The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

My favorite metaphor for the Christian life is puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without the big picture into which all the pieces fit, the puzzle pieces are, well, puzzling. Without God in Christ, the ultimate big picture, the pieces never seem to fit. We look at one piece and wonder what in the world it means. Life becomes like a Woody Allen movie ending in frustration or resignation. Why do you think he always seems to have that look of sadness on his face? A God-less universe can do that to a person. This metaphor is why my favorite quotation from C.S. Lewis is on the cover of my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Even in the conundrum that is life, in Christ it can make sense because we can trust him in his Almighty power and goodness and wisdom to make sense of it for us. And in him the pieces really do fit, which is why I was so confident in raising our children in the Christian faith. I knew they could never find in any other worldview the comprehensive understanding of every single puzzle piece of life, even those that take some time to figure out, and those to which we’re just not given answers. Which brings me to the history of redemption, and its importance for our faith.

That history is found in our Bibles, and our Christian life has no meaning apart from the entire story we read there. The Bible is God’s breathed out revelation, his word, about what this puzzling thing called life means. Without it, we are stuck in our own minds with the pieces trying to figure it all out, an impossibility as the history of philosophy and religion apart from Christianity makes abundantly clear. Without revelation all we have is speculation after endless speculation, and more endless speculation. What makes one speculation right and another wrong? Who knows! Nobody. That’s the point. Without revelation we’re stuck in a box with no exit or window for light to shine in. Eventually, the only way to determine right and wrong is power, might making right, which is why life in a God-less universe is so dangerous. Inside the box we initially got paganism, and through the Hebrews and the Jewish religion’s fulfillment in Jesus Christ, paganism was eventually defeated in Christendom. In the 18th century, however, revelation was rejected and mankind decided it liked life in the box better by trying to figure it out through reason, and secularism became the new paganism. We’re right back to might makes right and the will to power.

Thus the necessity of God’s revelation in Scripture and Christ, not only for civilization to survive, but also to thrive. This starts with each individual Christian understanding the importance of redemptive history for their own faith, and then together we’ll be capable to obey Christ’s command to the Apostles to disciple the nations. Being familiar with the ultimate big picture is critical if we’re to successfully be part of advancing God’s kingdom on earth, also in the Lord’s Prayer in obedience to Christ’s command.

What Exactly is the History of Redemption?
That’s an easy question to answer. We find the entire story in Genesis 1-3. God created the world good, man rebelled, everything went to hell, and man’s Creator promised to make it all right. The story plays itself out from Genesis 4 to Revelation 22, and we are right smack dab in the middle of it! Of course there are a few details, and they make all the difference. It is unfortunate so few Christians know those details because all those pieces make the frustrating pieces we have to deal with every day fit so much better.

I was prompted to write this because of a conversation I had recently with a family member. She asked me what a zealot was because someone told her Jesus was a zealot and not what the gospels proclaim him to be, Lord and Savior. It was gratifying that I knew enough through my years of study and learning to walk her through the history of Israel, and how the zealots came to exist as a response to Israel’s oppression by foreign powers.

Oppression in Israel’s history is a critical part of redemptive history. God called Abraham and the Patriarchs specifically to lead them into 430 years of slavery, which is a very odd thing for a god to do to his people in the ancient world. And four centuries is a very long time! In the history of His people, God often communicates in metaphor, and this was an extended metaphor for the slavery and bondage of sin. The Exodus continued the metaphor. The only possibility of escape and freedom from the bondage of sin is revealed to be the power of God. We get a strong hint of God’s power, not our choosing, being the operative principle in the redemption from sin in the life of Abraham. He’s called by God from his homeland to go to a land He will show him. God makes a covenant promise with Abram that his offspring will be like the stars in the sky and sand on the seashore, and be a blessing for all the peoples of the earth (Gen. 12). He then tells Abram he will fulfill both sides of the covenant promise, His side and man’s (Gen. 15).

The problem is that Abraham, his name since changed to mean, “farther of a multitude” (Gen. 17), and his wife Sarah are old, and not just old but really old, as in it is impossible for them to have children old. God made the initial promise when Sarah was already beyond child bearing age, but he then made them wait 25(!) years before Isaac would be born. That would put Abraham at 100 and Sarah at 90. Having a child at that age is obviously impossible. A year prior to the birth, God in the form of three men visited the childless couple and said He would return in a year and Sarah would have a son. She laughs because the idea is ridiculous, and He asks the rhetorical question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Of course not! God wanted to get across the point that with man what is impossible with God is made possible, and God made this abundantly clear throughout redemptive history.

After the Hebrews are freed from their slavery, they celebrated their deliverance every year, and still do, at Passover. For the Hebrews and the Jewish people to this day, the Exodus is central to their image as a people: they were never to be the slaves of anyone. Unfortunately, Jews who rejected Jesus as their Messiah failed to realize the Exodus was a metaphor for sin, not God’s promise that they would never experience political oppression. They also thought the promise was for a physical plot of land in the Middle East and not the entire earth. That is a big miss! Having misread God’s message, the Hebrews thought God’s promise was fulfilled 400 years later with King David and the glorious reign of Solomon, but as soon as Solomon died, everything started going back to hell. Israel split into the northern ten tribes, called Israel, its capital was Samaria, and the southern two kingdoms were called Judah with Jerusalem being their capital.

The Rise of the Prophets and Israel’s Oppression
As you read through the Old Testament it is vital that you connect what is going on with and through Israel to you as part of God’s chosen people in Christ. Remember and commit to memory Matthew 1:21, a verse vital to understanding where you fit in this vast history. The Lord appeared to Josph in a dream and told him that Mary “will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua (Yeshua), which means The Lord Saves. Jesus didn’t come to try to save his people, or to make it possible; he came to make it actual. That’s what God does; He makes the impossible possible. We begin to see this much more clearly when the prophets come on the scene.

