Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
In the first line of the book, we find out that God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning. It’s a pretty big book, and a lot of stuff follows that. None of it could happen, though, if that first bit didn’t. The Bible unfolds in actual time and history. The reality it describes is the objective one we live in.
God created the heavens and earth. This is not an illusion.
Without that truth, all bets are off. You are reading these words with your eyes. But are you really? How can you be sure that you’re not a brain in a vat somewhere, hooked up to a machine that feeds you stimuli and makes it all seem real? Maybe the lifetime of memories you have is really just a large computer file dumped into your head.
The suggestion that our so-called reality is merely a sophisticated computer program being run by advanced aliens is becoming more popular. This notion is entertained even by the ones we call our leading lights: scientists, physicists, computer programmers, etc.
I knew a man in the Navy who believed the world he experienced, including all the people in it, were creations of his own mind. If he shut the door to a room behind him, that room ceased to exist until he opened the door again. I asked him why his brain persisted in creating me as a character in his life who kept pointing him to Jesus. He admitted that was puzzling. He eventually descended into hopelessness, and nice people in white coats took him away to a quiet place, where they could keep him from harming himself.
In popular culture, this exaltation of the subjective over the objective is working mayhem. I saw a mother threatening to sue a school system for not confirming and accommodating her son’s opinion that he was a cat, not a human.
This is more than simply narcissism run amok. This is a religion. It gains disciples every day, and these disciples, once converted, become (each one of them) the one, true god of their own world. They define their reality, and everyone else must bow.
But Genesis 1:1 still informs us that God made everything. Later, this is emphasized repeatedly, adding that all things were created not just by him, but for him. Reality is real because God says it is. Apart from that, your feet are planted firmly in mid-air.
Additionally, the God who makes things real has fixed a real day on which he will judge the actions of all his free, moral creatures. He has established a law, a rule of righteousness that is firmer than the world itself. He offers forgiveness now, in advance of that day, through Jesus the Christ; a real man who walked the real streets of the actual Jerusalem some 2,000 real years ago. He’s given proof of this by raising him from the dead.
Come back from your dream-world, in which you are the center, the top, the head of all things, and live in reality under the gracious rule of the God who is here.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at: