Modern life makes so many of us strangely empty.
- Christopher Buehlman
Life in First World Nations is a balancing act between modern conveniences and inconvenient truths. For the most part, we live our lives sandwiched somewhere between pleasure and opulence, and the reality of pain and death. Depending on cultural and individual circumstances, most are able to escape or at least delay the inevitable. We often postpone or refuse to deal with the deeper issues of life. Including its finality. The young and the healthy, the distracted and the wealthy, enjoy the luxury of denial. At least for a season. Yet, even within the richest nations of the world, financial distress and loss, sickness and disease, loneliness and depression, strongly argue for mankind's need to first come to know, and then please our Creator and Savior.
It’s a great time to be alive. Seems like only yesterday I was trading in a beeper and roll of quarters for a Motorola “Brick” handheld cell phone weighing nearly two pounds. A bargain at $1,000 and a buck a minute, even in 1980 dollars. For that price it did absolutely nothing but make, take and drop calls. A decade latter I’d add an early addition Palm Pilot featuring a highfalutin monochrome touch screen to my repertoire. So long post-its, though years latter a friend was still pasting them to his Palm Pilot V in a show of nostalgia.
Recently, that same friend underwent proton treatment for prostate cancer without a hitch. He’s also sporting two new titanium knees replaced on the same day. They should wear out when he’s about 100. Times, they be a changin’. So much so, one would be hard pressed to do progress justice.
Of course, not everyone’s fortunate enough to live in the developed world. Over 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. Some 800 million don’t have enough food to eat. More than 700 million don’t have access to healthy drinking water. More than 1 billion are without electricity. Around 17% of us owns a car…
For those who do, it’s a wild ride. Better science and tech. Better healthcare and housing. Better working conditions and entertainment. Better lifestyles and choices. With nothing but blue skies it’s all coming up roses. But are we paying close attention? Like Pinocchio, might we find Pleasure Island exacts a high price? Playing hooky from responsibility’s all fun and games until hands turn into hoofs. For folks as blessed as we, seems to be more brayin’ than prayin.’ As Scripture warns, given time misused freedom makes jackasses of us all.
While unfashionable, the Bible insists there’s more to life than what meets the eye. That really living’s more than finding new and inventive ways to “just do it.” That there’s a greater prize than feeling good in the moment:
- “What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?” Mark 8:36-37 The Message
Given today's levels of worldliness and sin, entitlement and Me-ism within the church, most members of modern Christianity appear to function as practical agnostics. The evidence for unbelief among professing believers is even more compelling when judged by the small amount of time and effort the average church attender, much less American, invests in regular and lengthy personal prayer and Bible study. Most simply find diligently seeking and serving God problematic.
The waining of faith and serious interest in God can largely be attributed to our wealth of advanced technology. Lifestyles of ease and entertainment seem to suggest we can ostensively afford to safely remove God from life's equation, or at least defer the issue until a more “convenient time.” Not only do we constantly take for granted the necessities of life that people once prayed for desperately, but we're inundated with thousands of pleasant distractions as well. Many of our pleasures prove damaging to ourselves or others. Even among those not in and of themselves harmful, most seem to have the deleterious effect of undermining the diligent pursuit of life's ultimate concerns and eternal truths.
It’s easy to forget we're "fearfully and wonderfully made" yet in doing so we may be denying the rights of our Creator in countless ways. Along with thousands of other blessings, HDTV and smart phones, radio and iPods are largely tuning God out. Even those regularly attending Church, do so only a few of hours a month on average. According to a Pew Research Center, “Currently, half of American adults (51%) say they attend religious services regularly – at least once or twice a month. Meanwhile, 49% of American adults now attend religious services just a few times a year, rarely or never. A majority of them (27% of all U.S. adults) say they have never attended religious services more often than they do now. But a substantial proportion (22% of all U.S. adults) say they now go to religious services less often than they did at another point during adulthood.”
