Jesus Christ, the Extra-Terrestrial

In the desert of Arizona, there sits an ultra modern, gleaming glass structure that looks like a giant space-craft just in from another galaxy. It is called Biosphere 2, and it represents a bold scientific adventure designed to teach us more about life on this planet. In the process, the designers are hoping it will also teach us how we can reach out to the stars.

On September 26, eight volunteers, four male and four female, stepped into Biosphere 2 and sealed the door behind them. This would be their home for the next two years. Biosphere 2 is a completely self-contained system. No air, no water, no food, no waste products are exchanged with the outside world. Everything is recycled within the biosphere. It is a system that scientists call a closed loop. They call it Biosphere 2 because they call Planet Earth Biosphere 1.

The eight biospherians plan to grow all their own food from the more than 3,500 plant species that they have taken into the experiment with them. They have landscaped the interior into five ecological regions including savannah, rain forest, and desert. They have even built an artificial ocean. The entire complex takes over 3 acres and cost over $100 million to build.

Among other things, Biosphere 2 will simulate a manned space flight to the distant planets. Such voyages would take years, and a crew of astronauts would have to take everything they needed along with them. They would be operating in a completely closed system, just like Biosphere 2. For that reason, NASA is very interested in what’s taking place under that glass canopy in the Arizona desert.

But I believe that the most intriguing part of this experiment - you might call it the world’s biggest science project - won’t have anything to do with whether or not the plants grow, or how much food they produce, or what the air quality is. I’ll be watching the people. I want to see how 8 human beings are going to get along with each other over the next 2 years.

Will they remain friends and fellow adventurers, like a space-age Swiss Family Robinson? Or will they fragment into groups which begin to bicker and fight and stake out their own turf under the glass dome? Will there be romance? All of the participants are single. Will there be jealousy? Will there be personality clashes when they realize that they are each going to have to deal with the same seven people - and only those seven people - every day for the next two years? What will life be like in the loop come 1993?

Of all the variables in the Biosphere experiment, the human variable is still the biggest question mark. In spite of the massive technological challenges of a project like this, the greatest challenge won’t be scientific, it will be psychological and spiritual.

Why? Because that’s how it has been with Biosphere 1. Human beings have been living on planet Earth from time immemorial. And although during that time we have gained a great deal of knowledge about our environment, we have not been able to improve our relationships with each other to any significant degree.

You only have to read history to realize that. The first writings we know of came from the land of Sumer in Mesopotamia, around 4,000 BC. These little clay tablets inscribed with funny wedge-shaped markings, tell us about wars, and conflict, bloodshed and slavery, of man imposing his will on his fellow man.

How much different are things now, 6,000 years later? On the same ground where we found those clay tablets from Sumer, 100,000 Iraqi soldiers spilled their blood just a few short months ago. 500 oil wells spewed their black sludge onto the desert and smeared the sky with their smoke and flame. Kurdish refugees and Shi’ite Muslims died like dogs under the murderous decrees of a vengeful maniac.

No, times really haven’t changed here in Biosphere 1. Although we live in an beautifully intricate, delicately balanced ecological system, man simply cannot get along with his neighbor. From the two year old toddlers who fight over their toys in the nursery, to the sophisticated, highly cultured nations who threaten each other with nuclear annihilation, there’s trouble in Paradise. Man, for all his accomplishments, still struggles with a positive desire to do evil, and especially to do it to his fellow man.

In other words, if we’re living in a closed loop, we’ve discovered that there is an demon in the loop. And, in the words of the cartoon character Pogo, “We’ve found the enemy… and it is us.”

One of the recurring themes of human literature down through the ages is that there is an answer to this problem, and the answer comes from somewhere outside the loop. Whether you’re reading Greek mythology, where superhuman gods come to earth from their home on Mount Olympus, or sitting in front of your VCR watching a movie like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you keep running into this idea that somewhere, outside the loop, there’s somebody who has the answer for the evil of mankind.

On the island of Puerto Rico, in a place called Arecibo, there is a large valley shaped like a bowl. This valley, which is 18 acres in area, has been completely paved over and lined with radar-reflecting aluminum panels. Strung by wires over the valley, from one rim to the other, are sophisticated radio receivers. The valley has been made into a huge dish antenna, pointing to the heavens; the largest radio telescope in the world.

That telescope is searching the electro-magnetic spectrum of deep space for evidence of intelligent life on other worlds. Are there radio signals out there which would indicate that somebody is talking to us? And if they are talking to us, what are they saying? Do they have a message for us? Could they possibly have the answer that will help us to defeat the demons in ourselves?

