Phyllis, Hayley, and Ultimate Truth (part 3)

Now, let’s go back to the first question. Remember how you innately knew that Hayley’s version was “right” and Phyllis’s version was “wrong”?

What do I mean by “right” and “wrong”?

As pertains to this discussion, as I am using the terms for this article, “Right” is what corresponds to that perfect reality, while “wrong” is what doesn’t match up or is far from the absolutes of perfect reality.

Let’s relate this discussion back to Christianity. I would submit to you that the Christian faith is the one that matches up with the perfect, absolute reality that we are all, consciously or unconsciously, trying to achieve for our inner meters. God Himself is perfect, and He Himself is the epitome of that absolute, perfect reality. His Word is equally perfect as an expression of His nature. It is inviolable and cannot be broken. God cannot lie, and therefore, His Word is the truth.

You may be reacting to this statement, or you may agree with me, but hear me out.

The Christian worldview, the Biblical system, is the one out of all the other systems, worldviews, or religions, that corresponds to perfect reality. I realize that saying that is like throwing down a gauntlet, just begging for somebody to take up the debate and say, “What about this?” or “What about that?” But I will go even farther and state that whenever things about God or the Bible don’t make sense to us, the problem is not in Christianity, but in our own perceptions (or individual Christians) being faulty. True Biblical Christianity is there to correct our inner reality meter, not the other way around. The Bible is incoming data that causes you to have to alter your reality. There is no other option to how we interact with the Bible. We don’t get to discard the Bible’s teaching in our minds and say, “God doesn’t know what He’s talking about.” We don’t have the luxury of altering the Bible’s teachings to match with our version of reality. We don’t come to the Bible and say, “No, it’s actually this way.” Nor do we have the privilege of holding the Bible in limbo while we look for an alternate explanation. No. We treat the Bible as the definitive Word of God, that cannot be broken or err in any point.

Why do we have such an extreme and limiting view of the Bible? Do we treat it this way because it’s a rule? Not necessarily, though some have made blanket statements to this effect that sound like rules. Rather, it is because we have recognized that the Bible is the pure and infallible expression of the perfect, ultimate reality that all of us are trying to achieve and live by. It’s only for our own benefit that we live by the Bible, because life simply makes more sense when we know the difference between right and wrong. Things are less confusing for us when we have an accurate inner reality meter with which to check incoming data. It’s for own convenience that we align our thinking with the truth of the Word of God. Whenever our thinking departs from the truth of Scripture, we are wrong and stand to be corrected, and we also stand to find certain things very confusing, to the point where we may simply have to give up and say, “Well, I simply don’t understand that.”

It is no coincidence that the ultimate, perfect reality about the world matches exactly with the truth of Scripture: They both have the same author! God is the creator. He designed the world, wrote the laws by which it operates, and then took the initiative to reveal Himself to His creatures in His Word. What a privilege we have, for there are certain things that we would have been unable to discern about the way things work without explicit instruction.

God’s ways are higher than our ways, and there are unseen spiritual realities that we would never have guessed without someone telling us. The reason for this is that we are fundamentally broken. At the fall, man’s spirit died, and he thereby lost the possibility of perceiving spiritual realities. Spiritual things are no less real because we do not perceive them (in fact, I would argue that spiritual realities are far more real and true and unalterable and eternal than our world of physical matter.)

The Christian has regained the Spirit, for the Spirit of God dwells in him and gives him new life. The Christian who reads the Bible, becomes immersed in it, and drinks in and accepts its truth gets closer and closer to the eternal realities of God’s perfect truth. 

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