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January 3 - January 20, 2022
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.
The Bible is not a fairy tale crafted by ancient people to give a sense of meaning to life. It is an account of reality.
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. 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.
Put another way, Christianity is a worldview. The Christian view is not the only way of viewing the world, of course. It has competition. Every religion and every secular philosophy claims to represent reality in a true and accurate way.
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.
Puzzles are a good way to think about worldviews since they are made up of lots of individual pieces too. When the pieces are fit together properly, you’re able to see the big picture clearly.
A worldview is like a story, and nowadays I think this is the best way to put it.
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”). Maybe you’ve noticed that the basic parts of a good story
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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.
CHRISTIANS HAVE A PROBLEM when they fail to understand their own Story. They are not able to answer the two objections most frequently raised about their beliefs.
Here are the obstacles.
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.
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.
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. Every disciple on record who was personally trained by Jesus to carry on after him delivered the same message: There is a narrow way to eternal life that few find, but a wide way to destruction that many follow.
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.
WHEN YOU LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE, you don’t start at the beginning of the dictionary. You start with common objects and frequently used phrases. You start with the basics and then build upon them.
People wanting to learn about God sometimes start at the beginning of the Bible and read through to the end,
but that method almost never works. A better approach is to start with the basic, foundational concepts and build on them. First, get the Story’s basic outline in your mind and then go from there.
So let me give you the backbone—the plot line—of the Christian Story. 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).
EVERY STORY HAS A BEGINNING. The first words of our Story go like this: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
First, notice that it begins with a person, not a thing. That’s because God existed before he made anything else, and he himself was never made.
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.
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.
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 n...
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Since God made everything out of nothing, it all belongs to him. He has proper authority to rule over all because none of it would exist without him.
We belong to God, true enough, but not in the same way other things belong to him. We are not merely objects that are owned. We are human beings who are precious to God in the same way a child is precious to his parent.
the Christian Story is different from, for example, the Muslim story. The God of Islam is the supreme sovereign, to be sure. In that way these stories are similar. But Allah is not a father and humans are not his children. To a Muslim, that would be a blasphemous thing to think since, to them, it would diminish and, therefore, demean God.
In our story God is not far off, but near to us.
Fourth, notice that in this story God is distinct from the rest of creation. This is an important point. Nature is not God. Rather, God made nature.
The kingdom God made now consists of two different kinds of things: physical things you can touch or see, and nonphysical things you cannot experience with your senses but are still real.
Next I want you to see that the Story has a theme.
The idea that God owns everything and has proper authority to rule over everything he has made is the main point.
Here is another way of looking at it: The universe is managed by some One, not some thing.
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
Think about this. Some homes are governed by a strong-willed child, or worse, a band of them. Chaos reigns because children do not know what is best for them. When they consistently get their way, mischief abounds. Generally, this is not a home where you want to spend much time.
When the whole world is run by children doing as they wish, ugly things happen.
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.
Everything was just the way it was supposed to be. Which is just another way of saying that everything God made was good.
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. Scientists pretty much agree that everything in the universe had a beginning.
common experience—not to mention common sense—teaches that anything that happens is always a result of some other thing that made it happen, and nothing at all makes nothing at all happen. By contrast, what the Story says makes perfect sense. It says that everything came from some One.
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.
the system is subject to its Master. The Maker controls the matter, not the other way around.
If at the end of the day the world is nothing but mindless matter in motion, then where does that leave us?2
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.
in matter-ism there is no mind, no cosmic force, no plan, no Purpose.
SO MATTER-ISM IS THE FIRST competing story. The second alternative is also an ancient one. In this view, Mind is all that exists—a Divine Mind (or, some might say, a “Divine Being”).
