Trusting God's Narrative of Reality: Introducing the Big Picture
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John 18:38 (ESV)
Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”
Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
This morning we are going to talk about worldviews. We will get to the definition of a worldview in just a moment, but first it might be helpful if we talk about a practical example.
Let’s talk about a physical worldview.
For many years “scientists” thought that the earth was the center of the universe. And it is easy to laugh and mock them for that view.
However, have you ever, once in your life, had the sensation that you were moving at 70,000 miles per hour? If not, you ought to be able to agree that geocentrism, makes complete sense to our senses.
What is geocentrism? The theory that the universe revolves around the earth.
Every personal observation we can muster tells us that, from all appearances, we are situation on a stationary, motionless planet around which everything else revolves.
If we were to go back in time and tell those people that the earth is actually hurtling through space at over 1,000 miles per second (like a cosmic baseball) and that it is simultaneously spinning (like a curve-ball) at over 1,000 miles per hour, what do you think they would say? They would think we were crazy! Why?
If we were really moving that fast we would feel something right?
I feel the wind buffeting me every time I ride on my motorcycle and that is at speeds of a measly 60 mph. 1,000 mps?
Have you ever gone on one of those carnival rides that spins you around and around? And you get sucked to the wall? That is not even close to 1,000 mph, but you sure feel the ride don’t you?
From everything that people on earth can see and feel, the universe must be geocentric, right? And yet the vast majority of all eight billion of us believe that geocentricism is completely wrong.
So- in complete contradiction to our everyday senses, we hold a worldview called heliocentrism. What is that? the believe that everything in our solar system revolves around the sun.
This is in large measure, a worldview based on faith in the things most of us have never personally seen. It is an interpretation of reality that we have come to embrace on the basis of certain evidences.
And yet, it completely transforms how we view our world and everything around us!
How? It dictates our knowledge base, directs our entire educational system, and even shapes how we live our lives and talk about reality!
It even had theological implications! Can you think of any? The earth is no longer the center of the universe, and by implication, neither are we!
This illustration of a physical worldview is suggestive for our metaphysical worldview.
What is a worldview?
What is a worldview?
1. A set of basic beliefs, assumptions, and values.
1. A set of basic beliefs, assumptions, and values.
2. Which arises from a big story about the world
2. Which arises from a big story about the world
3. And produces individual and group action
3. And produces individual and group action
Who has a worldview?
“Not everyone’s worldview is equally well-defined, or thought through, or even self-consistent. Yet everyone has one. Your worldview shapes everything you think, from origins to aliens to morality, and is ultimately the rationale behind everything you do.”
Your worldview defines everything you think about everything.
Worldviews are so pervasively influential that they even shape our statements about worldviews. Stephen Jay Gould, famous American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science historian, made the oft-quoted assertion:
“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview— nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.” —Stephen Jay Gould
Can you spot the irony and absurdity of Gould’s statement?
What is really dangerous is when someone pretends their worldview is not dogmatic.
With all that said, why do worldview’s matter when it comes to the trustworthiness of God’s words?
Remember what a world view is: A set of basic beliefs, assumptions, and values, which arise from a big story about the world and produces individual and group action.
Where do we find our “big story” that feeds our beliefs, assumptions, and values, and shapes our interpretation of reality and our reactions to the world around us?
Where do most people find that big story? evolutionary theory, the musings of a favorite author, the philosophy of a screenwriter or a pod-caster, other religious documents, some people stitch together a willy-nilly worldview from whatever seems popular, sounds sensible, and makes them fell good. Christians find theirs (or ought to) in the Bible.
Plotting the Biblical Storyline
Plotting the Biblical Storyline
How many books are there in the bible?
How many authors?
How many years did it take to write?
Cross reference picture
Cross references explained
Why does this graph look this way? Because the Bible is not some random collection of unrelated, or even loosely related, sacred writings that happen to come from one predominant people group. One of the most revolutionary concepts to understand about the Bible is that it is, from beginning to end, a story.
It’s not just a true story; it is THE true story.
Remember our definition of a world view: A set of basic beliefs, assumptions, and values, which arise from a what? a big story about the world and produces individual and group action.
The big story of the Bible is the big story that ought to be foundational to our worldview. The single big story of the Bible should be that which shapes your basic beliefs, assumptions, and values. It should be that which produces individual and group action.
