Suppose your boss believed every day was April Fool’s Day. Prank after prank after prank continuously. One morning, he meets you at the door to announce you’ve been fired.
“Yeah right,” you say. “April Fool’s Day.” But the grim look on his face says otherwise. Are you fired or not? Either way, you want the peace of knowing the truth.
If your six year old regularly reads this blog post, please direct him to a You Tube post of Elmo’s care of a fish.
Remember when you found out the ‘man in a red suit around a certain time of year’ did not exist?’ Ever since you were two years old, your parents insisted he was a real guy who annually checked a certain list. Then on your sixteenth birthday, you discovered your parents had been telling you what they called ‘a good fib.’ A good fib! Is that even a thing?
Finally, at the age of twenty-six, after ten years of intensive counseling, you moved on with your life. But never again when your parents uttered, “Merry Christmas,” did you trust them.
The truth is this: when you know the truth and apply it, your life is much simpler, more calmly defined. Seriously. When the Bible commands us to not engage in drunkenness, and we apply that command to our lives, we escape so many downfalls and disasters. When we obey the commandment not to covet our neighbor’s wife, we eliminate a potentially horrible outcome.
These are truth because of a larger truth. There is either one God or no God. It certainly can’t be true that hundreds of gods exist. Which one is really in control? Which one should we worship? What happens if they don’t get along? If one is in charge of weather while another is in charge of the earth, what happens if they start fighting? An earthquake and a hurricane at the same time, both trying to outdo each other? What if the god in charge of spinning the earth grows apatheticc—big problem!
So no God then? Based on a theory proposed by a mere human who studied common adaptations of finches’ beaks and tortoises’ shells on Galapagos Islands in 1835? The world’s conclusion: There is no God! Well, thank God! Whoops—didn’t mean to say that.
A collection of sixty-six books written by forty men over a period of over four thousand years surely should stimulate someone to ponder if the collection carries truth. Doesn’t that seem more plausible than relying on Darwin studying adapting animals on an island?
When you read the Bible, you discover one overriding truth. The Old Testament continually points to the coming of one particular person, the Messiah. Following, the New Testament is the revealing and confirmation of the Messiah in the person of Jesus Christ—God who became man.
Either 15 or 16 writers (it’s not established who wrote the book of Hebrews) wrote the entire New Testament. All of them were either eye witnesses of Jesus’ life or contemporaries of His time on earth. They were scrupulous in detailing His life and wrote emphatically about the tremendous impact He made on them and the world.
But go ahead and give Darwin’s theory more credibility than those sixteen writers’ historical observations. Makes sense to me.
If you’re God and you’re walking on the earth you created, wouldn’t you be able to do anything you desired? Like raising the dead to life, or standing in a boat to calm the wind? Or, most importantly, raising yourself from the dead after being crucified?
But go ahead and allow the adaptations of finches’ beaks and tortoises’ shells to be your truth. Makes sense to me.
If, while He was on earth, God taught incredible truths, wouldn’t it be important for us to listen to Him. Makes sense to me.
Jesus said this in John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.”
Truth? Believing it is so, creates an easy yoke both in this life and the life to come. Allow the most massive truth of all to permeate your heart.