“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” (Ps. 19:1)
The uniform experience of every positive character in the Bible is that the course of their lives proceeds not according to their own plans…but according to God’s will and way. In a life that is totally surrendered to Jesus Christ, the scheme of events and circumstances will lead to an unconventional and supernatural trajectory to open up the way to exercise faith, so that God has a practical means within reality to reveal His true character to people (Jud. 7:2).
One theme throughout this book is that God alone has the divine perspective, a thorough knowledge of each of us, and the creative brilliance to write life-scripts that will achieve this objective. A God-guided journey of faith is a revolutionary concept that rises above the modern naturalistic worldview of skeptical cynicism toward the supernatural God of the Bible.
The current secular paradigm of philosophical materialism does not acknowledge or admit a brilliantly creative, transcendent God who wants to beneficially participate in our lives according to the unselfish model of divine love. The world views this concept of the real, living God active in our lives with incomprehension, suspicion, and unbelief.
Unique to any previous period in human history, these two contrasting worldviews…actualized faith and skeptical unbelief…are now polarized into diametric opposites like never before.
Multitudes of people today buy into the idea that the Bible is not reliable because of its “non-modern” element of the supernatural, without even knowing where this skeptical thinking originates from and whether or not it is valid. A great social and cultural battle of these end-times will be over the facts surrounding the existence and nature of God (Dan. 7:25).
The empirical evidence from science is beginning to weigh-in on this issue from a surprising direction. Who Jesus is, and the true nature of a journey of faith through the cross lies at the center of this world-splitting debate. The stakes in this conflict are enormous beyond reckoning.
Our technologically advanced, modern western culture now has innumerable career options, greater access to education, less gender and ethnic discrimination, and fewer economic class barriers…which were not as favorable even a few decades ago.
The great irony in all of this is the corrosive presence of cynical, skeptical unbelief in the God of the Bible. Present circumstances place our modern world in an ideal position to rediscover the biblical message of God revealing His true character and nature to people, through the tight specifications of a precisely crafted adventure of faith.
God has many more varied options to work with than ever before in history.
But modern skeptical unbelief…based upon the philosophy of naturalism, undermines a biblical journey of faith at its source…the existence of the one true God active in both the physical and moral realms of our world.
This question…whether we rely upon self-determinism to find ultimate purpose and meaning in life, or exercise faith and trust in a more knowledgeable and capable Jesus Christ to lead the way…lies at the heart of the upcoming challenging events facing the Christian church and the broader world in the last days.
The Cross in the Christian Life 