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

by Gregory Koukl

there are two particular things Jesus did that were vital to the rescue. First, Jesus lived the life we should live but do not.

Second, Jesus made a trade. He took his perfect life and he traded it for our rotten lives.

To satisfy justice, God came down. Not Allah; Yahweh. Not Mohammed; Jesus. God stepped out of heaven and dwelt among us—“A body you prepared for me”—and said to the Father, “Take me instead.” That was the trade. The trade took place on a small outcropping of rock outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem. It was called Golgotha, the place of the skull. We know it as Calvary, the place of the cross.

what Christ accomplished by how he lived is as important as what he accomplished by how he died.

The two are inseparable, and the rescue depends on both—Jesus’ death and Jesus’ life.

We must never forget that in many ways Jesus’ life was just like ours. He was a real person who breathed, walked, slept, ate, laughed, and wept. Getting a feel for the flow of that life gives substance and depth to the drama.

Crucifixion is a cruel form of execution.

Why punish the innocent One?

In the end, the cross does not prevail. Arguably, Jesus does not die of exposure, or loss of blood, or asphyxiation. Rather, when the full payment is made, when the last of the debt of those who trust in him melts away, when the justice of God is fully satisfied, Jesus simply dismisses his spirit into the Father’s hands and dies.10 But before he does, a single word falls from his lips. It is the word tetelestai. 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.

The Story puts it this way, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God,”13 and, “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring us to God,”14 and, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace,”15 and many other statements such as these.

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.

This was not an accident. It was planned. The prophet Isaiah described it seven hundred years earlier:

Mankind faces a singular problem. People are broken and the world is broken because our friendship with God has been broken, ruined by human rebellion.

This is why Jesus of Nazareth is the only way to God, the only possible source of rescue. He is the only one who solved the problem. No other man did this. No other person could. Not Mohammed. Not the Buddha.

And that is only the beginning, since fixing man is the first part of fixing the world.

No, faith does not save. Rather, Jesus saves through faith. He is the rescuer, and we reach for him, the “capable pilot.”

This relationship between faith and fact may be why Jesus had more to say about truth than he did about trust.

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.

The world went bad because man went bad first. Since man’s brokenness broke the world, and only Jesus is able to heal man’s moral injury, he is the only One who can heal the world’s injury too. These two things are tied together. Put another way, Jesus, the God-man, is man’s only hope because only Jesus can fix the problem of evil. Only God coming down into the world can rescue the world from itself.

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.

God’s delay is not due to slowness, then, or to powerlessness or to lack of pity.

Rather, God is waiting. He delays because of patient compassion.2 When the final curtain falls, he knows the play will be over. When evil is defeated, it will be defeated completely. The time for mercy will have run out. Justice will have its day and multitudes will feel its force.

The little we know about how the Story ends is both thrilling and terrifying, depending. Some

The first thing you need to know is that in this Story everyone will live forever—you and me, our friends and our loved ones, strangers and enemies.

But living forever will not be good news for all, because in this story not everyone lives happily ever after.

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. . . . Anyone whose name was not found written in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire.6

You were made for happiness with God, and without him you will be denied any goodness of any kind.

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.”14

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.

Here is the Story’s solution to the problem of evil: perfect justice for evildoers, perfect mercy for the penitent; evil banished forever, and everlasting good restored.

we have been made for another world, and the thing we long for, even ache for—the Story calls it a kind of groaning1—is not to be found in this world or in this lifetime. We have been longing for home, and for a Father who waits for us there, and we are lonely here in exile until we are finally together with him.

God’s perfect mercy—forgiveness for everything we have ever done wrong—means we will finally, one day, be going home, and finally, one day, our hunger will be satisfied.

The hellish images are easy to grasp because we are well acquainted with suffering. Heaven, though, lies largely beyond our mental

We were made for something far better than what we experience in this life.

When a person has always been dirty, it is hard for him to know what it might feel like to be completely clean.

We are in a similar situation. The fact is we are completely clean before God because of the trade I spoke of earlier, but the feeling of purity eludes us.

When we finally go home, though, we will not need reminders. Purity will penetrate us so completely we will feel nothing else—no guilt, no defilement, no pain of moral brokenness, no shame.

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 This is the first wonder. Mercy makes it so.

The reason there will be no guilt, no defilement, no brokenness or shame for us—no sense of sin—is because there will be no sin, ours or others, anywhere. Evil will be banished, forever, never to return. Nothing and no one to harm us, and

The resurrection will not only change our insides, it will change our outsides, as well.

I suspect the transformation will be so magnificent, even the healthiest among us will have seemed physical wretches compared to our new heavenly selves.

Our bodies will be remade, not just mended. They will be completely new since the bodies we have now are not suited for heaven.

our whole selves will be changed and transformed, new and perfect, suited for a new and perfect place.

God has made another promise as well. Those under his mercy are not gone forever. There will be a reunion. You will be together with them again.

your close ones in the Lord are not lost, like others. You will be with them. The Story tells us so, comforting us now, while we wait.

The next time you see something—a moment in a film, or an embrace, or a vista that transfixes you—or you hear something—a poem, or a melody, or a bit of a story—or you detect a faint fragrance that sends you, in the same moment, both back to a forgotten time and forward to a new, unknown one—and you find that deep down inside of you something moves and you are transported, and you want to weep, though you’re not sure why—I want you to think, in that moment, that God is giving you a foretaste of Glory.

And that will be the end of the Story, the true Story, the Story of Reality. But it will not be the end, of course. It will only be the beginning of a new one, one we have been waiting for all of our lives. I cannot tell you anything more about that since it is completely beyond me, except this: In that Story, we will experience life better than the best we ever thought possible since—above all other mercies—we shall be his, and he shall be ours. Forever.