Israel’s civil war was a period of geopolitical conflict. Isaiah was the first prophet coming approximately 730 BC, and his writing is probably the most pointedly eschatological of all the prophets. The northern kingdom was destroyed in 722 by the Assyrians and the ten tribes scattered and lost to history. Judah lasts approximately another 150 years when Jerusalem is destroyed and the Babylonians take most of the people captive to Babylon. After 70 years, God brings the now called Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and their religious life, and it stands until 70AD when it is destroyed by the Romans. This entire period is also metaphorically rich for our personal journey of faith. The prophets warn and promise, the people do well, then rebel, and this happens over and over, not unlike our own struggle with sin. God consistently promises that He will be their Savior because they obviously can’t save themselves. The verses promising this are practically innumerable, but Jeremiah 23:5,6 are a powerful reminder that this salvation in which we trust is God’s work in us out of which we work out our salvation with fear and trembling:

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteousness.

This branch is Christ who is king now sitting at the right hand of the Almighty ruling over all powers and authorities to the end of ultimately fulling the redemption of His creation. Jews thought the references to Judah and Israel were literal references to land and the people who inhabit it instead of the salvation from sin. That is also a very big miss.

The Unexpected Messiah
Micah, the last prophet to speak God’s words, lived 430 years before John the Baptist arrived. He tells us about a messenger for the coming of the Lord which would be fulfilled in John. During those years of silence the concept of a Messianic Savior developed that had nothing to do with the actual Messiah who was born in Bethlehem, Jesus of Nazareth. Part of the reason had to do with what transpired for the people of Israel during those 400 years.

After the Babylonian exile (586-538BC), the Jews were ruled by the Persians until Alexander the Great defeated them in 333, who then conquered Judea shortly thereafter. When Alexander died, the Jews were ruled by a combination of Greco-Macedonian kings, until finally in 160s to 150s they gained some semblance of independence under the Maccabees. Less than 100 years later, however, the Romans gained control over Judea; and in 37, Herod the Great, a questionable Jew, was appointed “King of the Jews” by the Romans. There was a whole cross current of ideas among the Jews trying to deal with this centuries long upheaval, some through violence, some isolation, others religious observance.

As a people whose self-conception would not allow slavery and oppression, living under hundreds of years of it developed a burning desire for Yahweh to send his Messiah to finally deliver them. There were many conflicting conceptions of who this Messiah would be, but everyone agreed he would be a human ruler like David anointed by God (the meaning of Messiah) to wipe out Israel’s enemies and finally restore Israel to its former glory. The disciples were still thinking along these lines when just prior the ascension, they asked Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” The Zealots were among the most, well, zealous of those fighting against the oppression of the Romans, and they often used violence to do it. Needless to say a Messiah like Jesus was the last thing they would ever accept.

The History of Israel and Me
From a Christian perspective, we can see in this broad overview of redemptive history God’s plans through it all to save me personally. I wasn’t an afterthought who God would possibly be save if I just made the right choice. God choose me! And in Christ before the world was even created. Once God choose Abram to get the ball rolling, it only took 2000(!) years for the plan to unfold to fulfillment. We have much to learn from all of that time, and the more we learn about it the more profound will that fulfillment be in us. As Agustine famously said, “The New (Testament) is in the old concealed, the Old (Testament) is in the New revealed.” The more effort we put into unearthing what is concealed, the more what is revealed will absolutely blow us away, not to mention transform our lives and our world.

 

Epistemology and Being Poor in Spirit

Epistemology and Being Poor in Spirit

One of my favorite verses in Scripture might seem like a strange verse to have as a favorite, I Corinthians 8:2:

If anyone thinks he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know.

It took a long time for me to appreciate and truly value my ignorance. The tendency of our younger selves is to think we know way more than we actually do. My younger self, probably in my twenties, came across the cliché, “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.” It slowly dawned on me after two or three decades how true that cliché really is. God has blessed me with an insatiable curiosity to learn, and by this point into my seventh decade of life, I know a lot, especially compared to normal people. As I’ve grown in my knowledge over the decades, the cliché has become increasingly profound in its implications for my life, as I will try to explain.

First the word epistemology. It means the study (ology) of knowing (from Greek episteme, “knowledge”). We might think our knowing is straight forward and obvious. It is not, at all, as you quickly learn in the history of philosophy dealing with epistemology. For Christians and orthodox Jews, we’re taught in Scripture that knowing is possible and real, not in the least problematic. In fact in Scripture the word know and its variants is used between 1163 (NIV) and 1362 (ESV) times. That’s a lot of knowing! So Paul’s approach to knowledge is not calling for any kind of skepticism, that we can’t know anything. Quite the contrary. Before I get to the context; I want to share my inspiration for this post.

 

In this video Jordan Peterson and a handful of other scholars discuss the book of Exodus. These are two hour plus discussions that took place over a week early last year. Near the end and at approximately two hours and fourteen minutes, he says the following in the context of the passage about Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3):

 From the Sermon on the Mount, being poor in spirit means being brought low enough to be humble enough to be ready to receive. It’s a reference to pride, and a call to a particular kind of humility. He decided you could be friends with what you didn’t know. If you were the former, you try to prove your point all the time. Once you realize the depths of your ignorance, and what you don’t know is inexhaustible, and my troubles are inexhaustible, I better have an inexhaustible source to call on, and I can certainly call on the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance. It reverses everything because all of a sudden what you don’t know is your greatest hope because you can open up the landscape of revelation to what you don’t know.

I love that phrase, “the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance.” It’s so Jordan Peterson, and so true! The reason is that all knowledge, every single thing that can be known is of, from, and to God, as Paul says, “For from him and through him and for him are all things.” That means it’s a bottomless ocean in which we get to swim literally forever. And as Peterson implies, all knowledge is revelation, something given to us by God, and when we know this, in our seeking knowledge and learning we’ll be like the proverbial kid in candy store. It will be fun and thrilling and exciting, and so very gratifying. And unlike candy, we can never get enough.

