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

by Gregory Koukl

Jesus came to save us from that deforming disorder called “sin.”

Knowledge of God is accessible through creation.

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.

giving evidence of his identity by raising him from the dead:

The Christian worldview is logically coherent. Each principle follows the one that went before, like an expertly composed symphony or a carefully crafted storyline.

The cosmos is not just a succession of brute facts. It is the plotline of a grand story that God is telling through the verifiable events of history.

“What is Christianity?” is this: Christianity is a picture of reality.

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.

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?

There is a saying that has been helpful in some ways but I think is misleading in this regard. The saying goes, “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” From what I understand now, that perspective is in the wrong order. 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. God’s purposes are central, not yours. Once you are completely clear on this fact, many things are going to change for you.

The basic principle is a commonsense one: If you make it, it’s yours.

Nowadays, when certain ethical issues come up, it’s common to hear someone say, “I have a right to do whatever I want with my own body.” It’s a popular point, but it isn’t quite accurate, is it? First, no one can do whatever he wants with his own body, not in a civilized society anyway. Second, if God made us, then our bodies are not our own, strictly speaking. We inhabit them, of course, and have an important connection with them. But if God is God, then we are not completely free to do as we wish with our bodies. In the end, the Potter has the right over his own clay.

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

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. That isn’t to say nothing could ever disrupt it, disorder it, throw it out of kilter. The happiness was not immutable. It could change. Things could go wrong. But they did not start out that way. They started out right. Everything was just the way it was supposed to be. Which is just another way of saying that everything God made was good.

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. But it’s hard to make sense of “Purpose” and “things gone wrong” if we are driven solely by “a purposeless and natural process that did not have [us] in mind,” if there is “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,” and if life in the final analysis is nothing more than “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Remember too that when people get to make their own purposes, the door is opened to limitless variety, with no individual purpose better than any other. There would be no way to say, for example, that Megan the social worker could have a purpose that was any better than Robert the stockbroker or even (as ghastly as it sounds) Drake, the sex-slave trader, since that would require a Purpose that served as a kind of benchmark the others could be measured by. But in matter-ism that benchmark does not exist.

I said earlier that almost everyone agrees the world is not the way it ought to be. It should be a lot better than it is. But when you think about it, that’s a very odd thing to believe if you also believe in matter-ism because it presumes there’s a Purpose that is not being realized. Yet Purpose is the very thing that’s impossible in a world filled only with matter. That does not ring true.

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.

On the one hand, man, like everything else in the visible universe, is made of physical stuff. He has a physical body, which means he is a creature with limitations. This is what philosophers mean when they say man is “contingent.”

We are not the center of the universe. We are not God in physical bodies. We are not all power or all wisdom or all intelligence. Instead, we depend on and owe our existence to the God who made us from the dust, who sustains us at every moment, and who will return our mortal bodies to the dust when we breathe our final breaths. Let us never forget that we are creatures.

sentient creatures—

It should not be surprising, then, when cultures consistently believe that there is nothing special about being human, that soon they deny ultimate moral obligations and unalienable human rights too.

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.

The difference between “just doing what comes naturally” and principled self-restraint is called civilization.

In tough times like recessions and depressions, it turns out, crime rates frequently drop. Then they rise as people prosper.

Then he is broken yet again when his soul is torn from his body in death, his self violently split in two.3

Satan is real—a powerful spiritual being, the third player in the Story along with God and man. He has invaded God’s Kingdom of light to bring his own kingdom of darkness. He gains ground by craftiness and secrecy, and he destroys by lies, accusation, enticement, and subterfuge. If you doubt him, beware. Stealth is his weapon. Satan happily stays in the shadows where he can do his dark business undetected. Underestimate him—or worse, ignore him—to your peril.

Imagine a commando in World War II who is dropped behind enemy lines posing as a German officer so he can get into a concentration camp and destroy the gas chambers. Imagine next that as he mingles with other officers he sees a soldier preparing to execute a prisoner. This is an evil he could stop by simply shooting the soldier, but at what cost? He might save one person, but his mission is to save many. More lives would be lost in the long run if he prevents an individual death, but does not stop the gas chambers from destroying thousands.

