One of my granddaughters had two imaginary friends when she was a child. Their names were David and Elizabeth. She loved to make up stories about their adventures and especially their wedding. We heard these tales for some time until her mother decided she was getting too old for the fantasies and pulled her back to the real world of chores and homework.
Imagination can be a great thing. What would our world be without it? Cars, planes, medicines, the internet and many other things we depend on are here because someone looked at the world in a different way.
God gives us this ability, but it can be used in a bad way as well as a good way. Eve knew the truth. She understood that God warned her and Adam not to eat from the tree. But Satan led her into a dreamworld, an imaginary realm where the rule did not apply. The real world told her that if she ate from the tree she would surely die; the alternate universe said, “You will not surely die” (Gen. 3:4). Eve chose the fantasyland and we have paid the price for her and Adam’s moral daydream ever since.
Nature shows the true God—the all-powerful, all-knowing, eternally good and just Creator. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). That is the real world of common sense and honesty. But some shut their eyes to reality and say, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1) and believe the foolish fantasy of evolution. In the New Testament the wild imagination of the Gentiles led them to believe in Greek gods like Zeus and Hermes (Acts 14:12) and to change “the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things” (Rom. 1:23). Adults laugh when kids tell tall tales, yet millions of educated men and women live in this silly dreamworld today.
The real world of human beings is a world of males and females. That is how God made us. Jesus said, “From the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). The Lord even created the animals with two sexes (Gen. 7:2). This is a fact from the mind and hand of God, and all the protests, movies, and government legislation to the contrary will never change it. There are two genders in the actual world. People who say there are five or six or eight or nine are living in a state of delusion. They are going “against nature” and against nature’s Creator (Rom. 1:25-27).
Why do people reject the obvious truth and choose to believe irrational ideas that border on the insane? Romans one gives the answer. The Gentiles knew the truth about the Creator and His creation (Rom. 1:18-21). However, they “did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (v. 28). This literally means they tested God and His rules and His truth and rejected Him. As a result, “God gave them over to a debased mind,” a heart that was morally worthless and unable to make moral judgments—in other words, the mind of an animal.
The worst thing Alice in Wonderland could do to children was to distract them from doing what their parents or teachers told them. The world of metaverse is a dark world of perversion that causes depression, fear, and thoughts of emptiness, hopelessness, and suicide. Yet very wealthy and powerful people intend to plunge us into this twisted fantasyland unless we put a stop to it.
Kerry
West End church of Christ bulletin article for September 25, 2022