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Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Gen 1:26)

In the beginning was the Word. (Jn 1:1)

 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. (Jn 5:26)

Praise You, Father, for You have granted me life. I do not deserve it. I did not create it. You have made me and sustained me. You have saved me from death many times, and I am grateful to You and to You alone for the precious gift of life.

Something has always existed. To say otherwise forces the absurd notion that something popped out of nothing. Scripture says God is that something. God is self-existent. You and I are not. God exists on His own, quite apart from the universe and from you and me. God does not need us; He does not need the universe. He is and He always has been. The concept of a being who had no beginning is incomprehensible to us. Everything we see began somewhere; thus, in God, we come up against a Being to which nothing compares. In this area He is not like a watch or a house or a father or the hills or the stars. He is not like an idea or electricity or an emotion or anything else we know. All those things have beginnings and require a source or a medium. God simply is. He is the “I AM.” He is the source. Take Him away and you take away all possibilities of existence. In the beginning the Word was. He already existed when the universe began, and it owes its existence to Him. God has life in Himself (Jn 5:26); no one can give it to Him, no one can take it from Him. He is the Uncreated Creator of all. He has had no beginning, and everything that has had a beginning owes its beginning to Him. Our heart beats because God allows it to, and when our heart ceases to beat, we have no right to demand otherwise. Those decisions are not ours to make. Life is not ours to hand out. Have mercy, O God.

This places us in a particular position before God. We are but creatures and must remember that fact. The rocking chair does not get arrogant before the woodworker; the pot does not talk back to the potter. Rebellion against God is a lapse of memory. We somehow forget that He is the artist and we are the painting. But the analogy breaks down, for the artist had a beginning. When we subconsciously act as if we are the center of the universe, we creatures put ourselves in the position of the Self-existent one. The notion that the world revolves around us lies behind all sin. We subliminally claim for ourselves a throne we have no right to claim. Life comes from God. He gave it to you. He can take it any time He wishes, and when He does so, He will be just. It is His life, not yours. He simply lets you use it. So use it for Him.

No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the Lord (Pr 21:30)

…to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! (Rm 16: 27)

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men …” (I Cor 1:25)

Lord, help me to trust You — to see that Your plans and Your will are wiser than mine. Sometimes I forget that. Forgive me. And open my eyes to see that Your ways are wise because You are wise.

Have you ever met a brilliant fool? A genius professor who couldn’t keep his marriage vows. A businessman who was a money-making machine but also enslaved to the money he made. A judge with a keen legal mind but no real understanding of righteousness. Sometimes we equate knowledge with wisdom. We are prone to admire the wrong things. Knowledge is the acquaintance of facts. Wisdom is the right application of those facts. Both are good things, but there do abound many knowledgeable fools. People can know facts about God without obeying God, but they cannot be wise without obeying God, for wisdom affects life. Wisdom is how we talk, how we think, how we act. It is not just what we know.

Last week we saw that God has all knowledge. This week we take another step. We see that God has all wisdom.  He knows all there is to know, but He also knows how to use His knowledge and always uses it the right way and for the best end. God cannot be anything but wise, for it is His nature that puts the wisdom in wisdom. Wisdom is what wisdom is because God is who God is. When God does something, it is wise, not because God follows wisdom but because wisdom follows God.  Wisdom is nothing more than the character of God in action.  When God acts He knows what He is doing and He is doing what is right. We may sometimes question the wisdom of God. We lose our job or our health or our daughter and cry out, “God, what are you doing? Don’t you know how I hurt?” We do not understand the path His wisdom makes us trod. We do not see now what God is doing through the circumstances and why He allows such pain. But He is wise.

Everyone must grapple with this issue at some point. You and I are very good at ordering our lives, at deciding what we should do and where we should go; but if we are to grow with God, there will come times when we will have to set aside our own wisdom and plan in order to do something we do not understand or care to do. We will have to trust God that His path is wiser than ours. We do not see how, we do not know why, but we will have to trust Him.

God said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you” (Gen 12:1). I do not believe that Abram, Sarai, Lot or any of Abram’s other relatives fully understood what God was doing. Wisdom, as they likely saw it, would dictate that Abram settle down amongst his kin in his homeland and tend flocks and live a nice, secure life. But Abram had a message from God, and Abram had to decide which was wiser — to move though he did not understand why, or to stay with everything he knew. History vindicates the wisdom of God.

