|
OF MONKEYS AND MEN #1
DEBATE AT DISNEY WORLD
Have you ever experienced a heartbreak or a loss that you were convinced simply could never be fixed? Maybe your home burned down. Or you got the news that you had terminal cancer. Maybe a spouse or one of your children was killed in a motorcycle accident. And you said to yourself: “This is it. I’m just going to have to endure, to live with this hurt forever. There’s nothing in the world, anywhere – no solution, no ‘fix’ – that can ever put this right again.” That’s a helpless feeling, isn’t it?
Maybe you remember right at the very beginning of the recent war in Iraq – the early stages – and the first reports of American deaths began to hit us all in the heart, in our national soul. There was a man who looked into CNN’s TV cameras, and his world was destroyed. It was over for him. The man’s name was Michael Waters-Bey, and his 29-year-old son, Kendall, had just been killed in the conflict. Kendall was married; he had a 10-year-old boy himself. And now this grieving grandpa looked into the television cameras, intruding as they were into his living room and into his heartache. Having to take out his hostility and despair on someone, he said to America’s Commander-in-Chief: “This was not your son or daughter, Mr. President. This is the only son I had.” And then he added one more sad, sad line. “That chair he sat in at Thanksgiving will be empty forever.”
And at a time like that, people who say they have a Christian faith, and preachers who talk about faith, and especially ministries like the Voice of Prophecy have to really dig deep and ask ourselves this: “Does Christianity have an answer for this heartbroken grandfather? We say we serve a wonderful God, but is He also a mighty God? A mighty enough God – and a creative enough God – to fill that empty chair someday soon and make Thanksgiving Day a time of joy again?”
You know, I think about that grandpa, and that 10-year-old son, Kenneth, who doesn’t have a dad anymore. There are so many things I’d like to say to them, although maybe if I were suddenly thrust into their presence, the best thing to say would be nothing. For a while, at least. Just to sit there in their presence and be a Christian who cares. So much of what we say comes across as a platitude, or a trite, sterile Bible verse. But when it came time FOR the verses, I think the very first verse in all of God’s Word is some incredibly good news for the Waters-Bey family. If you know it, say it right now with me, why don’t you?
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Well, you probably already knew that verse by heart, but Genesis 1:1 happened a long time ago; you’re wondering how it helps this little fourth-grader, Kenneth, right now, in 2005, who doesn’t have a dad anymore to assist him with his homework or help him learn to catch a football. All this week, we want to think together about whether or not we can believe what the Bible says about the power of God, not only to create things, but to create them anew. Is there evidence out there that all this Christian talk about tombs bursting open, and the dead coming to life, is more than just 21st-century “opium” to delude people at funeral homes?
We did a Voice of Prophecy radio series a few years back, and got such a blessing from a terrific Christian bestseller entitled How Now Shall We Live?, by former Watergate prisoner Chuck Colson and his writing partner, Nancy Pearcey. Many of you who join us regularly – and maybe you hear Chuck himself on this radio station with his daily commentary, Breakpoint – know how this powerful, aggressive, dog-eat-dog Nixon henchman, Colson, once said he’d run over his own grandmother if he had to, just to get Nixon reelected. And he was all tied up in Watergate, all the power trips and shenanigans and obstructing justice. I don’t think he would have denied the existence of God; he simply wasn’t paying attention. In the ruthless world of D.C. politics, if you wanted to tap into power, you made it yourself.
Then, right in the thick of it, he became a Christian. He served his time in prison, came out, started a Christian prison ministry of his own, and has co-written some amazing religious books since then. And in this latest one, How Now Shall We Live?, he tells a simple story about a dad and a daughter going to Disney World. Maybe some of you have been down the I-95 Interstate to see Mickey Mouse too.
Well, this dad, Dave Mulholland, was there with a purpose in mind, and it wasn’t to ride on Dumbo the flying elephant. He was concerned about his 15-year-old daughter, Katy. She was in high school, just starting to stretch her own wings, and, you know, it just seemed like she was starting to fly off in all the wrong directions. Dave and his wife had found pot in her purse one day. That was a crisis. She and her friends were getting into things they shouldn’t. But the most serious thing of all was that she was just drifting away from God. And even from the idea that God mattered, that He was real or a part of anything. She didn’t think Christianity was relevant anymore; her friends shrugged off religion as kind of useless and stupid; her science classes in school made it plain that the Bible was just a potpourri of fables and “urban legends.” Religion was simply a cultural phenomenon that made Mommy and Daddy happy.
The way Colson puts it in his book:
“They [these Christian parents] felt they were losing her to a secular world smugly satisfied with itself and deeply hostile to their own.”
You probably remember a famous little verse found in Psalm 53:1, that goes like this:
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
And you know, I think there are a lot of people who don’t go that far down the avenue of atheism. They think, “Okay, there probably is something out there. But he or it has nothing to do with me, and I have nothing to do with . . . it or whatever it is.” In other words, they put God on a distant, separate shelf and then go on their way. Sometimes it’s laziness, or self-sufficiency, or even just inattention. The very colorful Message paraphrase doesn’t give this verse an atheistic twist, but puts it this way:
“Bilious and bloated, they gas, ‘God is gone.’”
It’s interesting that the NIV reference markings for this word “fool” in Psalm 53:1 send us over to Psalm 73:22, where the same word “fool” is found again. Notice how it’s used this time:
“Rise up, O God, and defend Your cause; remember how fools mock You all day long.”
But friend, let’s be gentle with one another here. “Fool” is a harsh-sounding word, and a lot of good-hearted people are atheists or secular. This Katy, there at Disney World with her dad, isn’t a bad kid, really. She just has secular friends and she goes to a high school where well-meaning teachers are trying to teach out of the science textbooks and latest high-tech web sites the best way they can. This is just the world around us, and young Katy is hanging out with her friends and trying to fit in. Another loose paraphrase of the Old Testament, this one called the Clear Word, puts Psalm 53:1 like this:
“Only a fool says to himself, ‘There is no God.’ He says this so he can do what he wants to do and not feel guilty about it. He doesn’t care about doing good.”
Anyway, back to Mickey and Minnie and Pluto and our friend Dave Mulholland, who, between all the exhibits and rides, was kind of hoping that he and his daughter might have a chance to do some serious father-daughter talking about the big things of life.
But then – disaster! They went into an incredible exhibit called “The Living Seas.” And there, with all the sights and digital Dolby surroundsound, the way only Disney geniuses can do them, the narrator came on with his resonant voice of authority:
“Imagine a place somewhere in the endless reaches of the universe, on the other side of the galaxy of a hundred-thousand-million suns. In this tiny corner of the universe, deep within the cluster of slowly forming planets, is a small sphere of just the right size, a sphere just the right distance from its mother star.”
And then Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy hit this dad and his daughter with the punch line:
“A spot of light expanded into a thunderous crashing flood as stars exploded and galaxies formed.”
In other words, a big bang. A universe just jumping into existence all by itself. No God, no Creator, no divine heart of love making a world in six days. Just one-in-a-trillion evolutionary luck.
And now Dave Mulholland was sure he was really sunk. But he took Katy outside, bought her an ice cream cone, sat down on a park bench, and tried to cut through what they’d just heard. Is there a God in heaven who can do all the things the Bible says He can do . . . or did we just slowly find our way to this lucky little speck of dirt called Planet Earth all by ourselves?
What do you say at a time like that? Dave Mulholland took a deep breath and began to tell his kid about Rolex watches on the beach.
|