The irony of all this is that one of the most ancient and revered documents in human history has already revealed the answer. The Bible states in no uncertain terms that Yes, indeed, planet Earth has been visited by intelligent life from another world.

A messenger has come from outside the loop. An intelligent being came from beyond the solar system, from beyond the galaxies, from beyond the quasars, which are the most distant objects we know of in the universe. He came from beyond the universe itself. He came to planet earth and he brought us the answer.

But we didn’t recognize him. Because he didn’t come in a spaceship. He didn’t come down in a blaze of flashing lights, riding a Chariot of the Gods. He didn’t come wielding a light sabre; a conquering Jedi knight who came in the name of the Force. He didn’t land at Edwards Air Force Base, or the Johnson Space Center, or Cape Canaveral.

No, he came quietly to a pre-industrial, pre-scientific world. To a backward country of farmers and fishermen and shepherds. He came quietly and without any fanfare. He came as a baby.

I want you to realize that Jesus was here on earth before he was born. He arrived on planet Earth nine months before his birthday. He was here all that time in his mother’s womb, the product of divine conception. He grew from a multi-celled zygote to an embryo to a fetus, just like you and I did. But he was no ordinary unborn child. He was neo-nate who had a heavenly father and an earthly mother. His father lived beyond the stars. His mother, a humble Jewish girl, lived in Nazareth.

The story of the Virgin Birth is such an unlikely story. If you or I were going to make up a myth about a man who came from heaven to visit planet Earth, we would probably not begin that story by having this individual born of a virgin. I mean, who would believe that? Have him come a more conventional way, a more believable way, like in a spaceship, or through a time warp, or something.

Yet the Bible, seriously and reverently, records the fact that Jesus was born of a virgin. It’s one of those things that is so unlikely that it has the ring of reality. Nobody would make this up. Christianity, in the words of C.S. Lewis, is a religion you could not have guessed.

So Jesus was half human and half divine, or more correctly, he was all human and all divine. He was an extra-terrestrial, but he wasn’t an extra-terrestrial. He came into this world the same way we all did. He wasn’t an alien. He was a man, a bona fide human being, of flesh and blood and personality and feelings. But he was a human being who didn’t come from inside the loop.

One day a father and his son were walking though the woods. Along the path was an anthill. The ants had diligently built up this little mound by taking individual grains of sand and placing them neatly around the entrance. They were in the process of going about their business, entering and leaving the anthill. But the boy, not looking, scuffed over the anthill with his shoe.

Immediately, the anthill became the scene of pandemonium. The ants thought that they were being invaded, so they put their disaster-preparedness program into action. The worker ants hurried around inside, gathering up the eggs to escape through a back door. The soldier ants rushed to the entrance of the destroyed anthill to fight the invader. The Secret Service ants closed ranks around the queen and hustled her toward an emergency exit.

The little boy and his father looked on, fascinated by all this frantic activity. “I wish I could tell them that it was just an accident and they’ve got nothing to worry about.” said the little boy.

The father thought for a moment and said, “Son, if you wanted to get a message to those ants, there’s only one way you could do it. You’d have to become an ant yourself and go down there and tell them what you wanted them to know.”

That’s what Jesus did when he came here to earth as a man. He came here to communicate with us in terms that we could understand. He shared in our humanity, he came into the loop, so to speak. And he came into the loop with an important message from God.

When Jesus was born that first Christmas 2,000 years ago, he himself was the answer to the problem of our evil. But many people have misunderstood that. Let me see if I can illustrate it for you.

Everyone probably spends Christmas morning the same way. You unwrap your presents. But how do you spend Christmas afternoon? Well, if you’re like me and if you have kids, you probably spend Christmas afternoon assembling the toys that your kids opened that morning.

A lot of toys come in boxes that have those big words printed on the side - words that strike fear and dread into every parent’s heart - SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED. That’s why, on Christmas afternoon, you find yourself sweating over a 10 page book of detailed instructions that was written in English by people who live in Taiwan.

A lot of people think that Christianity is something like that. They believe that Jesus came to give us a gift, but it’s a gift that requires some assembly. It’s free, but it requires a lot of our effort to get it together and working properly. And because they think of it like that, they miss out on it entirely.

Have you ever been to one of those in-store demonstrations of kitchen gadgets? You also see them at State Fairs, or Home shows. There’s a salesman up there with some gizmo called a Veg-O-Matic. He shows you how the Veg-O-Matic is going to absolutely revolutionize your kitchen. You can slice with it. You can dice with it. You can even use it to cut julienne fries.

And this guy has a really slick presentation. He cuts up oranges, and he slices tomatoes with blinding speed. And he even tells jokes while he’s doing it. And he finishes up his presentation by telling you that if you buy the Veg-O-Matic today, he’ll throw in a set of steak knives for free.

