Perspective: Is Belief In God Reasonable?

[MUSIC] You are listening to the Passion City Church DC podcast. To learn more about Passion City Church, including our gathering times in Atlanta and Washington, DC, visit us online at passioncitychurch.com. Today's talk comes from Pastor Ben Stewart. [MUSIC] Well, a couple months ago, I had my first virtual reality experience. I took my oldest daughter to New York, and we went to the Harry Potter store. And as part of that, yes, we signed up for some Hogwarts experience. And I didn't even know what it was. I didn't know it was a virtual reality thing. And then they took the two of us into this basement, and there was in this little room, eight broomsticks, and they had the two of us, and then a few other adults mount up on these broomsticks, and they said, you're gonna put this helmet on, and you're gonna fly over Hogwarts Castle along with Harry Potter. And then they came up to me, and they said, hey, if your daughter gets disoriented or a little scared, as she's flying around, just tell her to put her feet on the ground, that'll help her. And I'm like, okay, so I'm just like, put your feet on the ground if you're scared, baby. I don't know why, you know, anyway. So I put the helmet on, and sure enough, as soon as I put it on, you know, your head is surrounded by a screen, and there is a sudden onslaught of information. I mean, within seconds, I am airborne, flying through the air with Harry over this castle, and as we do that, we begin to shoot down towards the ground, as we do it, I get nauseous, and I put my feet on the ground. Because this rapid onslaught of information was disorienting, and I knew where I was. I'm like, I know I'm in a room, I know the wind in my face is that little fan on the front of the broom, I know it. And yet, this complete surrounding screen information experience is disorienting me. I need to put my feet on something stable, really to give me perspectives in the midst of a confusing day. Now, why do I mention it? Because that's what, to me, this series has been. We've been a little bit of a different series for us, but for me, that's been what we've been trying to do. We almost called it foundations, but instead we called it perspective, because I think if we're honest, we're surrounded by screens and it's disorienting. And for many of us, that's our life today, and you go, man, I know some basics about life, but there's just such an onslaught of information that it's disorienting my vision and my values. I'm not sure where I'm going, and I'm not sure how to wait, what's really important, what's not, what's essential, what's periphery. I'm disoriented, and I need to just put my feet down what I know is true, some bedrock foundations about reality to give me perspective as I fly through the world on a broomstick. So what we did the first week is just talk about the reality statistically that this movement of Jesus is global, it's massive, it's growing, and by every statistical data available does substantive good in the lives of human beings, that at every measurable, from psychological and emotional health to generosity and volunteerism. Something about the association with Jesus is like Jesus said, it's like a branch being tethered to a vine, it lets us bear fruit. And then we looked at this book and saying, man, okay, this book tells us about this man Jesus, is it a reliable guide to the life of this guy that lived thousands of years ago? And we looked at the fact that, yes, this book faithfully has been passed down through generations, so what we have here is what was written back then. Now you may not believe Jesus is who he says he was, you may not believe what this book says, but what you can't do is dismiss this as, oh, it got garbled through time. Now this book has been preserved through history, so we have a faithful account of this man who, belief in, seems to make a substantive different in the lives of people across the globe. And then last week we had a professor come and show us that this book tells one big story, the human story about where all of life is going and what God is doing among the people he's made. And so what I want to do this week is really just ask the question, okay, we looked at the story of scripture where God is taking us, this grand arc of narrative, but I think it brings up a natural question for us, it's like, well, that's a great story, but is it true? Does it fit what is? I mean, does the story of this book tells fit the world that we live in? See, as Lewis used to talk about it this way, if you were playing the piano and there was sheet music on it and then there was a sheet of music on the ground, a page, how do you know of that page of music notes fits the song on the piano? He says, well, you have to pick it up and just play and see if it plays. Does it flow with what is? And that's kind of what I want to do today, because the Bible seems to think so. A first piece of three says, be ready to give people the reasons for the hope that you have. The assumption there is that our hope is reasonable, that what John and Rachel and the team was doing up here isn't just wishful thinking, they actually think it's true, which if it's not true, this whole performance was really sad. But if it is true, man, you can