A discussion group I once belonged to was reading a book on how men can live the Christian life. At one point the author suggested that people reject the Christian faith because they believe the Bible “puts them in bondage” to a moral standard they don’t want to live up to.
I disagree with that assessment. I believe that if people really believed in God, and accepted the Bible as the expression of his purpose, they would be glad to have a guide by which they could align themselves with the purposes of the Creator of the universe. In this way they could enjoy the benefits of being in partnership with God, and even aspire to being “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
So the issue is not that people resent the standards set by biblical Christianity and seek to escape them. The problem is that they don’t believe such standards exist in the first place, because there is no Authority who has decreed them. In their view, when Christians uphold a biblical standard for life they’re simply parroting the opinions of the biblical authors, benighted souls who lived in a dark, pre-scientific age and thought they had heard from some supernatural Source who really isn’t there. Today, of course, we know so much more than they did — in an observable universe of 300 billion galaxies 93 billion light years across (or whatever the latest numbers are), how can there be such a God as the one depicted in the Bible? Or if there is a God somewhere, how could any human being really hear from him?
In reaching people with the message of the Christian faith, the first task is to show that the perspective, or “world view,” I have just described is erroneous. It should be made evident that the Scriptural authors had a deeper perception of reality than the “flat” view that modernity imposes upon us. The biblical witness needs to be related to what cosmologists and atomic physicists are finding out about the nature of the universe, and what comprises it.
For example, there’s no way to avoid the view that this still-expanding universe of space, time and matter had a beginning similar to that described in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. That light appeared after the “big bang,” as a separate stage in creation (Genesis 1:3), becomes plausible in terms of the theory that the plasma of the universe expanded to something close to its present size in the first split second after creation — expanding faster than the speed of light, which itself had to first be differentiated from that primordial plasma that was “without form and void” (Genesis 1:2).
As another example, the “stuff” of the universe appears to be solid, but in fact all matter is mostly space. The distance between subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.) is comparable in scale to the distance between bodies of our solar system. I have seen it stated that if that space between particles were eliminated all the matter of the universe could be collapsed into something similar in size to a golf ball. Moreover, those “particles” are themselves made up of sub-particle entities, right down to what some theorists call “strings” that vibrate multi-dimensionally, not just in the four dimensions of space-time that we can experience. Whatever the case, it’s evident that the basis for all matter is some kind of frequency, not a material substance at all, and that “what is seen was made out of things which do not appear” (Hebrews 11:3). A non-material entity of some kind is required to sustain the shape of the material substance of the universe. Hence the Scriptures speak of Christ “upholding the universe by his word of power” (Hebrews 1:3).
These are only a few examples of where the biblical writers are far more insightful than most people give them credit for when it comes to understanding what is “really real.” By the Spirit of God, the apostle Paul states, they have been given a window into “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Cosmologists are only beginning to comprehend realities those ancient authors hinted at. They wrote in language the culture of their times could understand, but their perception of truth was deeper than what they’re often given credit for today.
So why do people reject the Bible, and the Christian faith based upon its witness? I believe it’s because they’ve never been presented with the evidence for the depth of the Scriptures’ understanding of the nature of reality. Their idea that the Bible is the product of outmoded perceptions of the universe is rarely challenged. Nor has their shallow world view that sees everything in flat, materialistic terms been subjected to the insights upon which both the Bible and contemporary science agree.
Francis Schaeffer suggested that in our culture the first premise of the gospel is not that “Christ died for our sins” but rather that God is real and we have to deal with him. Typically the church presents the gospel as the message that Christ died on the cross to atone for the sin that prevents us from being connected with God. But if there’s no God to whom to be connected, there’s no sin that needs to be atoned for because there are no moral or behavioral standards. So such a truncated “gospel” can safely be ignored, for it’s irrelevant within the contemporary cultural paradigm or world view.
Only when the Creator comes to be understood in terms of the vastness and mystery of the universe he has brought into being can any gospel that calls us to be accountable to him be taken seriously. Yes, sin is real — sin against the way things have been made, and therefore against the Maker of all things (see Romans 1:19 ff.). Sin is a disregard of God’s purpose for human life, and of his design of this universe. Once that sin can be exposed the way is open to offer the work of Jesus as its undoing.
Sometimes it is said that the teachings of the Bible have to be taken “on faith.” Decades ago one of my seminary professors quipped, “Faith doesn’t mean believing what you know isn’t true” — yet so often faith seems to be presented as if that were the case. But we don’t need to take the Scriptures “on faith,” nor to impose that requirement on people who don’t take them seriously. Instead, we take the Bible as a witness to what is demonstrably most deeply real and true about the nature of the universe, and the life we live within it.
Originally written 12-2012, revised 2-2025
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