Getting back to Paul. When we “think we know something” we shut ourselves off from “the landscape of revelation” (i.e., all of reality), as if somehow we own or possess knowledge like it’s ours, almost as if we made it up! Which gets us to where the rubber meets the road—love. Most Christians when they think of this chapter don’t think of verse 2, but think of the phrase, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” This is an excellent example of why taking Scripture verses, or part of verses, out of context is a good way to distort it’s meaning. It has turned too many Christians into anti-intellectuals as if knowledge in itself is bad. In chapter 8 Paul is discussing the problem of food sacrificed to idols, a big issue in the thoroughly pagan port city of Corinth. Here is how Paul introduces the context of his remarks:

Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.

There is no question, we can know the theological reality of the unreality of idols. They, the gods to whom the animals are sacrificed, do not exist. Our knowing that, however, doesn’t mean we are superior to those who believe they are real. That knowledge doesn’t have to “puff us up”. And our being known by God is infinitely more important than anything we can know.

Everything turns on what we do with our knowledge. We only possess it because it objectively exists outside of us. As I said, we don’t own it, it’s not ours. And since we didn’t create our brains or nervous systems or body, or anything else, how can possessing it make us think we’re any more special than anyone else? Everything we have, including our knowledge, has been given to us and is to be used in the service of others. As Jesus told us, if we really want to find our lives, and to have life that is really life, then we’ll lose our life for his sake. And that means like him, who did not come to be served but to serve, we also exist to serve others.

Who Doesn’t Want to be Right? And the Curse of Absolute Certainty
I heard this phrase not too long ago from a friend about an acquaintance of his who asked him this question. It was of course a rhetorical question, the answer as obvious as the question is silly. No, I want to be wrong. Yes, of course I want to be right, but I was deeply ambivalent about the question itself; it just didn’t sit right with me. Which brings me to a conviction about knowledge I’ve developed over the years and a certain kind of very knowledgeable person. I wouldn’t call them know-it-alls because they aren’t arrogant or unpleasant people. They don’t “look down their noses” at others. In fact quite the opposite. They want to help others and are generous with their knowledge. What was it about such people that rubbed me the wrong way? They embodied that answer to the question: they believe they are absolutely right! And they are absolutely certain about it! That, I fear, is a dangerous place to be.

The problem of absolute certainty, what I call a curse, goes back a long way in the philosophical discussion over epistemology. It’s a curse because it’s a lie, a result of sin, that finite creatures can have knowledge of an absolute sort.  A certain pious French philosopher and mathematician is responsible for this virus making its way into the bloodstream of Western culture. I refer to him a lot in my writing because this is such a critical topic in our war against secularism. His name is René Descartes (1596-1650). There was a growing skepticism in the 17th century, and he was determined to do something about it. The problem was that his answer was to insist that knowledge of an absolute sort was possible for human beings based on their reason, that man’s rational capabilities could achieve absolute certainty. He started his journey to this conclusion by doubting everything that could be doubted, and discovered the only thing he could not doubt was his existence. How did he arrive at this conclusion? His own thinking. So he made famous the phrase in Latin, Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am, and became the father of modern philosophy. In the history of Christian Western civilization this was a disaster of biblical proportions.

You may think I’m being hyperbolic, if not melodramatic, and I’m overstating the negative implications of a statement that is self-evidently true. You might reply, of course I can think so therefore I must exist, but can you really know that? Be absolutely certain of that? When you trace intellectual history from Descartes to the present day, you quickly learn it is not at all self-evidently true. In a hundred years it led to the skepticism of David Hume (1711-1776) who concluded reason alone leads us to a dead end where knowledge isn’t possible at all. He was not happy about this, in fact quite depressed, but he had to be honest. Very few people in the history of philosophy were that honest, but eventually there was another who turned out to be the greatest prophet of the horrors of the 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Walter Kauffmann in his biography of Nietzsche, he says things in his writings that abound in prophecies of doom:

If the doctrines . . . of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal . . . are hurled into the people for another generation, if mankind realizes the unique worth of the human being has evaporated, and that no up and down remains, and if the tremendous event that we have killed God reaches the ears of man—then night will close in, an age of barbarism begins, and there will be wars such as have never happened on earth.

Next to this paragraph in the book I wrote, “The 20th Century!!!”

It is important to understand that it is not just skepticism that caused the barbarism of the 20th century, but the reason for it—the death of God. Nietzsche lamented this, but as a convinced atheist he believed God wasn’t an option for man because, well, God didn’t exist. So he believed human beings needed to create another moral foundation for civilization. Good luck with that! The moral foundation of Christianity, that “slave religion” as he called it, was gone, and the vacuum was going to be filled by something. It was the horrific paganism that Judaism and Christianity saved the world from, this time in the form of secularism. Enlightened man could no longer believe in the gods, but he could believe in himself! How’s that workin’ out for him?

The Only Source of Knowledge is God
What happened with Descartes was the idea that our knowing could start with ourselves, and then move out from there. No it can’t. The reason is that we are not God, which is shocking to learn for many sinners. What do you mean I’m not God? Of course I am. I get to call the shots in my life. I get to determine what is right and wrong for me. I determine my own meaning. The result of such thinking is that in America in 2022 a record number of people killed themselves, around 50,000. How many more tried? Add to this the dysfunction of broken marriages, dangerous and dilapidated cities, depression, and one could go on.

The solution is to start with God, and to accept we don’t know squat no matter how much we know. I remember Chuck Swindoll saying at a service when I went to his church in southern California say if you think you’re indispensable, put your hand in a bucket of water and pull it out. How quickly the water fills the space is how indispensable you are. The Westminster Shorter Catechism’s Question number 1 asks the most important question of our existence: “What is the chief end of man?” What is the purpose or telos of our existence? The answer: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The reason there is so much misery in the world is because secular man thinks his chief end is to glorify himself and enjoy himself till he goes into the ground and rots. Well, that’s inspiring! The problem as we see all around us, there is no joy in that.

