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GALACTIC NEWS FROM THREE ANGELS #11

A DEBATE AT DISNEY WORLD

It’s one of the most thought-provoking books to come along in a pretty long time, and it focuses on a Disney World vacation involving a dad and his daughter. In their recent Christian bestseller, How NOW Shall We Live? — playing off of Francis Schaeffer’s book, How THEN Shall We Live? — Chuck Colson and Nancy Piercey take 559 pages to describe for readers why the Christian faith is what they call a “worldview.” It’s not just a way to get away from this sorry old planet, and get yourself up to heaven . . . although Christianity accomplishes that. But it’s also a complete blueprint, a detailed, designed, divinely formulated plan, a strategy, for life and survival down here. Now. As people and as families and as nations.

“Only Christianity,” they write in the preface, “offers a way to live in line with the real world. . . . “Genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality. It is a worldview.”

It’s a deep and scholarly book, as these two gifted believers draw from an incredible array of philosophers, both secular and religious. They explain some of the hard terms we might not know, like existentialism, an attitude which they define like this:

“Life is absurd, meaningless; . . . the individual self must create his own meaning by his own choices.”

Well, instead of Aristotle and Plato, what does this have to do with Donald Duck and Pluto and a vacation to Orlando? Colson’s chapter entitled “Creation: Where Did We Come From, and Who Are We?”, begins with a father-daughter trip to Disney World. Dave Mulholland is there with his fifteen-year-old to see Epcot Center. Of course, she’d rather go on five thousand roller coasters, but with a sigh she finally gets with Dad into the line for that huge AT&T “Spaceship Earth” globe.

Dave actually has an ulterior motive for the Disney World trip. In recent weeks it’s seemed like Katy was struggling spiritually. Not wanting to go to church. Marijuana in her purse. And just a general attitude of antagonism toward the family’s core religious values. She appears ready to just chuck it all. And so Dave is hoping for some time to have one-on-one discussions, maybe between rides while they have some cotton candy.

But inside Epcot Center, they sit down in a semicircle theater for a multimedia presentation called “The Living Seas.” Maybe you’ve seen it too. And as they watch this wonderfully put together show, as only the Disney people can, the narrator’s voice describes for this 15-year-old high school kid the incredible, odds-defying miracle that kick-starts life. “Deep within the cluster of slowly forming planets,” he says, “is a small star of just the right size, a sphere just the right distance from its mother star. Somewhere in the endless reaches of the universe, on the outer edge of the galaxy of a hundred-thousand-million suns.” And on this one small world, after billions of years, “tiny, single-celled plants that captured the energy of the sun” produce a spark of oxygen . . . and the first organisms begin to form.

And after the lights come on, and Dave leads his daughter outside where they buy some lunch, the discussion begins. Is there a God out there who created life? Or did these “Living Seas,” after endless millennia of pounding up on a lifeless beach, suddenly create their own world?

Well, it’s an amazing book, and I certainly invite you to get a copy from Tyndale and read it for yourself. How Now Shall We Live?, by Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey. But back to this question of Christianity being a “worldview.” Because as Dave Mulholland said to his daughter during a rather heated lunch there outside the Norway Exhibit, “But everything is at stake here, Katy.” If all forms of life, including his own ancestors, just climbed out of the primordial soup on their own and turned from monkeys into men, if existentialism is an accurate description of the way things are on planet earth — “Life is absurd, meaningless, and . . . the individual self must create his own meaning by his own choices” — then everything was lost. His worldview was at an end.

What is the worldview of the Christian faith? I’m sure different expressions of it have been given by different people; here is how Colson and Pearcey express it. In fact, they suggest that all worldviews, not just the Christian one, must address the following:

“Every worldview can be analyzed by the way it answers three basic questions: Where did we come from, and who are we (creation)? What has gone wrong with the world (fall)? And what can we do to fix it (redemption)?”

And that’s it. One: Where’d we come from? Two: Why are things so bad? And Three: How’s it going to get fixed? Any life philosophy worth even the price of a one-day pass to Disney World has got to address those three questions. And friend, even those among us who have given up trying to find an answer to #1 — “Where did we come from?” — are eternally interested in #2. Why are things so bad? Why did Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shoot their classmates? Why does God permit Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic to act as they do? Why are there earthquakes? Why did Alaska Airlines flight 261 go down at Point Mugu, right near our Voice of Prophecy radio studios? And question #3: Is there any way out of our mess? Even when the economy’s good, can Al Gore or George W. Bush bring us back to moral soundness? Can a rising stock market fix the problems of corporate greed and prostitution and child abuse and Internet porn?

Well, friend, Chuck Colson’s 559 pages would not have had to be written if the citizens of this world would simply notice a verse of Scripture exactly 15 words long. We’ve been studying for two weeks now what many Christians call “The Three Angels’ Messages,” which are found in Revelation chapter 14. It’s taken us quite a while just to think about this first angel; in fact, we’re still praying and studying together what he has to tell us. After announcing that we need to fear God and give Him glory, and that judgment is about to commence, the angel adds these 15 vital words. They contain two crucial points, so notice with me:

“Worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.”

It’s a bit ironic — and we didn’t intend it — that our verse of focus today, Revelation 14:7, addresses the exact same thing as that Epcot Center exhibit: “The Living Seas.” But friend, the Word of God tells us — and this is the very heart of what John calls the everlasting gospel — that God Himself made the living seas. He made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters. “The sea and all its sources,” says the Living Bible paraphrase.

Maybe you noticed just one point . . . that God is the Creator, and missed the second. But let’s look again:

“WORSHIP Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.”

Listen, friend, if there’s one announcement planet earth needs to hear in this new millennium, it’s that we need to worship God again. Not our thriving economy. Not the Information Superhighway which is going to make life so perfect. Not ourselves: our minds, our learning power, our reasoning skills. Not our human achievements: our good grades, our high-paying, high-tech jobs, the Disney Worlds we create, the dot.com companies we start up. The last-day message for planet earth is this: “Worship God again. Return to the worship of the God who made it all.”

We’ve mentioned before the great autobiography by C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy. In the crucial chapter where he describes how God began to make His final moves to convert this determined atheist — the chapter is entitled “Checkmate,” by the way — the little lead quote is quite interesting. It’s by George MacDonald, a writer Lewis greatly admired, and it goes like this:

“The one principle of hell is — ‘I am my own.’”

In other words, I worship self. I made myself; I created my own empire, my own surroundings. There is no God, only the mysterious surge of life forces all around us, the one-in-a-trillion “spark” of life, or a Big Bang, or whatever . . . and I got here all on my own. Just the opposite, in terms of worldview, from what this powerful angel “flying in the midst of heaven” tells us: “Worship Him who made the heavens and the earth.”

As he finishes up his book, C. S. Lewis, now a brand new believer, writes about how he realized finally that God was to be worshiped . . . simply because He was God. Simply because He had created the universe. Not so much because God was good — although Lewis soon realized that He was. Not because He sent His Son to die for our sins — although Lewis soon realized that too, becoming one of the world’s greatest apologists for the message of Calvary. Not because there was a heaven to get into or a hell to stay out of. But just because God was God, because God had, as it says here, “made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.”

“God was to be obeyed simply because He was God,” he wrote.

And what a safeguard, what a protection, what a secure worldview we walk into when we first make that discovery!