Intelligent Design 3

[HKHaugan]

Every year the National Football League conducts a draft to choose players for each team. There are seven rounds the most prestigious of which is the first. When you are a first round draft choice your name is broadcast all over the world, you receive immediate media attention and ‘visions of sugar plums dance’ in your head. Millions of dollars await your beck and call. As you make your way ‘down’ the second to seventh rounds your value decreases. Unlike the first two rounds those chosen are not photographed, most of the audience has left and just the names are broadcast until the last round’s final choice is made who is given the inglorious title of Mr. Irrelevant.

Now I’m sure you are wondering what this has to do with intelligent design. I’m glad you asked. We’ll get to that in a moment. It’s what’s behind the NFL draft that needs to be seen. It is a microcosm of what most areas of human interchange are like. You are judged, rated, scrutinized and sifted. This is the built-in mechanism awaiting every person searching for their purpose, meaning and destiny. This is the world in which we live from birth to death. It is a world of judgment that hangs over everyone and an indication that ultimately everyone will face a judgment of some kind since it is such an accepted defining process in the world. Given our mind-heart-spirit individuality it stands to reason that what we have done with them will undergo an evaluation as we cross over into the realm of the unseen. I use the word cross intentionally since it is a movement from one place to another, one plane to another, visible to invisible, that is, leaving a horizontal visible dimension and moving vertically into an invisible one.

Now let’s apply all of this to the subject---intelligent design. Judgment is the major issue on every level of human interaction. But when you add in the context of life and death there is a final question that faces every single human being. What happens now? Where have I been and what have I done and is that all there is? The very fact that there is a summary, a judgment and the questions it raises, means a conclusion is drawn because that is intelligent conclusion wrapped in the fabric of existence.

Having said the foregoing we need to distinguish between the world’s standards of judgment and God’s standard of judgment. The NFL draft is typical of the large secular world and its processes grading individuals’ worth in terms of their inequality, not their equality, their inferiority and superiority. What God has done in Jesus is to design in every one of His images an equality based on His love for them because He is the One who created them. He doesn’t evaluate anyone in terms of their social, ethnic or economic status. The proof is in the Cross of Jesus. His death was a visible exclamation point on the value of every human life. He died for all everywhere for all time.

The why of His death is revealed in the intelligently designed answer to the problem of self-conscious aloneness, the internal struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, guilt and the need for peace, identity and security. That answer is that the Creator of the universe would enter that which He created not only to make Himself known but to be the answer to solve every one’s internal personal dilemma.

The Cross would lift up the life of the one man Jesus as the vehicle for God’s answer. He set the standard for human attitude, character and action. His life was a series of encounters with the invisible power in every heart that is the self-destructive urge to be a ‘draft judge’ in the arena of relationships. He identified the urge’s source---the devil.

Actually the intellectual assumption made by the Cross is a brilliant answer to the question existence raises—“What is life all about?” In one conclusive stroke it summarizes the nature of man’s flawed condition, sin, and its solution, forgiveness. This summary action includes the inner issue of every human being, guilt and its cure, a perfect human sacrificing His life for the sake of others. This is the dynamic that equalizes the identity and worth of every person. It exposes the spiritual problem as the common internal barrier to perfection and the spiritual answer to remove it. What makes it more than a concept is the Person who revealed that the internal unseen conflicts are first spiritual, then personal and then interpersonal.

The real internal struggle is one of pride, sin’s greatest ally in a heart dressed in avoidance and self-denial when it comes to the problem of sin. It requires a relationship with the Revealer who alone can deal with our imperfect intellect, emotion and inner confusion to answer the problem. What we have had historically is imperfect people trying to figure out from within how to deal with themselves. Or they look to another imperfect human being who appears to have a solution. That’s hardly a basis for trust to take on such an important work. We have to come to grips with the fact that we need someone from outside the human condition to present us with a one-size-fits-all answer. That is the ‘why’ of the Cross.

The Cross presents three challenges. First, it asks us to lay down our pride, our control and our reserve. Second, it encourages us to have and rely on an invisible relationship with God. Third, it tells us to search the Scripture to be the authority for internal correction. These characterized Jesus’ earthly life. It’s what we call taking up our cross and dying to pride, dying to the fear of trying a relationship with God and dying to the idea we don’t need an external authority. The Lord’s brilliant analysis, brilliant personal application with proven brilliant results of which all of you are part.