Moses said to God, “O Lord, please send someone else to do it” (Ex 4:13). Moses’ plan for his life was different from God’s, and I can’t help but think that in this scene, Moses had his own questions about the wisdom of God’s plan. Moses did not care to do what God had commanded but had to decide which was wiser — to follow his own desire or God’s. History vindicates God’s wisdom in choosing that man for that task.

God still works this way with His people. He has infinite knowledge and wisdom, and He will test the followers of Jesus to see if we thoroughly believe that God is all knowing and all wise. He does not want us merely to be able to write such a thing on a piece of paper. He wants us to order our lives around it. God knows what He is doing, and He is doing the right thing. We either believe that or we don’t. If we believe it, we actually live as if God’s wisdom is true. Our faith changes how we handle money, criticism, suffering, sex, peer pressure, and the rest of life. And the people of this world may think we are crazy. They will think we are fools.  But that is OK.  After all, “The foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom.” (I Cor 1:25).

…God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. (I Jn 3:20)

Who has understood the mind of the Lord, or instructed him as his counselor? Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge or showed him the path of understanding? (Is 40:13-14)

Lord, what do I know that You haven’t known from eternity? What You know surpasses me infinitely, for You know Yourself and You are infinite. Bless You. And You are intimately acquainted with the deepest thoughts of my heart. Yet You love me. Praise You.

We live in an information age. We have more information at our fingertips than people had in all the libraries of a hundred years ago.  We worship information. We think that people who know are the people we should admire and follow. Why then do we not worship God? He has a billion billion times more knowledge than all our universities and computers combined. But we ignore Him. Sometimes we are too smart for God. We are proud of our knowledge, but next to God our knowledge is like the knowledge of a newborn. And the odd thing is that in real life newborns never think their parents ignorant, but we sometimes live as if we know more than God. We are just babies.

God knows all, and what He knows now is no different from what He knew when He formed the world. God does not, God cannot learn. He is perfect and unchangeable, and to speak of a god who has grown to be God (as Mormons teach) is to speak of no God at all. If God has grown in knowledge He is not God. Nothing is a mystery to God, nothing confounds Him, nothing surprises Him, nothing is new to Him. He knew from before the founding of the earth the inner most secrets of your heart right now — secrets which you do not fully understand. He knew then the decisions you shall make next year if, in fact, you get to live till next year. And if you do not live till then, He knew that, too. Everyone faces Him in the judgment, and when we face Him, we cannot hide.  He knows.

We do not know.  The more the sciences tell us about the universe, the more we see we do not know. We discover five facts but learn in the process that we have five hundred new questions that we have no answers for. Such is the immensity of truth. A body of knowledge as immeasurable as truth requires a capacity for knowledge that we cannot comprehend. Yet God, being infinite, can know infinitely. The things that puzzle scientists today do not puzzle God, and He knows now the answers to the questions that will puzzle science five hundred years in the future.

But He knows more than academic facts. He knows the secrets behind the important questions. Why are we here? What are we like? Where are we going? Why is there evil? The great questions of human existence neither surprise God nor stump Him. He has all knowledge about these issues and a perspective that we do not. God unchanging has always and will always know all things. You can hide secrets from your family, but you can hide nothing from God (Ps 139). He sees your secret lusts. He knows your fears of failure. He understands the real motives why you pursue the Phd you pursue. He sees your sin through and through. He knows you better than you know yourself. Might as well come straight with Him.

To the follower of Jesus, God’s knowledge is a great comfort. God loves us as we are.  When Satan accuses, what can he say? “I’m going to tell God about this lust of yours!” God already knows and forgives in Jesus. The one person in the universe that we most need to be right with is willing to be right with us even though He knows every little detail of how we turn against Him. The knowledge of God highlights the greatness of His love and mercy.

To know God is to see that God knows. When we see this, we worship.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Gen 1:3)

Is anything too hard for the Lord? (Gen 18:14)

Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea — the Lord on high is mighty. (Ps 93:4)

Lord God Almighty, let us not merely comprehend that You can do many things. Let us see Your power at work around us. Grant us confidence as we live life that You can do anything. Give us faith to act on Your mighty power, and let us remember that the immensity of Your power makes us weaker than babes in Your sight.

