Sometimes I hear the Lord the most clearly in a half-asleep state. This has been very encouraging for me, especially in times when I start drifting asleep while I’m trying to read my Bible and pray. It reminds me that whether I’m praying or napping, eating or singing worship songs, he is always with me and can speak on so many levels. 

So, an avid time of Bible study recently became a late morning nap. As my head drifted down, the Bible in my lap turned to a page I hadn’t seen in a long time. Before I was aware of that though, I was drifting off and felt this hazy impression from God about an article to write. It had to do with a comparison between flat-earthers and those who struggle with the message of Christ’s finished work and our complete victory over sin. 

Now before you think this was due to me being in a very tired frame of mind, let me explain how well this fits together. I don’t know if you’re aware of the wide movement of people across the world who believe the earth is flat and that there’s a giant conspiracy covering it up. It’s actually fascinating how convinced – and how convincing – they are. A simple understanding of physics, as in the way the world works, blows it out of the water, but still they manage to be quite believable.

And it’s understandable, no? For all intents and purposes, when we look with our five senses and examine the world around us, it does look flat. There’s very good reason for this being the main belief of humanity for much of our history together. People who started to claim we were on a big round ball floating in space were seen as absolute lunatics. That’s because it truly seems ludicrous! The fact that right now you are kind of hanging to the side or slightly upside down as we float through near empty void makes no sense at all. How is that even possible!?

It is possible, but imagine trying to explain why to someone from the ancient world. To do so, you would have to articulate some form of mathematical and scientific knowledge; however, that would require layers upon layers of simpler knowledge to be added beforehand so they could come closer to comprehending the main points. For the most part though, a person would need to just take this wild truth by simple faith. A simple faith that almost feels silly.

Well, that brings me to the message of Jesus’s finished work and the reality of our perfect righteousness in him!

What do I mean? Well, the teaching that we are righteous and free from sin sounds just as ludicrous to some people as it does when you tell a flat-earth believer we’re actually hanging mid-air on a giant rock … that brings me to the verse which my Bible accidentally opened to as this half-asleep thought was channeling through my failing attempts at prayer. 

Come and reason with me.

Though your sins be as scarlet

They shall be white as snow.

– Isaiah 1:18

After I came to a fully alert state and saw this verse, I remembered how this is the main verse for our book The Snow Globe (key word: globe…as in a sphere). In that book, we go on an extensive journey into the “physics of grace,” you might say. Using the empirical evidence of scripture mixed with testimony and other forces, we challenge the typical religious “reasoning” that is very sin-focused (and thus “flat”).

When a believer looks out into their life with natural reasoning, they often see mistakes, struggles, and failures. It becomes clear then, they are not perfectly righteous. Their sins are all over the place like a scarlet stain on a dress and there is no bleaching that observable fact away. Therefore, they devise other theories about this term “righteousness,” this idea of being “as we ought to be.” They will say that perhaps one day — when we die — this will come true. Death will be the ultimate bleaching agent that can accomplish such a feat. But in the flat everyday existence of their current lives, this righteousness is just a far-out promise for the future. 

Sadly, this denies the fact that the ultimate washing has already come! Death does not save us from sin. Jesus’s blood is what saved us from sin already. This is why we call it a finished work. In Christ, we are no longer sinners. When he died, our sinful nature died with him. We are no longer slaves to darkness (Romans 6 ya’ll). 

But let’s get back to our flat-earth analogy… This message of Christ’s finished work and a complete victory over sin is something that must be seen from a heavenly vantage point. We have to come into a totally different kind of “reasoning.” 

The fact of the matter is, if you were take a flat-earther on an aircraft that goes above the horizon line, the truth would be settled. (I guess they could still say NASA and the Illuminati painted the ship’s windows, so maybe we’d have to strap them into a suit and send em outside to observe things with their own eyes.) Then they would experience the spherical majesty and grandeur so many astronauts have seen and testified about it. (Which, by the way, is one of the greatest pieces of evidence we have. As much as the beauty of mathematics settles most flat earth arguments, hearing the direct experience of astronauts is hard to ignore. The genuine awe and wonder is something that can’t be replicated ….. much like when I hear a true testimony of someone who has encountered the love of Jesus and the truth of how he sees them!)

Well, there you have it folks. We have to rise to a higher vantage point. We have to wake up to the truth that we are seated with Christ above the fray of our so-called flat, sin-bound existence. We need to come and reason with the Lord and see what he sees.

And in the end, it will still require a simple, silly faith. 

Now that’s not to say there aren’t arguments within the “mathematics” of scripture to explain why there are still struggles in life, even while Jesus looks at us and calls us perfect and pure and free from sin right at this moment. Regardless, we want to learn to accept this Word like a little child. One day, we’ll get to “leave the ship” and have a full experience of the heavenly realm. But for now, let’s learn to live in the bliss of trust. Let’s reason with Isaiah and gain a new perspective on life. The work is finished. Righteousness has come.