Once upon a time Da Vinci had a code. . .  What is it about starting a story like that that makes me think of sword fights and damsels in distress-- of fairytales?  No true story starts that way.  Those first four words alert me that while there may be a moral, the story itself is just for my fun; It’s not real.  Dan Brown could have saved people a lot of grief if he would have started his novel, The Da Vinci Code, with those four words.  But he didn’t.  He instead cloaked his fairytale with a convincing concoction of truth and fiction that the uncritical throat has quite readily swallowed as real.  The result has been that many have been fooled; many outraged; and that many are now rich. 

My intention is not to bash Dan Brown or his book.  It’s what our culture is doing with what is true, with what is real, that bothers me.  Anymore, we are exchanging truth for personal interpretation of the ‘facts’.  Reality thus becomes the linking together of what sounds and feels good to me.  The authoritative truth of the Institution has become the relative truth of the Individual.  While I’m glad to see the Institution dethroned, crowning the Individual actually only replaces one ‘I’ with another. In the end, I-centered wisdom, regardless of the type, is out of touch with reality and can only lead into dangerous beliefs, choices, and situations.

I recently read a news report about con-artists who presented fairytale ‘facts’ through email, telemarketing, and sweepstake scams of ways to get rich quick.  Who, after all, wouldn’t want wealth to be a personal reality, the con-artists sure did.  And, from the report, so did millions of duped Americans who interpreted their fairytale ‘facts’ as reality.  It is as Jesus says, ‘wisdom is proven right (or in this case, false) by her children’.  I-centered wisdom always leads to ruin.  It is in fact not wisdom at all, but falsehood and folly. 

Jesus’ distant grandfather, king Solomon, once wrote:  Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own.  Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he is the one who will keep you on track.  Don’t assume you know it all . . . Your body will glow with health, your very bones will vibrate with life. (Prov. 3:5-8)

This is not I-centered wisdom.  It’s God-centered wisdom.  He doesn’t try to define reality in his own image, by what he desires or feels or thinks is true.  He knows reality doesn’t begin with ‘I’ but with God.  God created it, blesses it, and makes sense of it by relating to us within it.  God alone holds all things together, giving them true meaning, significance, and purpose.  So Solomon trusts God to lead him and, by so doing, experiences the life of God filling his being and his reality. The same is true for us.  Knowing what’s real is not about interpreting ‘facts’ by myself and for myself.  We are most in touch with reality when we live in relationship with God and follow God’s way of life-giving wisdom--not as we conceive it, but as God reveals it. 

The good news for us is that he has revealed it—in factual form, yes, but more fully, and with most life-giving impact, in the living person of Jesus.  Jesus is the fullness of God’s life-giving truth in personal form.  It’s in a real, living and growing, relationship with Jesus, therefore, that we not only get in touch with what's real, but we are also empowered to become real.  Within the grasp of relationship with Jesus, we are lead to experience God’s life filling our being and our reality.

Let us, therefore, not settle for a fairytale-‘facts’-version of what’s real.  But rather, grasp what’s real by becoming more real in God through the  grasp of a life-giving relationship with Jesus.