It is a marvelous thing to sit and look on something as powerful as Niagara Falls, to be confronted with something before which we are helpless. We are reminded quickly of our own weakness. It is not that we humans are completely powerless creatures, for we have the power to harness the power the Falls produces. It is that, strong as we think we might be, the Falls confronts us with the fact that there are simply some things we cannot do. Nature can humble us. When a hurricane strikes the coast, people flee. Some things we cannot control.

But God has made Niagara Falls, and God has made the ocean, and the imparted power which they have is nothing to God. Nature has limited power. Humanity has limited power. God has all power. He is the Almighty. He can snap His fingers and scatter stars across the sky. He can cure a child from an incurable disease. He can speak a word and bring a billion-man army to its knees. He can raise a Savior from the grave. Such is the power of God.

Is there something you think He cannot do? Then your God is not the God of the Bible, for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is God Almighty. Job was right to say, “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted” (Jb 42:2). To deny the miraculous is to deny the Almighty. He created this world.  He can do with it as He pleases.  He also gave you your life.  He can do with it as He pleases.

When we live as if the only forces on Earth are physical, political, economic, or cultural, we deny the Almighty.  When we mentally strip the power of God from history, we also strip Him from our lives as well.  We forget that He controls our destiny, that He works in history, that He hears prayer and can actually do something about it.

To think that our circumstances are beyond the hand of God is foolheartedness. He can handle the universe, and He can handle what you are going through.  In this sense the power of God is a great comfort.

It is also humbling.  Presidents and wealthy men think themselves powerful.  They do not understand power.  If they did, they would humble themselves before it.  And so would we.

If we saw it.

There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God. (I Sam 2:2)

 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling one to another:

 “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

“Woe is me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” (Is 6:1-5)

God Most Holy, I am a man of unclean lips, a sinful creature. How can I comprehend Your holiness? And yet it is right for me to think on it. Show me Your blazing purity.  Give to me a vision of Your holy nature.  But have mercy.  Give me what I can handle but increase what I can handle so that I can know You more. Give me this vision not that I might merely know but that I might fall before You in worship and that I might live before You in right fear and with a right heart.

Whatever is holier than we is a mystery to us. Unholy people cannot understand a righteous man. His ways are an enigma to them. And the righteous man will be the first to tell you that he is not so righteous as people think. So if we have difficulty understanding a righteous man, what shall we do when we find a holiness so pure, so white, so bright and burning that viewing it would bring terror to the stoutest heart. Sometimes Christians talk too glibly about yearning to see God. We should have such yearning indeed, but seeing God is no small matter, and we ought not think of it lightly, as we might think of seeing our dad in Chicago. We can be like James and John asking for what we do not understand. To see God is to come before holiness. Take off your shoes. Cover your mouth. Fall on your face. The holiness of God is not some kind of relative holiness as we might find in a man or woman.  The holiness of God is absolute.  It is the fountainhead of all holiness.  Nothing on earth compares to it. Isaiah was a righteous man, but the veiled picture Isaiah saw in the temple caused him to bemoan his sinful state: “Woe is me. I am ruined.” To see the holiness of God is to see our own wicked hearts for what they are and to realize that we do not belong in such a presence. The person who sees himself as a decent fellow knows nothing of the holiness of God.

Everything God is and everything God does is holy. He is blindingly pure and fervently separate from everything we are and do. That is what holiness is. Separateness. God is not like us. Fresh snow is as scarlet beside Him. We cannot see or understand the holiness of God in the raw. We can have a sense of it. Luther did and it caused him to unravel. Some may have special visions of it as Isaiah did and perhaps the mystics. We worship Him because of it. We change our lives because of it, for His holiness is the source of ours, but we can never fully grasp the overwhelming purity and separateness of the Living God.

Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”

And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” (Ex 33:18-23)

 …God the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen. (I Tim 6:15-16)

Oh God all glorious, let us humbly adore. Let us join the prophets and the angels and the litany of saints in falling face down before you. Open the eyes of our hearts to see even a glimpse of the Unseeable, and in seeing, let us worship. Let our minds and hearts be enraptured with your overwhelming beauty and glory beyond description, beyond classification, beyond all capacity to see and know. Blessed be Your glorious Name.

Ezekiel describes his vision into heaven — the throne, the great expanse, the brilliant light, the figure like the appearance of a man radiant with light, the likeness of a rainbow. He then responds to what he saw: “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I fell face down, and I heard the voice of one speaking” (Ez 1:28).

