Right now I am pondering "truth" and am very aware
that there is little truth to be found in the society I inhabit. The only
consistent truth I find is among the Bible believing Christians. Most people
seem to live their lives from a worldview full of untruths and are in darkness,
(hence the epidemic of mental illness and the terrible rates of suicide in our
time). Many people appear to live in fear.
But from every quarter we are being pressured to believe complete lies about life, the world and our place in it, who we are, about our history and our present society. Truths about life are hidden from our children; they are now excluded from school curriculums. It is no accident that our Western countries became so free and so prosperous; most people no longer know how or why this is so.
My Top Five Key Truths
Truth 1: God created everything out of love and for love and to reveal His glory. Jesus wants to bring many children to the Father's glory and the Father wants to give His beloved Son a glorious bride. Thus God created an environment perfect for humans to live in, and then created us.
Lie 1: That there was nothing, nothing at all! Then from nothing came a big bang, then something existed; and from the "something" came everything we know, the universe: time, matter, space, life. (The natural laws, which scientists totally depend on, exclude the possibility of any of this).
Truth 2: God planned that there would be a Universe with life in it; millions of species. He planned how cells formed, plants and animals grow and have babies, everything. Every living cell is a complex organism that can feed itself and reproduce itself.
Lie 2: That we, and all life, evolved spontaneously from matter over billions of years, all this without leaving any fossils or other traces that we can study to see what happened, or how it happened. (The number of "billions" is constantly increasing, in my early adult lifetime it was 2 point something, then for a while it was 3.4 billion, then 4.6 billion, now Harvard University says 13.8 billion!)
Truth 3: God is spirit, we human beings get to bond with God's Holy Spirit. His infinite wisdom gave us all the intangibles like love, family ties, memory, creativity, compassion, empathy, trust and fear. These already existed in the Godhead and are passed on to us humans who are made in God's image and likeness. We too are spiritual.
Lie 3: That the spiritual world is imaginary or insignificant, and irrelevant.
Truth 4: God created man and woman, male and female, so that we would be relational and caring, mainly so that we can relate to God, and have children who will grow and learn how to live in stable, loving families and communities, and we will all learn to "one another" one another. Our identity and sense of self, and our rôle in life, is based on our male-ness or female-ness; this is natural and vital.
Lie 4: That gender is both fluid and unimportant.
Truth 5: God gave us everything we need for life. He constantly cares for every part of the Universe according to His great plan. God also gave us charge over the natural world, requiring that we would be caring stewards. He gave us science and the laws of physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, gravity, logic and more, so that we could evaluate, create and care for our world and its resources.
Lie 5: That the climate is changing and our planet likely doomed because of global warming caused by catastrophic levels of man made carbon dioxide and methane emissions into our atmosphere.
The Creation And Our Climate
When we look at carefully constructed climate models we find that the Earth has shown no global warming for more than half a century; many show that if temperatures are changing, they are cooling, ever so slightly. There is NO global warming.
AND, our atmosphere is not in any danger, the increase in carbon dioxide is helping forests and farm crop-yields which grow by consuming CO2, water and other nutrients. Planet Earth produces so much methane in various ways, that what comes from cows is insignificant.
Logic therefore tells us that any changes to our climate must be caused by something other than these gases. Do scientists not want to tell us (and their bosses) that they have not yet discovered the cause?
The good news is that there have been times in demonstrable Earth history when weather systems and atmospheric CO2 and methane levels were much higher than today, yet the world ecosystem continued to work; people are still thriving on Earth despite these past cycles.
Our worldview is our overall view of the world, it shapes how each of us understands our life and experiences, (and the lives and experiences of others), and how we act in response. It reflects how we answer every question about life and living.
A worldview reflects what we know as "truth". It is "our philosophical view of all of reality" (Neil Anderson).
Everybody has a worldview and it is something uniquely personal like our fingerprints. "A worldview is a network of ultimate beliefs, assumptions, values, and ideas about the universe, and our place in it". So if we believe untrue things or "go along" with ungodly ideas, then our worldview will be corrupted and will impact everything we think and do. So sad.
Propaganda is increasing, particularly from government sources, big business, social media networks and the popular media; from the plutocracy.
Newspapers and free-to-air TV and radio are a minefield of misdirection and misinformation. I am finding it best to stay away from news programs and newspapers and use TV only for re-runs of old shows and movies. Some of my friends, who are probably made of tougher stuff than I am, stay away from these things altogether so they avoid even the station breaks and the advertisements.
The ideas we find repugnant all come from a denial of God, and who He is, and His place and purpose in the Creation and our lives. This is sin.
"Never was there a heresy, but it had something to do with an insufficient estimate of sin" (H. C. G. Moule, "Ephesian Studies"). So true, when we under-estimate sin we do not see the need for God's solution of the cross. Satan does all that he can to undermine the need for the cross, he works hard to get us to ignore what the Puritans called, "the exceeding sinfulness of sin".
