“But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” (1 Cor. 2:10)
God has our back in a crisis. The only way we would know this for sure is by actual experience, by being in the middle of a shooting war.
This has to be true, because it cannot be fiction. It does not hold up as fiction. Once it rises to the level of becoming recorded in writing, put down on paper, it enters the arena of being universally testable and falsifiable over time.
The interaction between the living God and David, memorialized forever in David’s 23rd Psalm, is true because it cannot be otherwise…it cannot be fictional writing. Once David writes about walking through the valley of the shadow of death with God at his side, then fiction-writing as the source of its inspiration and origin becomes nonsensical.
The uniquely biblical concept of the living God participating in our lives to this extent of personal interaction…at the very center of our life-scripts…is too far outside of the default, conventional worldview thinking of sitting atop the thrones of our lives in self-sovereignty to make the huge leap across to the other side of the spectrum in placing our lives on-the-line in sacrificially following, through a journey of faith, the living God.
According to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking, David should be telling us how great and powerful he is, not about successful faith in God, because self-adulation surrounding his achievements would be the normally expected outer limits, the extent of his possible experience.
What would be the point, the motivation, the source of inspiration for David making this Psalm 23 up…if the actual boundaries of human experience stop at the edge of self-sovereignty, self-reliance, and autonomous individualism?
Following God into an adventure of faith would not hold water, would not stand-up, for any period of time within actual lived experience unless God is real and that we can experience His active participation in our lives.
Religious “faith” that is still rooted in self-reliance and self-rulership is not biblical faith. Biblical faith will connect us with the real God who according to the narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible will displace our ways with a higher life-script that reflects His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9).
This is the root of what was so threatening to the religious leaders in Jerusalem in the first-century that led to crucifying Jesus Christ, a line of reasoning revisited several times in more detail throughout this book.
The religious leaders in Jerusalem were exposed by Jesus as being blind hypocrites, as being fraudulent religionists.
They said they were the authorized representatives of God (Jn. 8:33, 39, 41) when in fact they were the deadliest enemies of applied biblical faith.
They were firmly committed to the default worldview of self-sovereign self-rulership, of maintaining complete control over their lives to the point of instigating the death of Jesus through Roman crucifixion, in order to remove the threat of having to surrender this self-guided, self-sovereign status quo (Jn. 11:47-48).
They knew roughly about biblical faith, had been exposed to it as they studied the Hebrew Bible, but did not want any part of it themselves (Lk. 11:39-54).
This is a component of the “mystery” of iniquity, the conflict between self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty in our lives that produced the radical outcomes of the cross, the resurrection, and our salvation, which again is analyzed and discussed throughout this book from many angles and in more detail.
The risk-factor involved in the novelty of voluntarily and willingly walking through a genuine journey of faith following the living God is on its own powerful and persuasive evidence that supports the divine origin of the Bible. As human invented literary fiction the concept of God-sovereignty displacing our self-sovereignty…as imaginary fictional invention…cannot and would not exist for any length of time in real practice.
Minutes, hours, or days of actual tested experience would quickly expose this concept, if fiction, as empty fantasy and be discarded as functionally worthless.
If God is in actuality “not home,” then His brilliantly imaginative solutions in the biblical narrative stories of faith, that soar above human creativity and invention would not only be inaccessible as real experience to be recorded as life-history on paper…they would also be beyond the creative imagination of human contemplation altogether.
David or some other writer inventing the 23rd Psalm as fiction has no motivational or conceptual legs to stand on. It does not take us anywhere within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
A real journey of faith following the living God, as recorded in the Bible is inconceivable and incomprehensible to a person committed to following their own way according to self-rulership.
This dichotomy of worldviews…two different approaches to life as unmixable as oil and water…should be an obvious red-flag jolt to anyone involved in the debate over the existence of God.
The fundamental first question, like the causal explanation of the Big Bang, is what or who is the source of the completely novel and innovative, alternative worldview of a God-composed journey of faith life-script starting with the life of Abraham, continued through all of the biblical narrative stories of faith?
What explains the origin of this consistent storyline pattern in the Bible of the cross of Christ (Lk. 22:42) continuing down to contemporary Christian experience in our modern times that is so utterly contrary to the conventionality of the accepted life-approach of going our own way in self-reliance and self-autonomy?
In modern speech a biblical-quality adventure of faith, if it is fiction, if it is false, then it would be a “non-starter”…it would have no “there/there.” It would be without tangible, supportive substance.
If there is no active engagement between God and people…then there is nothing extraordinary, unconventional, or supernatural to write about…nothing that could “get-off the ground” and sustain air-born flight.
This is why God-composed adventures of faith life-scripts having God displacing our ways with His higher ways are non-existent in other religions, philosophies, and worldviews, outside of the Bible.
This is why biblical adventures of faith fall far outside of and above the zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This dichotomy of two distinct worldviews delineated exclusively in the Bible and miles apart in their practical application to human purpose and meaning in life, is a major, commonsense apologetic argument for the divine origin of Old Testament Judaism and New Testament Christianity.
It is never raised by atheists and skeptical critics because they cannot even see it as a target to attack in scripture, as a debatable talking point.
It can only be raised by Spirit-born and Spirit-led Christians who have themselves been in the danger zone of faith in a “shooting war” that has real consequences in life, because people personally led and taught of God are the only people on the planet aware of this reality.
The idea that God-scripted life-plans fall so far outside of conventional thinking is itself a compelling and persuasive argument for the truth of their divine origin, because this unique genre is inexplicable as humanistically invented, literary fiction.
If Christians do not see the unconventionality of the cross of Christ skillfully embedded within the script of every biblical narrative story of faith, because they have not experienced God having our back in a crisis, then this positive and compelling apologetic argument for the divine origin of an adventure of faith…completely unknown outside of the Bible…will not be made.
It will be missed in the competing marketplace of ideas.
This is the dual choice we all have as cognitive beings having free-will to follow God down an adventurous path of discovery…or to go our own way in self-lead, conventional normalcy and thinking.
The Cross in the Christian Life 