endure any pain in your life because you know history has purpose and pain does too. So this is important to figure out is what this book is saying, true. And Genesis and Romans that we read suggest to us that created order and the order of creation reveals to us there's a creator. And it also says that the presence of conscience and morality in us points to a moral being, that there's order and there's meaning, there's conscience, morality, that this book and the story of a God who made us fits the world we live in. But it's a natural question to ask, does the way this book talks fit the world we know? And theories, as you know, a theory tries to take data and create a way of explaining it that gives the best accounting for the way things are. And the Bible creates a theory of why things are the way they are. Now let me just say this before we jump into a little bit of the data we're going to do today. I'm not a philosopher. Surprise, if you didn't know that. And I would guess most of you aren't either, right? But all of us, even though most days we wake up and it's rise and grind, got our head down, trying to make that dollar, trying to e-cat a motor, if happiness. As we're doing all that, every now and again, you stop and hang with some buddies on the rooftop in DC or you should or you go out and nature somewhere and you sit and look at the stars and you start to ask the questions every philosopher does. Where did all this come from? Where did I come from? Who are we? What's wrong with us? And how is it dealt with? We all begin to ask those basic philosophical questions. And what I want to do today is just sort of address those. How do those basic questions at every philosophy has to solve whether you've articulated yours or not? You have a philosophy. Does the Bible fit what is? And here, let me just say too, I know I won't convince all of you without a doubt. That's not really how it works. It's fascinating. Matthew 28 talks about Jesus after he resurrected from the dead as he's ascending to heaven. It says the group that was around him, many worshiped but some doubted. Think about that. That they're watching Jesus beat death. He's right there. And as he's ascending to heaven, there's guys going, "Eh!" "I don't know." "I don't know." So I'm not under any illusion that some of you won't walk out of here going, "I don't know, but that's okay." What all I want to show you is this is a rational way to understand the way the world works. And then I would push him further, not just "A rational way." I would say it's the most rational way to understand what is. Francis Schaeffer was an apologist. He was sort of the CS Lewis to the hippies back in the 60s. And he wrote a book called "He is there." And he is not silent talking about God. And he sort of grouped these arguments about the existence of God under these categories of the metaphysical necessity. There's got to be something above the physical that explains what is. And the moral necessity. How do we understand morality and human rights? Where does that come from? So we'll kind of use those big pieces as we fell out the time. But a metaphysical necessity. How do we know what made all of this? It was interesting. When I graduated high school, my church gave out books to high school graduates. These two little books called "No What You Believe" and "No Why You Believe." I think as they were sending us out there, like "Don't get lost in the world, kids." And gave us these books that were written by Paul Little. He was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. And he wrote these books back in the 60s about the basics of the Christian faith and why it's a reasonable faith. And in one of the chapters where he argues for the existence of God, he starts the chapter by quoting kind of a foil, what he called the analytical philosopher, Anthony Flew. Anthony Flew was more than just an analytical philosopher. He authored 30 professional philosophical works that really set the agenda for atheism for the century. He wrote a paper called "Theology and Falsification" that he presented in 1950 to the Oxford Sofatic Socratic Club that was chaired by C.S. Lewis. So this man got up, read a paper. Two C.S. Lewis saying, "Hey, the basic assumption should be atheism. The burden of proof is on the theist to say there's some invisible being who made all this." And that idea that we should presume atheism held sway for over a century. This man, Rolivar Ghi said, "It is not too much to say that within the last 100 years no mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of system comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found than an Anthony Flues 50 years of anti-theological writings. This guy set the stage for modern atheism. And he liked to tell a story and Paul little tells the story at the beginning that he used to say in debates. And he would tell the story of two guys walking through the woods and then coming out into a clearing where there was flowers and weeds. And one of the guys said, "Well, clearly there's a gardener who cares for this place." And the other guy says, "Not necessarily." And they're like, "Well, let's wait and see." And so they wait to see if the gardener shows up and no gardener ever shows up. And the guy who doesn't believe there is