Updated : 21/08/2001

Freed From Intellectual Bondage
By Dr Stephen Goh

I was born into a family steeped in ancestral worship and among twelve brothers and sisters I was the most rebellious. From a young age, I did not want to follow my mother in her Taoist practices, nor did I believe in God or ghosts. In my secondary school days, leftist thinking gained popularity and I was attracted to it. I became entrenched in Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and I grew to detest superstitious practices and regarded them as foolish and backward. Evolutionism, taken into my rebellious nature, was like adding fuel to fire. I became very opposed to religion and superstitions. 

However what made me detest religion most was my own wife's superstitious beliefs which made my life miserable.

Our life was so inhibited by all sorts of superstitions that it was a mental torture. I hated to the extreme the hypocrisy, greed, futility and deception of traditional religion. But just when I was tormented to the utmost by religion, it became the turning point in my life; God rescued me from mental torture and led me and my wife to lie beside restful, quiet waters.

It was thirty years since I had first come to Kuala Lumpur from Singapore to engage in retail business with my wife working alongside. We had spent all our time in the business and thereby neglected the proper upbringing of our children. 

As my wife's brother was in England, we sent our eldest daughter there to further her studies. He was a fellowship leader in a church and invited our daughter to join some of the group activities. She led a well-disciplined lifestyle, took her lessons seriously and took part in the Bible study and prayer meetings. After she accepted the Lord and became a Christian, her outlook and values changed and she became more confident and her studies improved. 

My second daughter had studied law and she too accepted the Lord. Our children had become Christians first and kept on praying for the two of us to believe in the Lord Jesus. Our second daughter persisted in sharing the gospel with her mother, urging her to accept the Lord as Saviour. It was difficult task but nevertheless, my wife finally accepted the Lord as Saviour.

As my wife and I were too busy doing business we did not spend time with our third and only son and as a result we spoilt him. He was naughty even as a young child. He later became addicted to computer games and lost interest in his studies. Our fourth child was equally trouble.

We suffered much for our neglect in disciplining our children early but because, one after another, they became Christians, their lives were radically transformed. From problem children they became new persons striving for excellence. My family experienced first-hand the miraculous power which faith in Jesus brought.

As I grew older and read more, my thinking began to change. On top of that I also came into contact with Christians from different walks of life. All these brethren gave me a fresh understanding of Christianity.

On Father's Day one year, my eldest daughter gave me a Bible and I started to read it.

I started going to Church and listened to sermons and took part in Bible Studies. Doubts which I used to harbour began to be clarified. With my children's prayer for me I finally came to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour.

Today this faith in Jesus has changed my thinking and behaviour. It has also transformed us from a typical city family of quarrelling parents and problem children into a blessed and joyful Christian family. Of course, this did not happen overnight.. What happened was that this faith in Jesus gave us an example to follow, a hope to strive for and the Holy Spirit to enable us to gradually transform our lives for the better. 

Misconception had caused me to reject Christianity, but a proper understanding by the wisdom of God through the Holy Spirit helped me to accept it. The blessings it has brought to my family are beyond all expectations! 

Praise God!

After having spent 11 years at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States and obtained more than half a dozen qualifications in law with double first class degrees, 3 masters and a doctorate I thought I had arrived. In reality, I was only in the state of becoming despite the scholastic honours and achievements and status to which I was elevated. Until I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Saviour, I did know that I had not arrived and suffered from what was expressed so clearly in the Book of Ecclesiates, 1:18, “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

I was taught and then believed that a man’s intellect could meet most of his physical and emotional needs. By associating with the intellectuals at Hull, Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard in the 1960’s, I was also confident that humanity could reverse the conventional wisdom of man’s fate described by the philosophers as “nasty, brutish and short”. Men like Bertrand Russell, an agnostic, taught us that we did not need God because we could not know nor understand who He was. Humanists on the other hand assured us that man guided by reason was sufficient unto himself and that progress in knowledge alone would automatically bring about a better world.

That was essentially my belief at age 30 when I was about to return to Malaysia, get married and start a career. By then, however, I had started to reassess the teachings of Bertrand Russell and the humanists, as I was not happy with their failure to put things right in the world. It was clear to me that man’s increasing belief in himself did not seem to be making him any happier and peaceful, let alone Godlike. Reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography in 1971 finally convinced me that his personal life was also spent in total misery and felt an “unbearable pity” (to use his own words) for the intellectuals and their ineffective efforts to bring about a better world, and their lack of power to control their lives in the spirit of happiness and love. Man, no doubt, had become cleverer and more ingenious in alleviating his personal needs through modern technology but had less and less of the sober uplifting humility that comes from standing in the presence of God. I knew then I had too much reverence for ordinary mortals with feet of clay and began to feel completely disillusioned.

I was, however, too proud to admit that in Jesus and in the Word of God, the Bible, my needs and the answers to life’s problems could be found. I had of my own free-will rejected Jesus since the age of 15 in spite of having been brought up in a Christian family. Intellectually I found the deity of Jesus unacceptable and the Bible irrelevant to the world’s problems. The debate on the inerrancy or otherwise of the Bible was to me redundant when it was clear something more practical had to be done by men themselves as aptly expressed in the adage, “God will help those who help themselves.” I sincerely believed that a happy and good life was within a man’s formidable intellectual power to possess, control and promote. 

