Those of us living near Irving, Texas (just outside Dallas) have had good reason to worry about just how solid the ground is we are standing on. We had 12 tremors (I call them earthquakes) in 24 hours. It was such an unusually high number, the story made the national news. These tremor/earthquakes have been quite different than the only other earthquake that I’ve experienced in that rather than the ground shifting beneath you for a period of time, these are more like someone just picked up your house and shook it once. Depending on the severity, these varied from a1.7, which you may not have even felt, to a 3.6 that got your attention–really fast!
Needless to say, most people living in the area are more than a bit concerned. When you don’t believe the ground beneath you is solid and might give way any minute, you get more than a little nervous. Yet, many people live their entire life on even shakier ground. While death is a certainty, few are prepared to die this year. Statistically, there are several of you reading this article who won’t see 2016. Did you just experience a little quake yourself?
That’s the bad news. I do have good news though. You can live free from the fear of death. You just need to understand it. It is impossible though to understand (much less accept) death if you don’t understand life – how you got here and why you are here. In this week’s blog, I’ll start with the how.
Unless you are a true atheist (there aren’t many), you believe in a god/creator and for good reason – there really isn’t a good explanation for how we got here otherwise. Most theories got busted when astronomical advances proved the universe to be finite in time (only some ten to fifteen billion years old). They assumed that the seemingly endless expanse of the universe allowed an infinite amount of time for life to “happen.” Now that we know the universe is finite, reason says something infinite had to have created the universe. But is He, this God and creator, knowable? I believe He is and I have good reasons to believe that the Bible is how we know Him. If you wanted to know if something someone had written were true, you would test what could be proven or at least plausible against what you do know.
This weekly Living Free column is about weighing the Bible’s claims about who God is against the facts we do know. Yes, you cannot know God without faith but that doesn’t mean your faith needs to be blind. You can still be an intellectual and believe in the one true God. A lot of believers (and others trying to believe) get tripped up right from the start with the account of the creation of the earth and man in Genesis. If you thought these chapters were written as fable as opposed to fact, or mythology as opposed to history, I hope to persuade you that you are wrong. It may surprise you to learn that the creation narrative appears in correct sequence and in scientifically defensible terms.
I hope I have piqued your interest and you’ll check back next week to read how I defend the creation account in the Bible. In the meantime, if you find yourself in a place where the earth begins to shake (either literally or figuratively), take comfort from these words in Psalm 46:2. “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.” God will still be with us.