one says, "See, there's no gardener." And the other one's like, "Well, maybe he's an invisible gardener. Those are around I've heard." So let's build a fence and just see if we can hear someone climb over it. They don't hear anyone. He's like, "Well, you know, maybe he's real sneaky. Let's electrify the fence." So they electrify the fence. They never hear any shocks go off. "Let's get some bloodhounds." Maybe he's really adept at climbing or can jump early high, but we can discern him through scent. And the bloodhounds never go off. And so finally, this man, this believer, says, "Well, you know, maybe he's invisible, insensible to electric shocks." And he comes secretly to look after this garden that he loves so deeply. And the other guy finally says, "Well, man, hey, look, what's the difference between your invisible intangible gardener and a make-believe gardener?" And the idea was it's ridiculous to assume the presence of an invisible person if you can't test for them and the viability of his existence. It's interesting. See, as Lewis had a rejoinder for that, Lewis was asked once to comment on a Russian cosmonaut who had gone to space and said, "I've been to the heavens and there's no God there." See, as Lewis said, "That's a category mistake. That's like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. It's not going to find him there. The playwright is not part of the play. The creator cannot be found in his creation like he is one of what's been made. That's not how this works." And so there's a response to that. But interestingly, I don't think that convinced Anthony Flew, but in 2007, I bought a book by that same atheist Anthony Flew. In the book was entitled, "There is a God. How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind." Apparently he had showed up at a debate in New York in 2004 to debate the anti-theist position and they asked him to present it. And he was like, "Actually, I don't believe it anymore. Surprise!" And kind of threw everybody off. And they were like, "What? You were the guy who set the stage for this? What happened to you?" And then he was asked, "Is it the recent work on the origin of life pointing to the activity of a creative intelligence that did it?" And he responded and I quote, "I think it does." He said, "Ian entirely because of DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material is done is that it's shown by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. If the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together, the meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It's all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the works of intelligence." And what's fascinating is in his book, he sort of repackages in a more sophisticated way, what was in Paul Little's little book that I got in high school. I won't summarize either of their books so you can go buy them Anthony Flues called There is a God, but he's sort of unpacked, so there's kind of basic views of why there's a deity. And he starts with simply the law of cause and effect that every effect has a cause. He presents actually in his book Gary Hovermaus' from Blinchberg College in Virginia, what he calls the most sophisticated argument for the existence of a creator, that there are limited changing beings that exist and the presence of every limited changing being is caused by another. And there can't be an infinite regress of causes of being because an infinite regress of finite beings would not cause the existence of anything. Therefore, there must be a first cause of the present existence of these beings and that first cause must be infinite, necessary, eternal, and one. All this came from somewhere and he says, "Where?" And you can't say, "Well, this was caused by that, by that." By that, at some point when you back all the way up, there has to be an infinite cause, an uncaused cause, a cause for all things, both impersonal and personal. And he says a way to talk about that and maybe in a shorthand is the word God. There's a first cause. And he says, "This has really been given validity in his mind because of the prominence of the Big Bang theory. Scientific research that's shown the universe has the beginning that the impersonal universe was not eternal." Stephen Hawking says, "And almost everyone now believes that the universe in time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang." Francis Collins writes about this. He says, "We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin. 15 billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that there was nothing. And I can't imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that person had to be outside of nature." It's interesting, Dr. Robert Jastro, I think he says name, he was the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies for 20 years, died in 2008 in Arlington, Virginia. He wrote this about the Big Bang. He considered himself an agnostic, but he wrote this. "Now we can see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details may differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical account of Genesis are the same. The chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time and a flash of light and energy. Let there be light." There's the kind of religion in science. