Answering Life's Toughest Questions

All worldviews attempt to answer the ultimate questions of life: where did we come from? how did we get here? why are we here? where will we end up? what makes life worth living? Mankind has always asked these challenging questions. This is where religion came on the scene, for God has put eternity in our hearts from the beginning and man has always wondered about life after death, as the ultimate issue and the big question. All religions and worldviews attempt to give satisfying answers to these questions and to "save" mankind. Some people think religion is just escapism or a crutch, but secular people have crutches too and just put their faith in science that it has the answer or can find them.

Everyone is a person of faith! It just depends on what your presupposition is, i.e., it's not a matter of faith versus reason, but what you are willing to accept as truth, to begin with. We must begin with God and explain our worldview, not start with some interpretative framework and explain away God--for where you begin usually determines where you will end up; even Darwin pondered, "Would you trust the convictions of a monkey's mind?" It has been said that if you teach a man he's an animal that he'll act like one; some men want to believe they are animals so they can have the morals of one.

Man is not an animal in the sense that he seeks the reason for being, meaning, purpose, and understanding in life--we wonder "why" and contemplate ourselves. We not only know things but know that we know and ponder why we know it and what we can know even how we know things. In other words, man is a natural philosopher, while animals don't wonder or think about the bigger issues in life besides their basic needs. 

 Even having an education, a higher standard of living, and freedom, man can be empty inside. Man needs fulfillment and relationships, for we are a social, spiritual, moral, rational creature and have personalities that relate to others on a personal level, giving man the unique ability to know and relate to one another--even laugh together with a sense of humor!

Science can indeed give us the "know-how," but it cannot help us with the "know-why" of life, it cannot give us purpose in life and hope for the future, nor satisfy our longings for truth, identity, impact, importance, guidance, and meaning in life--animals have no such need. Do animals wonder who they are and try to find themselves or get in touch with themselves? Only man wastes time by worrying about the future and regretting the past. Man is by nature a religious being too, and if he doesn't worship God he'll worship something or someone else; on the other hand, no one has ever observed a monkey building a chapel outside of The Planet of the Apes!

It is my premise that Christianity answers these questions better and fuller than any religion or secular worldview. There is a harmony, coherence, and unity in the Christian worldview that lines up with the Bible as the authority. Christianity outshines all other worldviews in reasonableness, personal experience, and foundation in fact and history. The Bible is the foundation upon which the faith stands. Every worldview must have some authority or "scripture," and the Bible is the highest standard attained by man and it's self-attesting.

It appeals to no authority higher than itself for proof and proves itself. This is not circular reasoning to say we believe the Bible is the highest authority because it claims to be, because God has the authority to speak through His Word and if He appealed to anything else or we did, like science or history, God would be taking a backseat to them and not be the ultimate authority figure.

Secularism believes that everything has a natural cause and can be explained naturally--there's no place nor need for miracles! The supernatural is ruled out from the get-go and doesn't enter the equation. Only the strong survive in this dog-eat-dog world of survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle--the real rat race. We are just all lucky to be here due to some great cosmic accident eons ago. They offer no explanation for life and their origin-of-life experiments fail to come off, and they must see the cosmos and life as mere givens, and unexplainable phenomena.

In their view, everything is an infinite series of finite, efficient causes and there was no First Cause, which they refuse to accept as possible and necessary because it sounds too much like God. But students of logic, science, philosophy, and mathematics know that an infinite series of causes is impossible--there must be a first cause! This is called the impossibility of crossing infinity. But they have no room for God in their equation and will not let a Divine Foot in the door, thinking that religion is a neurosis or delusion, a crutch for the weak. Much more they refuse to accept the spiritual dimension of life--everything is material and made up of matter and energy, without any spirit or Ultimate Mind behind it. For instance, the brain is just a cog of machines, made up of electronic circuits, and the mind doesn't exist independently of it, just another name for the brain. We have, therefore, no soul and no spirit worth saving.

The meaning of the cosmos hangs on which came first and which has precedence: mind or matter. Either one or the other preceded: In the beginning ultimate mind; in the beginning ultimate matter. The Bible starts out: "In the beginning God..." John elaborates as "In the beginning was the Word..." The Logos here referred to is the "expressed thought of God." Either mind created matter or mind evolved from matter--there's no other option. It's impossible for there to be nothing in the beginning, for "out of nothing, nothing comes." goes the axiom: ex nihilo, nihil fit.

Cosmologists now reckon a beginning to time, as the Bible has always predicated (cf. 2 Tim. 1:9; Tit. 1:2). Time, being the corollary of space and matter, didn't always exist, and God must be outside of the time/space continuum to be the First Cause and get the ball rolling (something timeless created time!). What or who fired the shot of the Big Bang, who banged the Bang? We conclude that there must be someone behind the cosmos who is responsible and intelligent and programmed the universal constants, called the Anthropic Principle or the fine-tuning of the universe.

