The True Story of the World

What happened, and why it matters.

Recently, I was working outside at a coffee shop on a breezy South Florida morning when a rescue truck turned into the parking lot. As the first responders in the vehicle stepped out and milled around, looking around, I asked the guy next to me, “What happened?”

That’s our inclination. When something unusual or startling develops, we want to know, “What happened?” What’s the story here? Even more when it’s personal. If see my daughter or wife crying, I ask immediately, “What happened?” Usually, we ask, “What happened?” when something turns wonky and has gone the wrong way. A friend and his wife separate. “What happened?” Someone loses their job. “What happened?” You see a sticker on the window of a store or a vehicle, “Gone too soon.” “What happened?” A good day spiraling into fighting and bickering. “What happened?”

As we look at our world, we can ask what happened? We see the good things and also the awful things and wonder why the world is the way it is. We look at our lives and wonder, What happened? I had so many hopes and plans, and now look where I am. What happened?

What happened to the world? What happened to my world?

There’s a story here, that makes it start to make sense. I want to tell you that story. I want to tell you what happened. Then I want to tell you why it matters.

It’s an old story. It sounds like a fairytale but it’s the truest tale ever told. Every word of it is true reality. It starts where all stories start. In the beginning. It wasn’t just any beginning or a beginning, but the beginning. The start of the start of everything. Before then, there hadn’t been anything or anyone but God. God is different than anything or anyone else. God didn’t have a beginning and God doesn’t have an end. In the beginning God was there, and God made everything else. He made the skies and the seas, the stars and the sturgeon, the dirt and the dragonflys.  He made plants, and animals, and he saved his best and favorite creation for last. Last of all, he made people. He made a man out of dirt and breathed Life into the man. After that, he made a woman from the man’s rib. God was the father of the man and the woman, and they were his kids. God entrusted the man and the woman with taking care of the rest of the world God had made, especially the garden where they lived. They even got to name the animals. It was an important job.

Good parents give their kids guidelines or rules to follow. God gave the man and the woman one rule. There were all kinds of trees all over the garden with all kinds of fruits. God said, “You can eat from any of these trees, except for one.” In the middle of the garden one tree grew fruit that would cause the man and the woman to know and experience good and evil. Up until that point, they only had experienced good. God wanted them only to know and experience only good, forever. So he said, “You can’t eat the fruit from that tree.” If they did eat that fruit, they would die. It seemed like a good situation and easy enough to make the right decision.

But another creature in the garden convinced the man and the woman to disobey God. The creature was a snake filled with an evil spirit named Satan or the devil. The snake lied to the man and the woman, saying that God was holding out on them. He said God didn’t want to share with them. “God knows” he hissed, “that the fruit you aren’t allowed to eat will make you like God.” They listened to the lie rather than God’s truth.

They ate the fruit.

Right away, they knew something was very, very wrong. They realized they weren’t wearing any clothes. They felt embarrassed, ashamed. For the first time ever, they felt like something was wrong with them. Because something was wrong with them. Badly and terribly wrong. They had disobeyed God. The word God uses for disobeying him and rejecting him is “sin.” The man and the woman had sinned. They had said with their actions that they didn’t believe God was good, that they didn’t believe God was worth listening to. They said that they would rather have the devil for their dad than God. It was like opening a gift on Christmas morning and then telling your parents you hate them because they didn’t give you enough. The man and the woman regretted what they did right away, but it was too late. God came looking for them, but they hid. They were ashamed of themselves, and they were afraid of God.

God found them. No one can ever hide from God for very long. He told them that their sin would have serious consequences. Sin would bring pain and sadness. It would make work really hard and really frustrating. Sin would make our friendships and families have problems, sometimes really terrible ones. Worst of all, because of sin, they would die.

But.

God said something else to the man and the woman, and the snake. He said a long time later, when the world was broken and full of sin and almost emptied of hope, a woman would have a baby. That baby would grow into a man, and that man would kill the snake and bring people like the man and the woman back to God. He would become their Father again.

This promise was a small bit of hope, but God still made the man and the woman leave the garden. And they never got back. The man and the woman had kids, and their kids had kids, and those kids had kids. Before too long, the world was full of people, who came from the man and the woman. In all sorts of places, people filled up the world. But without God, things were usually scary and dark and dangerous. People forgot about God. No one could find their way back to the garden.