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event. Every effect must have a cause. But now science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment and it asked what cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the universe and science can't answer these questions? This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all, but the theologians. They've always accepted the word of the Bible in the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak and as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who's been sitting there for centuries. Flu did the same thing. He said, "I just look at the data and I look at the fact that something had to cause all this and the something that did did it at a moment in time and that what we see has the signals of design." He said, "Seems to me to suggest there's a designer who made all this." That's another argument that's related to it. This argument of intelligent design or order and design in the universe. We all work this way. I joke with my kids this way. We hike all around DC. That was part of our COVID-Coping strategies. But I remember every time we go hiking, you know, you're out in the wild with him, you're like, "Let's get out of nature. Let's go see the unknown." And then every now and again, you're walking through the unknown and there's like a handrail, you know, and some stairs. You're like, "Ah, it kind of breaks the vibe, but I get it. It makes this slope a little easier to handle." But every time we did that with the kids, I would go, "Kids, isn't this crazy how that tree fell and over time, it just kind of sort of integrated and disintegrated to make this natural handrail right about our. " And it weird how water flowed downhill in such way to create these steps and they would all go, "Dud!" Because they knew that's ridiculous to see this complexity and think accident. When you see design, you think designer and Anthony flew ultimately landed in that same place as well. And for him, he said he was following not the Bible to do that. He was following Einstein. Einstein said this, "My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we're able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds, that deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe that forms my idea of God." A fluke quotes Darwin as well. Darwin wrote a chapter of origin of species entitled "Difficulties with the Theory." He says, "To support that the eye with so many parts all working together could have been formed by natural selection seems I freely confess, absurd and the highest degree." Stephen Hawking said, "The odds of a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang or enormous, I think there are clearly religious implications." Francis Schaefer felt the same way. It's interesting, some people may looking go, "Ben you're positing an invisible being that created all this." Isn't that fantastic? Well, I think a beautiful answer to that is, "Why are we all here?" Any answer you give is fantastic. Any answer you give to why we're here and I'm talking and you're listening and receiving me. The fact that any of this is, any answer you give is crazy. Nothing made all this. That's one of the option. But that's a hard option to maintain because nothing can't do anything. I don't know if you know that. Nothing doesn't have a will, nothing doesn't come over the ideas. And so some people say, "All the somethings of the world came from nothing." But it's very hard to maintain that because you always want to smuggle in just to smidge something. Nothing moved, buh-bh-bh, nothing doesn't move. Nothing began to ripple. No, no, no, nothing can't ripple. It's hard to hold the nothing hypothesis because you always want to smuggle in a bit of something. But as soon as you get into something, you ain't got nothing. You got something and you change categories. So number two, as you say, "Well, this all had an impersonal beginning." There was an impersonal something that just became all that we see here. And that's hard to maintain because impersonal things don't have a will or a volition. So how could the impersonal make or create the complexity we have? And your answer is accident, chance, time, certain chemicals or energy mixing in a bizarre way. It's accidental. It gives you an answer for unity. Where did all of this come from? But it doesn't give you an answer for diversity. Why are there separate things? Humans, chairs, rocks. If you have an impersonal, then everything is ultimately energy. Everything's ultimately matter. And so you'll know more special than a chair and to break a chair or kill you doesn't have any moral meaning. It's hard to maintain that all this came from the impersonal and live a moral life. You can be moral and believe that. But it's hard to maintain that at a philosophical level. And so where it pushes you is where it pushed Anthony Flew. A personal being made everything. And that's why we're personal. He has a will and we do. He has desires and we do. He has aims and goals and we do. We're in his image is the way you could say that. And it instantly makes sense of our existence that we're not meaningless. Your desires aren't meaningless. Your goals aren't meaningless. Your loves aren't meaningless. All those things you desire