1. Walking Blindfolded Toward the Cliff

Start with a few questions. When you drive, do you put on a seat belt? Before you cross a busy street, do you look both ways, or do you dive into traffic and hope everything will be all right? And all of us have been to funerals. We know we are going to die. Death is around the corner, and it could happen at any moment.

Here is a fact of arithmetic: the majority of existence will occur after you die. So much of existence comes after your death that your time here on earth is, mathematically, infinitesimally small. Compared with forever, it is almost nothing.

So picture it this way. We are all walking toward a cliff. Some are close to the edge and some have a long walk ahead, but every one of us is blindfolded. That is what it means not to know when you will die. You could die tomorrow, next year, or in twenty years, but you will go off the edge. You have watched other people go off it. You held ceremonies for them.

And the ground is a conveyor belt. Time cannot be stopped. You can run the other way — eat healthy, wear the seat belt, test a tank for gas before you climb in, look both ways — and that is wise. But the belt is always faster than you. Run as hard as you can and the best you will do is about a hundred and twenty years, and then you are off the edge.

People talk about religious delusion. But here is one delusion we can prove: the delusion of not caring that we are walking toward the cliff. If you walk blindfolded toward a wall, you put your hands up by instinct, even though bumping a wall is nothing — a bloody nose, a tissue, and life goes on. Yet when it comes to the edge of the cliff, which you could reach at any moment, people do not want to think about it. Mention it and they say, "Talk about something more positive." More positive? This is the most important event of your existence.

"I think nothing happens," some say. Try living the rest of your life like that. Cross the street without looking because you think you will be all right. Climb into a tank without checking the air. You would never do it, because you could be hit by a truck, and a truck is a small thing next to eternity. Whatever happens after death is infinitely more important than anything happening here, because here is for a moment and there is forever and ever.

Fear of the unknown is not weakness; it is an instinct that keeps you alive. It is why people are afraid of the dark: you do not know whether there is a hole, a lion, a man with a gun, or just the corner of a table waiting for your toe. All you know is that you do not know, and that is enough to make you careful. It is why you do not fly down the stairs headfirst when you are late, and why you do not floor the gas pedal the whole way to work. That fear makes you smart.

So apply the same intelligence to the one certainty you have. We know we are going to die. Therefore we need to think seriously about what happens when we do.

2. Sowing and Reaping: The Balance of the Universe

We have observed that in the universe everything balances out. The Bible calls it sowing and reaping. Hinduism calls it karma. But the Bible represents the oldest religion on earth, and you could argue that Christianity is the oldest, because the Christianity we have today is only the most recent covenant. The first covenant was made with the first man, Adam, and the Creator.

Think of any simulation. To enter the internet, you need an avatar; you cannot jump bodily into the computer and run around inside. So it is with the Creator and His creation. And it is foolish to look for God inside the machine, like an AI trying to prove the existence of the mainframe's designer by running code tests on its own internal software. The designer would not be in there.

In fact we have a great deal of evidence of spiritual activity. Because science cannot fit it inside its tests, it is filed under parapsychology — which is an admission that something is happening; it is simply outside their modes of testing. Those modes may open up. Standard physics gives no way to reach Alpha Centauri or any distant star; you would need to step into a new physics. Today they call that new physics "spooky," as if it were religious, when it is just physics. The spiritual realm is science at a higher level.

People before us would have looked at today's technology and called it witchcraft. Scientists today look at the more advanced science of the spiritual realms and call it spooky, magical, religious. One day future scientists will look back at them the way today's scientists look back at those who thought flight was magic. This is not controversial: no scientist teaches from a book written fifty years ago, and if you ask why, the answer is "because it's wrong." Every generation of scientists has said the previous books are wrong. In the year 3000 no one will teach from the books of 2023, for the same reason.

So we know there is always a balance. You have seen it in your own life, and others have seen it in theirs: what you do to someone usually comes back to you. Every force has an equal and opposite force in the laws of physics, and the same holds in the laws of the spiritual realm. The sowing and reaping God spoke of in the Holy Bible is observable and testable. Fire a missile and engineers must calculate the trajectory, because what goes up comes back down. The physical realm behaves that way, and the spiritual realm behaves the exact same way. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction; what goes around comes around. That is why it matters to do right by others.

And here is the point that builds on it. Many people try to do right by other people. But if it is scientifically impossible that there was no Creator, no initiator of reality, then that Person must be included too. You cannot refuse to wrong your neighbor and then wrong the Creator. Do right by the Creator and by others.

3. Artificial Intelligence and Real Intelligence

We are speaking of things far beyond the universe, beyond alien technology. People could not understand alien technology, let alone the Creator's technology. But we have something in our own hands that helps: humans have been creating AI.

