The concept that a biblical journey of faith is in place and ready to go…fully scripted within the mind of the Composer God… before each person of faith is initially enlisted into their unique calling and before the action begins…is universal in the pages of the Bible yet found nowhere else in human philosophy, religion, or experience.
Self-realization through a self-propelled program of good works, in the eastern religious sense, is the humanistic counterfeit version that falls far short of the guided tour into all truth that is divinely packaged in a God-composed, compact, biblical-quality journey of faith.
The biblical narrative stories of faith, as experienced through preplanned programs of divine origin, are pathways leading in the opposite direction from the self-realization foundation of randomly discovering truth by learning from our mistakes through fate or chance encounter alone.
Responding to whatever comes our way in life by chance…in the reactive mode…is the underlying theme of every modern literary work of fiction and non-fiction in every genre from romance novel to spy thriller to autobiography to theatrical play.
Preplanned, proactive business models for life having God-composed storylines as their basis…belong exclusively to biblical journeys of faith.
Journeys of faith actively guided by God, where His storyline displaces our worldly conventional storyline, cannot be found anywhere in literature outside of the Bible.
This makes logical sense. The two domains of reality…conventional and divine…are miles apart.
The Anthropic Principle (1973) in the scientific fields of astrophysics, chemistry, and mathematics tells us that within split-seconds after the Big-Bang creation of the universe, all of the required particles were in place in the right quantities and proportions to permit the existence of complex life like ourselves, billions of years later.
The Joseph “novella” in Genesis 37-50 in the Bible is considered to be one of the great pieces of literature in all of history…a brilliant short story of depth, characterization, pace, plot, and theme to rival anything in modern times.
Like the advance forethought that underlies the Anthropic Principle…of the unimaginably tight arrangement of ingredients essential for future life being put into place eons before complex life actually emerges…in a similar way the singularly imaginative life-script for Joseph comes from God fully formulated and ready for Joseph to step into…without any required collaboration or prior input from Joseph.
The story of Joseph in the Bible has not the slightest hint of a retroactive business plan assembled and implemented in the spur of the moment…mid-stream within the storyline itself…as the result of a hastily discovered need for random, reactive, trial-and-error pragmatism.
Premeditated foreknowledge of where Joseph will eventually end-up, and how to rightly get there within a brilliantly planned and paced series of events, is the through-line of the story.
The first five books of the Old Testament were written sometime between 1,450 and 1,250 B.C. by Moses and a team of learned Hebrew scribes coming with him out of Egypt, during the 40-year period of wandering in the wilderness.
This is approximately 3,000 years before Shakespeare, and about 3,200 years before the development of the modern fiction novel, without anything of equivalent literary quality in-between.
All of the storytelling literature between the close of the writing of the Hebrew Bible around 400 B.C., and Shakespeare in the early 1600’s A.D., are of pre-modern, intermediate quality.
The ancient presence of highly developed, modern quality, God-composed life-scripts starting in the book of Genesis…is evidence of a pre-planned structure and framework of information for personal character growth that God already anticipates in the storylines He has crafted.
If God through His Spirit enables a person to successfully complete the joint-venture journey with Himself alongside each step of the way, He also pre-plans the precise route that journey will take.
The concept of God-composed life-scripts, complete and ready to step into, is also evidenced in the total absence of human collaboration in the initial composition of the messages of the prophets to the Israelites and to other nations…as recorded in the Old Testament.
God knows exactly what He wants to say through the prophets, and instructs them to go…and to stand…in the gate to the city, or in the public square, and proclaim these words exactly as given.
This precise definitiveness allows for no progressive, trial-and-error randomness.
The divinely inspired message of the prophet must be right and perfect the first time…to withstand the test of time…which is outside of horizontally limited, conventional human foresight.
Psalm 22, written by David, with its pinpoint, precise, detailed prophecies is an example of this.
The Cross in the Christian Life 