The beauty of Christianity is that God really does want us to be joyful, to enjoy life, to take pleasure in whatever we put our hands or minds to, whatever we create, whatever we experience. I’ve never liked the word happiness because I don’t know what it means. Joy, by contrast, communicates satisfaction, fulfillment, like seeing your newborn child for the first time. That is joy! Seeing indescribable beauty in nature, or hearing it in music, or marveling at your tastebuds as you experience the sweetness of an apple. Even our fleeting accomplishments can bring us joy if they are pursued in Christ, and we know they really don’t matter at the end of the day. Only He matters! That is the road to using all we have to God’s glory, including our knowledge, in love and service to others because we do it all for Him, to Him, and through Him. That is the only source of true fulfillment, now and forever.

The Apostles Turning the World Upside Down-Today!

The Apostles Turning the World Upside Down-Today!

Reading through Acts is an incredible apologetics experience. I once heard an ex-atheist interviewed on the Side B Stories podcast say it was reading through Acts that brought him to faith. He said there was no way it could be made up, and of course I agree! One of my goals in writing Uninvented was to encourage Christians to read the Bible with an apologetics mindset. This is especially crucial in our secular age. We need to understand how the Bible presents itself as true history, not as myth, fairy tale, or fiction as critics have insisted for 300 years. When you read it, it reads real. It breathes out verisimilitude on every page. Acts is especially powerful in this regard because Luke, the author (also of the gospel) is such a careful chronicler of events. Even non-Christian scholars have to admit he is an excellent historian. We also have much to learn from Acts about the world-transforming nature of the faith that has once for all been delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).

This piece was specifically inspired by a sermon I heard at our church earlier this year as the pastor was making his way through Acts. Paul and his companions were in Thessalonica, and as usual causing a stir by preaching the risen Lord Jesus. We read in Acts 17 how some Jewish religious leaders were none too happy and formed a mob to take out the trouble makers.

6 And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.”

Exactly! There is another king named Jesus! And Caesar doesn’t like that one bit.

Having read the NIV translation of the Bible since I became a Christian in 1978, I didn’t know this verse said what the ESV correctly translates as, “turned the world upside down.” The NIV says, “These men who have caused trouble all over the world . . . ” and that doesn’t do justice to the Greek. That morning I couldn’t help feeling a thrill at this passage, especially connecting king Jesus to turning the world upside down by turning it right side up! According to Strong’s, the extended meaning reads like this:

anastatóō (literally, “change standing from going up to down“– properly, turn something over (up to down), i.e. to upset (up-set), raising one part up at the expense of another which results in dislocation (confusion); to unsettle, make disorderly (dis-orderly).

These Jewish leaders didn’t realize how right they were! God’s created order distorted at the fall was turned upside down, everything potentially becoming the inversion of what God created to be. The mess that we see all around us and observe in history, not to mention our own lives, was the result. But God from before the world was even created was going thwart the devil’s plans, and it started the very day of the disaster created by man’s rebellion. That fallen world is what the Apostles were turning upside down, and God through his Holy Spirit and His word and His people is still doing it.

Fighting The Fall
I first heard this phrase when I was a young Christian, and the moment I heard it I said to myself, yes, that is what I want my life to be! That desire was actually planted some years before I became a Christian. When I was 16 my Catholic grandmother gave me a book for Christmas called The Robe about the centurion who oversaw the crucifixion of Christ. When they cast lots to see who would get his robe, he got it, and it had a deep emotional and psychological impact on his life, eventually transforming this Roman pagan into a Christian. Having rejected his life as a Roman military professional, he wandered throughout Judea trying to figure out this new life, and wherever he went he made a positive impact on the people he encountered. He helped turn anger and bitterness and jealousy and dysfunction into joy and peace and harmony. When I heard this “fighting the fall” phrase, I thought back to the centurion and the vision it gave me of what I wanted my life to be.

Just as the curse which sin brought affects everything, so the righteousness Christ came to bring seeks to reverse those affects in everything. It starts with the greatest commandment, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. That sets the foundation because the gospel the Apostles preached was a ministry of reconciliation. To reconcile means to restore harmony in a relationship, and God in Christ came to restore harmony to our relationships to other people and creation. The fall brought chaos, and salvation brings order. At Babel (Gen. 11) God thwarted man’s hubris, and started the process of reversing the fall in choosing Abram (Gen.12) through which he would bless all the peoples on earth. The blessings started when Christ fulfilled the promise and succeeded where the first Adam failed. On the cross he purchased a people to carry it out, and guaranteed its ultimate fulfillment when he ascended to the right hand of God to reign over all powers in heaven and earth (Eph. 1:18-23).

Christ also began the reversal of Adam’s failure to fulfill what is called the dominion mandate (Genesis 1).

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Reconciliation extends beyond relationships, the foundation, but also to creation. Instead of letting weeds grow in the garden, we pick them. Instead of letting dust and dirt settle in the house, we clean it. Instead of living in huts, we build houses. We live in an area of Florida bustling with growth and dynamism. Every time I see a new development spring up out of the dirt I think, the fall is losing! Or when a new road is built to allow traffic to flow more smoothly and safely I think, the fall is losing! We are “taking dominion” by building, cleaning, fixing, fighting entropy (the inevitable nature of things to wear down unless we do something about it). We are created in the image of God to be co-creators with the raw material He has graciously provided.