All worldviews aim to save the world too and to make a brighter future for posterity. Christians don't believe we can save society and do not attempt to save man through politics. Most secularists are highly utopian and believe man is capable of perfection and therefore so is society. But this kind of dreaming is pie in the sky and gives false hopes, like believing someday man will know how to become immortal. There are those who freeze their bodies in hope of man someday figuring out how to thaw it out and revive it. In the meantime, all members of the worldviews attempt to better themselves and their world and make it better for succeeding generations. Doing good works is a part of every worldview, it's the motivation that differs: Christians do it out of gratitude and love for God and others, while other worldviews want to earn their way to salvation or just make themselves feel good, because of their unresolved guilt. Soli Deo Gloria!

Admitting Our Spiritual Blindness...

"The true Light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world" (John 1:9, HCSB).  
"Jesus said, I came into this world for judgment, in order that those who do not see will see and those who do see will become blind" (John 8:39, HCSB).  

Like the blind man admitting he couldn't see clearly, we must also come clean and confess our inadequacies, sins, weaknesses, shortcomings, or in short, our sin (calling a spade a spade) to God, and not be engaged in a coverup, hypocrisy, facade, or masquerade.  Why?  "Be sure your sin will find you out" (cf. Num 32:23, KJV).  "You have set our unjust ways before your secret sins in the light of Your presence" (Psalm 90:8,, HCSB).  The primary condition of salvation also is to admit our disqualification for it--that we are wholly blind to spiritual truth without Christ in our lives.  We will never know we are blind until we try to see the light or seek sight!

Light itself doesn't heal blindness, but Christ is the Light who can.  Even believers can have spiritual myopia and not see things the way they should through the lens of the Spirit--having a Christian worldview--having mind and thinking renewed--the lense of our interpretive framework.  The point of healing is to admit we need it, and just like when Jesus healed the blind man when he saw "men as trees walking"; oh, how different his life would've been without this straightforward confession!

He didn't try to see, but had faith he could! I know Jesus had quite a reputation for healing the sick but it still was an act of faith to come to Him for it.  We must go to the Lord.  So, salvation is not trying but trusting, and its the object of our faith that matters for it to be genuine.  Faith doesn't heal or save, Christ does!  Blindness isn't just physical but spiritual--we all are that way without Jesus.  We may not know when we began to see or how we see, just that we do!  We must be like the blind man who said, "All I know is that I was blind, but now I see!" But God is interested in more than physical sight!  Then our testimony cannot be denied or refuted by scholars!  Once the light is in us and we see we have spiritual discernment and our outlook changes and it can have dramatic and radical changes in our lives and testimonies.

We all need to see men as they are in reality, as sinners and God can open our eyes to see the Big Picture with Him in the equation to be oriented to the real world or Reality 101.  The world has too high a regard for man, that he is the measure of all things, that man must be deified and God dethroned, and what they really mean is "glory to man in the highest," not to God alone be the glory--Soli Deo Gloria!  God alone deserves the glory and worship for He alone is worthy, for worship means "worth-ship."

If ever we get healed (and we must want to be healed!), and we will if we believe, we must give God the ultimate and final glory--He only uses men as His instruments and vessels of honor!  But note that spiritual healing is what is promised, not necessarily physical healing with salvation. Then we can overcome our lack of intuition or insight into God's will by following Jesus, which is the essence of ethics (orthopraxy or right conduct).  When our eyes are opened, we can then see God at work and that: when God needs to lend a helping hand He uses ours when He wants to love someone He uses our hearts when He wants to listen to a person in time of need when God listens, He uses our ears!  God is in the business of using us as vessels of honor to accomplish His will and glory.

So how is God moving in our life?  We can only know if we see and our eyes have been opened by grace and when our spirits have been quickened.  "God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform!"  Now, no one sees perfectly in time but we all can use spiritual enlightenment from the Word of God, especially its preaching to illuminate us. Our blessed hope is the beatific vision or the full measure of seeing God as He is with our eyes having full restoration in glory.

CAVEAT:  WE MUST ADMIT OUR BLINDNESS TO SEE, AS JESUS TOLD THE PHARISEES THAT BECAUSE THEY SAY THEY CAN SEE, THEY ARE BLIND:  "'If you were blind,'  Jesus told them, you wouldn't have sin  But now that you say, 'We see'--your sin remains" (John 9:41, HCSB).   In sum, we could say that if we don't come clean we may remain in our sin and not be rescued, for salvation is a form of rescue or deliverance from slavery and blindness.      Soli Deo Gloria!