For us now to see God as He is would be instant death, like traveling to the center of the sun but infinitely more consuming. We are sinful, frail creatures, easily broken, easily killed. We have difficulty looking across a snowscape on a sunny day; we cannot look into an eclipse. Do we think we can gaze on the full glory of God? His is a glory that would penetrate through us and consume us entirely, for as He said to Moses, “No one may see me and live” (Ex 33:20).

The visions which the prophets and John the Revelator had were by necessity veiled images. God had to hide glory from them in order to show them the glory He did. They saw a fraction of a drop of glory and fell on their faces. Their little peeks of God unknit them inside out. Such is the nature of God. He dwells in unapproachable light. Who can see Him? Who can know the fullness of the Almighty?

Lord, I want to know You.  I want to know what You are like.  I want to live in You, but I can’t live in You if I know nothing about You.  Reveal to me the glory of Yourself.  Then will I be able to live  right.

A man wanted to talk to me about a book he had read. In the book, the author, a well-known lawyer, claims that God has learned over time how to handle the human race. This lawyer apparently states that in the early days of Genesis, God did not know how to deal well with the human race. He condemned the world to the flood and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. In time, however, he learned to be more merciful, and when we reach the New Testament, he had gotten it right. Today, of course, God thinks as we do.

I’m not surprised at such a portrayal of God. Modern culture often has a small God, and this God is no different. I am sure that this lawyer is a fine lawyer, but he does not know God. His god is too small. The lawyer has made himself God’s judge. Unfortunately, that is not how God sees things.

The idea that we can think of God in any way we please is nonsense. It assumes that God has not revealed Himself. And it hurts us.

Our thoughts of God determine the quality of our faith. Tozer was right when he said that “the low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us” (p. viii. Knowledge of the Holy). We will not be morally pure if we worship a simplistic God. We will have no power to transform our world and no depth in our souls if our view of God is average. If our god is less than God, our lives will be less than Christian. Unfortunately, the Western church today suffers from this problem. Our view of God is too small. We are slow to attempt great things because we forget the greatness of the One we serve. We avoid risky steps of faith because we do not believe God is faithful. We are prone to make comfort our driving force because we subconsciously think that we are the center of life. We dabble with heresy because we ignore what is revealed. We play with moral impurity because we forget that God is a consuming fire. In each case above, you may say other factors also contribute, and I will not squabble with you, but our view of God is a foundational factor. If we really saw God for who He is, we would take more steps of faith, attempt greater things for Christ, and be morally purer and doctrinally truer.

Now our view of God must not be solely an endeavor of the head. Many people could technically tell you all the right answers about God if they were asked, but they don’t live as if those answers were true. They say they know God, but they don’t live as if they know God. They merely have correct answers. If we are to know well the Christian faith as it appears in the Bible, we must think often, with devotion, right thoughts of God. Any understanding of Christian beliefs begins with an understanding of God. When we begin to think of God aright, and do so from the heart, we will have the foundation laid for all other thinking about the Christian faith.

We must have before our hearts and minds a certain God. God is not any god, and we are not free to think of the Holy One in any way we please. The follower of Jesus believes that God has revealed Himself through the Scriptures and that we must thus base our thoughts of God on those Scriptures.  And since God is the foundation of theology, we shall begin our discussion of Christian beliefs with God.  Beginning next week, for the next few months I shall briefly highlight certain attributes of God as He reveals Himself in Scripture.

Now we see but a poor reflection, as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. (I Cor 13:12)

You can know God. That is the whole point of the Bible. Yet you will never really know God, for He is God.

I do not contradict myself, and I believe that life gives ample examples for why I don’t. Consider. Imagine a neurologist talking about her knowledge of the brain — neurons firing, the functions for different parts, how it will behave to certain medications, etc. Imagine then that same neurologist saying that we really do not understand the brain. It is a mystery. You know what she means each time. Or imagine a husband saying that he knows that his wife will order the catfish platter at a restaurant or that she will chew out that manager who would not let her return the dress. You can picture the husband saying, “I know Marianne.” Now imagine that same husband later saying, “Marianne is a mystery. I don’t understand her.” No sensible person accuses him of contradicting himself. You know what he means each time.

Neurologists can understand much about brains without understanding everything, and husbands can know much about their wives without knowing fully what makes them tick. We can know without knowing everything. We can know brains and wives because they provide us with data that we can comprehend. We find them to be mysteries because the data is complex, and not all of the data can be seen. That is how knowing God is.