Until many years later, God showed up to a man, one of the ancestors of the man and the woman. He lived pretty close to where the garden had been, but God told him to move to a new home. God told the man that God was going to make him the first father of a new people. This new people would know the real and true God. For thousands of years that man and his family would be the people who would make sure that God wasn’t forgotten. They would have the special job of doing what the first man didn’t do. They would know God and obey God. That man’s name was Abraham, and he walked across the world to follow God. He walked from his home to a place on the coast of a great sea. We call that sea the Mediterranean Sea, and we call that land Israel. Israel was actually named after Abraham’s grandson, who had twelve sons. Those sons’ families became twelve groups or tribes of a nation also called Israel. Israel is a place and a people. The story of Israel is a long story, with lots of kings and battles and ups and downs. Sometimes people in that nation would remember God, worship God, and obey God. But very often they wouldn’t and they didn’t. They still had the same problem that came into the world since the first man and woman. They would sin and they would die.

Now, God had given them a short-term solution for their sin-problem. Because the consequences for sin is death, the people could bring an animal like a sheep to die instead of them. They would bring the animal to a place where people worshipped God, called the temple. And in the temple there were servants of God called priests. The priest would kill the animal. That was called a sacrifice. The sacrifice would temporarily bring people forgiveness of their sin. It sounds gross, but the blood of the animal was the reason God would forgive them. The blood of the animal was the life of the animal, so God would accept the life of the animal instead of the life of a person. Remember, sin requires death, the giving of a life. But there needed to be another solution, for two reasons. First, the sacrifices in Israel would only be temporary. They had to offer them over and again. Second, the sacrifices were only for one group of people. If God would forgive the rest of the world and the people in the world like he planned, a better sacrifice was needed.

A better sacrifice was coming.

Remember that promise that God had promised to the first man and woman, and the snake? God made the same promise to Abraham. He said Abraham would have a special son, many years after Abraham died. Abraham’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson would be different than any other person who had ever lived. He would be the promised son of the woman who would kill the snake and would end sin and death, forever.

It took a long time. It took thousands of years. That seems like a really long time to people like us, but for God that’s only like a few days. God knows everything and does everything perfectly, so he knew the perfect moment for this special Son to enter the world. Finally, a young lady in that land of Israel found out she was going to have a baby. Her name was Mary. Mary was different than any other woman who has ever had a baby. Every other mom had a baby with a human dad. But Mary was different. God put a baby in her womb by a miracle. Mary was a special mom, because her baby was a special baby. He wasn’t just a human being, like the first man, like Abraham, or like anyone else. He was completely God and completely a human being in one person.

A messenger from God called an angel appeared to Mary, and told her to name the baby Jesus. Jesus was a special name for the people of Israel. One of the great leaders of their nation who brought them into the land God had promised to them had the same name. He was called Jesus and he was also called “Messiah” or “Christ” because he was the one God had promised would be filled with God’s own Spirit.

Jesus was amazing. He knew more about God’s teaching than any of the other smartest people in the nation. He was also the only perfect, sinless person ever to live. Before Jesus, the first man had sinned. Before Jesus, Abraham had sinned. Before Jesus, everyone had sinned. Since Jesus, everyone else has also sinned. You have sinned. I have sinned. But Jesus never sinned, not even once. He never did something he shouldn’t have done. He never said something he shouldn’t have said. He never even thought something he shouldn’t have thought. He always thought what he was supposed to think. He always said what he was supposed to say. He always did what he was supposed to do. In other words, he did everything that everyone before him had failed to do. Jesus was the only person who ever lived who didn’t sin, and so he was the only person who ever lived who didn’t deserve to do. He didn’t need to make the sacrifices like everyone else for temporary forgiveness. He was the true Son of God, and God was his eternal Father.

Which makes what Jesus did even more amazing. After showing off who he was with amazing teaching and mind-blowing miracles, Jesus let himself be arrested and sent to death. Of course, he was innocent. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but he knew he was the only one who could die for his people for a permanent sacrifice. This sacrifice would bring forever forgiveness. This sacrifice would forever defeat sin and death. So he was put to death by an old way of killing criminals called “crucifixion.” Soldiers put big nails through his wrists and ankles into big pieces of wood. These big pieces of wood were called a “cross” or sometimes called a “tree.” The soldier tilted that wood up in the air, and they let Jesus hang there until he died. Jesus died differently than anyone else who has ever died. He was the only person who didn’t deserve to die. He didn’t die for himself. He died for others. He took all the consequences of sin on the cross.

