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

by Gregory Koukl

The correct answer to the question “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.

Everyone has in his or her mind a story about the way the world actually is, even if they haven’t thought about it much or worked out all the details.

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 like once the repair takes place.

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.

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.

Make-believe accounts do not actually explain anything. They only illustrate problems in clever, imaginative ways.

What isn’t obvious is that nothing is really solved by getting rid of God, though that is the standard move at this point. I say this because removing God from the equation, though understandable, does nothing to eliminate the problem that caused someone to doubt God’s existence in the first place. God is gone, but the original problem remains. The world is still as broken. Atheism settles nothing on this matter.

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?

Christians promote the narrow view that Jesus is the only way precisely because Jesus himself was the author of it. He made the claim repeatedly, many times in many ways.

It tells the most important things that happen in the order they take place and consists of five words: God, man, Jesus, cross, resurrection (here I mean the final resurrection at the very end of the Story).

God is the very first piece of the Christian Story because the Story is all about him. God is the central character. The Story does not start with us because the Story is not about us.

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.

“Does it not make a great difference,” C. S. Lewis once observed, “whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If 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.”3

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.4

The idea that God owns everything and has proper authority to rule over everything he has made is the main point.

If God created the entire universe in an instant (and we now know that could well be what happened), then just about anything else out of the ordinary would be pretty easy by comparison.

We all know that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. We call it “the problem of evil.” But that can only be so if there is a right way for things to be. And that could only be so if the world was designed for a Purpose that for some reason is not being achieved.

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.”

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 he is.

If man’s special value falls, then unalienable human rights fall, too. If man is not special, if he is not deeply different from any other thing, then there is no good reason not to treat him just like any other thing when it’s convenient for us to do so. If man is just “the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind,” as matter-ism dictates, if he is just a gear in the machine, or if he is only an illusion of the universal Mind, then there is no good reason for unique and unalienable human rights.

When man is reduced to a mere animal—when the force of one’s worldview logic demotes humans to mere biological machines—morality and human rights die and power is all that remains.

Does a natural desire for food justify grocery theft? Does a natural hunger for sex nullify restraints to passion? Does a natural tendency toward violence (yes, some have claimed this) justify attacks on annoying people? Are humans not obliged to a higher law than the law of nature? Animals do what comes naturally. Humans should not.

Eliminate ignorance and poverty (they say), and crime would pretty much be eliminated too. These are both popular options of late, but I think you know this is just nonsense. Look around you. The rich and educated may not get caught as often, but they are no more noble than the ignorant and the poor.

if the group is “right” by definition, and anyone who breaks ranks with the crowd is, therefore, on the “bad” side, then what will we do with a Mahatma Gandhi or a Martin Luther King Jr.? Social reformers always oppose the group, since if the mainstream were in the right to begin with, there would be no need for reform. This view also means that thugs like Nazis are, oddly, off the hook since they had their own social contract of sorts.

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.

No, “forgiving ourselves” will not fix the brokenness. Absolution must come from somewhere else. It must come from the one we have wronged, the greater One, the One responsible for the Law-over-everything-and-everyone that we have broken. We are not beholden merely to a regulation but to the Person behind the regulation—our rightful Sovereign, God. Forgiveness must come from him, since he is the One we have sinned against.

As to not being a Hitler, I am glad to hear it. One was bad enough. But that is hardly helpful since Hitler is not the standard. I suspect you are no Jesus either, and you are probably more like Hitler than you are like Christ.

The longing itself is a clue for us—an ache in our hearts reminding us of the way things used to be, a sign that we were made for something better—though, for the moment, we have lost our way—and a hunger for the world to be that way again. The Story says God has put eternity in our hearts,1 and that sweet pain may be evidence of it, a primal memory deep in our souls reminding us of the way the world started—good, wonderful, whole, complete.

The Story makes it quite clear that man’s conflict in the visible realm is tied to a battle going on in a realm that is not visible, but is still completely real. And in a literal sense, the things we do not see matter a lot more in this struggle than the things that we do see.4

Disobedience destroys, and sometimes the damage is so great it can never be repaired. The same is true with God and us. God gives commands for reasons. When we disobey him, we always break something valuable.

This is why there is evil and suffering. Bad things happen in a world that is broken. Every evil that assaults us is the result of rejecting God’s rule. It is what the Story calls sin. Sin is the mutation that has twisted and distorted man from his original beauty. Sin is what has broken the world. And a broken world produces broken people and crippled circumstances. Because of sin—man’s sin, our sin—the world is no longer the way it is supposed to be.

we are so well acquainted with our own failures that familiarity has largely removed any deep sense of their gravity. We are inclined to consider ourselves as, generally speaking, basically good folk.4

Goodness has different faces. The same virtue that enflames God’s love fires his justice. God would not be good if he truly hated evil but was benign toward those who consistently cause it. Justice means exacting an appropriate payment for a crime. No payment, no justice. No justice, no goodness. Is God “vengeful”? No more than any good, fair, noble, just judge who must pass sentence on lawbreakers.

There is no good historical evidence for any of the ancient mythological characters and their deeds, but there is an abundance of reliable historical evidence for Jesus. And if the primary source documentation for the man from Nazareth is compelling, then it does not matter how many ancient myths share similarities.

Jesus of Nazareth was a man of history, who made a profound impact on history.

Love is not a virtue of solitary selves. It cannot be known alone, but lives only in the sharing. If God is not Triune, he cannot love until he creates. Thus, love would be a quality he gains, not an unchangeable moral perfection deep in his being. This is a problem, by the way, for the Muslim understanding of God. He can show love, but he cannot be love.

“Social justice” is not the Gospel. It was not Jesus’ message. It was not why he came. His real message was much more radical. Jesus’ teaching—and the Story itself—focuses on something else. Not on the works of Christians but rather on the work of Christ. That is what the Story teaches.

Jesus did not come to rescue us from our ignorance or our poverty or our oppressors or even from ourselves. Jesus came to rescue us from the Father.

The pain of the cross pales in the face of a greater anguish. There is a deeper torment that cannot be seen, one no movie can capture and no words can adequately express. It is more excruciating than the nails pinning Jesus’ body to the timbers, more dreadful than the lashes that ripped his flesh from his frame. It is a dark, terrible, incalculable agony—an infinite misery—as God the Father unleashes his fury upon his sinless Son as if Jesus were guilty of an immeasurable evil.

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.

unless the central details in the Story about Jesus are true and we actively trust in him, then Jesus will do us no good.

The “trust your feelings” advice denies you the tools necessary to separate smart from foolish, wise from silly, safe from perilous. This is not good counsel since in life there are lots of lemons, and many of them are spiritually deadly. Never trust anyone who tells you to rely on experience over careful thinking.

As one has said, “To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that he says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.”8

Common sense tells us that men will not suffer martyrdom for myths they make up themselves.

Though the concern about bias is understandable and completely appropriate to raise, the complaint as offered is not adequate. The charge simply will not hold up unless there is convincing evidence of a distorting bias. That, to my knowledge, has never been demonstrated.

what good would it do the disciples to steal Jesus’ remains, then lie about a resurrection? The basic rule with lying is this: Invent a story that benefits you, not one that gets you beaten, whipped, stoned, crucified upside down, or beheaded.