365 Days of Christmas

The magic and wonder of Christmas time seems surreal at times as if one has stepped out of reality and into a world that exist for only a few glorious days. The house is perfectly clean and wonderfully decorated in full Christmas splendor. The shopping malls and neighborhoods are winter wonderlands. Joyful melodies float across the radio waves and fragrant winter scents of apple cinnamon and ever green trees tantalize the senses. Even more, people’s hearts are filled with merriment and the joy of giving. Bright colored packages are exchanged and time stops for just a moment on Christmas day giving the illusion that all concerns of life are suspended and nothing matters except this wondrous atmosphere of Christmas.

Some may think that all of this is merely an illusion life grants us for a short period of reprieve each year. However, what if instead of seeing it as an escape from reality, we see it as the first time we really stop to taste reality each year? What if all this creative wonder and spirit of joy is not an illusion, but a taste of something we ought to be enjoying all year. What if our lives are consumed with an illusion of reality, and Christmas is the time where we allow ourselves to stop and smell the roses?


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Point of Reference for Value

What is real value? Can value be real if it can be given and taken away at will by humanity? History shows a world full of people who think their race is better than another’s. Prejudice, racism, and slavery still abound in the world and yet we all have this idea that this is wrong. How is that? Are we just evolved from the animals and we have our own form of the survival of the fittest? What keeps that mentality from prevailing over the value of every man, woman, and child?

In the popular film I Robot, Will Smith’s character wrestles with the knowledge that a robot calculated the odds of his own survival over that of a small child and pulled him to safety instead of the child. Smith wanted the child, whom he had never met, saved before his own life. He was willing to chance both of their deaths to save the weaker one first.

In an airplane if there becomes a need to put on the oxygen masks the stewards tell the passengers to put it on themselves before putting it on the children and others who need help. This is because it is our natural inclination to protect the weaker not the stronger. The stewards know that if you don’t put the oxygen on yourself first you may not have time to help the weaker ones and they won’t be able to help you. The point though is that we will risk ourselves to help those with less chance of survival. This is not in line with the Darwinian evolutionary progress.

Regardless we hold to the value of life. If life has value regardless of who believes it does, then someone else external to us is giving life value. Time plus matter plus chance is not producing value. If all there is the natural universe which exists as a result of random chance then there is no value to our lives other than what we choose to give it. If we have the power to choose to give life value, we have the same power to take it away for we are not perfectly good people and we will use people for our own needs and thereby rob their value at the will of the stronger.

However, if we have been lovingly fashioned and created by a good God who makes good things then we have inestimable intrinsic value. Each and every human no matter how small or weak or handicapped has priceless value. This is why abuse, murder, discrimination, racism, hatred, unkindness, etc is wrong.

I’m certain some of you are ready to argue that since I said above that humans who give value can just as easily take it away that God could do likewise. In fact, you will further claim that he has reduced the value of life by taking it Himself. So how in the world do I have any grounds to claim God gives us value?

I don’t think anyone can argue though that humans have a birds eye view on life nor are we perfectly good in our thinking and actions. We could and have convicted innocent men. We are not perfectly just in what we do.

However, a perfectly good and holy God would be perfectly just and perfectly good in all of His words and actions. A perfect God would not need to change to be something other than what He has always been for if He is perfect then there isn’t something else better to be and perfection isn’t ever being less than that. So if God created us with value then we really have it and that doesn’t ever change. But God also is just because He is good and perfect and He can perfectly exact justice and when He does so our tainted fallen minds may see it has unjust and we may try and claim He is doing something wrong. But if goodness is that which lines up with Him, we have no grounds in our created selves to declare the only source of real goodness as doing something not good. For we have no other point of reference for the good. He created all, He is the only uncreated Being; thus His goodness is uncreated.

All other references to good only gain meaning in light of His goodness. He has to give it to us from His own goodness in order for it to be so. That is why that which is evil is that which is contrary to Him, for what is in accordance with Him is good. When we alter the point of reference of good to something that is not perfect we create an ambiguous ever changing point of reference which is no real point at all.

Our understanding of what is good will be limited and tainted by our current state of imperfection, but when we join in God’s life by His invitation which He has extended freely He works in us to bring a full restoration of who we were really designed to be. And while He instantly makes us righteous when we accept His invitation, the transformation of the inner reality is a process walked out in time that culminates in a future day where we will fully be restored.

Jesus's Story: Myth or Truth?

All beliefs have some of the truth in them. Some have more dirt and distortions to their glasses than others. Christianity is one of a kind. No other system of belief is so integrated into history with real events real conversations with the God over all creation.

C.S. Lewis was an atheist with a masterful knowledge of mythology and world religions. He kept seeing similarities in various stories, but as an atheist he had no explanation for this reality. He loved the stories and the myths, but knew they were simply that. Then he realized that there was one Story that stood out beyond all the others. One Story that all the others were mere shadows and distortions of even though they retained some of the flavor of the One Grand Story. That being the story of Jesus which was not rooted in mythology and legend like the others, but was rooted in history. The events of the Bible took place in real time and delineated real historical events like a history book: except there were miracles of God interwoven in this text. However, he knew if you disregarded the miracles there was nothing left to the text. Many have mistaken the miraculous element of the Bible to legend when no legendary text exists of the same literary style of the Bible. No mythology is written in this style.

