Coram Deo Video Transcript
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Lesson 2: The Transforming Story – The Depth of the Story
Video 1 of 4: The Worldview Story
Presenter: Darrow Miller
We’ve been talking about the transforming story, and as we’ve looked at this story we’ve seen that it’s a powerful story because it can transform individual lives. It can lift communities out of poverty and it has the ability to build nations. Nations that are free, just and compassionate.
We’ve been looking at the breadth of this story. If somebody were to ask you tell me, in a few words what is the Bible all about? All you have to do is remember for words. And these four words, if you unpack them tells the whole nature of the biblical narrative. The four words are the creation, the fall, redemption and consummation. And that’s what we have just looked at.
I want to focus for a few minutes on the word consummation. Very often in the church today we speak of the creation, the fall and the return of Christ. But we have a faulty paradigm and we are thinking that the world is going to get worse and worse and worse, and when it gets bad enough Christ will come back. I consciously use the word consummation to change hopefully how we think about the end times.
God is at work in history, and he is working to fulfill his purposes. When the end of history comes, all that God has been doing will be consummated. I remember a number of years ago when I was working for Food For The Hungry, my friend Dave Evans asked me to come down to Bolivia. He was the country director of Bolivia for Food For The Hungry and he said he was having some problems with his staff and asked if I would come down and meet with the staff and meet with him and I said sure, so I flew down to Bolivia and when I got there I said Dave, what’s the problem?
He said, well, the problem is my staff are Christians. I said, why is that a problem, that’s a good thing. He said no, they go to church on Sunday. I said, well that’s good. No, he said, it’s not good. Will why? Because it church, the pastors talk about how things are going to get worse and worse and was and when they get bad enough, then Jesus is going to come back. And the same people come Monday to Food For The Hungry and we send them out into the communities and what are they supposed to do? They’re supposed to help bring improvement to the community. They are there to bring about the development of the community.
Many of them are struggling because they wonder if their work on Monday is going to slow down the return of Christ. And he wasn’t joking. And this is true of so many Christians. We think things are going to get worse and worse and worse and when they get bad enough, Christ will come back so there’s really nothing for us to do today. We just have to sit and wait for the return of Christ. This is a faulty paradigm.
We need to see that God is at work in history. His kingdom is coming, we have a responsibility in the coming of the kingdom as we saw recently in Matthew 28:18-20, it says that we are to disciple nations. God wants to see nations transformed. So God is at work and we are to be at work. When Jesus comes back, all that we have been doing and all that God has been doing will be consummated.
So this is the breadth of the biblical narrative. But the narrative also has a depth. And this is the meaning of the story. Every culture has a story. In every culture answers certain questions, questions like what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful?
The Bible answers those questions. Very often as Christians we don’t think in those terms but we ought to think in those terms because the Bible not only has a breadth but it has a depth. It answers the basic questions of life. So what is good? What is true? What is beautiful? The Bible also asks and answers questions, what does it mean to be human? Where is history going? And what is the nature of creation?
So the Bible has a breadth and it has a depth. The depth is the worldview. The depth describes the meaning of the story. Now in this graphic we can see three very different worldviews. If you think of all of the religions in the world, all of the philosophies in the world and you were to distill them down to their essence, you would have three basic possibilities. You’d have animism, secularism and biblical theism.
It’s kind of like beverages. Milk, soda and wine. They are all liquids that you drink. They are all beverages of one kind or another, but they’re very different. You can have all sorts of different kinds of milk. You can have that free [00:08:00] milk, you could have chocolate milk, you can have strawberry milk, you can have whole milk. But what makes milk milk?
There are thousands upon thousands of different types of wine. But what makes wine wine? And what makes soda soda? The thing they have in common, they’re liquids, they’re beverages, and we enjoy them.
It’s that very small piece that’s distilled out when you boil everything down that separates the wine from the soda, from the milk. And it’s at that level that we’re looking we speak of worldview. We can’t take, a person could spend their whole lives studying philosophy or religion and never look at all the religions and philosophies that there are. But if you look at three basic ones, you’ve covered the bases. If you look at these three worldviews, these are the distillation of all the religions and the philosophies of the world.
The first worldview is animism. An animist believes that the universe is ultimately spiritual. In fact, some animists would go so far as to say that this reality, this here is an illusion. This is Hinduism. Hinduism would look at the world that we inhabit and say, this world does not exist. It’s only a dream. A dream in the mind of God. When you are asleep at night and you are dreaming and you think it’s real, and then you wake up and you realize you’re only dreaming, all of this is a dream in the mind of God.
What is real is the spiritual realm. The physical realm either doesn’t exist or is unimportant. The secularists have a totally different view. They believe there is no spiritual reality, there’s no God, there’s no angels. No demons. The only thing that is real is nature. In human beings are simply part of nature. We have come about through evolution but what we are, in our core is matter. Because there is no spiritual reality.
The third worldview is the view of this book. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. What Israel in this worldview, God is real. There is a spiritual realm in which the Angels and the demons inhabit and God made a physical universe, which is real. And which he declared to be good. And the spiritual realm and the physical realm are not separated, they are integrated. There’s a relationship between the spiritual and the physical.
These three different worldviews see human beings in radically different ways. They also see where time and history in very different ways. And they see the nature of creation in radically different ways. What we like to do in the next few minutes is begin to look at how these three worldviews see man, history and nature in such radically different ways.
We’ll begin by looking at what it means to be a human being. And we’ll see that animism looks at a man or woman and says that the foundation, what they are as a spiritual being. Somebody said that we are as human beings, we are a ghost that inhabits a machine. What is the real is the ghost. What is the important, is the ghost. In animistic societies, spirits inhabit the animals, they inhabit the forests, the trees, and they inhabit human beings. So what does it mean to be human? It means to have a spirit.
On the other end, the secularist says there is no spiritual realm. So what it means to be a human being is to be an animal. And we’ve represented this with the mouth and a stomach. We are a consumer of resources just like other animals. But at the core we have no soul, we have no spirit. All we have is a body and when we die, it’s all over.
Now what we want to do is look at the biblical concept of what it means to be human. I’d like you, before we look at our next session, I’d like you to think about the story that animates your culture. Whatever country you’re from, there is a cultural story. What is that cultural story? Is it more animistic, is it more secular, or is it a biblical concept?
How does this worldview affect your life personally?