The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between

by Gregory Koukl

If a personal God created us as personal beings, then it is logical to conclude that we stand in a personal relationship with him. In fact, we have a moral obligation to him, owing him respect and fidelity, just as human offspring have an obligation to honor the parents who brought them into the world.

Instead, people are tempted to think of religion as a kind of spiritual fantasy club—true for you, but not necessarily true for me. Find the club you like—the one that meets your personal needs, that gives you rules to live by that are respectable but not too demanding, that warms your heart with a feeling of spirituality. That’s the point of religion.

Some might say Christianity is not really a religion at all but rather a relationship with God or a relationship with Jesus. This way of putting it might be confusing to some, but I think I understand what those who say this are getting at.

“What is Christianity?” is this: Christianity is a picture of reality.2 It is an account or a description or a depiction of the way things actually are. It is not just a view from the inside (a Christian’s personal feelings or religious beliefs or spiritual affections or ethical views or “relationship” with God). It is also a view of the outside. It is a view of the world out there, of how the world really is in itself.

Both parties in the conversation think they’re right and the other wrong. Why, then, is only the religious person (usually) branded a bigot for doing so?

Every religion tells a story of reality. Every philosophy and every individual outlook on life is a take on the way someone thinks the world actually is.

All worldviews are not equal, though. Some have pieces that seem to fit together (internally) better than others, and some have pieces that

seem to fit reality (externally) better than others.

EVERY WORLDVIEW HAS FOUR ELEMENTS. They help us understand how the parts of a person’s worldview story fit together. These four parts are called creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.

Creation tells us how things began, where everything came from (including us), the reason for our origins, and what ultimate reality is like. Fall describes the problem (since we all know something has gone wrong with the world). Redemption

gives us the solution, the way to fix what went wrong. Restoration describes what the world would look li...

Where did we come from? What is our problem? What is the solution? How will things end for us?

a person’s worldview is really a part of his religion, even if it doesn’t include gods, temples, bibles, rituals, or the like. In this sense, even atheists have a religion,

Every worldview means to tell a story like this one, a story of reality. It means to make sense of the way the world actually is—the world as we find it—not simply the world as we wish it to be.

When you think about it, every story, if it is a good one, has four parts. It has a beginning that sets the stage, telling you who the main characters are and how the story gets rolling. Then something goes wrong. There is conflict that makes the story interesting. The main part of most stories tells how that conflict gets corrected, how the wrong gets fixed. That solution brings a final resolution—writers call it the denouement—where the parts of the plot resolve themselves in a satisfying ending (“They lived happily ever after”).

Christianity is the Story of how the world began, why the world is the way it is, what role we play in the drama, and how all the plotlines of the Story are resolved in the end.

It is clear to most people that the world is not the way it ought to be. Something has gone terribly wrong, and everybody knows it. That’s the first part of the first obstacle. The second part is this. If there were a God, and if he really were good, and if he really were powerful, then the world would be a different kind of place than the one we find.

Both confusions (the skeptic’s and the Christian’s) are based on a misunderstanding. As we will see, evil is not the problem for Christianity that people think it is because it is not foreign to the Story. It is central to it. It fits right in. In a certain sense, the entire Story is precisely about how the world went bad and how it gets fixed.

But given a Godless, physical universe, the idea that things are not as they should be makes little sense. How can something go wrong when there was no right way for it to be in the first place?

When people do not understand how the Story deals with evil, they are going to stumble when they consider that issue.

No, there is a reason why Jesus made this controversial claim about himself, and it had nothing to do with arrogance, bigotry, or small-minded exclusion—a kind of cruel trick played on unsuspecting people to guarantee their damnation. Rather, it had to do with the drama itself and is, ironically, tied directly to the first obstacle—what went wrong with the world.

As it turns out, the brokenness of the world and the unique role of Jesus are connected. The second solves the first. That’s a main point of the Story. It’s one thing I hope you will see, that the two most controversial aspects of Christianity turn out to make complete sense once you understand the Story’s big picture.

(here I mean the final resurrection

Do you see the logical order of these five elements? Our story starts with God. He created everything from nothing, including the most valuable thing in all creation: man. But something went terribly wrong and human beings got themselves into a lot of trouble. So God initiated a rescue plan. He entered the world he created by becoming a human being, just like us—the man named Jesus. To rescue us from our problem, Jesus did something utterly unique that culminated on a cross. How people respond to what he did will determine what will happen to them at the final event of history, the resurrection.

Notice, you have all the parts of a good story: beginning, conflict, conflict resolution, ending. You also have all the pieces of a complete worldview: creation, fall, redemption, restoration.

