Creation to Restoration

Making sense of the world

How do we make sense of the world?

Maybe the easiest answer is: you don’t!

Just live your life. Keep your head down. It helps if you don’t read the paper or watch the news too much, you can almost ignore everything, and then maybe… just maybe, you’ve got a chance that life might be straight forward enough to figure out.

Except… it doesn’t really work. Unfortunately, even if you ignore the mess that’s happening in the Ukraine at the moment. If you stop listening to all the culture wars. If you close your eyes to all the natural disasters and ignore the general crime and dysfunction… the problem is, things still just aren’t right. Because even forgetting those external factors, we face our own sickness. Perhaps worse, we face our own mental anguish. The regret. The guilt. The deep dark thoughts that come over us. And believe me, even if you don’t have a diagnosed mental illness, we will all face that mental anguish to one degree or another.

So ignoring it’s not going to work. So I come back to my question: how do we make sense of the world?

Secular science might try to again say: you don’t! They might argue that this is all just a random assortment of atoms that have by chance come to be, and therefore everything can be explained by the forces of natural selection. But there is something deeply troubling with this explanation, not to mention some big gaps in the logic.

Others might consider spiritual forces. Perhaps even a battle between good and evil. And at the moment, those evil forces are proving too strong. Perhaps the old idea that good will triumph over evil, well perhaps we can assign that too fairy tales.

If this is our explanation, then things might be a little bleak. Who knows if good will triumph. Perhaps if we rally behind those forces for good, maybe… just maybe… there might be a little glimmer of hope.

But in the end, all of the attempts feel unsatisfactory.

What if there was a better way to understand why the world is the way it is. And what if rather than ending either in no hope, or at best a bleak hope… what if we actually end with a firm hope?

I’m going to suggest there is such a way of understanding the world, and though I’m going to suggest it’s fundamental to the Christian worldview, the reality is many Christians can lose sight of it. In fact, many Christians can get caught up with this idea of a battle of good and evil without realising there’s more to the story then thinking about it as two equal and opposing forces.

The Bible

I’m going to suggest the answer is in fact the overarching story of the Bible.

The problem is, the Bible is so big that we fail to appreciate what it is.

We know there are a lot of good stories in there. Many of them we can learn some pretty good lessons.

We also know that there is a lot of good teaching about how to live life. Perhaps many of you might even have various verses printed out. Maybe you even have them stuck up on your wall at home.

But it can all seem very disjointed.

Well, despite many different authors writing over a period of about one and a half thousand years, and numerous different genres… there is actually a very united story line, one that we can see how God is interacting in this world.

Now, I’m actually going to try and keep things short this morning, but in the very short period of time that I’ve allotted for myself, I’m going to do a super quick survey of the Bible, but in such a way that will help us answer the question: how do we make sense of this world.

Creation

Well, the Bible starts at the beginning - the first three words of course being: “In the beginning...”

There was nothing. There was no physical world at all. But there was a God - who has always been.

From nothing God created the world.

For the purposes of answering my question, at this point in time, everything was perfect. The world made sense because it all aligned with God’s good order.

Crowning God’s good creation - was humanity.

The Fall

But evil entered. In the form of a snake, evil tempted Adam and Eve.

Why was this important? Because it put a rift between humanity and God.

And this is an important part of the Christian worldview.

You see, once the order was broken, chaos was allowed to grow. Could God have stopped it at that point? Well, yes, but at the expense of what made humanity so special - the fact that they were made in his image… able to make choices of their own free will.

And so chaos grew and grew. The chapter after Adam and Eve’s fall, we get the first murder. A few chapters later, the world is in so much chaos, that God decides to send a flood. But even with this cleansing, chaos still persists.

People think they can outsmart God… to the point that they try and build a tower to heaven. This ends in God scattering them.

At this point in the story. There is little hope. We can understand the evil in the world. It’s there because humanity turned their back on God. But any hope that humanity can turn things around is almost completely and utterly gone.