have an eternal reference point that the personal made us and that's why we're personal. And so yes, he's infinite and we're finite. So if you were to draw a line and put infinite things on this side and finite things on this side, God stands alone. And we're over here with trees, rocks, grass, fish, birds, animals. And that's why we feel connected to this creation because we're created things too. But then when you make the line personal things, trees, rocks, grass, but we're something else. And a baby is worth more than a TV. And a woman is worth more than money. That suddenly there's a value to the personal because the personal being made us. When you play it, it plays. Do you see that? That an infinite personal being caused all of this. If you just sit and think about that, that a being out there had a will and a purpose and he made you, suddenly you have purpose. You have meaning. You're not an accidental collocation of atoms just tripping meaninglessly through the universe. Your personality has purpose. There's enormous significance to that idea if you believe it, right? And some of you may go, well, Ben, that all sounds nice, but isn't this just wishful thinking? I didn't have a dad. I need a dad in the sky. Let me imagine a big dad that loves me so much. Isn't that just wishful thinking? Well, that argument doesn't work real well because it defeats itself. If my belief in a God is wishful thinking, your belief in no God might be wishful thinking too. Maybe you don't want a God because you don't want a dad, right? Up there. It's interesting Thomas Nagel as an atheist wrote his book, The Last Word. He says this. He offers this at the end of his book. He says, I want atheism to be true. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there's no God. I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be like that. And I'm curious whether there's anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there's a God, anyone who whatever his actual belief about the matter doesn't particularly want either one of those answers to be correct. What he's saying is it's not just, well, Christians wish and scientific people are smart and use their brains. He says, no, both sides wish. So the wish fulfillment argument just shows you that human beings wish. We all wish. So it doesn't disprove a God. We all want something. But if you just look at the data, where did we all come from? I think the best answer for all of this metaphysically, there's a necessity that a personal being made the personal you and me and the landscape on which our story plays out. I think that music plays. I love the way John Lennox said it as he talks about scientific discovery and how beautiful it is. John Lennox would ask the question, why does water boil? And then he can do it in a way I can't, even when I listen to my canyons, he starts explaining how molecules get heated up and how they bounce into each other. And he starts explaining all the molecular mechanics of how water boils. And he says, how does water boil in this molecule? And he says, yeah, now it boils because I want to cup a tea. And he says, to explain how something works scientifically is not to negate the volition of a personal being who desired and set those mechanics into place. So we have a world that works with law and order and a rational understanding because a rational mind made it. He used to with me family, some of you are like, man, I didn't know I was going to class. I told you there's a weird series. We'll get back to just teaching to the Bible very soon. Trust me, this makes me tired. But let's talk about the moral necessity before we get out of here. And the reality is this, if you say the universe came from impersonal thing, it was just stuff and suddenly we rose out of the stuff and we were like, I have a conscience in meaning, but all this is meaningless. Whoops, what a cruel joke. We're doomed to just try to eat meaning out of a meaningless world. That's a sick joke by the impersonal creation. If you do that, you really have no basis for morality. You can talk about preference. I don't prefer genocide. I don't think it's ultimately socially advantageous to oppress certain parties. But you can't talk about moral awtness. And the difficulty of that for us is we believe so deeply in moral awtness. We do. It's interesting. Tom Holland, not Spider-Man, he's a historian, wrote a book called Dominion fairly recently. It's a big book that's very much worth reading. Tom Holland would say, I'm not a Christian, he grew up going to Sunday school and he said, I went to Sunday school and I found all the stories of the Israelites really boring. He said, but I was really interested in all these other cultures. He's pagan cultures. He said, so it became a historian and he wanted to study other cultures and he wrote a book. I believe about Spartans and he was studying other cultures. And he said, as I did this, I was fascinated about these other cultures that I ran into something very disturbing to me. And he said, that is my deep belief in the value of human beings is not present in these other cultures. He said, for the Spartan, if a baby had a defect, you just pitched it over a cliff. And he said, the idea that the weak or the poor or women have rights, he said, for many