, he never rendered a decision at all, but left it for someone else to figure out years later because he didn’t want the political fallout that would surely come from angering the Jewish leadership among whom Rome had charged him to keep the peace  (Acts 24:27). But there is an interesting thread of details in Felix’s story. Sometime after he denied a verdict in Paul’s case, the governor, who had both a Jewish wife (who he had taken from another man) and an accurate understanding of Christianity summoned the apostle for discussions (Acts 24:24-27).  The persuasive, logical, clear-thinking Paul conversed with him about faith in Jesus Christ, and oriented those discussions toward explorations of righteousness and self-control. The bible says this alarmed Felix, so he sent him away. But he continued to speak with Paul often in hopes of some kind of bribe.  A surrender to God would certainly have interfered with Felix’s desires and goals.  But belief in God strengthened Paul. He certainly would have been able to find the money for a bribe, but chose instead to stay the course for the mission of the savior he trusted.