Abraham

But in the twelfth chapter of Genesis, we get a tiny tiny glimpse of hope. God simply tells a man by the name of Abram to Go… go to a land that God will show him.

And with the simple command comes a promise. A promise that through him, a blessing will come. Not just a local blessing, but a blessing to all people on earth.

And so the Bible starts tracking the story of Abram, who will great significance has his name changed to Abraham.

As you follow his story, we start to see the promise fleshed out.

A nation will come from Abraham, and from this nation blessings will flow.

The irony of course is that for much of the story, Abraham is childless. But eventually the promised child comes - Isaac. From Isaac we then get Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel - where we get the name of the nation that will form.

Israel

Well, as the nation of Israel starts to take form, they end up in Egypt for about 400 years. In dramatic circumstances, they leave Egypt, but only to find themselves wandering in the dessert for another 40 years.

But here’s the thing. It was during these years of wandering that they started to understand what God wanted of them.

They were given the law. Moses went up the mountain and came back with the Ten Commandments. But more than that, God revealed how this was to be applied throughout their life.

Now maybe you’ve always thought of this as God being overly rule based. But it is actually God helping people to see the way things should be.

Now it becomes evident that the law was never going make things right again - but it did point to something - something that will make a lot more sense later.

Well, Israel do finally make it into the promised land. And while it might seem they achieved their goal, the reality was that things were still not satisfactory. Chaos was still getting the upper hand.

The King

Eventually, Israel asks for a king. The story takes us to King David, and for a moment, things almost feel like they’re going to come good. But they don’t. In fact, after King David, things take a big dive downwards.

Israel is a mess.

But God starts sending prophets. Prophets that tell Israel where they have gone wrong. But also give hope that something is about to happen.

But despite this promise. By the end of the Old Testament, things still seem hopeless.

This idea that from Abraham a blessing to all nations would be found, well, that seemed a distant memory.

To the casual observer, you might think that the question of how we make sense of the world, well, we’re as lost as ever.

Jesus

But that all changes as we get to the New Testament. A baby is born. Jesus.

And as the New Testament continues, we start to see how that promise made to Abraham actually now makes sense.

Because that nation that came from him, it helped us to understand God’s ways, and now God chose to dwell among us in the form of Jesus.

Jesus showed us what it means to live in the ordered fashion that God designed.

But of course it was impossible.

But with God, the impossible become possible. Because Jesus dealt with the thing that was actually causing the problem.

He died for us.

Hanging on the cross, he took the punishment we deserved.

He broke that which held us back.

But that’s not all.

He didn’t stay dead.

Jesus rose again!

He broke through the bonds of death.

And this is where the hope comes from. Because Jesus rose again, we know that death no longer holds us down.

After rising from the dead, Jesus ascended to heaven - but he has sent his Spirit who is God with us.

And for this reason, we can start to move in the direction of what Jesus intended for us - to live God centred lives.

Change is possible.

But even more - Jesus promised that one day he will return, and when he does - all things will be made right. There will be no more pain or tears, for the old order of things will be gone.

Conclusion

So how do we make sense of the world?

By understanding the nature of sin - but more than that, understand the victory over sin that Jesus had.

As we explore this idea, we start to understand why the world is as messed up as it is, but also why we can have hope. A hope that even now, we can experience a blessing. But an ultimate hope that some day soon, all things will be right.

That hope is something you can have today.

You see, I mentioned earlier that people make a mistake about thinking of the battle of good and evil. There is a battle of good and evil, but it’s not an equal one. It’s a battle whereby God has already won the victory, but he allows the evil one some freedom while he awaits the final number of people to come to him.

It’s not an equal battle. There is hope because Jesus has already won.

All you need to do is accept Jesus. If you accept what he has done, recognising your need for him, then you can have the hope too. And this is my prayer for each of you.

So let me pray now...