ancient cultures, if you said that, these are humans and thus have rights. He said, they would have been like, what? That's laughable. No, might makes right. That's it. And he said, I realized I wasn't fascinated anymore. I was repelled because that way of conducting life was so antithetical to my values. But then he asked, where do these values come from? And he said, I worked all the way back around to a place I didn't want to be. And that is everything I think matters in life came from a guy named Jesus of Nazareth. And he said, and you too. And he said, in all my friends, they don't believe in him. Hate this. He said, but we have to admit so much of what we value came from that man. And so he begins in this book to just recount human history, and particularly in the West show that a lot of our value systems, even those of us who don't believe in Jesus, that he's the son of God, he said, much of what we value came from Jesus, that we believe human beings have rights. We believe we should care for the poor. He said that, that rose out of Christian thinking, if you look historically, it was the fact that Jesus became weak and died for us, that we say, hey, weakness may have purpose. It's not something to call out. It's something to protect and love, because you're made in God's image. And he came for you. And he took on your weakness to redeem those who are weak, to make us what we're meant to be under God. He said, that idea of a value even among the weak is a very Christian idea. You don't find it outside of the sphere of Jesus. You can believe that and live that way outside of Jesus, but you have a theory that fits your feelings of moral impulse when you believe God has shown me who he is and what he's made, and as we saw in Romans, and my conscience testifies to this. So if you look at us and go, we're moral. We have a moral oteness. Then why are we so mean? Why are we cruel? We've talked about this before with the Yale Infant Cognition Center. It was fascinating that they did a study where they found moral impulse in babies. Preverbal, especially six months old. It's a fascinating study. Read it. These are babies. And the nature nurtured debate was so fascinating. We're seeing morality play out and preverbal babies. And you can read about how they did it. They use puppets and some puppets would share and some puppets would steal things and hit people, and they would show these kids the puppets, and then they would offer them the puppets. And they said, "It wasn't just a minute statistical significance. It was the vast majority. When you offered them the good puppet, the one that was nice and helped people and shared, they would laugh. They would want to hug it. They loved it. They smiled. When they saw That's all the puppet that was me and hurt people in stole. They were. to pull away. If you put it towards them, they would cry. They would hit it. Like they instantly understood it needed to be judged. (audience laughing) And like this is a pre-verbal baby. Is no one's putting 'em up to this? No one's like, "Hey, when they bring out the bad puppet." They're like, "No." Like there's a deep moral oddness in us, deeply woven. That's beyond preference. We believe it in the marrow of our being. And then they ask in the study, "Why?" They're like, "I don't know why. Science can't answer why." And tell you, "How can't I tell you why?" You jumped into philosophy at that point. And then the questions ask, "If we all have this moral oddness, why do we all violate our own morality?" And the question there is, "Huh?" (audience laughing) What are your options? Well, if there's an impersonal creation, there's no such thing as right or wrong. 'Cause there's no judge to determine what's right or wrong. It's just preference. So help you, murder you, at the end of it all, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Because there's no reference point for your sense of good or bad. You can speak of your preferences, but your moral oddness is somehow disconnected from what is. But if you believe there's a God who's personal, then you go, "Well, did he make us mean? Did he make us this way?" And if he did, then our cruelty that you read about in the news and see on Twitter, it's intrinsic to us and therefore impossible to change. It's just part of the fabric of who a human being is. That's one option. If there is a God, he is the devil. Or there's one other option. A personal being made us, and he's not evil. And when he made you, you weren't either. And then in space and time, something broke. You jumped off the tracks that something in us broke and the brokenness we see in us is not essential to us. It's a parasite that good is eternal. Evil is a sucker on us, distorting us. And if you believe that, then there's hope. We once lived without evil. Maybe there's a chance to live without it again. And when you have a good, personal, infinite being who made this world and made good, personal, infinite people in his image and we broke and went wrong, now you have a way to call people morally, say no, he made these people there for they have value. They're made in God's image there for they have value. That baby has value, that injured person has value, that person who's weaker has value. Suddenly there's a place for value. And there's