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

by Gregory Koukl

So, to eliminate any confusion on this point, I am going to give you a short quiz. In the Christian Story, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe? Who is the Lord, the master of the universe? Who is all powerful? Who is the center of the universe? The answer to each of these questions is, of course, God—the God who is completely distinct from the rest of his creation. By contrast, in the New Age story of reality, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe?

Who is the Lord, the master of the universe? Who is the all-powerful one? The New Age answer is, you are. That’s why you are also the center of the universe.

In our story, God made the world and we are his subjects. This makes some people uncomfortable. I understand that. It also makes the Mind-ism story attractive since God is the same as the world—meaning you are part of God—and in one version of this view you are the “God” who is continuing to make your own world. But a story being attractive and a story being true are two entirely different things. Never forget that.

When it comes to the true-story-of-reality issue, though, we must set aside our preferences and ask different questions.

Since God creates with noble intention, there is a purpose—a proper goal—for everything and everyone. All that God made, and every way God made it, was just the way it was supposed to be. He is the author of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and is the most marvelous Being we could ever imagine. None is greater or more noble or more virtuous or more wonderful. He is good, but he is not safe.1 We must never forget that. Absolute goodness makes God absolutely dangerous, for the only ones who are safe are the ones who are good like

We are creatures from the beginning and will always be creatures. We are not the center of the universe. We are not God in physical bodies.

Thinking of ourselves as divine is just another way of making the Story about us. There is a God, and we are not him, and pushing him off of his throne and taking it for ourselves is foolish. It is also dangerous.

Second, God’s imprint makes it possible for us to have a friendship with God. This is not a friendship of equals, to be sure. My daughters and I are friends, but we are not peers. In the same way, God is still King. He is still our Sovereign. That will never change. But he can also be our friend. Our King is not distant like a royal, but close like a father. This is what people mean when they say they have a “relationship” with God. It is the kind of friendship he intended from the beginning. It is what we were made for.

Even though man is beautiful, he is also broken. Yes, man is noble, but he is also cruel.

economic improvement, but it does not make people better. It has just produced more literate and, therefore, more clever criminals.

No, ignorance and poverty are not the problem. Neither education nor economics gets to the real root of man’s woes.

When it comes to man, though, we do expect something different and we fault him when it is not. But why? If the Darwinian idea is the correct one, then everything surviving is just “right” the way it is, perfectly adapted for this moment in biological history, nothing more, nothing less.

There is no better or worse, no beautiful or broken. There are only survivors who are fit or casualties who are not.

I do not need relief from the feeling of guilt, but from the guilt itself, regardless of how I feel.

Forgiveness must come from him, since he is the One we have sinned against.

The world is broken because we are broken. Our badness made the world go bad.

We are broken—not like machines that need to be fixed, but like transgressors who need to be forgiven—and we know it.

There was a real place in a real time when a real rebellion broke out on earth, and that rebellion changed the world and everything in it.

God gave the first man, Adam, a home perfectly suited to his natural needs. He gave him a friend, Eve, to be his proper companion, an able helpmate by his side

share his life with. He gave them rule over the land and its beasts and gave them a meaningful task: to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue. Bring productive order to the earth that had been delivered into their care. With all of that, God gave them something else that was more important ...

Rebellion does not bring freedom, though. Instead, it brings brokenness, disgrace, guilt, slavery, and struggle.

“broken” world to begin with, so the problem of evil turns out to be just as lethal for atheism as it appears to be for theism.2

In order to share God’s happiness, man would have to be able to share his goodness.

So God created man morally innocent, without sin, intending man to use his deep freedom to choose obedience, growing in goodness

and virtue, becoming more like God himself—both in holiness and happiness. If friendship with God and sharing in his happiness are good things (and it seems they are), then making a creature who could enjoy these things is also a good ...

When it comes to the problem of evil, there has been a trade-off. Precisely because God is good, he wanted to share his happiness with others. So he created humans with the kind of freedom and the kind of nature that would allow them to grow in goodness, deepening their happiness and their friendship with God. Since happiness depends on goodness,5 man had freedom to choose the good, but this same freedom also allowed him to choose the bad. This is called moral freedom.6 Put simply, something good made something bad possible (though not inevitable).

looks now like the tables have turned. Precisely because God is good he made a creature that could go bad. And there is no other way around it. No freedom, no growth in goodness. No growth in goodness, no growth in happiness. So God’s own goodness is no longer on the chopping block.