How you view the world drives how you live. The Bible is God’s record of reality to help us see and interpret our experience through His eyes, because He is the only one who sees everything, and sees it as it really is.
The Bible is a big, very long, very complex story. That’s why there are several ways of summarizing the Bible overarching message, identifying its seams, and tracing the progression of its story. Because the Bible possess multiple organizing themes, its story can be view from a variety of different angels.
The Glory of God
The Glory of God
Many have suggested that the grandest and most overarching theme in the Bible is God’s desire to display—and share—His own glory.
Jonathan Edwards—wrote a group of essays entitled The End for Which God Created the Word.
In these essays he demonstrates scripturally that the ultimate goal of God through human history is to show and to share the glories of His attributes and character.
So, you could view and explore the big story of the Bible as the record of God’s revelation of His own glory in human history.
Creation, Fall, Redemption
Creation, Fall, Redemption
The story of the Bible is the story of God’s Creation of a world peopled by creatures like Himself in important ways, the Fall of that race into mistrust and rebellion against their Creator, and the extraordinary steps God takes to Redeem us from the consequences of our fallen-ness.
The Covenants
The Bible can be organized covenantally.
Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, and New.
Other Themes
Other Themes
Dominion, worship, divine presence, promise and fulfillment, the people of God, and many more.
Which one is the right one? There is lots of debate on that topic.
Its better to think of them as overarching paradigms that are not in competition with each other, and none is more right than the others. All of them emerge from the Bible and function like gears in a complex machine, all of different sizes and shapes and speeds and moving in different but complementary directions. Or they are like spirographs— anyone know what those are? overlapping, intersecting, and complementary outlines of redemptive history. Each of them contributes something distinctive to our understanding of what is going on in the Bible and how it relates to us in multiple ways and on multiple levels.
Our study through this book has been about the trustworthiness of God’s words. We have talked about trusting God’s words in spheres big and small, personal and panoramic. In this study we want to back out as far as we can and take in as broad a scope as possible, as wide as all of human history, and encourage you to trust God’s narrative or reality. The Big Picture storyline we are going to use is one we haven’t mentioned yet.
The Kingdom
The Kingdom
Kingdom is one of the major, overarching, framing themes that God has woven into His revelation of reality, and one of the thematic threads woven most closely to the core of the Bible’s storyline.
Initial Arguments:
The kingdom was a persistent and predominant focus of the ministry of Christ.
How many times do all four Gospels record Jesus using words like “kingdom” or “king,” specifically with reference to God’s kingdom? About 160 x’s.
In addition the rest of the NT includes dozens of other references to the divine kingdom.
God himself has chosen to describe reality in kingdom terms. It is the primary model He uses across both testaments to describe His relationship not only to His people but to the world and humanity at large.
The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land.
Your throne, O God, is forever and ever. The scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness;
Who would not fear you, O King of the nations? For this is your due; for among all the wise ones of the nations and in all their kingdoms there is none like you.
At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation;
Cursed be the cheat who has a male in his flock, and vows it, and yet sacrifices to the Lord what is blemished. For I am a great King, says the Lord of hosts, and my name will be feared among the nations.
and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.
Kingdom language is God’s way of expressing the nature of His relationship to creation, His claims on creation, and His purpose for creation.
It is also the language God uses to explain the meaning and significance of human history. And if furnishes the setting in which we are intended to view our own lives in the context of history!! How?
Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.
But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
We are not primarily citizens of earthly things, we are primarily citizens of heavenly realm. We are not citizens in a heavenly democracy; we are subjects of a King within a kingdom.
All the freedoms and self-determination of modern democracies render a kingdom mentality very foreign to us.
Author remarks about a very confused bumper sticker: “Elect Jesus King of your life.”
For most of human history the kingdom model was predominant. We don’t like the idea of a king in this world, because absolute power corrupts absolutely, but we are waiting for a monarch with perfect justice, sinlessness, and without guile.
From the Bible’s beginning to its end, the history of the world is framed as a story of the kingdom of God. The view of creation as a kingdom commences in Genesis and climaxes in Revelation.
Bookends of the story of the Bible!
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
By the time time you reach that final chapter in the story, you become away that there is a vast historical background to all of the events it describes—events that fill out the final landscape of human history, events that have been in preparation and in prophecy for a long, long time.
Why is a kingdom worldview so important?
How does that tie into trusting God?
If we can understand and trust completely God’s narrative of reality what ramifications would that have on our daily life?