The answer, for us, is Jesus.
God Is Known In History in Jesus
The idea of God may seem difficult: we have all seen cartoons or heard funny stories reflecting some people's perceptions of God. But we can know God in clear and practical ways.
God came to Earth in the form of a human baby, a boy who grew to manhood, a person just like everyone we know. His name is Jesus. No serious student of ancient history doubts the reality of this.
When God created the Cosmos He created a very big, beautiful, fertile and safe environment and then, as the final element, He created humankind, a man and a woman. God created us in His image and likeness; we are spirit like God, and we are soul and body because we are physical creatures.
Because we have a spirit we can communicate with God as no other creatures can. In the original Hebrew language, the Bible says we are a "speaking spirit"; we are the only creatures with a spirit, we are also unique because we have complete language, with tenses, nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. We can record thoughts and ideas for others, even those in another place or time. We can see "the end from the beginning" so can design complex things, from a conceptual idea to a completed object or system: an airplane or bridge, football or pizza, or a painting or song! Wonderful.
When Jesus came to Earth, He was given a body and a soul, like us. He was given the name Yeshua where the "Ye", like the "Je" of Jesus, or the "ja" part of hallelujah, means "God". "Yeshua" and "Jesus" mean "God saves". So God came to a very troubled Earth as "God Saves". We surely can say "hallelujah"!
A big thing for me are the Bible verses which make Jesus approachable. These enabled me to accept that Jesus wants to come into intimate relationship with people, with me and with you. We are told that if ever we look directly upon God we will die (Exodus 33:20); but we can look at and be near to Jesus because He is a human, just like our mother or our best friend. "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). So when we are with Jesus we are fully in the presence of God. Awesome! When we first come to Jesus, Father God immediately adopts us as a son or a daughter (Galatians 4:7). We are fully included!
Christians are the only faith group who can know and be in intimate relationship with their deity.
Miracles Known To Be True
Another area where we get to "see" God is in testimony. Testimony is when someone tells of the works God is doing in a life. It always helps our faith when we know that miraculous things have happened, things which could not have come through the natural laws of science or medicine; supernatural events, accomplished from the power of the spiritual world, from God Himself.
Faith helps our hope; when we are in doubt or afraid our hope is precious. When testimony reminds our faith that Jesus is still working miracles in the world, we know we can look to Him for our own life and future, this brings hope. These days I often think that only Bible believing Christians have any real hope.
Having seen miracles in our time and place, we can also accept the miracles in the Bible. If we can believe even one miraculous testimony, (or are able to tell our own), then surely we can believe all the hundreds of miracle accounts in our Bible.
(Without the miracles there would be little left of the Bible, right? See Genesis chapters 1 and 2, 2 Kings chapter 4, Matthew 4:23-25, John 2:7–9, Acts 10:38 and more and more)
We can accept that God spoke, and the Universe came into being, including us and our lovely planet Earth.
Then, if we look at the laws of science and nature (on which all science and engineering are based), we see that the Big Bang could never have happened because "something" cannot come from "nothing".
Origins Of Life
All the scientific theories of "origins of life" and "evolution" fall down before one or more laws of science, thermodynamics or nature, all!
People of faith believe the spiritual world to be real; we represent more than 4 out of every 5 people on Earth. We do not agree on all attributes of the spiritual world, but we all know that it is real. Anyone who has seen or experienced déjà vu, or a dream come true, or any kind of miracle, knows this to be true.
The Bible is God's book and is the most logically complete presentation of our origins and our social well-being that has ever been seen. The number of extremely intelligent people who have discovered this and come to be Christians is remarkable, I love their excitement over what their towering intellects have found to be irrefutably true. God reveals Himself to us in many ways (Luke 1:26-28; Acts 7:30; John 6:19-20; Revelation 1:1). In every case truth and purpose are revealed and gladly received by the people.
Truth is needed if we are to meet God's will for us, that we, and all the Creation, reveal God's glory and fulfill His purposes (Ephesians 2:10). We can do this only when we live in truth.
Sometimes things seem confusing, then I remember that Jesus is with me (Matthew 28:20); my heart will sing the Jess Ray song: "It may be too good to be understood, but it's not too good to be true". Yes!
Bless us all. Amen.
"When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were frightened. But he said to them, 'It is I; don't be afraid'" (John 6:19-20).
" .. the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you" (John 14:17).
" .. the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie - just as it has taught you, abide in him" (1 John 2:27).
"O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord" (Isaiah 2:5).
Thank you Jesus. Amen.
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At a recent church meeting where many from different Christian congregations were gathered, a visiting pastor was leading. He asked a young local man named David to come and stand in the centre, as representative of all those under thirty, and lead us in prayer in tongues. This David did. The whole meeting was in unity, and, as we prayed, Jesus gave me a vision.