Of those self identifying as Christian and attending church, most can quote only a handful of Scriptures in a row. Serious prayer's a lost art, having for the most part been downgraded to wishful thinking. And with temptation and sin rampant, including some of the greatest quantity and quality of evils in human history, obeying Biblical commands is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Yet our awe and respect of God should be growing as the mind-blowing glory of creation is being revealed! For the first time in human history we now know there may be 200 billion trillion suns and perhaps a trillion trillion planets. Each sun born, existing and expiring as consuming fires. Many reaching millions of degrees and Earth masses. Many of these orbiting supermassive black holes reaching billions of years of age, degrees and solar masses. All of this spread across a canopy with a growing observable diameter of nearly 100 billion light years of space-time:
• “God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon. Madame Day holds classes every morning, Professor Night lectures each evening. Their words aren’t heard, their voices aren’t recorded, But their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere. God makes a huge dome for the sun—a superdome! The morning sun’s a new husband leaping from his honeymoon bed, The daybreaking sun an athlete racing to the tape. That’s how God’s Word vaults across the skies from sunrise to sunset, Melting ice, scorching deserts, warming hearts to faith. The revelation of God is whole and pulls our lives together. The signposts of God are clear and point out the right road. The life-maps of God are right, showing the way to joy. The directions of God are plain and easy on the eyes. God’s reputation is twenty-four-carat gold, with a lifetime guarantee. The decisions of God are accurate down to the nth degree.” Psalm 19:1-9 The Message
Adding to this majesty is the miraculous existence of human life. 3D ultrasound and YouTube video’s like “Life In The Womb: 9 months in 4 minutes” reveal our bodies, much less our souls (intelligence and personality) and spirits (eternal aspects of our being), are a masterpiece of Divine design:
▪ During the first month of life, the number of brain connections or synapses, dramatically increases from 50 trillion to 1 quadrillion.
▪ Your heart beats about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.
▪ If all arteries, veins, and capillaries of the human circulatory system were laid end to end, the total length would be 60,000 miles, or 100,000 km. That's nearly two and a half times around the Earth.
▪ The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime. That’s enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.
▪ We’re made up of 37 trillion cells. More or less.
▪ The human brain has over 100 billion neurons.
▪ In one square inch of skin there are 625 sweat glands and 90 oil glands. There are also 19 million cells, 19 feet of blood vessels, 19,000 sensory cells.
▪ 50 million of the cells in your body will have died and been replaced with others while reading this fact.
▪ The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors.
▪ We have over 600 muscles.
▪ Our lungs breathe in between 2,100 and 2,400 gallons (8,000 and 9,000 liters) of air each day.
▪ We breathe 23,000 times a day. About 600 million breaths during our lifetime.
The fantastic fine tuning necessary for such statistics, and hundreds more like them, present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for intelligent design. And thus a Designer. Even bypassing the impossibility of nothing plus nothing equaling everything, it’s been estimated the odds of natural selection alone producing advanced life on Earth is 1024,000,000. In layman's terms, it's like an individual winning the California lottery over 3 million times playing a single ticket in each drawing.
With science revealing ever greater glories of creation, we have choices to make. Will we take for granted our place on our privileged planet or will we recognize the importance of asking and answering life’s ultimate questions? Should we fill our lives with daily concerns and amusements, literally "not to think” or appreciate the tools we’ve been given, and invest good faith effort into peering beyond time into eternity?
Either by design or default, our attitudes and actions express our opinion on two great questions. Does God exist? Is God worthy of our best efforts? Those intellectually honest enough to jettison atheism are left with agnosticism or some form of religion. Of which there are many. Yet even a layman’s study of world religions, in a side by side comparison with the Bible, reveals a preponderance of evidence for Scriptural authority and authenticity.
