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RACING TO DEFEAT

Pastor Leith Anderson tells the story about a bicycle race in India, where there was one significant rule change. The object of the race was to go as SLOW as possible. When the opening gun fired, you had to get up on two wheels, you couldn’t touch the ground with either foot, and you had to somehow keep upright . . . while going the shortest possible distance. So the cyclists just teetered there in virtual suspension, inching forward almost imperceptibly, edging their front wheel left, then right, hoping to keep their balance. When the final gun sounded, the racer who was farthest down the track was the big loser, while the guy who was still the closest to the start line was declared the winner and given a Bangalore blue ribbon.

Then Pastor Anderson poses this question. Suppose a cyclist came in who didn’t comprehend this one rather vital rule change? The starter’s pistol goes crack!, and he zooms down the road all by himself like the coyote chasing the roadrunner, sweating, pushing, sprinting, shifting into high gear, creating an enormous cloud of dust as he hurtles excitedly into the great beyond, getting ever and ever FARTHER away from victory.

Dr. Norman Gulley, who has taught theology for years at one of our Adventist universities, has a book out entitled Christ Is Coming! And with a red face, he tells a personal story where he was going to our Newbold College over in England. One day he had to take a nasty essay test: three hours of frantic scribbling to answer five huge questions. So he zealously flew through page after page, filling up his “blue book” with voluminous observations on every esoteric facet he could think of for all five issues.

He was a bit frustrated, though, because even with three hours, he just didn’t have enough time to truly nail home #4 and #5. There was much more he could have written, and maybe with a lot more polish. And then, just as the closing bell went ding!, he noticed something on top of the exam sheet. “Choose any three.” And his heart sank. He could have picked any three of the five – and given a careful, thoughtful hour to each one! If only he had read the directions . . . and ascertained the ground rules of the day. He asked the professor for some mercy, and was curtly told that “probation had closed.” The door of forgiveness and pardon had slammed shut.

Can you think of a time when not knowing the ground rules bore painful consequences for you? And of course, that doesn’t just hurt when we’re in the exam room, or teeing up for the final round in a PGA tournament. In our entire journey through life itself, it makes a huge difference if you comprehend the framework of reality God has set up for you and me to live IN.

Just up the freeway in Ventura, a short distance from where we have our studios, Christian researcher George Barna points out trends and dilemmas for the Christian church. He recently had this to say:

“Without a biblical worldview, all the great teaching goes in one ear and out the other. There are no intellectual pegs . . . in the mind of the individual to hang these truths on. So they just pass through. They don’t stick. They don’t make a difference.”

We’ve been borrowing paragraphs here and there from Chuck Colson’s recent bestseller, How Now Shall We Live?, and he takes that quote from Barna and poses three questions. Any worldview – religious or secular – he suggests, is only as good as the answer it provides to these three core questions.

Question #1: Where did we come from, and who are we? And the Bible answers that question with one word: CREATION. We’ve already quoted Genesis 1:1, of course, but here it is again:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

So friend, if you accept this hallmark statement as part of your own personal worldview, then where did you come from? You came from the hand of God. It’s been a huge theme with us here at the Voice of Prophecy of late – that you and I can be God’s adopted children, His actual sons and daughters. That, more than anything else we can think of, is what we ARE: His children. That’s point one.

#2: What has gone wrong with the world? The Bible’s answer to that is very simple: the Fall. A serpent in the garden of Eden. A fallen angel named Lucifer or Satan or the Devil. And now we have sin. Suffering. Sickness. Death.

Question #3: What can we do to fix it? This is where politicians make promises, and sociologists make predictions, and educators try to diagnose just what is wrong with our troubled human race. That is well and good, an appropriate exercise. But the Christian’s answer to the question of “What can we do to fix it?” is . . . nothing. We can’t really do anything – not of a lasting nature, anyway. But Christianity’s answer is Calvary. Jesus loving us and dying for us and coming soon to rescue us.

Early in the book authored by Colson and his writing partner, Nancy Pearcey, they make two points about this biblical worldview. Of course, Christianity puts the presence of God into all three of these questions: where did we come from, what’s gone wrong, and what’s the fix? And then this observation:

“Few of us really understand,” they write, “common grace, which is the means by which God’s power sustains creation, holding back the sin and evil that results from the Fall and that would otherwise overwhelm His creation like a great flood.” And what’s this all mean to US? They continue: “As agents of God’s common grace, we are called to help sustain and renew His creation, to uphold the created institutions of family and society, to pursue science and scholarship, to create works of art and beauty, and to heal and help those suffering from the results of the Fall.”

Hiding in those eloquent lines is a wonderful irony. You know, Christians are sometimes accused of being rather useless citizens of planet earth. We think God made everything, and we figure He’s going to swoop down and rapture us away from this hopelessly doomed, messed-up ball of mud . . . and so we don’t bother to be good neighbors, to vote, to pay our fair share of taxes, to protect the environment, to help those around us who are in need. We’re seen as people who don’t just believe in hell, but who have a “go to hell” attitude toward the fallen world and its fallen citizens who live on the same block with us.

And actually, if the Christian really embraces and understands this worldview – where God is the Creator and the Rescuer, that He is THE solution – we become the very opposite thing from a pious isolationist. Listen, a creationist should care about the environment more than anybody, because he sees the fingerprints of God in nature, and wants to preserve and restore the Eden model.

Colson and Pearcey continue, a page or two later, to clearly define how a person who accepts the Christian worldview, who sees God in Parts A, B, and C of this cosmic equation, will be extremely active . . . because so much is ETERNALLY at stake. Notice how they put it:

“In every action we take,” they add, “we are doing one of two things: we are either helping to create a hell on earth or helping to bring down a foretaste of heaven. We are either contributing to the broken conditions of the world or participating with God in transforming the world to reflect His righteousness. We are either advancing the rule of Satan or establishing the reign of God.”

And friend, we either take this Bible-based worldview, or we have to settle for existentialism, which this same writing team describes in these words:

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

The other option – in terms of a worldview – is postmodernism, which thinks that there are NO eternal truths, no overarching realities except what you and your friends decide are right for you on August 6, 2003 in the year of our . . . nobody. We were reading the other day that back in 1995, the NABT – that’s the National Association of Biology Teachers – announced that “all life is the outcome of ‘an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process.’” Does that give you confidence?

The late Carl Sagan once cynically described the Christian God as “an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow.” He then adds this cryptic disclaimer, which pretty much sums up his own worldview:

“A universe that is infinitely old requires no Creator.”

Because even if a “big bang” or a sudden, miraculous confluence of protons and neutrons so that life springs into existence takes 50 billion years . . . we’ve got 50 billion years, so here we are. But by that worldview, life has no purpose beyond what we can figure out for ourselves, no peace beyond what we can force our tyrannical neighbors to submit to, and no life beyond our own inevitable tombstone.

That’s the life philosophy behind Door #1. Or would you rather embrace what this ancient but still relevant Book says in I John 3:1?

“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.”