Goodness, Beauty, and Truth and Christ’s Reign
Those familiar with classical education hear these words often. In a world full of evil, ugliness, and lies, God has given us the mission, as Paul says, to “not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21). Living by site, Christians are easily driven to pessimism. I started pushing back on this natural tendency when I decided to believe what the Bible tells me is true about the nature of reality, that Christ reigns over all of it. Not some of it, not ninety-nine percent of it, but all of it. How in the world could we ever think that man or Satan could act outside of the express will of the king of the universe? We can’t know how this works; we don’t have to do the math, but simply accept and trust God’s revelation of his sovereign reign in Christ over all things. If you really believe this, it will transform your life and how you view everything. Reading through Romans recently, I was struck in this regard by Paul’s words about Abraham (4:17):

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.

Think about it. The God who created everything out of nothing, calls things that don’t have existence into being. That means by His power (Zech. 4:6) through His people transforming everything the devil distorts and tries to destroy into goodness, beauty, and truth, wrapped up in a big red bow of love. Of course all of it driven by the one on the cross who paid it all that we might have life that is really life. Many Christians think Christ’s reign won’t be fully realized until he returns, but that is not at all the biblical witness.

Psalm 2 introduces the king God has installed on Zion, His holy mountain. What do kings do? They reign, and this Messianic Psalm points to Christ. And notice the following verses in other Psalms declaring the reign of this Almighty king:

  • God reigns over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. Psalm 47:8
  • The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he has put on strength as his belt. Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. Psalm 93:1
  • Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns! Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity.” Psalm 96:10
  • The Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad! Psalm 97:1
  • The Lord reigns; let the peoples tremble! He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! Psalm 99:1
  • The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the Lord! Psalm 146:10

And in Psalm 110, a Psalm of the reign of the Messiah, we’re told that Christ is at God’s right hand until He makes Christ’s enemies a footstool for his feet. We know the operative word is “until” because in I Corinthians 15:25, Paul echoes these exact words, but adds the word “must.” So Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” And we know what these enemies include because the final enemy to be defeated at his return is death; so any evil, ugliness, and lies, and anything associated with sin must be defeated before Christ returns to defeat death. I know, that is very hard to believe when we live by site, but that is the clear declaration of the word of God.

Dominion and the Triumph of Christianity
From a human perspective, what do you think the odds of Christianity taking over the Roman Empire were in the first century? How about when Jesus’ disciples were cowering in fear while their supposed Messiah lay in a tomb after having been brutally killed on a Roman cross? Or when those crazy Galileans (i.e., Jewish hicks and hayseeds) were running around Judea claiming this Jesus of Nazareth had come back from the dead? How about the odds being zero because nobody in their right mind would have even dared think such a thing could happen, especially Christians. But three hundred years later it did. Eventually Christianity defeated the pagan world and gave us the modern world. It is still transforming lives, which transforms families, communities, and eventually nations. That’s the whole point.

British historian Tom Holland wrote a wonderful book called Dominion about how the only explanation for the modern world is Christianity. Holland, not yet a Christian, is an historian of the ancient world. He loved the pagan Greeks and Romans, but over time he realized he had nothing in common with those people. He started asking why, and Dominion was the result. While early Christians could never envision the world becoming Christianized that is exactly what happened, and I would argue precisely the point of the gospel. Why do I say that? Because Jesus did! In the Great Commission, Jesus said he was given all authority “in heaven and on earth” specifically that “all nations” would be discipled. Most Christians believe this means individuals will become Christians by the preaching of the gospel, and whether it has influence on the culture of a nation is beside the point. No, that is the point! And I recently learned that Paul ends Romans confirming exactly this:

25 Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages 26 but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith.

I like the way my NIV translates this as, “so that all nations might believe and obey him.” That is dominion, and there is no way transformation of civilizations happens because of a lie. It only happened and will happen because Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit to extend his reign on earth, advance his kingdom, and build his church.

Having listened to a lot of testimonies over the last several years, I am convinced there is no way psychology alone can explain the transformation of people’s lives. If Christianity is a lie, then that’s all it is, nothing more. But it is in fact the power of the Living God as Paul tells us (I Cor. I:18):

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

That power is the word from which we get our English word dynamite. God’s power blows up the works of the devil and transforms lives and does exactly what the Apostles were accused of doing 2000 years ago—turning the world upside down!

 

Christianity is the Only Source of Political Liberty

Christianity is the Only Source of Political Liberty

This is an assertion that many Christians, let alone secularists, will vehemently disagree with. Those who disagree, however, need to bone up on their history of Christian Western civilization. Christian England is the only place on earth where the concept of the rule of law developed that could hold a ruler of the nation accountable. Prior to that, whatever the sovereign declared was law. It isn’t a difficult case to make that the only reason liberty exists at all in the world is because of Christianity. Without Christianity all we are left with is either the will to power and tyranny, or anarchy. When societies end up falling into the latter, people would much rather the tyranny; at least it’s predictable.

This is the dynamic in which we find ourselves as we begin the new year of 2024. It will either be anarchy leading the tyranny, or liberty. It’s one or the other. The only way to liberty is through Christ, so I’ll put my money on liberty. But to do this, we need to disabuse a very lot of people of the notion that the rule of Christianity in a nation is inherently tyrannical. They deride the concept with the epithet “theocracy,” as if the rule of God over a society, what the word means, is a bad thing. It most certainly is not! Of course, that all depends on what we mean by theocracy. I address all this in my upcoming book, and I look forward to seeing what people who disagree with me make of my argument. Hopefully, they’ll agree with me after they read it.

