Phrases like ‘coping with reality’ should have been made redundant by now in our ‘Brave New World’. After all, why should we have to cope with reality when, as relativism says, we can create our own by determining what the truth is? But we continue to use this phrase in spite of what our post-modern minds believe. Why? Because learning to cope with reality is what we experience. The mere fact that we must cope with reality and not reality cope with us should wake us up to who really holds the cards.
Reality will have its way whether we like it or not. Everyone must deal with it, even the birds and animals. I have a sliding glass door right next to my work desk which has attracted the attention of two cute little birds called jenny-wrens. Instead of building a nest like the other birds, this couple has spent the first month of spring furiously fighting my glass door. Their antics, while entertaining, are sad. They are not coping with reality. They are wasting their limited time and precious energy fighting their reflections in the glass. Reality doesn’t care what they believe is true or how sincere they are. Unless we accept ‘the truth’ and adjust ourselves to it, we will never win this battle. Reality will always have its way; it has never lost a fight.
Learning to cope with reality is all about dealing with the truth. So what is the truth? Here are a few facts we must come to terms with: one, we didn’t create ourselves. Two, our true identity is not physical. Three, something is wrong with us.
We did not make ourselves, therefore, we have a Creator. And this Creator must be a personal being because we are personal beings. Big bang evolution does not meet the criteria to be our maker. Impersonal blind chance cannot produce personal conscious awareness. Even if ‘chance’ had a chance, this bold attempt to explain our origin still fails to qualify as it is based on the premise that something can spontaneously come from nothing. If science is sure of one thing it is this: nothing can begin to exist without a cause. This law applies to everything in our universe. Causality is irrefutable. We have a Creator, an owner to whom we are responsible.
You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. — C.S. Lewis
We are more than a physical body. Our spirit is what gives the body significance and causes it to live. Without the spirit, the body dies and returns to dust. Who we really are, our identity, is in the spiritual realm. We will never find someone’s personality located on their physical body or our ability to love in a laboratory. Our spirit is beyond physics, time and space, therefore we will continue to live after our body is dead. This truth is hard to ignore, especially at funerals. Raw emotion bares our soul and we start speaking of our loved one ‘in a better place’ or ‘looking down on us’. The body is dead but we instinctively know it is not over. He or she is still alive, somewhere. We are eternal and deep inside all of us know it.
Our eternal destiny is directly affected by the third truth: something is wrong. There is something dark and sinister deep within us. The Bible calls this imperfection in our nature ’sin’. The great English writer G.K. Chesterton said it was the one part of Christian theology that no one could dispute. If you don’t believe him, look at the world. We have been killing, fighting and ripping each other off without a break since the beginning of recorded history. We may be tempted to think we are OK, we are ‘good people’ and not as bad as that sinful world around us. If so, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Am I perfect?’ Nobody who is truly honest can answer, ‘Yes, I am pure. My life is spotless’. Anything short of perfect means we are impure and have the sin disease as much as the world around us.
Sin has forced us into war. The struggle between good and evil is real. We see and feel its effects everyday. But this cosmic struggle will not last forever. It must come to a place where it is eternally resolved. For evil, sin and corruption, that place is called hell; for that which is redeemed, good and perfect, it’s called heaven.
Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere. — C.S. Lewis
Heaven is a pure place. And only those who have had the disease of sin dealt with can go there. Some people don’t want to believe that God will prevent people from going to heaven. But how can it not be this way? Would it be right for me to enter a sanitised maternity ward if I was infected with a disease like bird flu? It’s not that the doctor doesn’t like me; he just doesn’t like the disease I carry. It’s my disease that stops me from entering the ward. God loves me but hates the disease of sin I carry. If I refuse to humbly confess my sin and accept His cure through Jesus Christ, then God has no choice but to deny me His glorious heaven and send me with my untreated sin to hell.
Coping with reality is, ultimately, dealing with the truth about ourselves and eternity. We must face the fact that we have a personal Creator to whom we are responsible. We must accept the truth that we are spirit and will live forever. And we must deal with our sin and embrace the cure God has provided through Jesus Christ. We must adjust ourselves to The Truth because The Truth certainly isn’t going to change to suit us (see John 14:6).
And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. — John 17:3 (ESV)