A God Centric Worldview

My first post is dedicated to Lexi with the hopes that she will navigate this world a little better than I have.

Worldview. It’s something that you use every day when making decisions and choosing words and actions. Even so, I imagine most people would have a hard time describing what it is let alone what theirs is. Know it or not, we show people our worldview through our behaviors and protect it by surrounding ourselves with people who share ours.

But our worldview is so much more than day to day actions, it starts with our most fundamental beliefs. The core principles of life itself. It then expands out to things like values then traditions, finally ending with the Pepsi challenge (or preferences). For example, you would be hard pressed to find someone that did not agree that the sun is hot, rises in the east, and sets in the west. It nourishes the earth by enriching the soil and providing light and warmth. Those are just facts.  But not everyone shares the tradition of lying on the Ocean City beach and we certainly don’t all wear the same bathing suit when we do.

For Christians, worldview is straightforward, one might even say simple.  The absolute truth at the very center of our worldview is that God created the world and everything in it. There is an order to the world that was established by God, and we live under his sovereign authority. Once again, those are just facts. How do we know those are facts and how does it benefit us while living and understanding our world and ourselves? Let’s consider it.

God shows us who he is or reveals himself to us through the very things he created. Genesis 1:31 tells us that, “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good”.  As He intended it, or perfect. God’s creation itself is an objective reality from which we can view our world, see God, and understand the order of things. In the old hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness”, Thomas Chisholm wrote, “Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above join with all nature in manifold witness”.

Secondly, God reveals himself through his written word. It is there that he further reveals elements of his character.  For example, God is unchanging.  In Malachi 3:6 God himself says, “I the Lord do not change”.  In the first verse of that same beautiful hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness”, Thomas Chisholm says, “Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not; As thou hast been thou forever will be”. Why is it important that God is unchanging? Well, if he did change, it would imply that he were not perfect to begin with. He reigns in perfect glory for all eternity. Simply put, that makes him dependable, the most dependable thing in the world. As mankind, we know exactly where we stand. And in case we do not know where we stand, we can fall on the bible, as God reveals his unchanging nature through his written word.

Conversely, mankind is constantly changing.  We change our minds, values, taste, clothes etc. We also know that because of man, the world as God intended did not remain unchanged and perfect, and that mankind spoiled it. God in his unchanging nature and compassion reached out and revealed himself a third way, through his son. When man could not or would not see God, he literally came and showed us who he was. He redeemed us back to himself through the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Ephesians 1:7 reminds us, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with God’s grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding”. 

So, God has revealed himself to us in several ways, offering us a foundation in which to view and understand the world around us and a path to an eternal relationship with him. As wonderful of a concept that this is, I am going to depart from it as it is not the focus of today’s musing. Instead, I would like to focus on a more sobering thought; that of the individual who denies the God centric worldview.

God created all things and that included us. We are part of that creation. If all creation reveals God and we are part of it, then we should also reveal and reflect the nature of God, that makes us special. We were purposefully and specifically made by God himself. In Jeremiah 1:5, God said to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”. God said that to Jeremiah when he called him to be a prophet and to reveal God to the nation of Israel, i.e., purpose.

To take God from that equation is to remove our own purpose and all that makes us special. If the world was made by some chance, as many suggest, then we too are merely a chance being. It is much easier to understand why depression and mental illness are so prevalent in society when you must confront that idea you are no more than a random event, an accident even.

Removing God, along with it our uniqueness and purpose, still leaves us with the fact that there are things that we cannot explain, understand, create, or fix. There are things that only God can do and truths that only he can reveal. Without Him, there is only the question of how to explain them ourselves. Have you ever heard the expression, “You have big shoes to fill”? The phrase suggests that a person is about to step into a job that was previously done by an extremely successful person and that the newcomer may not do the job as well as the previous person. Imagine if the guy that did the job before you were God himself! Pastor Alistor Begg says it this way, “It's not so much that we replace him with idols as that we decided we would take his place". Once you remove God from the equation, it's difficult to replace him. Pastor Begg continued, "When a nation turns its back on God, it doesn’t believe nothing; it believes all kinds of things”.

Remember that unchanging God we talked about a while back.  He provides stability, understanding and comfort. On the other hand, we agreed mankind was in constant change.  People who reject God live in a subjective self-constructed world. God provides an objective reality, one based on facts and truth while the skeptic bases his or her worldview on the subjective reality, based completely on personal preferences and feelings. How often have you felt so strongly about something only to look back months or years later and consider how silly you were to think that way. Now try basing life’s truths, even your very existence, on such feelings.

 That was a little more theology than I intended, but there is an important lesson in it. Understanding these concepts makes it easy to see why people can get so angry at the thought of being disagreed with. It helps us understand why people can take unborn life into their own hands. Why men and women can be so centered on their own sexuality that they can completely disregard the feelings of those standing beside them. Why people can tell you with extreme fervor how you need to think and behave. It explains why people can offend with such confidence and judge with such conviction. It explains why people can fight for the right to behave in a way that causes them to later grieve in their own actions. They are acting in a capacity to govern upon things they cannot even comprehend. They just can’t fill the shoes and were never meant to do so.

Being a believer can often shield you from the realities of the great distress that so many in our world live with. When we walk with God, we can sometimes forget the massive chasm that exists between God and others. From time to time, God may place you in a situation where these realities are more evident, in your face even. College is one of those places, where people from diverse cultures, family structures, and backgrounds find themselves together in a little community. When we are in these situations do we stand out or assimilate? If we do stand out, is it because we are argumentative or loving? In 2 Timothy 24, Paul says, “And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful”.  Such difficult words for me sometimes.  During those times, we must remember a great truth; people who reject God are not my enemies.  Pastor Larry Osbourne said it this way, “Non-Christians are not the enemy. They're victims of the enemy. Victims need to be rescued, not wiped out". In verse 25 of 2 Timothy, Paul continues, "Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth". Those words are even harder than the first. Not only should we not argue but we must be nice! The fact is this biblical perspective is the only one from which we can make sense of the nonsensical. It is from this perspective alone that we can insert the love of God. Shortly before Jesus left his earthly body to return to the glory of God’s presence, he said these words, “A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another”.

Let’s pray that even in seemingly hostile territory, we allow the Holy Spirit to make us Christ like, allowing us to act in his nature.  Circling back to the verse in Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good”.  Let’s remember that God made us and we were made, as He intended. The challenge to myself is that God reveals himself a fourth way, through my own life.