However, when it seemed clear to me that man’s own vain attempts to bring about a better and happier world were being jeopardised and nullified by his own foolishness, fears and greed, I went through the stage of being angry at man’s folly. I began to protest against all forms of inhumanity and social injustice - be it racial discrimination, war, the build-up of the nuclear arsenals and all such perennial problems that confront the world fro which men shall never have a satisfactory answer.

I was a Utilitarian and yet was not entirely satisfied that man could devise a perfect social system to achieve maximum happiness for the greatest number of people. By faith I was a follower of the Webbs who proposed to reform society through what came to be known as Fabian Socialism but the inescapable fact remained that a classless society was an illusion and well-meaning people seemed to promote more cruelty and misery than happiness. I resigned myself to this stark realisation of the helplessness of man to influence events for the good of mankind and the need to get on with my personal life became more urgent after my marriage in 1972.

For some time after abandoning Humanism as a panacea for this world, I had become interested in the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, the leading proponent of existentialism, which emphasized the existence of the individual who, being free and responsible, is held to be what he makes of himself by the self-development of his essence through the act of will. Materialism was now to be my creed and raison d’etre of my being although I was still searching for the quality of life that had so far escaped me. Despite ostensible personal, social and worldly progress, my whole-hearted quest for material goods and money as a self-fulfilling need was unwise. My life without Jesus continued to be a life in darkness as I put my all before the shrine of materialism. This style of hedonistic living and emphasis on material success gradually took its toll on my health and personal happiness ex post facto.

From the time I started building up my law career upon my return from Cambridge, I was arrogant to and disdainful of the Lord’s people. Those who tried to reach out to me received the cold treatment. Although my faith in Humanism had been rudely shaken I did not want to hear about Jesus as I was doing alright by myself even though looking back there were so many aspects of my life that were profoundly unhappy and indeed harmful to my health and family life.

My single-minded determination to succeed in life by worldly standards left me with little time for my children and they were growing up in fear of their parents rather than God. Instead of fearing God, which I now know is the beginning of Wisdom, I was fearful of spirits and my attitude was to appease them. Consequently, I indulged in the occultic practices of fortune telling and geomancy that led to me being in bondage. I wanted to be assured that whatever I did would bring my family good health, wealth and lasting prosperity. I was uncertain and anxious for the future. Depending on my own strength was stressful enough and my fears were realised when I fell seriously ill in September 1984 with high blood pressure. For the first time I was no longer in control of my life of what would happen to me and my family. This depressed and humbled me and I had to take careful stock of my life. The seeds from the Gospel of Jesus that were planted early in 1982 by my cousin and his dear friends, had however taken root. With the death of my best friend in July 1985 at the age of 46 I was further broken in my spirit. My intellect had no answers to the personal anguish I experienced and my intellectual friends could not help me to overcome my grief. It was at this stage that I broke my faith with existentialism as a philosophy of my life.

Questions on eschatology and the relevance of salvation became dominant once again. I asked myself “Where do we go from here?” Bertrand Russell had assured us that when we die our bodies would rot and that would be the end of the matter. The first argument that “if God created the world, who created Him at the first place?” was an attractive intellectual proposition for the denial of the existence of God. But even so, I still found it hard to believe the Truth which philosophers know to be rarely simple.

The Immaculate conception, the Resurrection power of Jesus and the mighty outpouring of His Holy Spirit on all flesh to overcome sins were slowly becoming evident to me. But until I made the Lord Jesus Christ as my Saviour, the simple Truth of His Salvation continued to elude me. However after having made a determined effort to study the Bible, I was gradually assured that the saving grace of Jesus Christ could guarantee me a place in the Book of Life.

This blessed assurance of salvation was good enough reason for me to become Christian again, and my wife and I accepted Jesus in our hearts in August 1985 and were finally baptised in 1988. Now, as born-again Christians, we are no longer fearful of spirits or of what the future holds in store for us. I want to testify that with the fellowship of other Christians, we are growing in the Lord as he would have us. Indeed, The Truth has set us free from all bondage and we now feel comforted that we can lead an abundant life as we abide in Jesus, His teachings and His Righteousness.

I am fully persuaded through the Word of God that the children of God are not to have a spirit of fear but of sound mind and understanding. As I continued to read His Word, today, I an truly say that my earlier life’s search for a social compact which could provide a happy and fulfilled life can only be found by accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and by being washed with His blood. If all of us strive to be like Him then we can minimize the vagaries of this existence and live victoriously and harmoniously on this earth. The book of Ecclesiates are even more meaningful to me now and reminds me of man’s futile quest for an abundant life without the fear and worship of our Creator.

On a personal level, the Lord has been exceedingly gracious to me and I am thankful that He has blessed me with a truly wonderful wife and 2 lovely children. I can truly say that I have found the peace and joy through Jesus and my family are now more united then ever and have been blessed in the fear and love of the Lord. Everyday I see the Lord’s blessings on my children and I thank the Lord for His Grace on me and my family. In truth, I have finally arrived, but only by my acceptance of Jesus Christ – who is The Way, The Truth and The Life. I truly believe our names have been confirmed in the Book of Life as we put our unquestioning faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is now my sole of reference Book on what life, now and hereafter, is all about!