The Necessary Idea of Sphere Sovereignty
I’ve recently become aware of Willem Ouweneel, a Dutch scholar and prolific author. I’m currently reading his book; The World is Christ’s: A Critique of Two Kingdoms Theology. He argues that a Christian worldview requires the autonomy of certain societal relationship, like churches (synagogues, mosques, temples), marriages, families, schools, associations, businesses, political parties, etc. He states, “each is relatively autonomous within its own boundaries, and should be free from interference from either the state or the church.” By contrast, “The state has the responsibility to administer public justice.” That’s all. Needless to say, the state as conceived in the modern world per liberalism and much of what calls itself conservative, known as “the post WWII consensus,” is deeply unbiblical. What liberalism has done inspired by the secularism that created it, is claim that Christianity at the societal level is inherently tyrannical. The claim is spurious and easily refuted by Scripture and history, but the distortion runs deep. Here is the way Ouweneel counters it:

The notion of a Christian state does not imply that Christian authorities enforce Christian values upon its citizens, but that they administer public justice in a Christian way. The notion of a Christian school does not imply that Christian teachers force Christian values down their pupil’s throat, but that they teach and educate according to Christian principles.

The tyranny claim is a perfect example of projection, normally associated with leftists. Liberals (secular or religious, left or right) believe the state is the ultimate sovereign, and that the state can force people to do things ostensibly for their own good. R.J. Rushdoony explains why theocracy is so often misunderstood:

Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.

In the Christian view, by contrast, the state has an extremely limited role, and the people within the spheres of sovereignty, like churches and families, are completely free from state intrusion except for public justice. If laws are broken, the state is responsible to adjudicate it.

The concept of sphere sovereignty is critical in the never-ending battle against the spirit of Babel, which is another word for the tyrannical centralizing state. The concept is as simple as it is contested by those who embrace that centralizing spirit. It was first introduced by the great Dutch theologian, statesman, and journalist Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) in a public address at the inauguration of the Free University of Amsterdam. The question comes down to authority and who wields it. Absolute sovereign authority rests in God alone, and He has delegated His authority on earth to human beings:

so that on earth one actually does not meet God Himself in things visible, but that sovereign authority is always exercised through an office held by men.

In this he asks two pertinent questions:

And in that assigning of God’s Sovereignty to an office held by man the extremely important question arises: how does that delegation of authority work? Is that all embracing Sovereignty of God delegated undivided to one single man; or does an earthly Sovereign possess the power to compel obedience only in a limited circle; a circle bordered by other circles in which another is Sovereign?

These spheres interact and overlap in society, but one sphere must never usurp the authority of the other. The only way this possibly works, and thus the only possibility of true liberty in any society, is the acknowledgement of the absolute Sovereignty of Christ. Kuyper explains why:

But behold now the glorious Freedom idea! That perfect and absolute Sovereignty of the sinless Messiah at the same time contains the direct denial and challenge of all absolute Sovereignty on earth in sinful man; because of the division of life into spheres, each with its own Sovereignty.

Stephen Wolfe in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism explains it well:

[I]t follows that every sphere of life requires a suitable authority, with a suitable power, to make determinations. For this reason, God has granted specific types of power by which the authorities of each sphere make judgments. The family has the pater familiar with patria potestas (“fatherly power”); civil life has the civil magistrate with civil power; the instituted church has the minister with spiritual power, and the individual has a power unto himself. The nature of each sphere dictates the species of power required. These powers and their differences are not arbitrary but arise from the nature of each sphere.

It is only when those in power acknowledge the power of God in Christ as the ultimate authority that the state will recognize its limits. This is the message the secularists (again, be they religious or not) need to be taught. The case, to me, doesn’t appear that hard to make.

Secularism and the Myth of Neutrality
The biggest enemy of liberty in our time is the myth of neutrality driven by secularism. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is the assumption of the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” place, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence.

Secular, understood classically in the medieval world prior to the Enlightenment, simply meant the mundane as opposed to the sacred. The Reformation rightly critiqued this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred as unbiblical, but the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers ended up affirming the same dichotomy, only now religion ended up becoming dangerous to social harmony. As Christianity’s influence waned in Western civilization, secularism came to dominate the public square as a force hostile to Christianity, and in due course became the dominant worldview of the West. The hostility is expressed in manifold ways throughout government and every area of culture, but there is no need to inventory them here. We’re all too depressingly familiar with them as it is. What well-meaning Christians miss, unfortunately, is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism.

In Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.”

The impact of secularism…  . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics.…  . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

They wrote this almost 40 years ago, and we are now in the “later” they speak of—the vacuum has been fully filled. At the time they wrote, nobody could envision the most pernicious enemy of liberty the world has known; the globalist technocratic elite enabled by the ubiquity of the Internet. Fortunately, that same Internet is the Gutenberg press of the 21st century, and the elites will be no more successful in suppressing the truth than the Catholic Church was in suppressing the Reformation.

America’s Fight for Liberty
Most people would agree that true political and religious liberty was for the first time realized in the republic that is the United States of America. Yet, Mark David Hall answers the question of his book, Did America Have a Christian Founding? with a resounding yes! Christianity and liberty are perfectly compatible. In fact, liberty is impossible without it. Unfortunately, the myth of neutrality leads many Christians to mistakenly believe religious freedom means a type of pluralism where all faiths are equally welcome at a neutral public table with mutual respect and tolerance for all. A perfect example of this misconception comes from David French, a one-time conservative who became an implacable foe of Donald Trump (becoming a NeverTrumper). This quote comes from an article in the left-wing Atlantic magazine titled, “Pluralism Has Life Left in It Yet”:

The magic of the American republic is that it can create space for people who possess deeply different world views to live together, work together, and thrive together, even as they stay true to their different religious faiths and moral convictions.

This magic world of America that French invents out of whole cloth never existed, because in God’s created reality, currently fallen and chock full of sinners, such a pluralist Utopia does not and cannot exist. Which is why America was founded as a Protestant republic with shared biblical assumptions and the Bible as its foundational religious text. Most people don’t realize, obviously including David French, that for the first approximately 170 years of America’s history most states had anti-blasphemy and sabbath laws. Not to mention anti-sodomy laws. Doesn’t sound very magical or pluralistic to me!