So either simple fishermen of Galilee two thousand years ago wrote the most magnificent one of a kind literary masterpiece of all time from their own imagination, or they were really recounting the real events they experienced and eye witnesses testified to of the life of Jesus and God's intervention throughout time in the lives of men and women.

The existence of many different belief systems does not take away from the reality of Jesus, but actually contributed to the truth of the Gospels by the similarities. If a real $100 bill had never been made no one could make a counterfeit or a distorted $100 bill for there was no real preceding it in order for it to be fake. If there is a plethora of religions and desires of worshiping something outside ourselves then that suggest there is a real and a right God to direct that worship.

The many stories of various beliefs are shadows and counterfeits of the real Story. We can hold on to the counterfeit, or we can exchange it for the real and take our place in His Story. I want to be in the Real Story, not wondering outside in shadows and counterfeits. Only by being a part of the real story through a relationship with Jesus Christ can we live life with a clean pair of glasses.

Truth Claims

Everyone makes truth claims. Even one who claims there is no truth, makes a truth claim. The one who claims there are a multiplicity of truths, makes a definitive truth claim that truth is pluralistic. Someone who maintains that truth is subjective to the individual or the community also makes a truth claim about truth itself.

Why is it then that the person who posits the existence of ultimate Truth that corresponds accurately with reality is branded intolerant and arrogant?

Some advocate a both/and type of reasoning to avoid exclusivity of truth. Whereas logic dictates an either/or reasoning (the law of non-contradiction). Truth by its very nature is exclusive of all non-truth. If it is true that God exist, then it cannot be equally true that He does not exist. This is impossible. If the Christian God exists, then it cannot be equally true that all world religions are also true for they are contradictory to the former. Just take the three main world theistic beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and you see major differences. No honest follower of either of these beliefs would posit that the other belief system can co-exist logically (the same person cannot believe all three belief-systems at the same time without living a contradiction).

The both/and advocate says truth must be “both/and” or nothing else. It cannot be either/or. Even the both/and proponent cannot get free from the “either/or” logic.

The problem of knowing truth isn’t one of the truth, but one of what the knower does with the truth. If the knower forces it upon those who don’t know or don’t believe by violence or manipulation then they have created an injustice. Jesus said that if a person says he loves God, but hates his brother, the truth is not in him. Jesus also said that if you know the Truth the truth will set you free, therefore it does not create oppression, but freedom. If one feels burdened by a truth claim it may not be truth, or the spirit in which it was relayed may have been false.

Moreover, in Christianity knowing the one who is the Truth enables one to live a life of truth and love.

We must understand that the existence of one truth is not an outlandish idea. However, what one does with the truth they profess is of enormous importance. Truth is more than a philosophical construct. It is also an experiential reality.

Don’t be fearful of looking for one coherent worldview. Truth is knowable and He wants to be known.

The Gravity of Reality

Truth is what is despite one's belief or acceptance of its validity. To illustrate this point, let us look at the law of gravity. Everything on earth is subject to the law of gravity. If I take a ball and throw it into the air it will fall to the ground (unless something else stops its trajectory). I can disbelieve in the law of gravity all I want to and it won't change a thing. The reality of the law of gravity will continue on unabated by my disbelief. The same is true of anything that is reality. Most would agree on the law of gravity and that it applies to all cultures and all times regardless of ones understanding or acceptance of the fact. However, the same people would disagree that spiritual truth can be the same for all cultures and all times. Somehow we have no issue with relegating spirituality to personal preference, cultures, or opinions. We certainly don't want anyone claiming to have the Truth in a manner that is outside of ones personal opinion or preference. Its taboo to make a spiritual truth claim for all people in all cultures and all times. Notwithstanding, the majority of spiritual worldviews are mutually exclusive. Truth by its very nature is exclusive of all that is not true. Just the same, it grates on the conscience of our culture to accept one worldview as all encompassing. However, like gravity the worldview that is Truth was not created by man anymore than the law of gravity was a man made invention. Gravity was not dreamed up by man and then made a universal law of physics. No, it was always there and at one point was discovered by man and explained by man. What goes up always came down before the discovery of the law of gravity the same as after the discovery. The same is true with reality. The truth of reality is what is no matter who believes it or accepts it as such. It goes on being true irrespective of what man thinks about it because it is true and no amount of disbelief can change that fact.

We must be lovers of truth. We must seek out that truth and discover to know it. A person wouldn't get by in this world very well if they disbelieved in gravity and simply walked off a ledge, cliff, or building at a whim like they were the Roadrunner or Coyote. Likewise, a person cannot get along well in life living in contradiction to reality. Albert Einstein said he didn't believe in universal morality, but he had to live as if he did to get by in life. His beliefs and actions did not add up for reality continued to be real despite what he wanted to believe. We can continue to say that our worldview (beliefs about life) are culturally or personally relative, but if we take an honest look at how we live and how life works we must acknowledge that our beliefs don't line up with reality. We must not live lives in constant conflict of the contradiction between our philosophy and the reality in which we live. We must not invent our belief system. We must discover what is truly is. The Roadrunner might be able to run off a cliff and survive the sudden realization of gravity unscathed, but this suspended reality doesn't work in real life. Ones worldview must be philosophically sound as well as practically livable in a real world.