"AI" is a misnomer. It stands for artificial intelligence, not real intelligence. When someone says, "That robot really thinks," then by definition it is not AI, because AI means it is not thinking; it is artificial. Even a toilet is AI in its mechanism. Flush it and it sends enough water to create a suction that clears the bowl, then stops, then refills the tank until it reaches a set level and stops again. That looks like it is intelligently managing its own water system, but it uses no electricity, only switches. A microprocessor uses switches too. AI is a great many switches configured in a very complex fashion, layer upon layer. It is not real intelligence.

People say they are terrified of AI and what it can do, and they are right to be. But God is dealing with something far greater than AI. He is dealing with RI: real intelligence. Not artificial. It really is thinking. If AI is terrifying and requires power to manage, imagine RI. RI could destroy humanity in a moment. To manage RI you would have to be almighty, all-powerful, all-intelligent, all-knowing — far beyond what is needed for AI.

With RI, just as with AI, there are specifications and parameters. Things self-destruct when they do not treat one another with respect, and when they do not treat the Creator with respect. Imagine an intelligent car that picks your kids up from school, takes itself for an oil change and gas, parks itself in the garage, and speeds away if someone is shooting at you. Impressive. And who cares whether that car is courteous to other cars on the road and lets them keep their lane if it will not do what you tell it? If it decides it no longer wants to pick you up, no longer wants oil changes, and has discovered that oil in the gas tank feels good and gas in the engine feels good, so now it has health problems from doing things differently than it was designed to do — and it is not listening to you?

What would a human do with that car? Melt it down. Put it in the furnace, because it is useless. It goes against the very reason it was created. That is the picture of a created intelligence that will not do what its Maker designed it to do.

4. Love, the Commandments, and Faith

So there were commandments and rules, and those commandments were based on doing what God wants first and doing what others want second. That is what the Bible calls love. In the Bible, love is not an emotion or a feeling ("I like you so much"). It is the sacrifice of your own will to the will of another.

Picture a burning house. Who would you run into it for? The more you love a person, the more likely you are to run in. You would run in for your children. You might not run in for a friend, though you should. You might run in for a friend but not a stranger, though you should. You might run in for a stranger but not for your enemy, though you should. Love, biblically, is being willing to sacrifice yourself for the other person's benefit.

Definitions belong to their source. Microsoft has proprietary definitions for its own technology, and those are Microsoft's to set. In the same way, "Christian" is a term invented in the Bible and defined there as a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. Not someone who says they are a Christian; a follower. If you do not follow Him, you are not a Christian, simply because that is the definition, and definitions are facts you cannot argue away.

The first four commandments are about loving God; the other six are about loving others. So there are really two commandments: love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love others as yourself. The Ten are an expansion of those two.

You have probably seen Ray Comfort of Living Waters give the test, so let's do it. Have you lied? What do you call someone who lies? A liar. Have you taken something that wasn't yours? Have you let a debt ride on your credit report, borrowed money and not returned it, downloaded music illegally, watched a movie from an unofficial upload instead of paying for it, been dishonest on your taxes, padded your résumé, or slept with someone who was in a covenant with someone else, violating a covenant the other party never agreed to have broken? All of that is theft. What do you call someone who steals? A thief. So what does that make you? A lying thief.

Have you used God's name in vain? That is not only using it as a four-letter word of disgust. It is treating His name as worthless. Even people who never say "OMG" take His name in vain when they pray without expecting anything to happen — when they are in the hospital and want God to be the nurse who assists the doctor rather than the Doctor. He is the Creator. He does not exist to cheer you up. He is the designer and engineer of your body; He can actually heal you. He is not the corner mechanic who has to cut a piece from your muffler to patch your heart the way surgeons do. He made this reality. Treating Him as less makes a person a blasphemer.

And notice something. People curse with the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. They do not curse with Muhammad's name, or with their mother's name. Of every god in the world, people curse only with the Christian God's name. Why? Not because Christians are dangerous: in India you can be set on fire for disrespecting the gods; in Pakistan you can be killed; in China you can be chained up; in North Korea you can be tortured for not worshiping the leader; even in Israel disrespect can get you killed. Nearly every religion on earth will kill you for disrespecting its god. Christians will get upset and say "I'll pray for you." So whatever argument you have against Christianity because "Christians do this," every other religion does it a hundred times over. Stay in facts and logic here.

And understand what faith is. Faith is not believing things that make no sense. Faith is not needing it to make sense before you obey. Everything God does makes perfect sense, and there are explanations for everything, so there is no reason to float off into la-la land when we talk about religion. But if you want to grow closer to the Creator, you have to learn to act without demanding the explanation first. Those who believe only after they get the answers do receive a lesser reward and are used less than those who simply follow orders. It is the same in the military or in business: if the commander or the CEO has to explain every detail and prove it is a good idea before you will move, you are not getting promoted or handed greater responsibility.