Reality

God wants us to experience the reality of a relationship with Him - it is predicated on His love for us,
expressed by Jesus on the cross. Ephesians 2 says:
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
6 and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus...

We are alive in Him!  We have died with Christ, and now are raised in Him to new life. That is the reality of the new birth, the relationship we have with Jesus through His sacrifice.  That reality is not based on works, i.e. we cannot accumulate enough good works to enter heaven, and we don't get it because our good outweighs our bad on some sort of cosmic scale.  Grace means there is nothing we can do to deserve God's love, but He has shown it to us anyway and enabled us to become His children and His disciples.  It's a free gift - and we have the capability to experience what He has in store!

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We are all sinners, and we need to be transformed - to be brought out of darkness into light, out of the control of Satan into the glory of God.  And it's not by works!  Romans 3 reminds us:
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus...

While we can attempt, in our humanity, to choose our own reality, the only one that actually counts is the reality determined for us by God - unfortunately, we can be prone to construct "fake news," you might say.  I've heard it said that our life with Jesus in heaven is more real than anything we experience here on earth.  God wants us to experience what He has in store for us, and to apply His principles to the human condition.

Historian Yuval Harari wrote a well-received book several years ago called, Sapiens, and his latest is entitled, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, which is, according to the founder of the Vox website, Ezra Klein, "about what comes next for humanity — and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future."

Klein interviewed Harari recently, and the piece begins with a happy thought:

In 300 years, Homo sapiens will not be the dominate [sic] life form on Earth, if we exist at all.

Given the current pace of technological development, it is possible we destroy ourselves in some ecological or nuclear calamity. The more likely possibility is that we will use bioengineering and machine learning and artificial intelligence either to upgrade ourselves into a totally different kind of being or to create a totally different kind of being that will take over.

T. Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner reviewed the article, and said, "They talked about the sort of stuff thinkfluencers like to talk about, including robots, 'the most cerebral humans,' falling in love with robots, Artificial Intelligence and robot emotions."  And, as Adams writes, "Then came the part where Harari attempted to describe Christian theology. It was not enlightening:

This idea of humans finding meaning in virtual reality games is actually not a new idea. It's a very old idea. We have been finding meaning in virtual reality games for thousands of years. We've just called it religion until now.

You can think about religion simply as a virtual reality game. You invent rules that don't really exist, but you believe these rules, and for your entire life you try to follow the rules. If you're Christian, then if you do this, you get points. If you sin, you lose points. If by the time you finish the game when you're dead, you gained enough points, you get up to the next level. You go to heaven.

Adams goes on:

You know, for a historian and academic, one would think Harari would have cracked at least one book explaining the basic theology of a 2017-year-old religion practiced by an
estimated 2.2 billion people.

There are literally thousands of easy-to-read explainers, many of which date back to the earliest days of Christianity. The source material, which says nothing of a supposed points system, is also readily available in libraries, online and in multiple languages.

Maybe one day the "most cerebral humans" will program the source material into robots so that it can be read back to us when we don't know what we're talking about. Dream big.

Commentator Erick Erickson was rightly critical, writing in an Instagram post, "At Vox, Yuval Harari 'explains' Christianity and gets every detail wrong. That's not how Christianity works at all."  He highlighted the part about the "points system."  You might say that people choose that reality and live their lives this way, but it is not the reality of the Scriptures.

So, let's think together about some takeaways centered around this interview story and the responses I mentioned.  First of all, we have to be grounded in reality, that is, Biblical truth.  The Bible is, as this Washington Examiner writer says, the "source material."  If we want to truly experience the reality of a relationship with Christ, the Word teaches us the principles of it.  And, the Scriptures do not teach that there is a "point system" - earn enough points, go to the next level in heaven.  That's works-based salvation, and it doesn't square with the teachings of the Scriptures.

We also can think about our own human capability.  This guy, Harari, indicates that essentially humans will destroy themselves, but will be replaced by something having to do with artificial intelligence, which we programmed.  And wrong programming will lead to the wrong outcome. It all originates with human beings. Humans are the pinnacle of God's creation - we were deemed "very good" on the sixth day of creation; we are "fearfully and wonderfully made," as we read in the Psalms.  We have incredible capability in our humanity, but with God's supernatural ability flowing through us, that means that we can see Him do beyond all we ask or think, as Ephesians says.

But, humanity has a problem - we were born in sin into a fallen world.  And, in our humanity, we can become conditioned to try to determine our own reality.  Satan did this when he deceived himself into thinking he could be like God.  He now tries to do it to us by planting lies into our minds, causing us to buy in to incorrect thinking.  If we are not careful, we can make decisions based on his falsehoods, rather than the truth of the Scriptures.  That is why we are instructed to take every thought captive - those strongholds present a danger to us, in that we can be caught up in the destructive patterns in which Satan would want to entrap us.  God enables us to break free from desperate non-reality into the glorious reality of His presence.