Seeing the Light

The small town of Nags Head ensconced in the greater Outer Banks, North Carolina bears a name reflective of the piracy legend of old. It is said that the locals of Outer Banks heard news of the piracy of Blackbeard at sea and decided to try their own clandestine adventure by tying a lantern around the neck off an old horse, otherwise known as a “nag” and lead it along the top of the tallest sand dunes such as Jockey’s Ridge casting the light out to sea. Upon seeing this light from sea, the ship’s captain would assume it to be coming from a ship anchored safely in a harbor and would direct his ship to do likewise. Unfortunately for captain and crew, by following this light as a guide he would beach his ship upon the dangerous shoals. The ship and crew quickly fell prey to these land pirates of Outer Banks who forced the crew to walk the plank, looting and burning the ship whilst making away with the plunder.

These infamous land pirates succeeded because they were counterfeiting something real. They knew that their light would signal ships that there was a safe harbor when in fact they would soon be beached upon land and plundered. In contrast, had the captains known where the real harbor was they would not have been taken in by a counterfeit.

It is the same with religions. Many belief systems are casting out their lights and yet they are only counterfeits of the real. They allure because there is a real, but once accepted as the truth they leave you plundered and lost upon the rocks. One can avoid it all and stay drifting upon the sea of uncertainty, never making landing, always fearful that the light of the harbor is as false as the next one. Or they can learn about how to find the real and avoid the pitfalls of the counterfeits. We can live our lives afraid of being plundered by false hope or we can look past the false for the real and latch ourselves securely to what is real. Once the real is attained the counterfeits are more easily seen for what they are not and any allure they may have had dissipates.

Answers From the Christian WorldView Perspective

What is evil? Evil is not really the existence of something as much as it is the absence of something. Evil is the absence of good. It is a result of man living for himself instead of in the righteous way he was designed to live. It is, thus, a product of the God given free-will of man. God could have created men as robots with no freedom. They could then be “good” and love Him because He makes them do that, but would that be love? Would love keep us from harm so much so that it suffocates us into mindless obedience to a Will more powerful than our own to which we have no choice, but to serve? I think we can emphatically answer no. Therefore, the way of love is for God to create humans who can chose to love Him and live ensconced in His love or they can reject Him and live as they please.



Now living contrary to our created purpose will be harmful and against what is good, pure, and holy. It will have consequences because the way of sin leads to death. That is the natural order of things. If something leaves its natural habitat where it belongs and enters an unnatural habitat there will be a significant depletion of its vitality. It is the same for humans. If we live contrary to our created habitat of existence, which is in communion with our life source, God, then we begin to lose the fullness of life and we live in a counterfeit reality. We need our roots to be in God to have the fullness of life. When our roots are in this world instead we do not obtain enough sustenance to be complete. When our nature took on sin when Adam chose to go his own way, humanity was altered, depleted in a sense from our intended nature. Adam spiritually and physically caused a change of events in all humanity. But God is a loving and good God and despite our digging our roots into nature instead of His Super-nature, He in His grace and mercy provided a way to protect us from the consequences of sin. He did this by the most loving act of sacrifice of His own Son who is of His substance, God. This redemption provided by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was not just for those who trust in Jesus after this event, but for all those who looked forward to the promise of redemption before this event. All of creation climaxed and culminates in the redemptive act of Christ. All that was depleted can find restoration in Christ because of His sacrifice.



Why did God have to do it this way? Why not just forgive all our sins with no sacrifice? Or why not just let us do as we please and give us all eternal bliss anyway? The wages of sin is death. Death, physically and spiritually, is the result of sin in the natural order of things. So either we continue in that death—that separation from the life source of God or He dies in our place and substitutes Himself to pay the price that we would have had to pay to protect us and restore us by His works and not by ours. So while all men sin and none are good by themselves. He paid our debt of sin. He suffered so we wouldn’t have to. What greater love can there be? What greater goodness?



You see, eternal life is more than heaven. Heaven is a place where our life continues after the natural body dies, but it is an extension of our source of life while we are living on the earth. If we are in God on earth, we continue the same way upon natural death. We continue that life with God. If we reject God on earth we continue in that place of rejection after death. It’s the state we exist in by our choice, not by His punishment. Eternal life happens when we accept the free gift of the forgiveness of God through Jesus. He promises that He will dwell within us, and commune with us, changing our nature to a redeemed nature versus our nature that is tied to death and the earth due to sin.



I was asked in a comment that if a Christian’s nature is changed why are some atheists more moral than some Christians? It would appear there is nothing to this whole idea that somehow Christians are changed for they are not better in their actions than anyone else who strives to be moral.



The answer is that while spiritually we are made new, sometimes it takes some time for that to mature in outward changes. It is a process of growth in Christ. Some Christians are in a place where they accepted His forgiveness and they have His eternal life, but they never left infancy in their relationship with Him. Sometimes it’s because they held on to some parts of their lives that they did not want to surrender to God and God’s still working out a process of redemption in those areas. Each person’s relationship with God is different and its own journey. There are not to be cookie cutter Christians who are all in the same robotic state of maturity in Christ because they said some prayer and now everything in their life is all-good. Upon accepting God’s forgiveness and coming into relationship with Him, you are at that moment under His grace and mercy and His justice justifies you as holy and pure in His sight. But in the natural there are things that still persist from the old life that often times can take time to work out. You do not suddenly loose your will and become a perfect moral puppet serving God’s every whim. You still have control of your mind, will, and emotions and you still are in a learning process of what it means to know and trust God. God is patient with us and He is kind. Our struggles or our doubts do not offend Him. So you’ll find Christians at all different places in their walk with God.



The important thing is looking at ourselves and our own distance from God. We can’t get to God by being good or being religious or any other way we can come up with by our own ideas. The only way to God, is God coming to us. He has done that through Jesus opening the door for anyone who wants to step through and walk a new walk by His loving strength; therefore entering a new supernatural reality that is more real than our counterfeit realities we derive by our unaided reason. He is the reason we can reason and yet we use it to deny Him instead of to come to Him for even our reason has been adversely affected by the sinful nature. When we use it without Him being our source of truth, we use it in a limited fashion and not in its fullness.

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.