So you bite. You buy a Veg-O-Matic. You take it home with visions of julienne potatoes dancing in your head. And you know what happens next, don’t you? In your hands, that stupid thing doesn’t work well at all. About all that you end up julienning are your finger tips! So you throw your Veg-O-Matic in the cupboard and eventually you forget about it.

A lot of people have this experience with Christianity. They look at their pastor, or they look at some Christian leader the same way that we look at that Veg-O-Matic salesman. Boy, that guy can really slice and dice his way through life! I wish I could do that. So they buy into it. But then they take their Christianity home and they find that they can’t get it to work. So they put it on the shelf and every now and then they think wistfully about what might have been.

I want you to know that this is not why Jesus came into the loop. This isn’t the answer that he brought us. Jesus did not come to sell us a product called Christianity that would enhance our lives if we used it properly. He did not come to give us an interesting toy that would fascinate us if only we could put it together right.

He came here to live his life in us. He didn’t come here to give us religion, and then leave. He stayed, in the person of the Holy Spirit. He came from outside the loop, but now he’s in the loop. And he’s committed to staying here. He’s right alongside of us, and he wants to live in us. And the way that that happens is if we invite him in.

And when we do invite him in, he starts working on that problem we’ve got - that problem of evil. First of all, he takes away the ultimate consequences of the problem. He does that right away; he gives us eternal life. Next, he goes to work on the causes of the problem of evil, namely, our own selfish pride. And he starts working on our character, and weaning us away from our addictive dependence on self and teaching us how to depend on Him. He starts teaching us how to live.

Today, Dec. 8, 1991, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the entry of the United States into the Second World War. What many Americans don’t realize is that the United States was entering a war that had already been going on for over two years, fought by countries like Great Britain, and Canada.

A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Hitler had already invaded and overrun Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway. These countries had sunk into a dark night of Nazi terror. The lights went out all over Europe.

But during those dismal years, a resistance movement began to grow. Rather than passively accepting the rule of the Nazis in their homeland, small groups of freedom fighters banded together to do what they could to harass the enemy. Winston Churchill issued a call for them to set Europe ablaze.

These little groups of courageous men and women met together at night, after curfew, at risk of their very lives. Many of them were caught, tortured and executed. They listened to the BBC on radio sets that were forbidden by the Germans. They received coded instructions from the Allies on these broadcasts, telling them, perhaps, to find out how many troops were in a certain region, or when a particular U-boat left port. When Allied airmen were shot down over Europe, the resistance hid them and protected them from capture when they could.

As the years of the war dragged on, their number grew. Even as the enemy was tightening his grip of terror on the continent of Europe, the resistance movement was gaining strength. The freedom fighters were looking forward to the day when the Allied armies would invade their continent and throw out the Nazis, and they were actively working to hasten that day.

They were living in Europe, which was very much a closed system, but their hearts and their hopes were focused outside of Europe, from whence their deliverance would come.

There was a limit to how much information could be passed over the radio between England and occupied Europe. There were times when the best way, indeed the only way, to contact the resistance movement was in a face to face encounter. And to do that, you had to send in somebody from outside the loop.

So every now and then, and especially as D-Day grew closer, the Allies would drop a special agent into Europe. Flying in ultra-quiet aircraft, these special agents would parachute into France. They were disguised as French civilians. They spoke French fluently. They had all their French identity papers. They were not Frenchmen, but they became Frenchmen in order to help the French.

These agents carried special communications to the resistance movement. They would teach them to gather information for Allied intelligence. They would show them how to sabotage the enemy more effectively, perhaps how to lay a satchel charge on a bridge, or how to booby trap a railway switch. They were helping them to prepare for the great invasion that was coming that would finally bring them freedom.

Do you see the spiritual parallels? We live, here on planet Earth, in a closed system which the enemy has taken over. Where is our help going to come from? Is it going to come from inside the system? No. We’ve been looking here for thousands of years and haven’t found the answer.

The enemy controls everything. Much of the time, he even controls our own thought processes, so we can’t even trust ourselves. He has his agents everywhere, ready to sell us out or give us false information that will lead us into a trap. No, the answer isn’t going to come from inside the system.

Our only hope is if somebody from outside the system, outside the loop, could come in and help us, teach us what we need to know, and stay here and show us how to live. And that is precisely what Jesus Christ did. He came from outside the loop and became one of us.

And he’s still here today, living in the lives of those who’ve trusted him. He wants to help you get ready for the great invasion that is coming, when the enemy is going to be thrown off this planet and his long reign of evil is going to come to an end.

Are you a freedom fighter? Have you joined the resistance? That little baby that was born 2,000 years ago wants you.