Discover Bedrock Truth is Word Foundation’s sister website. Whereas www.wordfoundations.com is a storehouse of articles that provide “INSIGHTS AND COMMENTARY FROM A BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE,” www.discoverbedrocktruth.org is a storehouse of Bible studies, “treasure maps” for those “MINING NUGGETS OF TRUTH FROM GOD’S WORD AND WORLD.”
Of course, engaging in a Bible study means one mainly mines truth from God’s Word (His revelation in Christ and the Scriptures). Even so, it’s important to understand how this revelation fits with the world in which we live. Here at Discover Bedrock Truth, the testimony of God’s world (His revelation in nature and all we observe around us) is not excluded. Consider this discussion from a Word Foundations article I posted some time ago.
Just how do the testimony of nature and what we read in the Bible fit together? Francis Schaeffer offers an illustration that brilliantly answers this question.6 Here’s a summary of his analogy.
Suppose we are walking through a forest, and we come upon a two-story cabin. We begin to explore the inside of the cabin, and on the first floor we find a table. On the table we discover the bottom portion of a book that has been ripped in two, leaving about one inch of type on each page. We can read what is printed on the bottom of these pages, but we cannot decipher the entire story, the complete message of the book’s author. Of course, no one among us ever would suggest that what we have has come into being by chance. An intelligent being is the clear source of the section of the book we are examining with great curiosity.
As we continue exploring, we go upstairs and find the top portion of the same book. We now can bring the two sections of the book together and at last can read the entire message of the author. We can understand the complete story he sought to convey when he wrote. Moreover, through the book, we can get to know the author. This is especially true because in the book, the author tells us about himself.
The bottom portion of the book—the section we discovered on the first floor—represents nature, the world around us, the cosmos, and the created order. The top section represents the Scriptures; in them nature and human relationships are explained. As we read the top and bottom pages together, as they were mean to be read, the bottom pages make much more sense. We note that what the bottom pages tell us coincides perfectly with all we learn from reading the top part of the book. We now understand not just “what,” but “why.” Our questions about life and nature are answered in the Bible—not exhaustively, but adequately.
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- We learn why evil exists in the world.
- We can understand how nature reflects God’s perfect character, even though the world and even the universe have been marred and damaged by sin and evil.
- We understand why death occurs.
- Furthermore, we read of God’s solution to the mess we’re in, and we discover that we can respond to Him in a personal way because He has revealed Himself personally to us. God didn’t just unveil Himself in nature and in the Bible; He also came and lived among us as a real human being in and through His Son, Jesus Christ.
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