Rationale to believe that faith is the reasonable response to mortal life grow daily. Sadly, the net result of increasing challenges to Biblical Christianity has been an unfortunate mutation into Churchianity. An amalgam of certain elements of historic faith and escalating worldliness, modern Christianity lacks both the willingness and expertise to adequately address the deep questions and great problems of life. Such an enterprise requires a new breed of contemporary believers. Prophetic Christians, honest enough to admit how far the Church has fallen, while at the same time dedicated to realizing the full potential Christianity offers.
Quantum Christianity provides the tool set to close the gap between Churchianity and Biblical Christianity. Unlike most modern commentaries, QC allows God to use all of Scripture to say what He means and mean what He says. It reveals that while some Biblical truth is as simple as "Jesus loves me this I know" the mature pursuit of God is a little more complex, requiring serious devotion of heart, mind and soul.
QC is seeker friendly when it comes to asking and answering difficult questions. Including complex concerns across the board, from modern science to situational ethics. Yet does so without demeaning Scripture to match unreasonable societal demands, or the increasing worldliness of the Church. It sadly admits the obvious lack of power in many Christian disciplines, such as prayer and Bible study, worship and discipleship. QC pinpoints the source of growing cultural darkness as the direct result of a waning of light within the people of God. It treasurers all Scripture’s many promises, while ever mindful of their even more numerous conditions and corresponding commands. By some counts, between 684 and 1,050 directives found in the New Testament alone. Confident in the faithfulness of our Creator, QC acknowledges the painful truth that mankind has good reason to feel abandoned by God. And vice versa. Rather than living in denial of this neglected yet important challenge, QC brings all the wealth of Scripture to bare on the most important issue in time and eternity. Emboldened by faith in the goodness of God, QC encourages particularly Prophetic Christians to "approach God's throne of grace with confidence” prayerfully interceding with transparency to Him whom "everything is uncovered and laid bare.”
On the flip side, QC ensures God unencumbered equal time, unhampered by man made doctrines limiting both the meaning and emphasis of Scripture.
Working through denial can be rewarding in many ways. Allowing for complete honesty between God and man creates new dimensions of understanding and opportunities for faith. Rather than encouraging presumption or even the dangers of spiritual profanity. Opening our eyes to previously ignored passages of Scripture provides spiritual depth perception, allowing us to see a more complete picture of God, ourselves and the reality of our situation, by combining bits and pieces of truth into a meaningful whole. In the same way, admitting the obvious challenges inherit in approaching the invisible and silent God is the first step towards overcoming them. Openness regarding the human condition encourages us to face our difficulties and seek out Biblical examples of those who felt as we do, yet overcame great obstacles and resistance through faith and perseverance.
QC encourages every member of modern society to thoroughly investigate the greater meanings of our existence. We didn't create ourselves, have limited power over our earthly lives and possess no control over our eternal fate. The same is true for all those we know and love. We had yesterday and may have today and perhaps tomorrow, but what is that compared to eternity? A lifespan of a hundred, or even a thousand years, is little more than a single drop of water splashed against an eternal wave enveloping our galaxy, universe and beyond!
We must rouse ourselves and others, once and for all coming to terms with the fact that we exist, but only for a moment. Our life and eternal state are in the hands of Another. For and at His pleasure "we live, move and have our being." We must acknowledge the great debt we owe God as Creator and sustainer of everything and everyone. We must thankfully realize the inherent responsibility that comes with the unparalleled blessings given to our generation.
It's QC’s goal to spark deep repentance for our culture's growing sense of entitlement and taking so much for granted. It's our hope that recognizing such truths we will come to our senses, confessing our prodigal natures and stop squandering our wealth and freedoms on frivolous and "riotous living." It's our prayer mankind's eyes will be opened to the fantastic heavenly cosmic drama overflowing onto Earth, and the spiritual significance of the hour in which we live.
May God save, deliver and empower each of us, our families and friends. May He quickly pour out His Spirit and grant the kind of fresh mercy and grace that stimulates serious study and prayer, spurring each of us on to "love and good deeds."
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For a hyperlink footnoted version of this article see eBook Quantum Christianity Introduction Volume 1
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