America’s founders were Englishmen fighting for the rights of Englishmen, which is why someone like Patriot Patrick Henry uttered these immortal words during a speech to the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775:

What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Sadly, most Americans today have traded liberty for security. The English men and women who turned into Americans understood the true value of liberty, of self-government, because they knew their English history, which Americans have lamentably forgotten given the woeful state of so-called “public education.” The revolution was their fight for “the rights of Englishmen.” They knew about Alfred the Great, Magna Carta, The Puritans, Oliver Cromwell and his fight for religious tolerance, and the Glorious Revolution and its Bill of Rights. In fact, Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution. Americans as Englishmen saw their rights earned centuries before being blithely discarded by the British government.

Covid and Recapturing of Our Liberty
None of this was in the realm of abstract “rights” intellectual conservatives love to argue about. It was real, boots on the ground, everyday living as self-governing people before God who granted them the liberty to live their own lives. Americans were eminently practical people, including its intellectual leaders. Unfortunately, with the rise of progressivism starting in the early 20th century, most Americans slowly lost the genius of America as being a self-governing republic. Instead of taking care of ourselves as a self-governing people, we gave over that care to the Nanny State. The Covid debacle was an indication of just how far we’ve fallen. Too many Americans, sadly, proved to be sheeple instead of the independent citizens America used to produce. But Covid has turned out to be a blessing in disguise because God’s job is to turn evil into good and thwart the devil’s plans to destroy his creation.

I’ve always believed the greatness that is America still resides in most Americans to some degree, and the progressive globalist totalitarians cannot wipe it out completely. Once the Covid scam came to be seen as exactly that, a scam, Americans woke up. They realized that instead of blindly trusting “experts” they should trust themselves. Because of the Internet, the globalists can no longer control “the narrative,” and truth is winning. There is a Great Awakening on so many levels. I believe we can defeat America’s woke Maxrist enemies, and re-found America based on limited government as a self-governing people. We need to pray for this daily and trust God in his sovereign Almighty providence will make that happen through us.

In Our Secular Culture Use the Word Creation, Not Nature

In Our Secular Culture Use the Word Creation, Not Nature

I’m planning on writing a book down the road called, There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever: Faith in a Secular Age. One of the most pernicious things secularism has allowed “unbelievers” to get away with is pushing the notion that there is such a thing as an unbeliever, that belief or faith is only for ostensibly religious people. Christians have played into the secularists’ hands by using the biblical word “believer,” a word that should never be used in the modern secular context, but Christians do this all the time. In most modern versions (i.e., not KJV) it’s used about 20 times, but it was unproblematic in a world in which everyone believed in the divine, but in the last two or three hundred years it is very much problematic. This is an unfortunate habit most Christians don’t realize they need to break. I now call people either Christians or non-Christians, or whatever faith they embrace, like atheism or Hinduism, etc., not believer or unbeliever.

Because of the rise of secularism in the period we’ve come to refer to as the Enlightenment, which has in fact brought us suffocating darkness, we must also be very careful about using the word Nature. I recently read a wonderful little book called, History in English Words by Own Barfield. The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, and I recalled he was a friend of C.S. Lewis and part of the Inklings, an informal literary group. Starting at Oxford in the late 1920s, the first three members were Lewis, Barfield, and J.R. Tolkien. That is quite the start to any group. In the book, Barfield discussed how words change their meaning over time depending on cultural circumstances. One such word he discusses is natural or nature, which as the Enlightenment developed in the 17th century completely changed its meaning to how we think of it today. The change of this word indicates a massive worldview shift in what used to be called Christendom:

At the beginning of the seventeenth century we first find the word Nature employed in contexts where medieval writers would certainly have used the word God.

Think about that shift. We might accurately describe it as plate tectonic, the earth literally moving under the feet of the meaning of words affecting how we see and interpret the world. It is a complex symbiotic relationship of life lived among human beings and how their perceptions are formed—how they see reality. There is never a simple one-to-one correlation in the meaning of words and culture as much as we might like to think there is; words and their meaning are as complex as human beings.

The Influence of Newton on the Rise of Secularism
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), one of the most brilliant men in history, and a devout Christian, would be surprised that his physics paved the way for the destruction of Christendom. Needless to say that was not his intention, but the devil is very good at what he does, lying to distort our understanding of God’s perfectly good creation, and everything else. Remember, the fall didn’t make God’s “very good” material world bad, a Platonic gnostic notion, but distorted us in our relationship to it. Thus, Newton developed a cosmology that made creation appear to be like a machine, a clock, and once God set it in motion there was no need for him to be involved. In fact Barfield’s next to last chapter is titled, “Mechanism,” and in it he writes:

[w]e should have to look deeper than all this for the true causes of a change of outlook as rapid and emphatic as that which swept through the last century. If we did so, we should probably discern, as one of the most efficient, that vivid sense of orderliness and arrangement which had grown up during the eighteenth century, the reverence for Reason, and especially for Reason reflected in the impartial laws which govern the working of Nature. To minds thus attuned direct intervention by the divine at any one point in the natural process could only seem like an intolerable liberty; and feeling as well as thought began to revolt at the conjuring-tricks apparently reported in the Gospels.

Newton did not believe this at all because he believed God not only created material reality, but He also sustains it at every moment. Without the “direct intervention by the divine at” every point, the so called “natural process” could not even exist. There is nothing in that sense that is at all “natural” about it.

You’ll notice that Barfield writes reason with a capital R to indicate not merely a God-given mental faculty, but reason having turned into rationalism—big difference. Rationalism gave man the impression that Satan was right, that he could become like God, knowing good and evil. Newton was only a baby when modern philosophy and secularism got is most substantial push with another Christian, French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650). He is most famously known for his phrase in Latin, cogito ergo sum, or I think therefore I am. That, brothers and sisters, gave up the game, even though as a pious Catholic that wasn’t his intention either. We have two choices in the reality God created. We can either start with us, or with God. One leads to disaster, the other to life and flourishing; Jews call it shalom, a kind of ubiquitous peace in which everything works as God intended it to work. Descartes, Newton, and many others, eventually lead to Darwin and the plausibility of a God-less universe in the minds of intellectual elites in the West.

