Is it Reality, or just an Optical Illusion?
Have you ever been to an event where they gave out those silly looking paper glasses that change the reality of things seen into something totally different? Most of the time it’s a movie theater, and they used to give you a pair of glasses that had one red lens and one blue lens. Now they are polarized lenses, but then you get to watch a movie that has been created to be watched with a pair of glasses like that, and everything APPEARS to be 3 dimensional. The movie director can even create the illusion of objects coming right at your face and close enough to touch.
Last night my whole immediate family and I went to a very elaborate and musically choreographed Christmas light show at our local zoo. When we presented our entry tickets they gave us each a pair of glasses that made every light bulb appear to have a candy cane hovering near it. When you saw hundreds of bulbs in a tree or other light display you would also see the same number (and the same color) of candy canes.
These illusions were impossible to touch of course. In fact, the closer you got to the bulb the smaller the candy cane became so that it was no longer visible when u touched the bulb.
Aren’t you glad that God didn’t make our eyes like that though, where half of what we saw was an illusion? It would be extremely difficult to distinguish between what was real and what was fake.
In the Bible we find a story of a man named Thomas who refused to believe that Jesus was alive and real unless he could touch Him, especially where Jesus had been wounded in His side. Thomas knew that our eyes can be tricked into seeing “ghosts”, optical illusions, things that appear to be real but aren’t, and he knew that if he could actually touch it then it was real.
I am very thankful that Thomas was such a realist! Because of his “doubts” we have one more assurance that Jesus is real and alive, and not just a figment of someone’s imagination.
Today we cannot touch or even see Jesus, but He has left proof that He is still very real. In the Bible God told us many things about Jesus before He even came as a baby to Bethlehem, and when we realize the foolishness in believing that these things all happened by sheer chance, we have all the assurance that we need to know that Jesus is real.
Is there a chance that Jesus is not real, and not the promised Messiah? Sure. It’s about the same chance that a person has of finding a specific tiny electron (on their very first try) from within a universe over 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the size of our known universe if it were packed TIGHTLY with electrons, but there’s still a chance.
By the way, electrons are so tiny that if you lined them up in single file and made a line that was 1 inch long (2.54 cm long) you would have about 2,500,000,000,000,000 electrons. If you were to count 250 every minute, day and night, it would take you about 19,000,000 years.
"Any man who rejects Christ as the Son of God is rejecting a fact proved perhaps more absolutely than any other fact in the world."
Have no fear, JESUS is REAL! He is NOT just an “optical illusion”.
For references to the “Electron” claim & for more information read:
