P.E.W. Perspective

I have been working on a book called Being Real. I have decided that I am going to release it here on my blog as a chapter book. I will release the introduction here now, and then the first chapter on Wednesday Dec 19th. After that, I will release a chapter every two weeks until the whole book has been released. I will likely publish it in paperback at that time, but as readers of my blog, you get first crack at it. Here then is the introduction to Being Real.

I will try to persuade you to believe in God and to want to live like He intended you to live. That is a big undertaking if you are not currently a believer, I understand that. I will not try to persuade you with scientific evidence or deep theological statements but rather with common sense and plain talk. That may be difficult to do. Common sense sometimes reveals things to us that we would rather not deal with. It can be much easier to accept things that do not demand anything in return. I will try to convince you that God created you, intends for you to live forever, wants you to do more on earth than just survive and, wait for it, actually look forward to getting up every morning and saying good morning Lord instead of good Lord, it’s morning!

For those of you that already believe I hope to challenge you to deepen your understanding of just how important you are to God and how much He really cares what happens to you. I want for you to eagerly seek out a life of service and be more concerned about preparation for the eternal instead of stressing so much about surviving this short span of life on earth. I will help you understand that God really does have a plan for your life, a plan that He established before you were ever born. And so we begin.

Let’s start with the basics. Either there is a God or there isn’t. “In the beginning God created…” (Gen 1:1) That is a big statement. “God created the heavens and earth – all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.” That’s Gen 1:1 in The Message translation. Now I know that it is modern to believe that there is no God responsible for creation. Most scientists would have us believe that sometime in the ancient past there was an accidental ‘big bang’ that ultimately resulted in an elemental life form. Then, somehow a series of random environmental circumstances caused that piece of ‘life’ in the primordial ooze to start evolving into more complex life forms until, wow, a human! So, in that belief system I am not a creation of an almighty powerful God but simply fortunate that all of my amphibious, reptilian, avian, simian ancestors were in the right place at the right time to somehow morph into a higher life form, eventually leading to a human being standing up on two legs and thinking for himself. I’m sorry but that version just requires too much faith. Rather, I choose to exercise a lesser amount of faith and just take the Bible at its word. God decided He wanted an earth so he made one. He thought about how he wanted to populate it and ended up making elephants, lions, dogs, monkeys and even bacteria and insects. So who created God? Where did He come from? This is a question that is often posed by non-believers. I have a well thought out answer that should be adequate for our purposes – I don’t know! Does that mean that the whole belief in creation falls apart? Not at all, somewhere along the line we have to exercise faith in something. In the big-bang/evolutionary model, can they tell us where those first particles came from that miraculously banged up against each other and created the universe? Can they tell us how somehow an inert piece of ‘stuff’ suddenly took on life? No! If God has to have a provable beginning, then those swirling masses of gas and particles have to have a provable beginning. I just find it a lot easier to believe as the Bible says in Revelations 1:8, “I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come…” (New Living Translation) I don’t have to understand where God came from, it is enough for me to see how everything around me points to the fact that it must be true, God just is and He made all of this!