Throughout the 18th century it was far too controversial to come right out with atheism, but in due course materialism became the dominant worldview of Western elites. Initially this was called Deism, the idea that God was a cosmic watchmaker who got it all started and sat back and let it roll. In Aristotle’s phrase, God was the “first mover,” who basically pushed the first domino and forever it goes. Once we get to the middle of the 19th century the intellectual and worldview playing field was set up for Darwin, who made plausible the idea that everything came to be the way it is based on “natural laws.” All we know is that the fittest somehow survive by some inexorable process, or laws, that “science” supposedly shows us is true.

The Doctrine of Creation, Not the Doctrine of Nature
Here is where we come to the contrast between creation and nature, and why as Christians in secular culture we need to always use the former and retire the latter. At least as long as the world remains driven by a secular view of reality. Nature as most people use the word today has the image of something running by itself and coming into existence by chance. Going back to William of Ockham (1285-1347), the Christian West slowly decided that it was a good thing to get rid of the concept of telos, or purpose, in nature. There were convoluted philosophical reasons in the battle over the idea of telos between Plato and Aristotle among Catholic intellectuals, but when Newton came along telos was slowly getting ushered out the back door—Darwin gave it the final kick in the behind to rid the Western intellectual house of it once and for all. Clocks, no matter how complex they are, run just fine without the messy idea of telos having to be introduced. “Nature” like a giant cosmic clock is no different. Creation, however, is an entirely other thing.

In Genesis 1, we are told God created everything according to its kind; the word is used 12 times in the chapter. I think maybe God was trying to make a point. Each kind has its own end, its own purpose, its telos. This is built into the creational order, the way God made things to be. The material world is only “natural” in that it is the nature of the way He created it to exist. But our secular world drenched in Darwinian assumptions sees in nature something that exists independent of God. In effect, nature is a product of chance. The problem with chance, however, is that it cannot create anything. Everyone knows this, of course, but indoctrination and brainwashing are powerful means to delusional ends. Yet we are all given to such secular delusions because secularism is the cultural air we breathe, which is far more dangerous than second hand smoke.

This is why Christians need to consistently remind themselves, their families, friends, and anyone who will listen, that we are not products of chance, not products of mindless, purposeless material processes. We are, as David said, fearfully and wonderfully made, as is everything in creation. We are not merely lucky dirt! But using the word nature or natural allows people, including us, to think we are. Not too many years ago I realized how easy it was for me to be seduced by the lies of secularism, and that some things are “natural.” For Christians, however, there is no distinction between natural and supernatural. C.S. Lewis points out that Mary’s conception by the Holy Spirit was no more miraculous than any other woman’s conception. Sadly, I had never really considered that. Undoubtedly, he’s right! Is not a new being’s creation utterly miraculous? Are we really supposed to believe the process of creating a new life is solely “natural?” Nothing in all of creation is “natural” because all things are created and sustained by the word of God’s power!

Many Christians tend to think of doctrine as dry, boring stuff. But without it all we have is puzzle pieces and no idea how they fit together into the bigger picture. The doctrine of creation is such a big, huge, beautiful picture. It tells us that we are dependent, contingent beings; in every way imaginable creatures who are not self‑sufficient. The rebellious human heart we inherited from Adam and Eve, on the other hand, tempts us to deny that it is God who gives us “life, breath, and everything else.” Grounding our perspective in this essential dependence on God for literally every breath opens us to the significance and wondrous meaning of all things.

The Importance of Wonder and Amazement
We’ve all heard the saying that familiarity breeds contempt. Since we are material beings who swim in a material universe, like fish swimming in water, it is easy to lose the wonder of it all, to get lost in the urgency and intrusion of the now. We must learn and teach others around us to wonder. We must fight the constant tendency to take reality for granted, and lose the amazement at how bizarre life really is. Just contemplate for a moment your existence, your consciousness, the you-ness of you. How weird is that! The ancient Greeks argued that philosophy begins in wonder, and if we are not constantly marveling at the amazing complexity and beauty of nature, and of existence itself, we are doing something wrong. We must have an abiding amazement, even astonishment, at God’s astounding creativity to help us break through the banal and apparent predictability of it all.

A good example in my life is the human body. Two and a half years ago I started a journey learning about health. Listening to very smart and knowledgeable people talk about the human cell, for example, is breathtaking. To think the cell could be a product of “natural” selection and some kind of random merely material process is absurd in the extreme. In Darwin’s day they thought the cell was some kind of blob, and not what in fact it is, an infinitely complex information processing system that allows living things to live. There is only one possible explanation: God! I listen to health oriented podcasts a lot, and often hear people describe “mother nature” as doing such and so, or something “evolving” over millions of years. Baloney! That drives me nuts.

I had a wonderful example recently of someone who in spite of her Darwinian worldview couldn’t help seeing God in the human cell. I had a discussion with a woman who owns a company called Beam Minerals. I discovered her on Dave Asprey’s podcast back in May of 2021, which got me started on my health journey. As she was describing what the cell does to optimize our health or destroy it depending on our lifestyle, she was getting an amazed look and sound at the stunning complexity of it all. I said, God is the only explanation for it. And she got this strange look on her face and said something along the lines of, “I still believe in evolution,” not very convincingly, “but the complexity is just too much to be a coincidence.” Bingo! I wish I could have pushed the conversation toward Jesus, but I put a pebble in her shoe and pray she will be fully opened to God in Creation in due course.

Here’s the lesson and exhortation: Let Creation remind us that we are part of something bigger, much bigger, and more meaningful than our own often petty worries and desires. We are part of God’s grand narrative to redeem all creation!