Start at the beginning. Start with the foundation. The foundation is God. He is responsible for everything that is. One ancient creed put it this way: “I believe in God, the creator of heaven and earth.”

That’s what happens when we think the Story is about us. In fact, a large part of the Story was written to people who believed in God and trusted in him yet experienced tremendous conflict and distress in this world. Suffering is standard fare in life, but especially so for those who take the Story seriously.2 This is a clue that man did not make up the Story by himself. If he did, he probably would have written a different story.

The Story is not so much about God’s plan for your life as it is about your life for God’s plan. Let that sink in.

So the first two things I want you to see are that the Story starts with a person, and that’s because the Story is about him, not us. Here is the third important detail to notice: In this Story, everything belongs to God.

somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall

have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.”

In this story God made you to know him, to delight in him, to depend on him, to rest in his arms. Because you belong to God in this special way, you are not alone. There is a place for you—a safe place, a home—even if you haven’t discovered that yet. No one is an orphan. We are his, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in the home he provides, that is in himself.

In our story God is not far off, but near to us. He is a refuge, a shield, a fortress, a present help in time of trouble. He is not just the grand and splendid object of our awe. He is also the tender subject of our love.

There is a King and his “dom,” so to speak. There is a kingdom. This is what the Story is all about. The main theme is not love or redemption or forgiveness or even relationship. Those are all important parts of the Story, to be sure. They serve the theme in important ways, but they are not the main point of the Story. The idea that God owns everything and

has proper authority to rule over everything he has made is the main point.

God is an active player in the Story. He does not sit silently and idly by. He is the storyteller, but he is also a player in the drama.

More important than anything else, because he makes himself known, then we can know him.6

Only while under God’s rulership can man fulfill his chief purpose—glorifying his King—and only under God’s rule can man discover his deepest satisfaction—enjoying him forever.7

According to the Story, though, when God made everything, when he formed the world at the first and set up his Kingdom, everything was exactly the way his noble mind intended. Everything was in its proper place. Everything was fulfilling its designated purpose. This is the heart of happiness—all the world, and everything and everyone in it, working together in perfect harmony just the way God wanted it.

“Who created God?” The question presumes that God was created, but no one believes that, certainly not Christians, so this is not a question any theist has to answer.

Consider this. Virtually no one who has thought about the issue at all—especially people like astrophysicists who spend their lives studying such things—believes the universe has always existed.

What I’m going to say next may be an odd way of putting it, but it gets right to the point: A big bang needs a big banger. To most people that seems correct the moment they let it sink in. Once you realize how amazingly obvious that statement is, the idea that the some thing that caused the universe was actually some One becomes much more plausible. And it is a short logical step from there to the conclusion that this One, who would have existed before the time-space-physical world he created, is not bound up inside it or subject to it.

That’s why in this story you’ll find things happening that wouldn’t make any sense at all in a world of a different sort—instant healings, massive bodies of water parting on command, loaves and fishes miraculously multiplied, even people coming back from the dead—yet they fit quite properly into our story. Here, the system is subject to its Master. The Maker controls the matter, not the other way around.

I mean a universal Mind permeates everything because it is the only thing. God is in everything—people, animals, nature, the cosmos—simply because he is everything.

Hinduism, all is god.

This picture of reality is also central to what has come to be called “New Age” (though it’s actually not new at all). Environmentalism is sometimes implicitly an expression of the everything-is-God view, since pantheism has a tendency to deify nature.2

Peter Jones taught series at Ligonier regarding this view to explains how this wordview seeks to blur if not eliminate gender.

You are God in a physical body. You are spirit in the flesh. You are Eternal Life expressing itself as you. You are a cosmic being. You are all power. You are all wisdom. You are all intelligence. You are perfection. You are magnificence. You are

the creator, and you are creating the creation of You on this planet.3

Man is God who has temporarily forgotten, but can, when properly instructed, be restored to his full experience of divinity.

kinda Mormonistic, preexistence.

The earth turns on its orbit for You. The oceans ebb and flow for You. The birds sing for You. The sun rises and it sets for You. The stars come out for You. Every beautiful thing you see, every wondrous thing you experience, is all there, for You. Take a look around. None of it can exist, without You. No matter who you thought you were, now you know the Truth of Who You Really Are. You are the master of the Universe. You are the heir to the Kingdom. You are the perfection of Life. And now you know The Secret.6

most non Christians i know would fall into the category of heathen, live for the moment, no thought for life beyond. This view is delusional, but would be more appealing than materialism, maybe.

New Age Mind-ism is the ultimate “spiritual, but not religious” option, promising a kind of mystical piety at bargain prices with no inconvenient Deity looking over your shoulder spoiling the party—or as C. S. Lewis put it, “All the thrills of religion and none of the cost.”