a place to condemn evil. That is wrong, not just because I prefer that it's wrong. It's wrong because it's wrong and it's wrong. And I can say that over cultures, over time, over anything. There's a moral outness out there and that's why it's in here. And yet I admit, but there's a brokenness in me, but maybe that God who made me good can do something about it. And I haven't proven to you that Jesus is the Son of God. That's a different talk. We're almost out of time here. But if we get to the end of all this and say, there's something in us that longs for beauty, longs for good, longs for things to be right, is there any way back? Let's just close it here. How does Hamlet meet Shakespeare? Kicks around in the castle, you can't find him. Can't find the author of the play in the play, right? Unless he writes himself into the story. When Shakespeare puts himself into the play. And if you were God that made personal beings in your image, how would you talk to them? Little guys, well, you'd put your fingerprints all through what you made so they could see the artist in the midst of the art. You'd put a bit of your heartbeat in their heart. So their heart beats for the eternal. Their longing for love is transcendent. Their longing for value and morality and beauty is transcendent. You'd put it out there and you put it in there. You would let them feel that the aberration to them is abhorrent. I don't like it. I don't like it out there and I don't like it in here. And you would make them feel that disinterest in it. I want this thing out. But ultimately, how would we do it? I show you hints of my presence in creation. You hear it beating in your heart. You long for something else, but at the end of the day, the word that spoke this into being had to become flesh. And dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory as the one and only son of God. That's what John tells us. Our God's a communicating God. It's great that he called him the word. He was speaking to us in creation and he is now in the heavens. He's speaking to you and your created beings. There's value to you. Whether you believe in you or not, there's value to you. And he's speaking to us in our brokenness. This is not the way it's supposed to be. And it's not the way it will be. I hate what broke. And as the maker, I'm doing something decisive about it. And so our story is a good, moral, beautiful God wrote himself into the play. And Jesus said, I'll take on your humanity. I'll take on your sin. I'll take on your struggle. I'll take on your guilt. I will take it all. And it has to be destroyed. I'll destroy it in me. I'll take it to the grave. I'll bury it. He who knew no sin became sin. So God can judge evil without destroying you. How can he do that? By taking it away from you and having someone else pay your debt. How do we know his payment was sufficient? Because Christ rose from the grave. And said, sin has been buried. Shame has been buried. Hopelessness has been buried. And he says, in what you can be now as the first fruits of a harvest. For those of us who don't harvest, the first fruits are the first fruits that come out. And they're a picture and a hope of more later. And he says, the change you begin to feel in your heart of hope, where there was once only despair, of love, where there was once only anxiety. He says, that's just the beginning of what I'm doing. Because history is a story and it's going someplace. And where it's going is I wipe all this mess away. And I leave behind those who know me and love me because they were made for me. That's the hope of our message. It's rational. It's beautiful. It's necessary. And to close, let me just say this, if you're like, why did you do this? It's not to try to dunk on atheists. That's not good at that and don't want to do that. That's not a win for me. Why talk about all this? Because I know some of you are here because you're longing for hope, but you're wondering, is this all wishful thinking? Is this just kind of a mass delusion? And I want to show you, no, it's actually very rational to believe this. You don't believe me going to journey. Read Alvin Planagah. That guy uses equations. It gets very heady. And his theological explanations of where we came from. And yet I want you to know that you don't have to check your rationality at the door to believe that you have purpose in meaning and value. And your hopes and desires have an eternal tether. And there's a God out there who's knowable. And I want all of us in here to feel the weight of there's a being who made all this. He's out there above this separate summit but intently connected to it like a spirit hovering over the waters and he can be known by you because he wrote himself into the story. So if you're struggling with that, keep coming back because he's the guy we keep talking about. But man, if you can come to know him, suddenly all the pain in the world can be sifted because there's purpose in the midst of it. And the darkest day in human story, the murder of the son of God, became the best day, the instrument of our redemption. Then even in dark days like this, we have hope because we believe a good God. God's not just our story now, but on into the future. And again, thanks for listening to the Passion City Church DC podcast.