Every great story has a beginning, middle and end. The story in Bible is no different. While there are 66 books that tell individual stories, when we group them together we have a “Meta Narrative”, or larger story. On Thursday mornings I teach class on Christian apologetics at a home school co op called “Heritage Academy” in Kalispell. This morning’s lesson was on this very concept, the larger story we have as Christians. It is larger in that the Christian view of the world and everything in it is shaped by the Bible as the true grid by which we understand where we come from, where we are at, and where we are going. The Bible offers us a beginning: God created the world and everyone in it for His glory and our good of having a relationship with Him. We have broken that relationship of trust and love for the trust and love of our material world, which is sin. This is why things are the way they are, not just because of oppressive systems, politics, environments, or parents. All that is indeed part of our world, but ultimately we as individuals also contribute to brokenness because from our hearts flows darkness, confusion, selfishness, and pride.

The middle of the story is that God is in the process of redeeming this world by the plan of salvation told to us in both the Old and New Testaments. He formed for himself a people to show the world that this world can be brought back to Him. Those people are gathered under the Covenant Love of His Son, or His Bride, the Church. We exist now in that process, the ongoing change or “sanctification” empowered by the Holy Spirit. But where are we going? Where does the story lead to? Why is that important?

If you view the world and the human experience as a strictly material story you end up in death. What happens after death? No one really knows nor can they know, besides the fact that your body decomposes and people are sad for a season as memories fade. According to the materialist world view, there is no larger point of the story in our world. However, we as humans cannot live without meaning, without hope, so we are forced to make our own up. This could be best summed up with the phrase, “you must live by your truth.” This has created the age of anxiety, or the fear that we are missing out on something we must discover. This is why we are so afraid that we are not living life to the fullest, because we are now put in the position to figure this out. If you have this belief, you will eventually be crushed by it. No human individual or society can bear the weight of constructing the reason for their existence.