God has chosen to reveal Himself through the Bible. Because He has done so, we have data on God. We can, thus, understand some things about God and even know Him personally as a wife does a husband. But God has also chosen not to reveal the full picture. The Bible is self-confessedly an incomplete revelation of God. For our purposes, it is more than adequate, but God is bigger than what you see in the pages of the Bible. When you think about it, this is common sense. God is infinite. How can you cram everything about Him into a book? Yet we do have the book, so we have something; and when we look at that something, we find it to be complex. The data we do have on God is not always neatly categorized, but this, too, should be no surprise. If brains and wives are complex, how much more ought their Creator be?

Therefore, we can know God but never fully, and only where He reveals. This means that we are right to try to make sense of God through prayer, through reading the Scriptures, or through a systematic approach to theology like The Summa or The Institutes. God invites us to put the pieces of Him together in some coherent fashion. We are wrong, however, if in our efforts to understand God, we figure Him out. Do your best to understand Him, but remember…you are often going to fail. You are dealing with God.

We are also wrong if we never get to know Him personally, for personal, relational knowledge of God is the reason why God gives the intellectual. He wants us, not just our heads. If God had to choose between a three-year-old girl with little understanding but a simple love for Jesus and a college professor with books on the New Testament but a cold heart, he would take the child a million times over. The intellectual is good and important, but it must serve the relationship. It is to be fuel for the engine of the heart. If it is not, it is merely a lump of coal.

Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven — what can you do? Deeper than Sheol — what can you know? (Job 11:7-8)

 But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. (Titus 2:1)

We have spent a number of blogs telling the Christian story. The discussion has been necessary because everything else about Christianity flows out of that story. The story is the foundation. Now we can start building. We will begin building by talking about Christian beliefs — also called Christian theology. These discussions will be basic. I want to describe God, Jesus, human nature, this world, the church, the afterlife, faith, and much more, and I want to do this in simple terms.

That’s a challenge when you think about it. I mean, how do you describe God in simple terms? In fact, how do you describe God at all? He is incomprehensible. Paul wrote, “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord …’” (Rm 11:33-34a). It is true. I can’t capture God with my pen. And you can’t fit Him into your brain. He is God! That is a truth we must never forget.

But truth, like a good tool, must be used properly, and many people abuse the concept of the mystery of God. I have heard some theologians say that God is so mysterious that no one can possibly know anything about Him. People who claim that all religions point to the same reality often emphasize the transcendent incomprehensibility of God. To them, the mystery of God is necessary, for if we truly can know specifics about God, then not all religions are equal. Some will reflect what we can know better than others.

When people conclude that we cannot know God because he is so mysterious, they encounter a problem. You see, if we truly cannot know God, then how ever did we discover the fact? Theologians who talk this way do not believe their own theology. If they really believed what they said, they would quickly be out of a job; for if they are correct, we no longer need their services to teach us and write books for us. They would better serve humanity by being plumbers.

In addition, if it is true that we cannot possibly know anything about God, then how can anyone claim that all religions point to him? That claim itself assumes a type of knowledge about God. If you do not know the destination, you cannot know that every map points you in the right direction. We are, thus, stuck with this sense not only of a god but also of specifics. I don’t mean everyone agrees on the specifics. I mean merely that everyone agrees that there are specifics.

Anyone who worships God assumes something about him. We may have different forms and styles, different theologies and faiths, different religions all worshipping a god of some kind. Obviously, all these different worshippers cannot be correct, and they will disagree about issues of no little import, and some will certainly not be worshipping God. Yet every person who attempts to worship assumes that he knows something about God — namely, that He is worthy of worship. And once you begin to look at the various worship practices and traditions, you find that nearly every one of them makes significant knowledge claims about God: He is good, He is powerful, He is personal, He loves us, He is just, etc.

When the average person prays, he assumes knowledge of God, for he assumes God can actually do something, that God is greater than we are, that God listens, that God can be spoken to, that God still works in history. All these statements indicate to us that theists of all stripes believe that we can know something about God. They may disagree about the extent, but even the deists taught that God created the universe. That is a knowledge claim about God and says something significant about his power and provision.

“Ok, Ok,” you say, “all people who believe in a god believe something can be known of him. But that’s not saying much, and it certainly doesn’t help me understand God any better.”

