The Story That Makes Sense of Everything
The Story That Makes Sense of Everything
Francis Schaeffer once said that Christianity does not start with “Jesus saves you from your sins.” It starts with, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” His point? Christianity isn’t just a personal salvation formula or a religious dogma, it is a comprehensive account of reality itself. It explains the structure of the universe, the nature of humanity, and the flow of history.
One of the reasons Christianity no longer makes sense to many today is that they are unfamiliar with the first part of the story. To begin with Jesus, is like stepping into a movie halfway through, you don’t know the characters, the plot, or where things are headed. The apostles could assume that Jewish audiences already knew their history, understood who God was, and grasped key concepts like sin and atonement. But when they spoke to Gentiles (non-Jews), they had to start at a much more foundational level.
That foundation begins with creation. If humans possess intelligence, will, and moral awareness, then the source of our existence must also have these capacities, otherwise, where would we have gotten them? This means our Creator is not an impersonal force or mere substance, but a personal being. And if we were made by a personal God, it follows that we stand in a relationship with Him, just as children do with their parents. That relationship carries moral obligations. To fail to honor God is not just a mistake; it is an ethical breach. And like any broken relationship, it requires reconciliation. Only after we understand who God is, who we are, and the nature of our relationship with Him can we fully grasp sin, guilt, and the significance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Christianity is not a Fairy Tale.
However, it is the story that all fairy tales echo. Yet today, religion is often dismissed as just another form of personal preference, like joining a club that suits one’s tastes. Many see it as a private, subjective experience, a feel-good system of ethics rather than an account of reality. But Jesus never treated religion that way. Christianity presents itself as a worldview, an explanation of how things actually are. And not all worldviews are created equal.
In this sense, there is no real difference between an atheist and a religious believer, both hold particular beliefs about reality. Everyone believes their worldview is true, or they wouldn’t hold it. So why are religious people uniquely labeled as intolerant for claiming their views are correct? Every belief system makes truth claims, and if one is true, others must necessarily be false.
Every worldview, religious or secular, answers four fundamental questions:
· Creation – How did it all begin?
· The Fall – What went wrong?
· Redemption – What’s the solution?
· Restoration – What will the world look like once it is fixed?
If you don’t understand the big picture first, assembling the details is like trying to complete a puzzle without the finished image as a guide.
Truth and the Problem of Evil
A major obstacle for many in accepting Christianity is the problem of evil. But evil is not a foreign intrusion into the Christian story, it is at its very core. The entire biblical narrative is about what went wrong in the world and how it can be made right. Eliminating God doesn’t solve the problem of evil; it only removes any objective basis for calling something "evil" in the first place. If the universe is purely material and governed by blind forces, then there is no true right or wrong, just preferences and survival. As Thomas Hobbes put it, life under such a system is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Yet we all sense that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. And that only makes sense if there is a way, things are supposed to be like. Design implies purpose, and purpose implies intention. But materialism, if consistently applied, allows for no ultimate meaning, only individual preferences. In the end, that leads to nihilism: the belief that life is empty, meaningless, and purposeless.
The Central Character and the Grand Story
Christianity, by contrast, offers a coherent and compelling narrative. The early Christians were called followers of “The Way” because Jesus did not present himself as one possible path among many. He claimed to be the way to God. The story of Christianity is a story of brokenness and restoration, and the five key words that summarize it are: God, Man, Jesus, Cross, Resurrection. These are both the storyline and the timeline, from the beginning (God) to the ultimate end (the resurrection at the end of time).
Importantly, the story doesn’t start with us. It starts with God because He is the central character. We play a crucial role, but we are not the main focus. The Christian narrative is not about our comfort, happiness, or personal prosperity, it’s about God’s purposes. That is a crucial distinction. If humans had invented the Christian story, we would have put ourselves at the center. But we didn’t. The story is not about God’s plan for our lives; it is about our lives for God’s plan. Let that sink in.
Everything in this story belongs to God, including us. The principle is simple: If you make something, it’s yours. God made us. We do not own ourselves; God does. Yet modern thinking often assumes, “I have the right to live however I want.” But if God is God, then we are not free to simply do as we please. As C.S. Lewis once asked, “Am I the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant responsible to the real landlord?”
Mind, Matter, and Meaning
Christianity affirms both a physical and a nonphysical reality. The material world is real, but so is the immaterial, consciousness, morality, love, and purpose. Atheism, on the other hand, insists that everything is reducible to matter. In that worldview, the story begins with impersonal particles, and it ends with them as well, nothing more. Richard Dawkins put it bluntly: in a universe of blind physical forces, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” (River Out of Eden, 1995).
But if the universe is nothing more than mindless matter in motion, where does that leave us? Are we simply biochemical machines with no intrinsic worth? If we abandon the idea that life has a designed purpose, then any meaning we create for ourselves is ultimately arbitrary. And if all meaning is arbitrary, then no meaning is truly meaningful.
The Answer Lies in the Story
In the end, the Christian story makes sense of the human experience in a way that naturalism never can. It explains why we seek meaning, why we long for justice, why we recognize beauty, and why we recoil at evil. The world is broken, but that brokenness is not the end of the story. Christianity provides an answer, not just for why things are the way they are, but for how they can be made right.
Who created God? The question itself assumes God was created, but the Christian view is that God is eternal and self-existent. He had no beginning and needs no creator. He is the Author, the central character, and the reason the story exists at all. And the Christian claim is this: the story is true.