After Jesus died, the people in charge took him down from the cross and buried him. They put him in a cave and put a big rock in front of it. That was a Friday when it was starting to get dark. Jesus’s friends and followers were sad and confused, and scared. They didn’t understand why Jesus let himself be taken away and killed. They knew Jesus was the Messiah, the true king of Israel. They knew Jesus hadn’t done anything wrong. Why would he do this? Why would he let himself be taken, arrested, and killed? They knew he could have stopped it from happening, but he didn’t stop it from happening. Now they thought Jesus’s life was over. They thought their own lives were over. They thought all their hope was gone.

There was something different, though, about the place where Jesus was buried. Jesus was buried in a tomb in a garden. Jesus had died on a tree and was buried in a garden. The first man had disobeyed God in a garden under a tree and brought death; but Jesus obeyed God on a tree and into a garden, and he would bring life. On Friday, Jesus was crucified. He was buried. He stayed in the tomb in the garden Friday night, and Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening. He was there all night Saturday. But something changed on Sunday morning, the morning of the third day. Maybe it was the first twitch of a finger. Maybe it was the first spark of electricity that runs along our nerves. Maybe it was the first pump of his heart. Maybe it was all three at once. Jesus’s finger twitched as charges of the neural energy raced through his body. His heart fluttered, the valves going open, close, open, close, Pump. Pump. Pump. Jesus opened his eyes, gasped in the still air of the tomb, and sat up. Jesus was alive!

Jesus’s friends came to visit his grave a little awhile later, but when they got there, Jesus was already gone. An angel told them that he had risen from the dead. Jesus had been telling these friends that he would have to die and that he would rise again, but they hadn’t understood him. They still didn’t quite understand. They hid away in a house and wondered what was going on. Until Jesus showed up, and they saw him face to face. He was alive!

Jesus came and talked with his closest friends and followers, and eventually over 500 people saw him. Some had trouble believing that it was true, just like some now have trouble believing it is true. Dead people stayed dead then just like they do now. For thousands of years, people have tried to explain why Jesus’s tomb was empty. They’ve tried to explain why Jesus’s friends and followers changed so much. They hadn’t expected Jesus to rise from the dead. They wouldn’t have made it up and then died before denying it. No one dies for something they know is a lie. They couldn’t have all imagined it together at the same time. No one has the same dream at the same time as someone else. They wouldn’t have told the story of a woman being the first one to tell everyone that Jesus was alive. In that time and place, people didn’t really care what women said. But Jesus’s friends and followers cared, because they knew it was true. They wouldn’t have made it up. They couldn’t have made it up. There’s only one thing that explains all the evidence. Jesus actually did rise from the dead.

For forty days, about a month and a half, Jesus spent time with his friends and followers, but then God did another miracle. Jesus’s mission on earth was done, so God took him up to heaven. Jesus is still there, completely God and completely man, and he will come back some day. It seems like it’s been a long time, like it had seemed to Israel so long ago, but remember a thousand years is only like a day to God.

So that’s the true story of the world and the true story of God saving the world. Now, here’s why it matters.

It matters, because if Jesus is alive, there is a solution to the problems in the world. God will make all things new. He will redeem people in the world and he will redeem the world itself. He will bring life out of death like he raised Jesus from the dead. One day, God will put to death all sin and death. He will put away all the evil and death that terrorize his world.

It matters because we’re all just like the first man and woman. We have all sinned. Our sin leads to all sorts of problems. Sin breaks the world and it leads to broken things in our lives. Our families get broken. We get divorced or our parents get divorced. We get sick. We have problems paying for things we need. Eventually we die, every single one of us. Some people live for many years and die when they’re old. Other people die when they’re a lot younger. But in God’s perspective, it’s always a short amount of time. When we die, we don’t just disappear. We end up living forever. We either live forever away from God in a horrible place called hell. Or we can live forever back with God our Father in a wonderful place called heaven.

Because Jesus is alive, then there is a solution to your sin-problem and your death-problem. You have disobeyed God. You have sinned. You can’t be with God because of our sin. God can’t have sinful people in his perfect presence. But he wants people in his perfect presence. He wanted Israel in his presence, so he gave them animals to sacrifice. That was temporary. He wants us in his presence, so he gave his only Son, Jesus Christ, to live a life without sin, to die on the cross for our sin, and to be raised from the death. If you will turn from your sin and trust in him, God will forgive your sin and give you eternal life. He will raise you to life in your spirit now and he will raise your body when Jesus returns. Because Jesus is alive, you can have life.