THE GOD WHO IS REAL

Acts 14:17 “Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy."

One of the more creative movies to come out in the last fifteen years was the Peter Wier film The Truman Show. The Truman Show is about a man named Truman Burbank--played by Jim Carey--who was adopted as a newborn by the OmniCam Corporation. The OmniCam Corporation then created an entire city on a movie set and placed Truman in this artificial city called Seahaven without Truman knowing any of it was fake. The enormous studio of Seahaven is filled with 5,000 hidden cameras, as people across the world watch every step of Truman’s life live on television. Of course Truman goes through life in Seahaven thinking that everything and everyone around him are real.

The creator and director of the Truman Show is a messianic figure named Christof, played by Ed Harris. For 30 years Truman is perfectly happy and content in Seahaven, with its perfect sky, computer monitored climate control, a wife and best friend who are really actors, and so forth. Truman’s reality is meticulously manufactured and manipulated by Christof, yet it’s the only reality Truman knows. At least until a series of accidents start Truman questioning this reality, until finally he figures it out and walks off the set into the real world.

Some people think that belief in God is like Truman in The Truman Show. People believe in God, these critics claim, because that’s the only reality that they’ve been presented with. Like the movie set of Seahaven, organized religion has meticulously manufactured and manipulated circumstances to cause people to live in the illusion of God. These critics point out that there’s no denying that people who believe in God are happy and content, even as Truman was happy and content in his world. However behind the set, critics claim, doesn’t lay God, but merely human directors like Christof, who pull the right strings and orchestrate the right circumstances to make belief in God appear real.

You see, even though Truman was happy in Seahaven, he was also tragic because his happiness is based on something that’s not real. And critics of religion claim that people who believe in God are in the same boat; we’re tragic, pathetic figures, because our sense of happiness and meaning in life is no more real than the movie set of Seahaven. True liberation comes for us the way it came for Truman, to turn our back on our make-believe world and courageously venture into the real world, a world without organized religion pulling the strings, a world where God is rejected as a relic from the unenlightened past.

We can know for sure that God is for real. We can know because God has left us evidence, because God reveals himself through the universe, and because we were made to seek God. These realities make knowledge of God a genuine possibility.

Now in many ways the various philosophical arguments for God’s existence seem like a rather tedious game of chess. You see, the reality is that the mission of the Christian church is not to persuade people that God exists. Instead, God has called us to introduce people to a relationship with God, so they can know him as a person rather than believe in him as an abstract concept.

If God is real, then the parallel with The Truman Show is correct, except it’s those who reject God’s existence who are living in a manufactured world like Seahaven. It is those who are in rebellion against God, who are avoiding him because they want to live their lives their own way, which are hiding in a make believe world of denial. As C. S. Lewis said about his younger years as an atheist, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading".

Our calling as a church isn’t to defend God--he’s perfectly able to do that himself--but to introduce people to a relationship with God, so they like Truman Burbank will walk off their Seahaven set and venture into the real world, the world God created and designed them to live in.