A Life-Changing Revelation

Since 1979 I have been giving my testimony. The narrative itself has not budged, but, as I have over and over recounted it, insights—sometimes amazing, and never thought about before—come to mind. (And sometimes blowing my mind, too.)

Recently, after almost 50 years, something hit me that, though crucial to my new birth, occurred a few years before it. I grew up a secular Jew in a secular Jewish culture, Miami Beach, Florida. (I don’t remember anyone keeping Sabbath, ever.) Intellectually pickled in this brine, I was raised and educated on an über postmodern worldview. Truth was subjective, cultural, personal, contingent. You have your truth, I have mine, that kind of stuff. I was a fundamentalist relativist, no matter how self-refuting that position is (think about it).

It hit me that truth, as in the Truth, had to be out there somewhere.

My dogmatic worldview, however, shattered in 1976 (I was 21 years old), when it hit me that truth, as in the Truth, had to be out there somewhere. I mean, the universe, all creation, it is real, it is here, and we are part of it, too. The 93-billion-light-year-wide cosmos (at least what we can observe, so far) and all that’s in it exists, and so someone (something) had to have created it, and whoever (whatever) created it was the foundation and source of all reality—that is, it was the Truth. I had no idea what it (the Truth) was, nor any reason to believe that I ever could know it; for me, the life-changing revelation was that it (the Truth) not only “was” but had to be. 

Then, a few months ago, I suddenly realized that what caused this life-changing revelation for me was the doctrine of—creation. Creation! Again, the universe, the created cosmos, it’s here, and to know the source of, the cause of, and the reason it’s here is to know what had to exist: the Truth.

How fascinating, then, that in my quest for the Truth (for as soon as I knew it had to exist, I wanted to know it) I was led (about three years later) right to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose name itself witnesses to how foundational the doctrine of creation is. And not only creation but also the six days of creation, with God resting on the seventh. “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made” (Gen. 2:2, 3).

And this, the seven-day creation account, as depicted in Genesis, is just as important as the creation itself, because theistic evolution, any model, requires billions of years of violence, suffering, and death in order to create humanity, which would make Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, which promises to end suffering, violence, and death—meaningless. Unless, of course, Christ died to save humanity from the very process (violence, suffering, and death) that Christ (John 1:3) used to create humanity to begin with. If that sounds ludicrous, it is because it is.

Though it took almost 50 years to hit me, when it did I was amazed at the realization that, of all things, it was the doctrine of creation that had led me to believe that truth, as in the Truth, had to exist; and, then, in my search for the Truth, I was led right to Seventh-day Adventists. And yet, if you think about it, what other doctrine would have done that, and also (if you think about it more), where else should it have led me?