A FRENCH RESURRECTION

Voltaire was an 18th century French philosopher and deist who rebelled against the corrupt Roman Catholicism of his day. But lest we think of him as someone who would agree with Martin Luther who opposed Catholicism based upon New Testament doctrine, Voltaire wanted to break Catholicism's hold on people by attacking New Testament doctrine.

AN EARLY VERSION OF DAN BROWN

He attacked the doctrines of the Trinity and the deity of Christ. In his opposition to the deity of Christ, he conveniently overlooked the fact that from the earliest writings of the faith, Christ was declared to be God in the flesh. Voltaire promoted the false idea that the church, over hundreds of years built Christ up to become God incarnate.

 Voltaire also overlooked the fact that the church councils which met about the deity of Christ did so because His  deity was being attacked, not to "make Him God." Those meetings affirmed the doctrine of His deity; they didn't manufacture it nor vote it into existence. They convened to refute by a formal statement those who said He wasn't.

IMMORAL MOTIVATION?

Perhaps there was a hidden motivation in Voltaire's attack. He didn't like the high ethic of Christianity. Henry A. Stimson, writing in 1904 said:

"[Voltaire's attack] is by common consent the most unspiritual, immoral, and irreligious of them all. The 'infamous thing,' as he termed it, against which his main assault was dealt, was simply continence and chastity. To him chastity was the mystic key of the Christian holiness.  

"Voltaire and his friends held that chastity is no virtue at all, but generally an impediment to free human happiness. This, in the testimony of the historian to-day, is the underlying motive of the line of attack upon Christianity which has never ceased from that time to this, and has lost none of its virulence."

VOLTAIRE, THE MAN OF REASON?

Voltaire furnishes us with a classic example of the unreasonableness of unbelief when he wrote: "If in the market of Paris, before the eyes of a thousand men and before my own eyes, a miracle should be performed, I would much rather disbelieve the two thousand eyes and my own two, than believe it.”

A FRENCH EASTER

Voltaire was a member of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, named in honor of the mythological muses, a Masonic Lodge in Paris. It was a lodge consisting of the so-called "free thinkers," the greatest writers and artists. When Voltaire died, the Lodge of the Nine Sisters held a memorial service for him a few months after his passing.

They draped the lodge in black, using only candles for its dimly lit illumination. They sang songs and gave speeches. Then a flame of light revealed a painting of Voltaire called an apotheosis which is

the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god. The artist had depicted Voltaire emerging from his tomb to be presented in heaven by the goddesses of Truth and Benevolence. 

Then a member of the lodge took the Masonic wreath from his head and solemnly laid it at the feet of the painting. That man was Benjamin Franklin. (from Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson)

 SUCH IS THE WAY OF FALLEN MAN

Such is the way of fallen man, who, in his rebellion, continues to believe the lie of the serpent in the Garden: "You shall be like God." Man continues to seek to deify himself and others, a deification which will culminate in the anti-Christ who will demand the worship of the world.

The culminating book in the Bible has a detailed word for those who hold to the apotheosis of any man: "From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.” (Rev. 19)