Neither, as it turns out, is his power. Since moral freedom just is the possibility of doing good and evil, removing the possibility would remove the freedom. It would be impossible for God to create man with genuine moral liberty without any possibility that man would use it for ill.

God’s goodness made possible a world that could have badness. As odd as that sounds, we learned a moment ago that this would make sense if God had a good reason to do so. We discovered that one good reason God might allow evil is so he can accomplish a greater good, that maybe a world with some evil would end up being better, in the long run, than one with no evil.

And remember, God’s goal with man is friendship. Yet it is difficult to be friends with someone who is constantly, egregiously offending—and doing it on purpose. True, God’s wrath is not his most popular quality, but it will do us no good to give it the short-shrift. Too much is at stake. No,

the One who is most holy sees sin most clearly. The One who is perfectly righteous sees the full tragedy of our most “trivial” breaches of goodness. And this is not good news. Man must pay, but he cannot pay. He must be freed, but slaves cannot free themselves. He desperately needs a rescuer. He needs to be saved by someone who does not himself owe, and who is not himself enslaved.

In the same way, none will find safe harbor in his own merit since all things hidden will be revealed, and the Story is quite clear on this point. In the final reckoning, every man will be shown to be a debtor to God—something each of us already knows deep in our own hearts.

Jesus’ solitary word requires three English words to translate: “It is finished.”11 Do not misunderstand, however. Jesus is not collapsing in exhausted relief at the end of suffering. The ordeal is done, true enough, but the Son of God rejoices not in what is over. He celebrates, rather, what has been accomplished.

His words, precisely rendered, mean, “It has been and will forever remain finished.”

Christ’s torment has not simply ended. His goal has been reached; his task has been achieved. The divine transaction is complete. Jesus takes our guilt. We take his goodness. That is the trade. And its effect exte...

You see, there are actually three passions woven together in this single act of Divine surrender. The passionate intensity of God’s anger at us for our sin collides with the passionate intensity of God’s love for us, causing the passionate intensity of the agony of the cross to be shouldered by God himself in human form.

But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”2 You will find these kinds of claims throughout the Story from top to bottom.

That mistake is thinking that believing facts and having faith are the same thing. They are not.

There

is a difference between “believing that” (what I want to now call “belief”) and “believing in” (what we will now call “faith”).

neither belief without knowledge (a “leap of faith”), nor a simple assent to certain truths (“believing that” Jesus was the Christ, for example). Rather, faith was knowledge in motion. It was “belief that” combined with “faith in”—active reliance, trust, in what they believed was true. Each was necessary. Neither was optional.3

In one sense, then, Christianity is not based on faith at all. Rather, it is based on a Person we put our faith in. That means certain critical details about the Story

You see where I am going with this. I am trying to show you that there is no contradiction between God’s love, which is wonderful, and God’s justice, which is terrifying. I want you to see that they come together in a breathtaking way when his love and his justice and his mercy all converge at a cross. “God is the only comfort,” Lewis has written. “He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need, and the thing we most want to hide from.”

First, the ones who are guilty are not in the best position to assess the gravity of their own crimes. Our moral senses, though intact, are still marred by our own rebellion.

Now, the point is this. When we sin, we are not sinning against a schoolmate or a teacher or a parent or an earthly king. We are morally assaulting the Sovereign of the universe whose own moral purity is perfect.

In the end, it all comes down to this. One day you will stand before God, who will sit in judgment on your life, and you will be found guilty. I suspect you already know that. When that time comes for you—and it will come—only one thing will save you from the punishment that is your due—God’s Rescuer, Jesus.

And when we are home, we will be immersed in it, filled with it, soaked in it—thoroughly good, yet still, remarkably, ourselves. The Story says, “When Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”6 We will be good because he is good. We will be holy because he is holy. We will be transformed to be as he is.7

Here is the reason we will always be safe from sin. Earlier we learned that our badness made the world go bad, that the world is broken because we are broken. This will never happen again, because we will never be broken inside again. When the Maker makes all things new—the New Heaven, the New Earth,11 you, me, everyone, everything all overflowing with goodness—we will not have the kind of goodness we had before, the kind that could falter, the kind that could fail. Jesus has purchased a different purity for us—his own—and has given it to us in the trade.

Jesus’ goodness, God’s own goodness, perfect goodness. Not as something we possess, but as something we are. Not attached to us, but rather the full Glory of God’s own goodness now built into us so we never fall short of it again.12 We will be free to do as we wish, since our every desire, like God’s, will be good and pure and right.

So, in the resurrection there will be no broken world because there will be no broken people because there will b...