Perhaps. But it is a start. At least it enables us to see through the sort of talk that says we cannot know anything about God but which then proceeds to tell us about him. This beginning may not point us to the right path, but it does eliminate one wrong path. It lets us know that the bridge is washed out on the path that opposes the mystery of God with the doctrines of God. In that sense it is helpful, for that path is well worn. Many moral people travel it, but if we push God’s mysterious character too far, we cut off the legs on which we stand.

God may be a mystery, but you can still know Him.

Sometimes people talk as if the Christian story ends in the first century. It does not. In fact, if you read what Jesus said, you quickly discover that He often spoke of His future return. So then, the Resurrection is not the end of the story.   Indeed, the end of the story has yet to occur. Christianity is a religion that is in the middle of its story. As far as time on Earth is concerned, the Bible talks as if we are now in the last days. Peter spoke this way at Pentecost (Acts 2:16ff). So if history were a book, perhaps we are now in chapter 38 of 40 (or something like that), but God is not finished with the Earth.

“Heaven and Earth shall pass away,” Jesus said (Mt 24:35). In church, I have been preaching on the book of Revelation, which gives us a series of visions of the future of Earth. The book certainly has its share of passages that are difficult to interpret, but it also has many major themes that are clear. One of those themes deals with the destruction of this Earth. No matter how you interpret Revelation, it is rather plain that God speaks as if this Earth comes to an end. And Revelation is not the only place in the Bible that talks this way.

Thus, Christians see Earth as something like the Titanic. It is big. It is proud. It has its own sort of glory. But it is going to the bottom of the sea. People run around on it trying to get the best cabins or even to become captain, but if they build their life around the Titanic, they will go down when the ship goes down. And they will have no hope.

The idea that this Earth is mortal is, in many ways, common sense. It fits what we see everywhere else. Everything physical wears out and falls apart. Your bodies wear out. Your car wears out. Your pants wear out. Your computer dies. Your home falls apart. Even the rocks on a canyon wall wear away. Why do we somehow think that Earth is different? Nothing physical lasts. And this Earth will die. This fact is part of the Christian story. The Bible predicts it.

Now if you remember back to the beginning of the story, you will recall that sin entered the world and corrupted everything. The man was cursed. The woman was cursed. The land was cursed. Yes, that’s right. The land was cursed. The beautiful world that God had made was corrupted, and God insists on His beautiful world again. But this world is not that world. This world is so corrupted that God cannot merely tweak a few things and voila — Eden. No. This world is so corrupted that for God to get the world He wants, He must actually destroy this one and remake a new one. And He will. But in the meantime, in between the first Eden and the future Eden, God wants to save people from the Titanic. This is why He waits. This is also why He focuses so much on sin, for sin is why everything is corrupted in the first place.

So God, through Christ, makes His people new and clean and changes their lives so that they no longer live for the luxuries and the culture of the Titanic. But sadly, many people will not listen to God. They think that the Titanic is where they will be happy, so they chase their own happiness apart from God. Unfortunately, they will receive the very thing they choose. But they will not like it. They were made for God, not Earth.

After God destroys this world, Scripture says that He makes a new heaven and a new Earth. This place is holy, clean, bright, beautiful, glorious. It has no tears or pain or sorrow, and it is the place where God dwells and where we see Him face to face. It is the place God originally intended you and me to dwell in. But for you and me to dwell there, we must be different from what we are now, for our current bodies are corrupted with sin. Our current bodies could not handle glory. Thus, God must remake our bodies in order for them to fit this new world. This, too, is common sense. Just as a creature on Earth must fit its environment or it will suffer, so must we fit this new environment or we will suffer. So God gives us new bodies.

We must understand that people who do not accept the cleansing and power of Christ are turning down the ability to live in glory. If they were to experience this future, glorious world in their current state, they would not like it. That is correct. Most people would not like heaven if they found themselves there. They would be like polar bears forever confined to the tropics. The light of glory would penetrate their insides and they would forever be begging for mercy. We must understand that there is a real sense in which hell is merciful.

And when this heaven and earth have passed away, and God has created a new heaven and earth, and He has buried all of our sin and transformed our current bodies into glorious ones, then, and only then has the Christian story on this Earth ended.

But when that happens, we shall begin a new story in the presence of God, an everlasting story where each moment is grander and more wondrous than the best wedding celebration you could imagine. And that everlasting story is the whole point of the law and the prophets and the Cross and the Resurrection and the rest of the Christian story we have described.   You see, this story of Christ that we think takes up so much history is just a brief preface. The real book is yet to come.