Truth, Alienated
Tuesday (December 9)
Truth, Alienated
Psalm 100:3
Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Strange as it sounds, I recently talked with a friend last week who is obsessed with the modern theory that aliens are the ‘answer’ to all the perplexities of man’s existence. Ask him how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids or how human beings dragged thousands of two-ton stones hundreds of miles without modern technology, and he’ll quickly tell you that aliens did it. Ask him why people in all cultures, especially ancient cultures, raise megaliths and stone circles that reveal a raptured attention to planetary alignments and celestial bodies, and he’ll say that aliens showed up through portals in the sky to meet ancient men. Ask him why people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, from East to West, from slaves to princes, universally share a belief in spiritual reality and concoct religions and construct altars and fashion idols for the purpose of atoning for sin, and he’ll suggest that most religions are just the worship of aliens that our ancestors encountered in ages past.
Well, even if we accepted all those answers, and even if we believed that some super race of beings somewhere in a different galaxy seeded us here and gave us technologies for building and farming, etc., such theories still don’t account for that insatiable yearning in our hearts for love and belonging and justice, nor do they account for our recognition of both a fallen world and our own fallen nature, nor do they answer our desire for redemption and atonement, which has always been our most perplexing and unquenchable yearning. Tell me which seems truer, friend: that some race of aliens arbitrarily created us, giving us all our ideas and virtues and powers, before leaving us to fend for ourselves, or that Almighty God formed us from dust, and then breathed into us the breath of life, and then, after we fell, incarnated into our very flesh and blood to empathize with our human condition and eternally atone for our failings, promising to redeem all that we had broken? Is the answer to life held by some alien in a galaxy far, far away, or is it found in Immanuel—God with us?
I suggest we tune out the sci-fi and listen to Psalm 100 instead.