Good morning, saints.
What is real today? Who, if anyone, is reliable and true?
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. – Romans 1:18-23
In Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the characters delve so deeply into the world of sleep that they no longer know when they’re awake or dreaming. To stay grounded in reality, they carry a ‘totem’ from the physical world, something tangible and touchable that’s constant, fixed, known, and unchanging. This constant will tell them if what they see is real, or a product of their imagination.
We really can’t forget watching the main character’s totem spin at the movie’s end. We want to see him free of entrapment in the dream world, and wonder expectantly if that totem will totter and fall. (I won’t spoil the outcome for you if you haven’t seen the movie, but it’s a well-earned final image).
Twenty years ago, a similar Cartesian nightmare played out onscreen in an arthouse movie called Waking Life. Waking Life is full of cell animation, with philosophizing characters who never figure out what’s real and what’s not, what’s true or false. It’s chock full of deeply thinking characters who can never quite figure out whether we’re awake or asleep, alive or dead.
Who am I really, and most importantly, who gets to define me?
Oh yes, I forgot to mention … the animation makes the movie really trippy.
So here we sit in 2024, with reality being questioned all around us. We, too, are desperate for a ‘Constant’ to discern what’s true from what’s false, what’s life-giving from that which seeks to mutilate body and soul.
Metaphors for this Constant abound in literature, nature, and Scripture. Some call this Constant “True North," orienting our direction like a compass. Others see the Constant as an anchor, keeping us from losing our moorings and drowning in the inky depths where cultural sharks and other unknown dangers abound.
We live in an age where belief in objective truth is an endangered species. Artificial intelligence now mimics human image, thought, and art at a pace faster than ethics can regulate. Emotion drives how we define ourselves with far greater force than hard-wired biology. Even personhood is put aside in order to manifest fantasies of what we wish we could be, and we will pay any amount or suffer any pain to escape responsibility for what we actually are.
Having stolen God’s divine conversation at the formation of the world, ‘let us re-make man in our image’ has become the mantra of the day, and self-deception runs deep.
Hollywood’s writers’ and actors’ strike that ended last February argued against the substitution of human artists with artificially generated humanoid substitutes. They were fighting for more than job security, wages and intellectual property rights. Once we realize that artificial intelligence (AI) has the ability to erase not only jobs but also our very human flaws, our poor skin and crooked teeth, the evidence of our aging—all the things that make us human, we realize that we are up against a cultural moment that questions truth and reality as God has defined it. AI is advancing its skill at an alarmingly rapid rate, promising ultimate cosmetic enhancement, but delivering the erasure of our authenticity.
This cultural moment affects not only our bodies, but it penetrates our minds. Propaganda is created in boardrooms, newsrooms, bedrooms, and basements, hitting our screens already interpreted and manipulated to do our thinking for us, drawing the conclusions of others instead of allowing us to draw our own.
Where is our Constant in such a world to ground us in what’s real?
This passage above from Romans tells us that our all-loving Creator God is the Constant we need in such an age. The world he’s made based on his own wisdom grounds us in the reality we need to navigate such an unstable world (Proverbs 3:10-20). In the big picture, the passage invites us to consider God’s world and know that the heavens are telling of God’s glory. His sunrise every morning attests to His reliability, and the seasons speak to his faithfulness to provide. The inky cloak of night, pierced by tiny twinkling pinholes visible from millions of miles away, speaks of the vastness of his authority.
In the more mundane things of life, we peer into the mirror to brush our teeth, or for some of us, shave or make up. Still others of us search for fine lines and growing greys. in these pedestrian acts, we behold the image of God stamped uniquely on our faces, our bodies, our sex, and even the times and geographic places our sovereign God has assigned us. Each time we peer into the mirror, we are reminded that every intimate inch of his universe proclaims that He is and speaks to His nature.
God was, is, and always will be the Creator; He’s the Constant in the world He has made.
But creation also speaks of God’s judgment, because there is a great deceiver among us who exploits humanity’s willful blindness. Whether we look at the landscape or in the mirror, each of us is presented with two options: truth or falsehood, worship or rebellion. Running on God’s wisdom that grounds us gives life; rejecting that wisdom brings destruction and death.
Seeing God’s world—and ourselves—as they indeed are will continue to be aggressively challenged. Yet believing and proclaiming the Creator’s truth and sovereignty when all around us speak lies, chaos, and destruction may be one of the most significant opportunities we have in our current climate.
In this era of global deception, then, every Bible-believing community must ask for the courage to speak loving truth and proclaim what’s real, trusting in faith that our Constant holds to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).
Take this moment right now to ask for such boldness and the faith and assurance to believe that its granting – indeed – is constant and real.
