The following is an excerpt from an brief commentary on 2 Corinthians 10:5 written by Michael Billings, two years before his homecoming into Glory:

“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5

It is of vital importance that if we are going to cast down every thought that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, said Paul; then we must bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. An ultimate commitment to Christ covers the entire range of human activity, including every aspect of our intellectual endeavor. To reason in a way that does not recognize this is to transgress the first and great commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with... all your mind.” We, as Christians, must reason in such a way that Christ and His Standard “might have preeminence” (Col 1:18). If God did indeed create heaven and earth and all things therein, then nothing can have meaning or interpretation apart from God. Inasmuch as all things came into being by His eternal decree, so thus also all things must only have meaning in terms of His eternal decrees. Nothing can have meaning in and of itself, because nothing exists in and of itself. Every fact is a God created fact and therefore, for us to have a valid interpretation of any fact, we must first go to the Author of that fact for the true definition. As R. J. Rushdoony states, “If we are to have coherence in our experience, there must be a correspondence with our experience to the eternally coherent experience of God.” It is not possible for man to have true knowledge about anything apart from the God of Scripture. We must remember that, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prv.1: 7). Those who have no fear of the Lord are completely incapable of true knowledge. Greg Bahnsen put it this way, “From beginning to end, man’s reasoning about anything whatsoever (even reasoning about reasoning itself) is unintelligible or incoherent unless the Truth of the Christian Scriptures is presupposed.” Sin has permeated and completely vitiated the human personality, his intellect and logic, as well as his will, rendering him incapable of any neutral intellectual common ground. It is for this reason, as Van Til states, that “men must totally depend on the Scriptures altogether for their interpretation of reality.” When men trust in any other standard apart from Christ’s Word, they become “vain in their reasoning... Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Rom1: 21,22).

Everyone has a standard that they deem as infallible and ultimate that is used in their intellectual organization of “truths”, which determines their interpretation of reality. Every man is forced to believe either that there are self-contained facts, or that there is a self-contained Creator. Absolutely no thought is neutral. It will either stand at enmity with God, or it will be working to establish His kingdom. There is no middle ground. When the men of this age declare, self-consciously or subconsciously, that man is autonomously independent, or his own god in any area of life, exalting his own finite knowledge above the infinite knowledge of the Most High; we cannot suffer to do any less that that which the Potter has commanded: We must expose the foolishness of the fool, we must “ridicule the ridiculous”, by proclaiming the Lord’s sovereignty over all the affairs of men, the Creator/creature distinction, the ontological Trinity as the ground for all secondary being and reasoning, the self-attesting authority of Scripture, the impossibility of neutrality, and the illegitimate ethical and moral dualism presented by the natural law theory. We must answer these men according to their man-centered foolishness, and by God’s grace, as Calvin said, “stop his obstreperous mouth” with the only authoritative Standard. Greg Bahnsen stated in a commentary on this verse, that, “We must challenge the unbeliever to give a cogent and credible account of how he knows anything whatsoever, given his espoused presupposition about reality, truth, and man.” And once we have cleared the beach of all it’s man centered debris; we must seek to establish in it’s place as our first presupposition the complete self-consciousness of God, and the consequent sole legitimacy of analogical and derivative reasoning on the part of man, because “you can’t beat something with nothing...”