Friday, 8/14/20 – Question: “What is Real?”

What is Real?

After suffering a mild heart attack a few years ago my doctor suggested I get a real-time heart rate monitoring device to guide me in my recovery. So, I bought a fitbit and have been using it ever since.

One of the features of this device is sleep monitoring. It tracks not only the hours spent sleeping but also breaks down the quality of that sleep showing time spent in deep sleep, light sleep, REM (dream stage) sleep, and times of wakefulness.

This morning I recalled a rather odd and somewhat disconcerting experience I had had in the night. I dreamed I was in some other house with a floor plan different than our own. I roused from this dream to use the washroom but must still have been in a quasi-dream state for I had difficulty finding it! Evidently I was imagining I was still moving about according to the floor plan of my, er, “dream” house. After finally finding and using the washroom I weaved my way back to bed and, as my fitbit feedback showed me this morning, continued dreaming.

Philosophers have debated over the centuries about the nature of reality. Sci-fi movies such as the “Matrix,” the growing pleasures of “virtual” realities over “actual” reality, escapism drug use, Star Trek’s “holodeck,” Quantum theory and the proposition of multiverses, spiritualism and the quest for transcendence – all these and more have challenged the simplicity of the Biblical account of a Loving Creator of a tangible world of matter and life, now corrupted by human sin.

Humankind has never wanted to face the reality of personal guilt and so we try to imagine alternate worlds, other realities where we can play innocent.

But human guilt cannot be hid. We cannot overlay any “dream” world and make it fit what is actual reality. (Our actual floorplan would not cooperate with my dreamworld terms.) We must accept and live by our Creator’s terms. We must “wake-up!”

He has made the only provision for our predicament: His Son Jesus Christ. We must acknowledge our guilt is real, turn from sin, bow to Christ, follow Him as Lord and live rightly in this real world until He brings us to the next.

What is Real? Christ came into this world to show us.

“For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” (John 18:37, NASB).

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6, NASB).

Press on…

Got a question? Use the Contact page and send It to me. We’ll search the Word for God’s answer.