It would be impossible for God to create man with genuine moral liberty without any possibility that man would use it for ill. It would be like trying to square the circle—a logically impossible challenge and, therefore, no meaningful challenge at all.

We may look around us and think it was not worth the gamble. But there is only one way we could believe that with any confidence. We would need to know every variable that might tip the scales in one direction or another. We do not. Only God can know that.

Because we can never know if freedom was worth the price of evil, this is one of those things we must leave to God.

Here is what we do know. Man did not use his freedom well. Adam and Eve, capable of living in harmony with God, in friendship under his rule in his Kingdom, betrayed the friendship. Instead of using their freedom to honor God, they used it to rebel. And now we are at the heart of a central matter in the Story. Parents give children boundaries for reasons. They have insight into how things work that youngsters do not have. They know that if their children disobey, they are likely to break something—maybe just a vase or a picture window, maybe an arm or leg, maybe a valued relationship, maybe an entire life. Disobedience destroys, and sometimes the damage is so great it can never be repaired.

When God’s children disobeyed their heavenly Father, they damaged everything. When Adam and Eve rebelled against the King of the universe, they broke the whole world.

So, Jesus is a man. That is the first thing. But there is something more. From the beginning Jesus says things no man is allowed to say, at least not a Jew speaking to other Jews. He says he existed before he was born. He says any sin he pardons is forgiven, as if he is the one any sin has wronged. He says honor due the Father is due him. He says final judgment in the final day falls to him. He says he is drink for the thirsty and bread for the hungry, so they will never thirst or hunger again. He says those who trust in him will live, even if they die.4

Jesus is tender and meek, but his claims are not. They are hard and brash and daring and divisive. “Unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.” “Before Abraham was born, I am.” “He who sees Me sees

the One who sent Me.” “He who believes in the Son is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already.”6

This is why only Christians can rightly claim, “God is love.” If love, at its core, is selfless giving, there could be no love without someone for God to give love to. “If God was a single person,” Lewis noted, “then before the world was made, he was not love.”16 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.

Later in the Story we learn, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

He speaks more and more in parables to obscure his meaning from the unrepentant.13

Theologians use different words to describe different aspects of what took place in Christ’s single act of submission and sacrifice that cost him his life. They use terms like justification or substitution or redemption or propitiation, and each is rich with meaning of its own, and that richness is worthy of exploring and pondering. For now, though, we will simply call it what Christians of the past have called it, the “Marvelous Exchange.”

The Story has a word for this turnaround. The word is repentance. It’s not just religious lingo used by street preachers. It is central to the Story. Repentance involves a change of direction. You are turning from a life of selfishness and self-centeredness in which you (or other idols) are the center of everything to a life where God is the center and you (and everything else) are under him.

And what exactly is it we are trusting Christ for? Two things, for the moment. First, that your sin went to Jesus’ account and his goodness went to yours. Since Jesus was punished for your crimes against God, God is not angry at you anymore.

The history of the Holocaust was written largely by its survivors. Should we doubt their accounts simply because these victims were also “believers” or because they had an “agenda,” an intent to tell the world of this horrific event? I think not.

Another work lists twelve commonly accepted facts,

My personal view is that any skeptic who is attracted to that explanation is simply not skeptical enough.

From the moment of that terrible fall, the human race has been in the grip of a terrible conflict. A war rages, and every war has its battles, and every battle has its casualties. This we know. We also know this war will have an end because the Author himself has told us it will. The end of the war is the end of the Story. There will be a victory. The evil will be punished. The wounds will be mended. The tears will be wiped away. The world will be made right again.

In the meantime, those who trust him are not alone in the struggle, even though we take casualties. He is with us, always, in everything. That is his promise.3 “In the world you have tribulation,” Jesus told us, “but take courage. I have overcome the world.”4

Like Jacob Marley,3 we wear the chains we forged in life, link by link and yard by yard. These books record the ponderous weight of them, the sins each of us bear, even though amusements in life may have temporarily distracted us from their heaviness.

crime against God that cannot—because of the Rescuer—be forgiven. Centuries ago, John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” put it this way: “I am a great sinner; and Christ is a great Savior.”

Hell is a place of banishment from God’s presence. The Story says, “These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power . . .”7